Foliate Oak April 2014

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Fiction

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City of Dreams
By Matthew Brennan

On the day that the Capital Coffeehouse opened in Port Townshend, the first cup of coffee they served spilled when a waitress bumped the patron’s table, newly situated within the floor space. The coffee surface listed, then tipped back across the still-full mug and breached the far ceramic lip, streaming down the alabaster side, pooling in the saucer, and splattering onto the new wood floor where it was ignored among the grand opening celebrations and seeped in to stain.

Through the wide coffeehouse windows, our patrons could see the harbor, where ships glided by under full sail, the steady winds carrying them into the harbor. Across the street, the grand opening banners of the Townshend Bank still flew. From above the cliff, the sounds of saws and hammers drifted down and out over the water as more houses and banks went up, seemingly overnight. Among the conversations spoken over those first cups of coffee, excited speculations of the promised Northern Pacific Railway extension were not long absent.

Seventeen years later, that first coffee stain remains, darkening a patch of flooring where a handful of regulars gossip in hushed tones. Absent are the sounds of construction, and the ships that steam past the windows continue down into the Sound and no longer make anchor at port. The bank windows across the street are boarded up, and the vaporous hiss of the coffee machines only reminds us of the trains that never arrived. 

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* * *

The Nude Vacuumer
By George Held

When I moved in to my third-floor Greenwich Village corner apartment, on an August day in 1982, I arranged my furniture so that my favorite chair for reading allowed me to look out a window at the red-brick townhouse across the street, where ivy grew up between the third-floor windows.

Early one evening a few days later, I was reading the day’s Times and took a break to look out the window. My gaze settled on the ivy for a moment before movement in the left window caught my eye. I saw a woman vacuuming, assiduously pushing and pulling the wand. She soon went out of view, only to emerge at the other window of her flat. Her wavy black hair fell just below her ears. Judging from where her shoulder appeared in the window, I figured she was about 5 feet 2. And then it struck me that she was nude.

I pulled the paper up before my face, a blush burning my cheeks. The last thing I wanted was for the woman to think her new neighbor was a Peeping Tom. She was obviously used to coming home from work of a hot summer day, stripping off her clothes, and vacuuming in the buff. Even a glance left the impression that she was a bit fleshy, but her breasts were so small that they hardly interfered as she pushed and pulled the wand at a steady pace.

I supposed the woman had been used to vacuuming nude for some time before I’d moved in. Maybe the two women who’d preceded me in my apartment enjoyed the view as much as I would eventually grow to, or maybe they too were averse to peering at their neighbor across the street.

In Oxford, Ohio, where I come from, it’s safe to say that no woman, even one of the wild students at Miami University there, would appear undressed in her window, vacuuming or not. Contemplating my new neighbor, I thought that Greenwich Village had exceeded my hopes, for I’d had no expectation of even the possibility of viewing nudity right across the street.

I sat in the same chair to watch TV, so out of the corner of my eye I began to sneak a look out the window to see if my neighbor happened to be vacuuming. She did this not every night but surely more often than seemed necessary. I vacuumed my place only once every few weeks, and fully dressed, I assure you. She used her vacuum cleaner two or three evenings a week.

I don’t know how long “Chloe,” as I came to think of her, had lived across the way and whether she liked our Village corner as much as I came to do. Besides the nude vacuumer, I enjoyed the chorus of house sparrows coming from the abundant ivy covering the windowless side of her building, and it pleased me to glimpse occasionally the famous blonde actress going up or down the stoop of the building cater-corner to mine.

In any case, my acquaintance with “Chloe” never moved beyond the window-frame stage, though I sometimes wondered if she was hoping I’d wait on her stoop for her to return home from work and introduce myself.

But I am probably too proper for my own good and would never have taken her cue, if indeed vacuuming nude in full view was that sort of cue. In any case, I watched as

fall turned to winter, and I supposed she had adequate heat in her flat, because she continued her nude vacuuming.

In January, after I’d returned from spending the holidays in Ohio with my parents, I noticed that in the evening her apartment remained dark. No one came home to turn on the lights, not to mention vacuum, until March, when I noticed a pair of young men there, and they soon installed curtains that they pulled closed in the evening.

I could then read my paper or watch TV without distraction after work.

*

One fine April Saturday as I walked down my stoop, I paused when I saw a familiar figure round the corner. It was “Chloe,” fully and nicely dressed. As she neared my stoop, I said, spontaneously, “Good morning,” and, pleased by this coincidental encounter, smiled broadly at her.

“Oh,” she said, breezing by, “I’m surprised you recognize me with my clothes on.”

“Oh, my,” I thought, my eyes following her as she flowed down the sidewalk while I was too witless to say another word.

I still think of her whenever warm weather arrives, but I never saw “Chloe” again.

 

* * *

The Soft Part
By John Oliver Hodges

On a hill in Hongdae Subi cut pork strips with scissors while Insook, whom she had not seen in thirteen years, spoke of leaving her husband three days prior. The breakup had been void of hitch: no shouts, no protests, no vacillation of desire; no trying to work things out, just nothing. “I packed my bag while he watched TV,” Insook said. “I didn’t say goodbye.”

Subi flipped the meat strips with chopsticks, saying “ung” and “nae” as Insook marveled over the lack of passion in the thing. She said, “It would have been nice to see him cry. Had he hit me, that would have been better than what he didn’t do. He didn’t get out of the couch.” Insook laughed like a snorting pig. The laughter took Subi back to their days growing up in Yeongdeok, to the summer of the rains, the summer they swore to be friends forever.

That summer was known as the busiest rainy season in Korea’s history. The rains ran down crazily from the mountains to flood the cities, and the windy fangs of the rains sunk into and mangled umbrellas by the thousand so that a shortage of working umbrellas caused residents of their village to stay inside. Through windows and open doorways people eyed the empty streets pounded by falling walls of splashing silver, and the brave ones called forth by necessity to acquire cookie packs, rice, coffee and, in Subi and Insook’s neighborhood, candles due to the electrical shutdown.

That summer Subi was nine, Insook ten. Each day, before the monsoon started, the girls had climbed the mountain to a secret cave. The cave was halfway up a steep hill overlooking a field of bright green clovers with purple spots on their leaves. The small trees growing sideways out of the hill were sturdy, and partially covered the cave’s oblong entrance. The cave was difficult to spot if you happened to be wandering by. It took several hours to get there, so each time they went, they brought supplies, old blankets and baskets and bottles of water. They made a home of the cave, played house. Insook was the husband. She bundled her hair up and wore a hat, and always changed out of her dress into boy clothes once they were in the cave. As Insook’s wife, Subi made small fires on the lip of the cave and fried strips of meat. Sometimes she knelt before her onni and caressed her feet as she had often seen her mother do for her dad. This was their happy play place away from home. They suffered many beatings for staying out beyond their curfews. The fun was worth getting in trouble.

So when the rains did not let up, Subi and Insook missed their time high on the mountain in their cave. One day at Insook’s they snuck a bottle of soju from her father’s liquor box. He would miss it, come looking for Insook, but the rains were so oppressive and conducive to boredom that her dad’s wrath might even be welcome. Up in the dusty attic they finished the bottle and, drunk, decided to travel through the mud and greenery and rain to the cave. Upon their arrival, soaking wet, they found a man.

He was handsome, dressed in American sneakers and pinstriped trousers. He was just lying there. The girls squatted on the lip of the cave in the rain, staring down upon him. They knew something was wrong. “Hey!” Insook finally said. The man remained motionless. In Spurts the girls closed the space between them. They scolded him for invading their space, then tossed pebbles onto his face. Subi reached her foot out and pressed it against his arm. She felt that he was not warm.

They could drag him to the lip and toss him over, but if anybody saw him later, their cave would be spotted, their good times over. He would smell if they did that, they knew. They should drag him somewhere to bury. In the pounding rain the earth would be soft. They could dig a hole for him with their hands

“No, we should report it,” Subi said.

“Do you want to die?”

“But his family?”

“He is a criminal. You want his family to know?”

Insook switched out of her dress into pants and a shirt, put on her hat. 

The rain whipped leaves off the trees growing out of the rock. Branches were torn from the trunks of the larger trees below. The low sky thick with clouds the color of dark soup was course yet puffy. The cave darkened quicker than expected. They lit candles. Light flickered over the dead man’s face. His looks were above average. He was pretty.

Insook was the man of the mountain. She gave the final on decisions. She grabbed an arm. She motioned for Subi to help. With difficulty they tugged him to the lip. His hands reached out into the rain. They were going to push him over. Subi watched the rain splashing in his palms. The rain turned a darker color. Then stones smacked his hands, causing his fingers to wiggle. Next they heard a loud rumble. The mountain shook. Debris fell over the mouth of the cave.

The friends hunkered back. They held each other in the back of the cave until the turmoil ceased. It was darker. They crawled to the lip, peered over, saw that the field of clovers below them had vanished. They now looked down vertically upon the rearranged forest.

The dead man stayed in the cave all night, his hands out in the rain like a sleeping beggar’s. In the morning they saw that his hands had changed color. Didn’t seem right leaving him that way, so they pulled him back onto the hump of rock and dirt where it was dry. The rain showed no signs of slowing. They finished their snacks. They slept. They drank water from clay jars, and days passed, and Insook nibbled at his ears. She tried sawing his hand off with their fruit knife. The body had swollen up and the man’s face was now bloated. His lips and eyes perhaps. They unlatched his belt, pulled the pinstriped trousers down to his knees. Subi held it firmly as Insook sawed through from below. She tugged. It came free in her hands. Insook cut it into smaller pieces, scallops and strips. Subi built a fire with the dry wood they had stored.

The meat saved their lives. They did not eat it all at once, but slowly over the next few days. They were going to have to again cut away at him, but a piece of the mountain above gave way to another slide. The mountain trembled. The mouth of the cave turned dark with a speeding mass of green shrubbery and rocks and stones that spilled into the cave. The cave’s opening closed, then opened a little, and closed again. When the earth stopped moving, there was a small opening. The dead man was buried. They climbed into the earth, wiggling forward like frogs, their legs behind kicking the mud and debris. Subi’s onni poked her head through first, and by the sound she made, Subi knew. The mud had provided them with a path to safety. They were sickly, covered in mud and frail. They slipped down the mountain to their families.

“I thought he would understand,” Insook said. She set her chopsticks down and covered her face with both hands.

“Onni,” Subi said. The meat on the grill was getting too crispy so she flicked it along to the side. Though they had just started eating, and Subi was very hungry, she couldn’t look at her samgyopsal now.  

“It’s been hard,” Insook said. Her hands still covered her face. Subi felt bad for her old friend, but she’d told herself not to relinquish the resentment she’d felt for all these years. Wasn’t it Insook, the man of their family, who’d insisted that they never see each other? Seeing each other could only remind them of their time on the mountain. Their crime. Subi had been so heartbroken back then, but seeing her friend like this now, the bad feelings vanished. As they had finished their beer, Subi raised her hand for the waiter. “Yogiyo!” she called out. She ordered another Cass. It gave Insook the excuse to stop sniffling, and in a few minutes they were eating the meat again. Insook looked like a big lobster holding the tongs in one hand and the large meat scissors in the other.

Taking a chance, Subi said, “It’s really too bad we didn’t have those scissors up on the mountain.” Insook tried stifling the laugh that wanted to break free. In doing so a bit of snot burst from her nose. Then came the loud piggy laughter Subi loved so. It seemed like only yesterday that they’d been in the cave up high on the mountain. When they left the restaurant, the entire wait staff shouted, “Thank you for eating here! Come visit us again!” A light rain had started, but only Subi had an umbrella. She opened it and the two women, in heels, made their way down the hill.

 

* * *
 

Brother Hinds in the Basin
By Brandon Mc Ivor

The first Haiku I heard was composed by Brother Hinds, a hermetic, but not unfriendly rastafarian who resided in Blue Basin Springs, Diego Martin.

I had met him only once, but I always remember: he had his dreadlocks wrapped around his head like a turban, and there was a sweet, peaty smell about him, like honey from a wild beehive. I was exploring the forest around the waterfall and had come across Brother Hinds sitting on the rotting trunk of a fallen sapodilla tree. He was seated perfectly upright, but his eyes were closed and his face was vacant, as if he were asleep.

My mother, when I had asked her what she was most afraid of one day, had answered  without hesitation or irony: “Rastas.” But Brother Hinds did not seem very scary at all. I backed away from him, not because I was afraid, but because he seemed to be in deep concentration and I did not want to bother him.

As I took the first step backwards, however, he said:

“Come sit here on this log with me.”

So I did. Brother Hinds had not opened his eyes, and it did not seem as if he were  going to say anything else, so I asked him:

“What we doing?"

He answered, “Sitting.”

“You come to see the waterfall?”

“No.”

“You trying to concentrate or something?”

“No.”

“Why you here then?”

“There is no reason,” he said.

*

I did not know what else to say, so I just sat there on the rotting tree trunk, kicking my feet and looking about. There were some squashed and half eaten sapodilla fruits scattered around that were coated with a grainy crust of hardened syrup. There were also some tiny sapodilla plants shooting out of the ground, but they had only sprouted because of the freak rainstorm some weeks earlier. Now they were drooping, all but dead, because of the heat.

Then, Brother Hinds told me to listen, and he recited this poem:

    Dry season drought--
    The spines on the stinging nettle
    Are withering.

He spoke slowly, and his voice was very smooth.

“That is a haiku,” he said.

If he hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t have known. I was confused, I’ll admit, as to why he was telling me about the nettles—especially since he had sounded sad that they were wilting. I had been stung many times by the nettles, and the less of them the better, I thought.

But I liked the way he talked, deliberately and pausing mid-sentence, so I told him:

“Tell me another.”

He responded with this:

    Spider web on a dry waterfall--
    Will its eggs hatch
    Before the rains?

I did not know what it was about them, but at that moment, I wanted nothing more than to stay on that rotting sapodilla trunk with Brother Hinds and listen to his haikus.

I asked him, “What is a ‘haiku?”

He responded, “It is a Japanese poem about nature. You know who is Basho?”

“No.”

“Basho was the best at writing haikus. He was an ascetic, just like me.”

“How you mean ‘ascetic?’”

“I mean he didn’t have plenty, but he was happy.”

“Like he was poor?”

Brother Hinds smiled.

“I'll tell you what,” he said, “Why you don’t read this?”

He reached into a knitted knapsack that was lying on the ground and pulled out a wrinkled softcover. It was covered over with brown paper, but it was peeling in places. On the front, written in pencil, were the words, “Narrow Road to The Deep North.”

“That is a book by Basho,” said Brother Hinds, “He went on a journey all over Japan, looking at nature and writing poems. If I was born long ago, I would have do that too, but back in Africa.”

“And I can borrow it?”

“Yes.”

“You don't need it? To help you write haiku?”

“I leaving Blue Basin to see the rest of Trinidad. I travelling light.” 

I took the book from him, and flipped through. The pages were a spotty yellow, and there was a paper ledger glued to the inner side of the back cover. The ledger was filled with names and dates, and the last entry read, “21/4/85—Kenneth Hinds,” which is how I came to call him “Brother Hinds.”

*

I read the book slowly over the rest of the dry season. Some parts were too difficult to understand, with a lot of Japanese place names, but other parts were plainly written, and I liked reading them very much. Occasionally, there would be poems interspersed with the text, and I would dogear and revisit them, thinking about Brother Hinds when I did.
 
There was one character in the book called Sora who always stood out to me. Not much was written about him, but he had been with Basho for almost his entire journey. Sometimes, I would reread the haikus, and I would be filled with admiration for Basho, the master, only to find the addendum: ‘written by Sora.’

This gave me ambition to write my own haikus and to follow Brother Hinds on his journeys, but I never saw him again. Still, I thought about him frequently, even much later in my life, and I would wonder how far along he had gotten in his pilgrimage. During the quiet moments in my life, I recalled the two haikus he had told me, and I was taken back to that place in the Basin, sitting on the rotting sapodilla trunk and swinging my feet with Brother Hinds. 
 

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