Category Archives: Vignettes

The Salt Pillars of Alexander

Short Stories, Vignettes

“Yo me hablo por lo mismo y traigo tambien la palabra de todos los muertos que se murieron muy callados. Por ellos hablo, en mi palabra hablan los muertos todos, los callados de siempre.”

It was at dusk that I sat under the auburn skies of late November watching the leaves from the oak limbs above me pirouette and fall. They reminded me of us, these leaves; struggling against the wind, struggling to regain their limbs, the source of their life, before the winter came. But the wind roared in my ears and those leaves just swirled and fell. Sometimes I would reach up and snatch one out of the wind, only to stomp it to the concrete sidewalk which bled cold into my bones. “Sometimes it is better when the struggle ends soon” I thought as I held those leaves to the ground to keep them from blowing off, down the road towards Texas and beyond.

“Down that road lies this my friends” I muttered to the leaves as I patted my coat pocket which held my tattered red notebook, pencil and knife. “And this”, I said, as I rubbed the coarse fabric of my clothes. These clothes which had left the quiet streets of Tulsa as jeans, jacket and sweater, but which I had called bed, blanket and home in the dry rolling hills and dark plains of the Mexican llano.

Across the asphalt and curb, I watched as the shadows gathered in the details of the red-brick house and stored them in the blackened shapes of night. I watched as the ever-green magnolia, in front of my boyhood home, became a darkened giant swaying to the rhythm of the wind, and the fall-bleached grass became an ash-gray carpet rolled out for the night. And I watched, and waited for the night to swallow whole, the two years that had passed.

The two years of leaves that had fallen, the two years of grass that had been cut, and the two years of life that had continued in this house while I had been away. But more than that I waited for the words to come back. Those twenty words which even the 3,000 miles couldn’t erase. Those twenty words which had haunted me in the moment before sleep, to dwell in my dreams, and greet me when I would wake. I waited for those words, and for the guilt and the sorrow that would come with them. Because for now there was nothing, not even a numbness, but rather a chasm, a great abyss where once a mighty continent of grief and guilt had lain.

Three days had passed since I awoke to that cavernous shell, that great absence within. Gloria had told me what it was, what it had to be.

“Alexander, you must return.” She had whispered. “It is the only way… for reconciliation. Go now, mi amor, mi vida.”
And it was the way the she spoke in my native tongue which had moved me, moved me to an understanding which I pondered as I sat outside beneath the oak tree on Eldridge street watching the light appear in the bay window of the house.

It was from this contemplation that I heard words once more. Not the twenty words of before, different words; words which rushed in to fill the void and to clamor about inside me, screaming for release.

Gloria claims that to name the dead is to bring them back…into you. I disagree, the dead are always in us. I know, now, what two years couldn’t teach me. I know now what it is like to speak the words of the dead, to never escape the past; because the past lives in you. I had thought for two years how horrible it must be to be a part of a culture where each individual is bound forever to their family, both living and dead, and to never have the ability to escape their hold. Yet now I know that the dead are inside us. They give us life and live through us long after their bodies have returned to the earth and all but their dust is forgotten.

Those are their words. These words which now rage through me like a phoenix igniting.

“Yo me hablo por lo mismo y traigo tambien la palabra de todos los muertos que se murieron muy callados. Por ellos hablo, en mi palabra hablan los muertos todos, los callados de siempre.”

“I speak for myself, and I also carry the word of all our silent dead. I speak for them, through my words speak all the dead, the silent ones forever.”

And so I arose, a single silhouette in the coal-black night. And stood for a minute listening to the wind hammer in my ears, with the cold of autumn on my face. Then I struck out across the asphalt and curb, to the opposite shore in this sea of darkness, to walk through the door and into the light. Two years had passed. Two years were gone. But I no longer traveled alone. My father walked with me.

The boy stood looking at the tree

Vignettes

The boy stood looking at the tree. The tree was old. A grandfather of cottonwoods, that bent with the summer winds and smelled of hot nights and summer sun. Eighty-three feet tall, the boy knew. He had walked its shadow and knew. He knew its height by its shadows length, though each fell differently. The shadow with a coolness, and a tinge of night, and the tree with a groan, and the heady smell of sap and decay. But that was all to come, at the moment the boy stared at the tree, tracing its bark, his green eyes twisting upward along the wooden tendons and sinews that raced towards the sky. He breathed deep of the summer air, felt the moisture of the creek behind him expanding with the heat, pushing down on his skin, holding the sweat in. But the tree seemed unfazed, swaying softly in the sticky breeze.

The boy was barefoot. The gravel bar hot beneath his soles. The boy caressed the soft grass at the foot of the cottonwood with his eyes. He knew the coolness of it, the softness like fine silk. But he remained on the gravel, letting the heat burn into his feet and surge upward like magma to sear his head with the tingling sensation of pain. He tilted his head to the right listening to the soft murmur of the leaves in the summer wind. He smelled the heavy scent of sycamore leaves and the bitter smell of crushed nightshade. His skin felt heavy from the heat and the humidity, his mind felt poised on the edge of numbness and pain.

He remembered his mother’s voice, light and clear. It would certainly have carried over the rustling leaves and the valley with the creek. If she had called. But she didn’t, she couldn’t now. So he imagined what the grass would feel like beneath his toes. How soft it would be, how cool from the shade. He imagined the difference between the grass and a slab of stone buried in the earth on this summer’s day. He thought it too would be cold, but not soft, maybe smooth, but not soft. He realized that there would be no padding, that the rock would be hard, it would not give like the green grass. His feet would not sink into it as they would the soft earth at the foot of the cottonwood, damp with the creek’s water and the dew. There would be only unyielding resistance, nothing would remain when he stepped off of the stone. There would be no footprints, no crushed grass springing back towards the heavens. There would only be the cold hard stone. That thought made the boy grimace and his mouth turned downward a bit on the edges and his green eyes narrowed a bit and he raised his hand and pushed his thick brown hair away from his face.

Then he began to dig his toes into the gravel beneath him, and the burning increased and his mind sang with it. But he kept on until his feet were buried beneath the small river rocks, buried beneath the heat of the surface, buried within the shadow of the gravel where the small rocks kept cool. And he thought of the sensations, the difference between hot and cold, and pain and comfort; and he decided that it did not really matter, either of them, because here on top, even on the gravel you made an impression. You could always look behind you and say look, there are my footprints, there where my mind sang with the pain of the heat on my soles. Or, there where I cooled them on the green grass, or even there where I partially buried them and found the edge of the heat and the cold in the layers of gravel. Those are the places of my passing.

And his body shook a bit, with the sun pouring over the top of the cottonwood, bathing him with light. And the short rasping sounds of his weeping mingled with the rustling of the leaves and together they became a whisper of that one day, that one moment, in my fifth summer. The summer when I decided that I would rather be there on the edge of the river rocks and the grass, where the trees grew by the side of the creek, feeling the edge of pain and heat and cold and comfort; than with my mother.

And I cried because I knew it, not the words for it, those came later. But the feeling of it I first knew then, beneath that tree. The feeling of separation, and isolation, and being forever alone.