affiliated with act 2

by Sam Alden via pinterest (affiliated with act 2)

via pinterest (http://www.olivierkugler.com/gq_rezepte/8_gq_spiegelei.html)

Edward Hopper’s night windows

the inspo for the mom in act 3

Act 3

On a Thursday evening of the eighteenth year of my life, my mother told me she found me on the front porch of a deserted house in an abandoned town in the middle of the American West. She told me in the bright yellow apron she’d always wore as she flipped the flounder, scraping off the crust stuck to the cast iron pan. I finished pouring my glass of partly skimmed milk and looked at my sister, who turned to look at our mother with a single popcorn kernel in her hand. I imagined a woman, an adventurer, a lonesome dreamer riding on horseback with a pistol, her eyes hidden in the dark shadow cast by the brim of her cowboy hat. It was high noon. I closed the fridge door, the living room smelled like fish.

“What.”

It was my sister who first stopped pretending like my mom mumbled just another filler comment as if we were talking about the neighbour’s cat who ran away for the fifth time. That exact millisecond as her face froze in a fixed grimace, eyes squinted, brows in a knot, I noticed for the first time how the corners of her mouth lifted upwards in a resting state while mine pointed down. We’ve always used different shampoos, her hair was silky like Rapunzel’s while mine occupied as much space as it could, its mere existence was a manifesto of sorts, it invaded spaces - in the bedroom as well as the city centre square. 

The warm kitchen illuminated condensed droplets on the windowpane in this November Chicago weather. What a lovely evening it could have been, I thought, if not for the springing conversation I sensed coming. She turned around and wiped her hands, her gaze fixed down. We watched as she tried to prolong the hand-drying process. I remembered aunty Macy’s comment on my ninth birthday when she carelessly told me I had a delicate nose no one else in my family was gifted. And then she looked up. 

“You were so small and weak, God, I wish you’d seen yourself.” Her voice took off in an unnatural pitch but soon adjusted itself, “I couldn’t help it.”

She told us how she wrapped me up with her ex-boyfriend’s leather jacket and held me close to her chest, fled into their 4x4 despite not having seen a single person in the 100 miles diameter. It was meant to be, she said, shaking her head. I couldn’t tell if it was directed toward me or herself or God. The flounder kept sizzling in the background; I wondered whether my biological mother was cooking too, standing in a rundown kitchen stirring a pot of mac and cheese, an alcoholic husband lying on the couch, kids screaming in the background. 

Both of them awaited an answer from me. My mother, this 48-year-old woman standing by the stove in her A&F joggers and yellow apron, suddenly turned into a kid who was admitting that it was she who stole the 20 bucks from her mother’s wallet after three days of straight denials. I realized how much power I held against her at that moment: the courage she had summoned also pushed her to the edge of the cliff. I could be the perpetrator or the saviour. I could push or pull. I could let her go. I looked into her slightly slanted almond-shaped eyes that marked zero resemblance to mine.

“Well, you’ve gotta admit, that was probably the best thing you ever found.”

via pinterest via caspar(v) on twitter

Act 2

She found the ring in the pocket of his winter jacket. No, she did not reach her hand into the man’s jacket like a creep - it simply fell out of it at the heat of the moment. The sound of metal hitting the hardwood floor was too distinct to be ignored. Maybe she had a sensitive ear. Who knows, anyway, it was not her fault. She wouldn’t have cared to look for it afterwards if he hadn’t denied hearing the sound. So maybe she did reach her hand into the pocket when the man was unconscious at two in the morning, but with good and justified reasons to do so.

The ring itself was quite plain, it was a silver band with carved initials on the inside. She turned to look at the person lying on his stomach, utterly unaware and sleeping soundly. Was she supposed to feel disgusted, repulsive, mad? Perhaps she should’ve woken him up then and demanded an answer; screaming, stomping, crying, even a slap on the face. Why did you do this to me? To her? You son of a bitch! Oh yes, she would stare intently at his remorseful handsome face that begs for forgiveness, then say no like the strong independent woman standing on high moral grounds that she is. She put the ring back and walked to the kitchen. 

Marie De Léon turned the lights on, made herself a cup of English breakfast, then turned it off. She walked to the tiny kitchen window in the dark, lifted up the blinds and looked into the bright night lit by a full moon singing a eulogy. She burnt her tongue by the breakfast table where they had made love earlier, restrained herself from slamming the mug and put it down slowly on a mat. The ring. Ah, how romantic. The bride and the groom took vows for life under the setting sun, popping champagnes and strumming guitars, her white train dragging against the greenness of May, his cologne smelled like wild citrus fruit. And then she slid the ring on his finger. 

The tea had cooled down when she took another sip. Marie De Léon felt a sudden surge of tingles hitting the back of her neck along the spine when she heard some ruffling sounds coming from the bedroom. It was an instantaneous panic before the realization that she was the victim and not the perpetrator. What am I afraid of? What can he possibly do to me? Isn’t he the one to apologize? And yet she couldn’t help but feel like she had leisurely dug up a fresh corpse in her backyard when it could have rested in peace for...at least another year or so. Her next move would be crucial: either bury it and self-hypnotize into believing the corpse has a perfect reason to be there, or, I dear say, do something about it. When he wakes up, totally ignorant of her undercover major discovery, she would be sitting at the breakfast table with the serious face:

“We need to talk.”

Or was it really necessary? Couldn’t she just pretend as if nothing happened, climb back into the sheets and have a good night’s rest, praying for the new day to erase the nightly memory? 

The dose of English breakfast was taken too early for it to work properly. Yes, the tea was the one to blame. She sat there and waited till the morning, till the ring shined under the first beam of the sun, till the sparrows chirped in the winter chill, till the fog got infused with the smell of freshly baked country loaves. When her sweaty palms had dried, she sat with composure by the breakfast table and met his eyes. Fuck.

“How was your sleep? I made you coffee, sugar only.”

taken by me, june 2020 downtown vancouver

taken by me, pacific regional park august 2020

Act 1

World-renowned painter Omar Al-Fasih told the journalist on his eightieth birthday in his 8e arrondissement apartment how it began with a single faded magenta shoe in the forest; or more precisely, the moment he unfurled the crumpled note left inside the Adidas samba sitting next to the trail he passed almost every morning for eleven years. The shoe had been there for a couple of months, and like any other sane person with important tasks, he never bothered to take one extra step (literally) to examine the muddy artifact that laid on a pile of wet leaves. Perhaps it was the acute melancholy permeating through the air particles of rainy Montreal, perhaps it was the extra espresso shot. On that particular day, however, he stopped by the sad shoe and wondered.

...how, why, who, what? 

Something about its singularity added to its mysteriousness. Something about how flat it laid, how close it was to the dirt path, how clearly inconspicuous. 

He looked around to make sure there was no one else nearby, then squatted down to scrutinize this dampened object. At age sixty-nine, Omar noticed how his knee joints cracked just a little as his eye-level dropped to one similar to a golden retriever’s. The aged and lively human was really surprised to have found that paper slip; after all, he expected nothing out of this pointless move. 

find me in Paris

Good things happen at a cost

this is your mantra

He kept the slip as a joke. When Omar got home he had almost forgotten about the piece of paper he found earlier. The weather seemed to have worsened. He sat down and heard the clock tick. It was 11:04 am. The rain outside was not strong enough of a downpour for any Gene Kelly action, nor was it mellow enough to wander in without getting caught up in the dampened clothes. Besides, he just got back. Dampened. Wet. Shoe. 

“I could go to Paris, I bet it’s sunny there.” Omar thought, with an imposed sarcastic undertone that protected him from furthering the idea.

He spent the next hour waiting for lunch time, when the clock hit twelve he journeyed 30 metres away from his place, got paneer tikka masala with Canada dry, then turned on the television. By the time he wiped his mouth it was 12:33pm and raining, as confirmed by the weatherman. In afternoons like this his mind drifted to his late wife and daughter who lived in the South. He stood up and turned off the tv, walked around the house before sitting down at the exact same dent on the left side of the sofa; and yet, just before his bottom hit the cracked soft leather, he hovered awkwardly with an L-shaped elbow supporting his body weight and stood up. The next day he listed the apartment in the local newspaper, bought a ticket to Paris, and had his friends come pick up his furniture. The day after he was on the Boeing 737 flying across the Atlantic. 

The journalist demanded more, Omar told him it was twelve minutes past his nap time so he must excuse himself.

“Monsieur, one last question, what would you tell someone who’s hesitant on pursuing something?”

“Get your ass up and go for a walk, even if it’s raining.” good things happen at a cost.