The boy-man on the Tarmac in Manaus, Brazil middle of the day on December 27, 1987 was wearing a Talking Heads t-shirt, and the girl inside the plane thought Talking Heads in the heart of the rainforest? Small world, then disembarked to a claustrophobic gift shop, lined as it was with fertility statues and shrunken heads. And jewelry made from river stones, each one small and beautiful and perfect: irreplaceable held in the palm
of the hand.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
As the children come into the party room they see the treasure box by the door overflowing with odd vests, second-hand dresses, scarves, hats, helmets, shields, tutus, capes (of course), foam swords, and they don these things, perhaps serially-changing from knight to ballerina to carpenter
Seamlessly
Because they are children
And this is their kingdom.
At the beginning of the black-tie fundraiser (325-1675 dollars a plate, depending on your commitment to “the cause”), the organizers have a basket full of random names, (where did they come from? Who were/are these people?) to the current batch of servers-take one and pin it on they say, so they do and for this night they are foreign to themselves-Renata, Consuela, Xavier…instead of Pam, Ashley, and Rob… They have to remember these temporary identities when beckoned or chided by the plate-holders. As when, mid-dessert, a tray falls, sudden show of violence, shattered porcelain, all those scrumptious (expensive) eclairs.
Wasted.
Three players, all brothers, familial resemblance in their eyes, the curve bones of their faces, halo-ed hair, lean in. All intent on winning the game of choosing–rock! paper! scissors! Shoot!! The mantra, the litany, the eventual victor, unaware of what can be broken with all these ordinary things.
Old time-y barber shop, corner of a once prosperous downtown, old fellas talking about the game on cathode ray TV mounted on the wall. Men coming and going, sitting, standing, paying tips with crumpled dollar bills. So many versions of the naked pate, the scruffy, and the wispy comb-over. Knife to chin, razor to scalp, going through this mitzvah of voluntary loss as that ancient metaphorical talisman turns on its axis outside-red/white/red/white ribbons of our old, shared story of triage. Triage or else.
the girl-woman in the kitchen takes her time, cracking the dome of the speckled egg with patience and surgical precision, holds the broken pieces together so that only the white can slip through, the round, intact yolk cradled in the serrated halves of a thing once whole and intact which could have been another thing entirely or…an omelet, a quiche, the whipped interstices of meringue, or these lovely macaroons scooped dough into her piping bag from the sterile bowl on the counter, suburban kitchen, tinted carnival colors, creamy in the middle.
I stopped half way through
Jen’s autobiography
Because things got dark when
The Ouija board killed
The man cleaning the coffee pot in the kitchen
Close to the unnamed laundromat which seems to me to be
A protagonist they used to smoke and drink behind
She was only 13
Don’t-didn’t-can’t-now
Tell mommy
That is when the addiction started…
“We struggled, moved to the next road over in a house outta apt, Tara was staying out all night, got a boyfriend way way older than her”
She lived with her father and her stepmom until Jen was born and she was abused. Then she came to live with her mother.
“The Monopoly Game at McDonald’s-Tara and I lived on that for that whole summer.”
Other people in the house played a different kind of monopoly game, eating everything, seven people in a three bedroom house.
“He and his girlfriend in my mother’s bed..we did not warn them when she came home…she threw the girl out”
Inadvertently losing both a daughter-in-law and her own favorite bar shirt which the young woman was wearing at the time.
“Mom started doing cocaine”
Lou started…
Only a fictional girl would walk into the house and not notice the prurient magazines by the front door, alighting instead on the cookie press in the kitchen grandma rolling out the dough after it has been mixed, pressed, shaped into a ball and refrigerating overnight derelict old phones and cameras, a stack of games she played with him in her (fictional) childhood, his competitive streak annihilating any possibility of comradery only as she revisits the rooms in the house like so much like a real house on a street so much like a real street
Where a fictional man once lived
Jen asks me why the parenthesis around Badamo(?) and I give her part of an answer in words then spend the rest of the day thinking about how inefficient it is to attempt to distill rage, grief, voicelessness into a slim set of punctual marks.
There was a moment (or a million) after I lost my foster daughter (Veronica Celeste Badamo) when I thought, baby mills (they never cared who they were hurting, I was just a care-giver placeholder, God, how much this hurts)…
I was (just) a foster mother. Just a bystander, unless heartbreak were a thing objectively quantifiable.
Not just the way they lied to us.
All the children who got taken.
All the voicelessness
In parentheses.
So irrevocable.
Carrying Light 