Saint

It is small and water-stained, this paper portrait of “San Charbel” inside of a plastic sleeve. The saint is wearing a black robe with a hood, his arms outstretched. His white beard is almost glowing. Behind him are a cedar tree and a white building at the base of hills that are grey and green against ice-winter mountains, which in turn blend into the faded yellow-blue glow of a sunset, or maybe a sunrise. A light blue circle around his head suggests a subtle halo. Above his left shoulder is a faint apparition of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, above his right, a wine goblet. In front of him, on clay-like orange rock, is an open book with Arabic writing and next to it a hoe or shovel. I don’t know much about him, except that he was Lebanese and his presence in Mexico is due to its large Lebanese immigrant population. He’s the saint of miracle cures—both physical and psychological—which I imagine is why he’s so popular. He’s the saint equivalent to blue-light late-night infomercial promises of less pain. He is hope found again, a garden cultivated from rock.

I’m not Catholic, or even religious. Raised loosely Episcopalian by closet-agnostic parents, I will, if asked, mumble something about secular humanism or in rare moods admit to some sort of vaguely pagan spirituality. This card is covered in symbols I don’t really understand and have never cared to learn about. The earnest prayer on the reverse side full of promises and exclamation marks and supplications pulls no heartstrings in me, nor makes me want to attend mass.

And yet I hold on to this little card, and have transferred it time and again from purse to bag to purse, for 14 years.

Shortly after we started dating, on an oppressively hot April day in 1997, H. took me to the cathedral in the Polanco neighborhood of Mexico City where the shrine to Saint Charbel is located. I stopped outside the heavy wooden doors, where an old woman was selling rosaries and milagros and little cards of the saint. I wanted milagros because I had an idea to make jewelry out of them and on a whim purchased the little San Charbel card as well.

I wandered inside and found H. near the rows of candles and an explosion of colored ribbons on the wall. He was writing something on a ribbon—a thank-you note, he explained—and then pinned it into the others. Always the sarcastic atheist, he shrugged quickly, embarrassed, but explained how one of his aunts had convinced him to visit the church several months before, at a low point. He told me how he had come here and knelt down and awkwardly asked for help, feeling silly, but doing it to please his favorite aunt.

I didn’t ask what he had needed help with—I was suddenly afraid—but the weight of the question was there, in the air between us. Instead, my hand found his, and fingers interlaced, they were like anchors in that cool, dusky church.

Anna Karlsson

The bus thumped, then pitched forward and something cracked beneath it, bringing everything to a straining, air-brake stop. There was no visibility through the side windows: not only was it nighttime, but it was also raining in heavy gushes and torrents. You couldn’t see—but you knew—that on either side of the bus and the narrow, two-lane road we were traveling along was rainforest, dense and wet and alive.

“What cracked?” I asked Anna, who was now standing, leaning toward the front of the bus to see through the driver’s window.

“There’s a bridge in front of us. It looks wooden,” she said. Soon, everyone on the bus was talking—confirming that we had arrived at a bridge that didn’t look stable, yelling out advice to the bus driver, making dire predictions of what would happen should we cross.

Our bus had already made two detours due to fallen trees and washed-out roads. If we couldn’t get through here to get back to San José, we’d probably have to return to Cahuita, or at least to the nearest town and spend the night.

We lurched again and once more we heard a loud crack. The bus stopped. Someone screamed. Anna sat down.

I was paralyzed, mouth full of bitter saliva. Of course, I thought, this is how it ends. This is the headline of that small blurb you glance at on the last column of the third page of the World section in the newspaper: “Costa Rica Bus Crash Kills 38.” This is the moment the bridge will break and the bus will fall in to the river and those who don’t die on impact will drown as the bus fills with murky water. This is my death. I am surer of this than I have been of anything in my 21 years. Why have I never been afraid, never thought that something like this could happen to me? Why did I never fully take into account the laws of physics and the perversity of chance to foresee some gruesome end like this? Of course! It’s so logical!

“Turn back,” a little voice in me said, piercing through my fatalism. “Turn back!” I screamed in my head to the bus driver who was going to kill us all.

Five minutes previously I had been listening to Anna tell a story about her ex-boyfriend buying a matador outfit in Spain—her looped, bird-call Swedish-accented vowels transforming into laughter as she described how ridiculous he was. A few hours before that we had been at a beachside restaurant, saying goodbye to new friends we had made that weekend full of reggae and black-sand beaches, full of sunbathing, beer, dancing.

Anna was a tall, blonde Swedish girl I shared a host-family with in San José. She had a subversive and conspiratorial laugh that invited you in on the joke, making you feel proud and lucky to be her friend. It was the first thing you noticed after her beauty, and her sharp observational humor felt unexpected—incongruous to that bright, gold coin of a face and large, blue eyes. In the months that I knew her, I eventually started to suspect (not literally, not out-loud, but in my imagination’s eye) that she was something quite rare and not fully human: part mischievous elf from an antique children’s book, part good witch.

Anna took my hand in hers and gave it a squeeze.

“At least we know how to swim,” she said.

I imagined how I must have looked to her at that moment—my eyes squeezed shut, tight line of mouth, grimly frozen in my seat—so I croaked out a chuckle. I couldn’t let on that I was busy digesting the idea of our violent deaths, entertaining Dread and Terror like honored guests, imagining my poor parents at my funeral, when she could still manage dark humor to comfort a friend.

The bus started in reverse and for a light-as-air second I thought we were going to turn around, but then we lurched forward with a burst and crack, crunch we were speeding across that old wooden bridge.

I imagined the river below, wild and deep, overpowering the rain-loosened banks.

We made it across and the bus sped along again on solid ground. Some smart aleck up front shouted “Otra vez!” (“Let’s do it again!”). I opened my eyes to Anna’s straight teeth, wide lips, and, of course, laughter.

***

Just posting a little thing I wrote in my memoir class. I used to scoff at memoir writing but a writer/teacher I admire, Leslie Kirk Campbell, made a very good point: where else do you get your material? Even if you radically change it, morph it, shape it, take one word, one line of it and make it into poetry, novels or short fiction--where else are you getting that raw, visceral, I was *there* emotion and description?

I also miss Anna, who I've hopelessly lost touch with. If you try to do a Facebook search on her name, you'll just get page after page of gorgeous Swedes.

Experiments in texture glitches

La mujer sin rostro

Stardust

Verde que te quiero verde

I need to remember

I was standing lost, sunk, my hands in my pockets, gazing toward Tinker Mountain and feeling the earth reel down. All at once I saw what looked like a Martian spaceship whirling towards me in the air. It flashed borrowed light like a propeller. Its forward motion greatly outran its fall. As I watched, transfixed, it rose, just before it would have touched a thistle, and hovering pirouetting in one spot, then twirled on and finally came to rest. I found it in the grass; it was a maple key, a single winged seed from a pair. Hullo. I threw it into the wind and it flew off again, bristling with animate purpose, not like a thing dropped or windblown, pushed by the witless winds of convection currents hauling round the world's rondure where they must, but like a creature muscled and vigorous, or a creature spread thin to that other wind, the wind of the spirit which bloweth where it listeth, lighting, and raising up, and easing down. O maple key, I thought, I must confess I thought, o welcome, cheers.

And the bell under my ribs rang a true note, a flourish as of blended horns, clarion, sweet, and making a long dim sense I will try at length to explain. Flung is too harsh a word for the rush of the world. Blown is more like it, but blown by a generous unending breath. That breath never ceases to kindle, exuberant, abandoned; frayed splinters spatter in every direction and burgeon into flame. And now when I sway to a fitful wind, alone and listing, I will think, maple key. When I see a photograph of earth from space, the planet so startingly painterly and hung, I will think maple key. When I shake your hand or meet your eyes I will think, two maple keys. If I am a maple key falling, at least I can twirl.

---From "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," by Annie Dillard

Window, Colonia Roma, Mexico City. Scarlet Pruitt Sanschagrin

alternative sea life

***

Credits & Notes:

The dominatrix mermaid outfit (called Mmmm...mermaid) is from Vita's Boudoir. Vitabela Dubrovna's creations just keep getting more wonderfully outlandish. I love that she was at her computer one day and thought, "You know what Second Life really needs? A goddamn dominatrix mermaid outfit." She was right.

My skin is Mystere Skin Tone No. 27 by Pulse skins. The hair is Betty Page by *Jetdoll*.

And look what I found on Etsy! Want, want, want:

Fairy Tale

Charley Harper

The other crows don’t believe me when I tell them I used to be half-human. They just caw and rustle their feathers. But it’s true.

My head was normal, though human-sized, with a grey beak, the large, quick eyes of our raptor ancestors, the sleek, black plumage. My tendon-calves and talons were also strong and avian. But the rest was a cruel joke—mottled feathers covering mammalian breasts, primate arms and hands, thighs bare and goose-pimpled white, a woman’s sex. Human heart, no wings.

A freak.

When I was born, the humans in that small town were frightened. The country doctor offered to kill me humanely and dispose of the body, but my mother refused.

As I grew older, I never learned to speak like the humans, but I could understand the hushed gossip of the neighbor women, the drunken shouts of the men, the taunts of the children. I heard them call my mother a whore. I heard the preacher tell her I was from the devil.

I also heard what the government scientist who appeared one day at the door said to her, pushing an envelope thick with bills into her hand in exchange for me. Again, she refused to give me up.

I loved my mother, as much as one can love a human. Each day, she would let me sit in the garden and watch the birds. She would bring me seeds and berries and crickets to eat. She'd bring me cool birdbaths in the summer and blankets in the frosts of winter.



And all around me the acrobats were soaring and diving: Magpie pinwheels of black and white and red in the wind, crows teasing cats, blackbird pirouettes, the looped birdsong of the starlings in the leaves.

Charley Harper

I learned the language of their calls and watched them build their nests from tufts of down feather and string. I watched their talons grab earthworms and crush field mice. I watched their yellow beaks vomit meat for tiny squalling chicks. I would close my eyes and imagine how it would feel for my own crane-like bones to unfold, for my own dark musk of wing to expand.

And each day the same crow would land on my outstretched hand and stare a warning into my eyes.

***

The third time someone offered to take me away, my mother did not refuse.

For months she had been coughing into handkerchiefs stained with blood. She could no longer leave at night to work. When the red-faced circus man gave her a bag of money and said he would treat me well, she nodded.

I looked back toward the house once as we drove away in the old-fashioned horse-drawn cart. My mother’s head was bent down, handkerchief to mouth.

***

The circus was exciting and dusty and loud, and after their initial fear of me, most of its humans were friendly.


I liked the boy who threw daggers. He teased and joked like the crows from the garden. Your goose is cooked, bird girl, he’d say to the roar of laughter from the crowd. I could hear him wink as he said it.


I liked the shy tightrope girl as well. She reminded me of the gentle robins that nested in the awning of my mother’s kitchen. I tried not to scare her during our act.

I even liked the man who took me from my mother and brought me there. He was as loud and greedy as the gulls that would fly in from the shore.

There were others as well—a very fat woman who would give me chocolates I could not eat, a man covered completely in hair, twins fused together, a short little man in a grimy tuxedo, the groundskeeper with his trembling hands, an animal trainer with a red, knotted scar in place of his left eye. At night around the campfire shadows and flame, I’d imagine their cacophony of voices and laughs as comforting caws and squawks.

***

Not every human at the circus was kind to me, however. Seeing the old fortuneteller, I finally understood the crow’s warning, which in my mother’s garden I had sensed only in my gut like the thud of a bird flying into a window.

“Devil!” the old lady would hiss to my face.

“She’s an abomination!” she’d shout to the red-faced man.

“Disaster,” she’d moan, holding up The Tower card to any who would listen.

"That crow is up to no good," she'd whisper to the groundskeepers.

Over those months at the circus, I grew feathers on my thighs and useless wings that would not take flight. I'd wrap them around me at night.

“Wings!” she shrieked one day, pointing to me in the mess hall, in front of everyone.

“She does not have a mind like you or me,” she warned, her eyes growing large. “She will kill us in our sleep! You fools, do you not see the evil in her heart?”


Nobody looked up from their plates. Nobody spoke to me or looked at me at all anymore.

The next day I woke to a scarecrow in front of my door.

The Scarecrow's Post

What happened next exists only in fragments, flashes: Running until my body screamed to stop, falling into the mud, dogs barking, night again, and then, suddenly, the rush of gratitude when I realized I was flying—the animal joy, the moon.

I don't remember when my human arms shriveled and disappeared. And I can’t think of when I was first among other wings, talons, beaks—the murder of crows, my family. I used to ask myself how it was that I couldn’t remember the exact moment of transformation, the change in my size.

I know now that I didn't get smaller. The world around me grew.

killydoon

***

Circus photos were taken at Mysterious Wave, a beautiful sim created by Cherry Manga & Anley Piers. The crow-girl avatar is called Puppeteer and is available there for purchase.

The fortuneteller's skin is Ethel Crabtree from Peachy Keen. It also comes with a shape and outfit not shown here. Her dress is Silk Gypsy from an old season of Paper Couture (look for it on the SL Marketplace). The turban is from Paper Couture's Roaring Green Ruffles outfit (also an old season). In the first photo, crow girl is wearing the Long Island T from Pig, and an edited version of the Black Boho Skirt by !BF! (I can't find the store anymore, sorry!).

I kind of believe in ghosts

Don’t go down to the river, child,

Don’t go there alone;

For the sobbing woman, wet and wild,

Might claim you for her own.

***

John Kenn

***

“Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that's on its mind and can't make itself understood, and so can't rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving.”

--"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" Mark Twain

Christophe Dessaigne

Christophe Dessaigne

***

Edward Gorey

***

In Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is a dislocated spirit or ghost that attaches itself to the body of a living person. It inhabits the flesh in order to carry out some sort of unfinished business--usually involving revenge.

E.G. again

Second Life credits

La Llorona photo

Hair: Harlow, Cake

Skin: Zombina, Miasnow

Dress: Chemise de la Reine, Ephemera

Sim: Chakryn Forest

Ghost girl in forest photo

Ghost avatar (wearing just the head and hair): Ghostly woman avatar, Curio Obscura

Sim: Bewitched (Is it my imagination or did this place used to be spookier when it was called Bentham Forest? I remember going there long ago and actually feeling creeped out. Now... well, let's just say that after much searching I finally found the only small corner there not marred by floating neon signs or glowing jack o'lanterns or vendor billboards ... the place is just silly now. It reminds me of how, as a girl, when I finally got to go to Winchester Mystery House, I was crestfallen by how normal and perfectly un-scary it was--with loud visitors in white sneakers tramping through, signs to "Watch Your Step!" at every corner and bored teenage guides. I really thought it was going to be haunted.)

Dybbuk-possessed lady photos

Hair: Myrna, Ingenue

Skin: Inanna-Vernissage Pale, Lionskins

Dress: Silk Gypsy, Paper Couture

Sim: The Docks, by Scottius Polke

...

Throwing out unneeded Second Life/blog photos from my hard drive always turns up a few that I like and wish I had used in the original posts. These three still speak to me and remind me of other things.

***

To grow old is to lose everything.

Aging, everybody knows it.

Even when we are young,

we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads

when a grandfather dies.

Then we row for years on the midsummer

pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,

that began without harm, scatters

into debris on the shore,

and a friend from school drops

cold on a rocky strand.

If a new love carries us

past middle age, our wife will die

at her strongest and most beautiful.

New women come and go. All go.

The pretty lover who announces

that she is temporary

is temporary. The bold woman,

middle-aged against our old age,

sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.

Another friend of decades estranges himself

in words that pollute thirty years.

Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge

and affirm that it is fitting

and delicious to lose everything.

--"Affirmation," by Donald Hall

***

***

Source

Pool-hopping, says the younger cop,

Used to do it myself, as a kid.

I stare past the blur of uniform, across

the dimly-lit lawn: two plastic garden chairs bob

in the shallow end -- drawn close, conversant.

All night I've listened to laughter,

to the sleek glissando of furtive swimmers.

I felt ridiculous, alone in the house, keyed

to every sound, finally phoning the cops

from inside a locked bathroom, then cruising

room to room like a watchful cat.

Now the porch light burns. The absent owner's cat

digs in his litter: each grain of sand flies

with the pitch and force of flung glass. Glass house;

invisible swimmers who scale six-foot fences.

They must be asleep by now, spooned

around each other, hair still damp on the sheets --

or maybe they've moved a few blocks down, lie seal-like

on the beach, dreaming, inches from the tide.

The pool's circulating pump sends water

over the edge, as I go barefoot on wet grass,

kneel and angle for the chairs. In water,

they're so heavy -- resistant as bodies. For a second

I even see hair billow out, as I haul the last one in,

I am that tired, that sick with desire.

--"House Sitter, 4 a.m.," by Julie Bruck

...

Curio Obscura-Butterflies Dreaming They Are An Avatar

Antony Gormley

Woops.