Food

As the crackling, hot container is hustled in, shoulders shift slightly and the flaming charcoal is placed in the center of the table. This activity is just precarious enough to remind me that cooking with fire is  dangerous and primal but almost always a communal experience. Soon, golden brown edges form on the sizzling pieces of curling marbled meat and my nostrils are filled with a smoky aroma. Cackle, pop, and fizzle. After a bit of picking and choosing, the wrapping begins. Then my month opens unusually wide, almost barbaric and obscene in its dimensions, and prepares for the package, or more like a present, covered in fresh green lettuce. It contains countless surprises for my taste buds. The first crunch is followed by a succession of tiny explosions in my mouth from tangy, zingy, pickled and pungent bombs.  It's difficult to close my mouth properly and contain all this commotion.  The second chomp snaps a hunk of garlic which is followed by a sudden sharp twang. The third bite is more reasonable and accomplished, and the red jalapeno pepper paste mingles with oil oozing from the tender meat. It drifts between my teeth, then throughout my mouth. The final bites are comfortable now, as the small portion of soft thick rice blends in, creating a kind of balance by being so bland but familiar. Everything is washed down with a quick shot of clear bitter liquor and I wince, then smile. The other people at the table smile too. I hoist my chopsticks and I lean into the kaleidoscope of colorful side dishes placed around the circular grill, once again.

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Description of an Object

You close your eyes and let your fingertips, as soft as breath, brush gently across a wooden uneven surface that juts out at you with a familiarity you have known all your life. Your fingers sound like they are brushing the surface of a drum, because behind this surface, it is empty and hollow, like a stage wall in the theater. It is a portable light weight landscape full of features yet you can cover it with both your hands. Softly and setting out with both your hands at the top of the only protruding summit, you descend gently into parallel valleys that swirl into circular patches like ponds on either side of this summit. If you move your fingers upward in unison, you cross over ridges above that lead to a smooth place like a plateau. From here your fingers part in opposite directions and drift down either side of the surface, in two wide arches that meet again leaving an oval shape in their wake. You are now at a lesser summit than the first one and it resembles a gentle smooth bump. Moving your fingers upward just above this bump, and after a slight dip, you arrive at two pouting horizontal lines curving slightly. You remove your fingers and open your eyes. Sometimes I am as gaudy and garish as a carnival in spring and other times as sullen and horror stricken as you would be too after hearing of terrible things. I am an eternal and frozen emotion. But I am a thing as familiar as the face you splash awake, remembering dreams which still seem to mean so much as you pause in the mirror. But I can only be woken from within when a body breathes me into being and the right disguise works.  

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Hotel Room

You enter and open your eyes, like the shutter unfolds in a camera and step into an old 1930s movie. Now, however, no longer black and white but rich and exuberant with saturated colors hinting of golden and red velvet days. It is an impressionist still-life crowded with eclectic objects and sculptures, some from the ancien regime of Versailles and others from the Aztec caves of Mexico. The room is jumbled with sleek curves and smooth angles. The rich furrowed streamlined geometry of the wood trim gives the room a balance and poise. The aroma of wood, velvet and leather mingle with the scent from the rich green plants placed throughout the room on high and voluptuous vases. This dimly lit room is cluttered with elegance but made spacious by nooks and crannies buried within mirrors that hide endless side rooms and passageways all painted in the same rich faux finished beige and gold walls found throughout. It is a labyrinth of decadence, a hospice at the heart of civilization, full of silver, crystal, ivory, and jade.  As you look up it takes a few seconds to reach the immense ceiling. On the walls, you see giant paintings with thick fluted frames, depicting maps and primordial figures from other continents. Under your feet, the dark brown lacquered floor is shiny and dense. It never creaks. The bed is hidden at first behind a high wood wall and is only made suddenly conspicuous by a glass dome canopy and the golden statues supporting it. It is an elevated and hard climb to reach the bed and it’s a place you would not want to leave too quickly, once you had arrived. Perhaps Charlie Chaplin made decisions about the next Little Tramp picture show here, or Noel Coward drank gin, or Mara Callas discussed her performance from a few hours before.
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Two Legs (2nd draft)

Two Legs

      Mark unfolded the blueprint and flattened it on the rickety turnstile, one of six in a row that resembled a hastily built barricade. He looked up slowly and followed his lanky shadow up to where his head was. His ears made him uncomfortable. He then surveyed the scene before him, his eyes darting around for anything that might be out of place.  The giant circus tent was taking shape, amongst roadies scurrying between clanking steel and wood planks knocking into place, with all the cables and wires stretching like arteries and nerves around the steel skeleton. The yellow and red canvas was hoisted, puffed suddenly then bloomed into shape, while the electrical crew zapped the final connections and the lights began to hum. Soon there would be a long silence, with only the slow roar of tigers and the grunting of elephants providing a muffled sleepy afternoon soundtrack just as it must have sounded on the plains of Africa 10,000 years ago. Only this was the landlocked prairies of North America and the soft golden breezes that came across the SuperStore Mall parking lot, always promised relief but only left you with another layer of wheat dust sticking to the top of your mouth. His first thought was “It’s going to be a hot one”. His second, “Wonder when I’m going to get it this time?” Just on cue, the middle-aged producer barked from the nearest portable trailer, “Let’s make sure the generator is in the right place this time. The last two words seemed to box both his ears and he wished he hadn’t let the barber be so ambitious with his hair. He wanted to say something but didn’t, again.

The Circus had been under siege now for months. He hadn’t counted on that. The ad at the summer employment office was listed under the Marketing Section. He had split up with his high school girlfriend and they both agreed long distance relationships don’t work out. And he was generally bored with classrooms and essays and the books that were now strewn around his room like dead butterflies. However, now, he slightly regretted his last conversation with his mother.

What would your father have said, it’s only been a year since…..and now you’re running away with the…..

It’s a corporate consulting company! They manage the tour. They’re all a bunch of suits.

They’re all a bunch of ex-convicts, drug addicts, and roadies and, and performers!

Come on, Mom, we’re all performers to some degree, aren’t we?

He cut his hair and bought a light blue button down and beige khakis for the interview.

Now, it was midsummer and nobody knew what to expect from town to town. The animal rights protestors could show up at any time. The puddle of sweat that sat permanently on the producer’s forehead was not unjustified. The new Cirque de Soleil had created a Precambrian shift in the circus world: big theme shows, collaborations with pop stars and, above all, no more animal acts. The big top would never be the same again. Adding to this was the constant tense and volatile air found amongst the performers, the concession people, the producers, and the roadies, which was fueled by the exhaustion that comes from nine weeks on the road. Fist fights were normal and sometimes there were knifes. But they all were united in a common distrust for the people in the box office trailer which also served as Marks mobile home for the tour. The accountant and producer drove in from a local hotel in the nearest city. One time they showed up in a helicopter. The circus people all stared. The producer played each group against the other and ended up blaming Mark, the corporate gopher, for anything that went wrong on the tour. By this time halfway through in the season, it was hard to tell who to trust anymore.

Can we have the map now? said Tommy, the balloon man’s son, wiping his unkempt blonde hair from his eyes. He was surrounded by five other children, all at different heights. These were the little people of the Big Top who inhabited the air between the trailers and scaffolding and who knew all the hidden flaps in the tent. Too young to work, they hopscotched all day over cables and wires and popped the occasional balloon. They knew all 23 animals in the back by name, including Bella the new baby monkey. Cindy, the acrobat’s daughter, now had her hands on her hips. Her face was knotted up in a cute little scowl. Mark pulled out the photocopy of the blueprint, he had prepared earlier from his back pocket and handed to Tommy. They all leaned in as he unfolded the paper.

Where are the dragons this time? 

Why do we have to find the dragons, said Jose, the jugglers son, the youngest and newest one.

Cause that’s where the treasure is, stupid,said Cindy.

Mark leaned forward and let his finger hover a while, then he tapped the paper firmly and said, “Right here, there be the dragons”.

They looked at each other and scurried back to their land of make believe, with empty popcorn boxes jammed onto crooked sticks, frayed bungee cords and water guns clinking and clanking as they ran. The map was flapping like a pet butterfly at the end of Tom’s arm. In their wake they left the soft scent of cotton candy and buttered popcorn.

What are you doing talking to those little brats? growled the producer, walking up to the turnstiles and hoisting his pants.

They’re just bored. I think everything looks ok for the show today.

You think, do you?

Well...

Listen, just keep your eyes on the freaks, kid! That’s why we hired your educated ass! You’re supposed to know the difference!” The producer liked reminding Mark that “we” were the people in the front seat of the vehicle and everybody else was in the back seat. He referred to anyone who didn’t count money on a regular basis as a “freak”. He leaned forward, grasped the turnstile, spun it round, and watched it jerk to a stop. He seemed to ponder it, as if it was a wheel of fortune and he couldn’t figure out what he had just landed on. “Well, at least these damn things are working! Ching, ching, ching! Showtime soon, the high school kids should be here soon to take the tickets! Just watch out for the freaks, will ya! He jerked his head and rolled his eyes towards the empty parking lot and said, “like that freak, he’s been here all morning.” Then he turned toward the back door of the box office trailer and waddled up the creaky tiny steel steps. Mark cringed when he remembered the letter he had forgotten to put away on the desk in the box office a few weeks before. In it he had written to a friend, “The producer is a funny pear shaped man forked with two stubby little legs in plaid pastel pants that are far too tight for the guy and he’s got a pair of white shoes to match his big white Elvis belt. He always wears this gaudy orange silk shirt from hell”. He still wasn’t if sure the producer had actually read it.

Mark leaned on the turnstile and looked out over the parking lot up and then awkwardly up at the sky and then back down at a man sitting in his pickup truck, because, it was the only thing he could look at in the empty parking lot. He had a sensation but if it were translated into a thought it would read something like how can you avoid looking at the only thing there is look at and pretend you are not looking at it? Just a dark silhouette, in a car door picture frame rectangle, but it was a dark silhouette that was definitely looking at Mark.  He had on a baseball cap and his dusty old tincan truck with old style rounded edges, like a chariot was almost floating in the sun soaked ocean of the parking lot. There was an Indian head with feathers on the door and the words Native American art stenciled on the side. A tarp in the back of the truck looked like a pile of black coal. Just to seem normal, he looked back up again at the Prairie sky. The hugeness of the sky always made you feel like you were seeing with the whites of your eyes. Out here, there were no scientific discoveries or revolutions resulting from telescopes. Here, the earth is definitely flat and the sky is a very real and present god who has watched over these fields of golden wheat, and its roaming wild and raw horses, from long before horses were called horses because language had not been invented yet.  Mark looked at his hands, sort of arched his back and stretched a bit just to look normal again. What the hell is normal when you work for the circus, he thought. Might as well do some cartwheels and stand on my head, he’ll think I’m just another one of the clowns.

What the hell’s going on! Showtime! shouted the producer, his head floating outside the box office window. “Let’s get the show on the road! Can’t we have just one show without a hassle? The list of things that had gone wrong so far this season looked like runaway train with all the crimes and incidents stenciled like ads on the side of box cars.

https://www.powtoon.com/online-presentation/bKDMacTxFlu/circus-troubles/#/

“Let’s put the mirrors and posters out”, barked the producer. Mark started propping up the plywood signs and kicking them open and so the distorting mirrors which faced each other, created a kind of gauntlet for the customers to line up within. The mirrors were the producer’s “big” new idea of the season. “This will keep the twerps and rug rats busy in the line.” Ten signs later and Mark was about 30 yards away from the pickup truck and could feel the man in the old truck watching him. He walked back slowly through the signs without directly looking at his body as it distorted and ballooned into a fat little midget then reappeared in the next sign as a tall skinny guy with stilts for legs then bursting into endless reoccurring reflections of himself in the next one. He a avoided looking at his head.  Tom was trying to boost Jose up onto the far side of the box office.

He got back to the turnstiles and everything was in full commotion. The cotton candy kiosk grinding out pink sugar clouds and the popcorn man was scooping and stacking small bags of bouncing particles. People had began handing in tickets to the local teenagers Mark had hired to man the turnstiles. They shuffled slowly with kids tugging at their parent’s arms and gesturing wildly like little weathervanes. Cindy hopped and dodged among the customers in the opposite direction. The producer popped his head out of the trailer repeatedly.

The man from the pickup truck was now walking slowly towards the turnstiles. Beside him was a little kid with a long shaft of wheat in his mouth. The shaft of wheat looked stronger then the arm he used to pluck it out of his mouth so he could spit occasionally. As he got closer the producer stuck his head out the back door and jerked his thumb in the direction of the man. The man had deep lines surrounding the features of his face. It was a hard face and eyes like the sky above him. His hands looked more like leather then flesh.  He bypassed the box office and approached Mark.

Wondering if we can have a look?

You have to buy a ticket, sir.

How much?

10 dollars for adults and 5 for children.

Don’t got it.

I’m sorry, sir.

.

The producer was now perched and watching from the slightly opened back door of the trailer.

We won’t be long. Just want to see what this here show is all about.

He looked down at the boy.

Everybody has to pay, sir. The box office is right there.

Mark could feel the producer’s eyes on the side of his head. The man leaned slightly to the left of Mark’s shoulder.  Mark gently raised his hand and pushed his ear back but the man was just looking into the mouth of the tent. The music had started and the dancing elephants with hula hoops around their trunks were lumbering in circles around the ring.

The man cocked his head and said,

I don’t get it, kid.

Don’t get what, sir?

What’s with making animals walk on two legs?

The producer let out a long exasperated grunt of impatience. The back door of the box office suddenly smashed open with a violent metallic clang and  then suddenly there was a pathetic yelp. But before the producer’s four limbs could even reach the ground, the children had scattered in all directions from under the box office. Their eyes were huge with shock and a little bit of the surprise that comes from unexpected success. Mark wanted to run too, but only for a moment. His two legs remained rigid and the shadow they cast looked like a geometric instrument poised on a map.