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From Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole
Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2002
Copyright ©2002 Eileen Tabios

The Beginning


It was always like this: a journey out to the fringe of danger, then
a quick and safe retreat. It seemed a pitiful surrender. The end of a barely-birthed millennium could be sighted, a foretelling that failed to categorize her mink coat as “old-fashined.” She was part of a different trend: walking the streets with Chopin plugging both ears.

Once, she slept for three nights in an otherwise emply hotel in Mindanao. The windows opened onto a terrace that the bellhop suggested she avoid. Not that you are a fat lady, the bellhop added belatedly with a nervous giggle. She looked at him for the first time and noticed he was old enough to be her grandfather. She decided to become content with the views behind glass of a sea patrolled by wooden boats festooned with colorful masts. She felt she should have a memory of fishermen’s wives stitching together cloths of white for clouds, red for birds, yellow for suns and blue for skies. With composure she understood that it would be remnants that would create rainbows. The masts waved as if they were unraveling, letting in too much wind through holes left behind by oversized needles. Still, they satisfied fishermen who only trawled by the shore. For adventures closer to the distant horizon, they replaced sails with noisy motors. She could hear the rusty motors breathing awkwardly through their paces, churning salt in the water.

She knew an island existed beyond her vision, past where the earth continued the downward trend of its arc. On that island, she knew more than one man thought of her. She knew they could not imagine what she saw everyday: glass on skyscrapers that stunned her with her aging reflections. Or, that when she sees through transparent walls, she sees old men huddled over street grates or old women pushing stolen shopping carts laden with useless debris—like knife handles with no blades, novels missing their last pages or seeds that will never feel the embrace of warm, wet earth.

For a moment she wondered what it would have been like to be a slave girl during the thirteenth century in an arid land. She envisioned the sky overhead to have been a dirty brown and the sun a flickering yellow globe. Her breasts, most assuredly, would have bared themselves to anyone’s stare. Her wonder occurred for only a moment, lasting like a single flicker of a humminglbird’s wings.

She knew her lover’s best friend was in love with her, and that all of his failed relationships derived from his search for oblivion. He knew she will never leave her lover, though she considered fidelity irrelevant. She wondered about what her lover’s best friend did understand: serial killers and their perpetual propensities. She considered lack of control unseemly—and that this was the trait that distracted men into falling in love with her façade. Yes, she knew that, out of control, she would be glorious. She knew the danger of her lover never ever having seen her loose.

For their tenth anniversary, her lover gave her an expensive oil portrait of a woman unknown to them. But the paint transcends her identity, they agreed. In the beginning, she also considered the stranger’s face to be the homeliest woman she had ever witnessed. When she woke up one day and discovered beauty in the stranger’s lined brows, unsmiling gaze, wrinkled cheeks and thin lips, she began to question her collection of assumptions. Months passed before she woke up another day to the wish that she had been a kind person during her past. Kindness, she believed, could have transcended much that was visible and much that was not.

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Copyright ©2005 Carayan Press