Asakiyume mita

Billy Behind Me, who was a character in the Patricia Russo flash story "Mena, Until," which I talked about back in February, makes an appearance in the second of this trio of short poems.

I like everything about that poem. I have a broken pot whose shards I want to try drawing with (though I have brilliant street chalks, so I don't really have the need--but it's the principle of the thing).

The end makes me think of how we talk with people when we can't talk to them in the waking world anymore. How we talk in dreams. Makes me think of what Ailton Krenak says, and about what the characters say in Embrace of the Serpent, and also of the story The Lathe of Heaven.


Some music for you: Baixi-Baixi

It's cold here.

The water in the marsh froze clear--where it's deep, you can see all the growing things, the mud, the bubbles ... the tossed cans... frozen in it. In shallower places, you can see the marsh grass is frozen in it and on it, held down by hoarfrost stitchery.



On the paths in the woods, water in the soil has frozen in the formation known in Japan as 霜柱 (shimo bashira), frost pillars. Sometimes they look like ribbon candy, other times like tiny stalactite formations, and other times, as here, like ghost moss.



( Here's a microfiction from a couple of days ago )

I'm reading too many things to do them all justice, and then interrupting them with other things, but the things I've spent most time with are

--More of Life Is Not Useful, by Ailton Krenak. The first essay was good; I felt more at sea in the second and now the third--I can't quite follow the logic of where he goes all the time, and sometimes there are jargonish phrases that I don't get. Even so, there are moments I like very much.

This, for instance, is both serious but also amusingly expressed:

We can inhabit this planet, but we will have to do so otherwise. If we don’t take steps in this direction, it would be as if someone wanted to get to the highest peak of the Himalayas but wanted to take along their house, their fridge, their dog, their parrot, their bicycle. They’ll never arrive with heavy luggage like that. We will have to radically reconceive of ourselves to be here. And we yearn for this newness.

And this I love:

There are people who were fish, there are people who were trees before imagining themselves as human. We were all something else before becoming people.

--I also have been reading Eagle Drums, by Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson, a story of an Iñupiaq boy who's compelled to live with eagles to learn what they want to teach if he wants to stay alive. I got this one from the library based on what osprey_archer wrote in this entry, specifically, that it "is built on axioms about how the world works that are vastly different than the ones structuring most modern fiction." She's right! And I'm enjoying that very much.

--I started reading C.S.E. Cooney's Saint Death's Daughter-- I love CSE Cooney's writing so much! I just hope I can maintain momentum on it, because it's long, and somehow I don't apportion as much time to reading as I could (which is a terrible thing for someone who writes to confess to).

Meanwhile, here are some things that I want to read (or have read and want to call attention to):

Aster Glenn Gray's Deck the Halls with Secret Agents. Long-time rival Soviet and US agents meet at a Christmas party! I wonder what happens next ;-)

Iona Datt Sharma's Blood Sweat Glitter --Sapphic romance around roller derby!

This one came to me as a recommendation on Mastodon, and since I follow the author on social media but have never read anything by her, I'm very excited! It's also a podcast--not sure if I will listen or read it: "The Font of Liberty" by Elizabeth Porter Birdsall.

And then there's Kerygma in Waltz Time, which I've read and would recommend to fans of story retellings, fan fiction, and falling into stories--it's by Sherwood Smith, originally published under a pseudonym in It Happened at the Ball, an anthology of ballroom stories.

There's a chair beside the path in the woods. Some leaves have collected on it.

Would you sit on it?



I sent the photo to my Tikuna tutor. She said maybe it's the seat of Madre Monte, a guardian of the forest and the animals in it, a terror to hunters, clearcutters, and fishers. She appears in the deep forest when there are storms, is responsible for water-borne ailments, and her screams are louder than thunder (says Spanish-language Wikipedia).

But maybe in her quieter moments, she appreciates a good place to sit down.

It takes temerity to sit in a seat that has "reserved" written all over it, but one of the fairies at my christening blessed me with temerity, so I gave it a try--and then jumped up, because when I sat, I sank riiiiiiiiight in, and I didn't want to find out deep the sinking would go.

* * *

In my dad's front yard there are a sugar maple and a Norway maple. The Norway maple was shedding maps the other day.



Where would you like to go?

Each map is unique--you take it and follow it as you see fit. You could do this with ordinary maps, too. A map of London is great for navigating London, but what if you try using it in Osaka or Kota Kinabalu or Cairo? It could be interesting.

On the first day we spent together, my friend took me down to the edge of Yahuarcaca. That name goes with a group of lakes connected to the Amazon, los lagos Yahuarcaca, but she calls it/them río--Río Yahuarcaca. Like the main river, it inhales and exhales. The waters are at their highest in April or so, and then begin to recede. In June (when I was there this time) they're not at their lowest, but they've receded a good bit. So as you walk beside the water, you're walking in places where you'd be swimming at other times of year. You'd be waaaay under water in April, but in June you're on (more or less) solid ground, breathing air. The same trees that feed the terrestrial creatures drop fruit into the water to feed the water creatures at other times of year. They're watching over and providing for everyone.

"When the forest is flooded, this is a nursery for fish," my friend told me.



Wouldn't you feel safe there? A good place to grow big. It was the fishes' turn to be in this space a few months ago, but at that moment it was our turn. We're sharing the space, just time-slipped. Water creatures were swimming by and over me--time-slipped.

Trees must grow very wise indeed, presiding over two worlds like this. Think of the tales they can tell of all the creatures they watch over.

Genipa americana, known as huito in Spanish, é in Tikuna, is a very wise and generous tree. Francy told me it's a great-great-great grandparent of the Ticuna people.** So when she and her brother took me to meet a huito tree, I felt really lucky to meet it.

Its fruit is edible when ripe, and when unripe, it makes a blue-black protective dye (as described in this entry). In the blink of an eye, my friend's brother was up in the tree. He tossed down a couple of unripe fruits so we could grate them and make some dye back at their house.



**Online I found the story of this written out: Yoi and Ipi, two brothers, came to Earth when it was completely dark: they cut down the giant ceiba that was obscuring the sun, and all manner of plants and animals then were able to flourish. Yoi, the older brother, gave Ipi, the younger brother, the task of growing huito and then grating the fruits. Some of the gratings fell into the water and became fish, which later Yoi caught. The fish he caught became the Tikuna people.

There was this place where the sidewalk pressed right against the flank of McKinnock Hill. Walking that section of sidewalk, you’d have ferns dropping moisture on your shoulders. It was a narrow sidewalk: you couldn’t walk on it and hold your left arm out straight. Too much McKinnock Hill in the way. But if you bent your arm, you could press your hand into the hill’s thick moss.

You could also kiss a bare patch of stone. That was the kind of thing we’d do when we walked home from school as kids: “Kiss that spot there … Gross! You just kissed McKinnock Hill! You’re going to marry McKinnock Hill!”

There were animals on McKinnock Hill. Mainly squirrels and chipmunks were what we saw, but sometimes there’d be roadkill—possums or the occasional raccoon. So we knew those lived up there too.

And foxes, too. A place like McKinnock Hill has to have foxes.



( At some point we heard a story... )

I have turned this little story into a PDF with the foxes in the header ;-) If you would like a copy--if you would like a copy to send to your millions of friends so that my flash-fiction reputation spreads like a tsunami worldwide!--you can message me here or send me an email at forrestfm (at) gmail dot com, and I will email it to you.

I read this sweet, weird, hilarious story yesterday, and now I want to become a traveling doctor, using this story as my patent medicine. "Lifts moods and births laughter, guaranteed to leave you feeling better than you started." It's "A Turtle in Love, Singing," by Tara Campbell, in Bourbon Penn, a new-to-me zine.

The story is in the form of police reports from the hapless Green Lake Police, who deal with a string of odd encounters, beginning with a disgruntled pelican or perhaps pelicans, sighted near the public restrooms in the southeast area of the lake. This is followed by the discovery of a patch of carnivorous plants resembling Audrey from "The Little Shop of Horrors" and then a lion leaning against a naked woman, and it goes on.

One of the charming things in these reports is how the police always advise residents to leave the oddities alone and/or just give them their space--for example, regarding the lion and the woman:

To repeat: no one has been harmed, no one appears to be in danger. Citizens are advised to stay clear and just let them have their moment. There is no need to keep calling the Green Lake Police about this unless the situation changes.

At one point the Green Lake Police receive "reports of a rainbow pegasus unicorn in the vicinity of the Bathhouse Theater." However ...

Officers sent to investigate were only mildly disappointed to find that the intriguingly improbable creature was, in fact, not a pegasus, nor a unicorn, but an inflatable personal raft floating on the lake. Officers did report, however, that the rainbow description only applied to certain sections of the floatation device, and on the whole, the design was a rather more pink-forward affair.

An encounter with a seven-foot raven prompts introspection and an apology for cultural insensitivity:

Here the desk officer might have overstepped a bit by bringing Raven’s trickster reputation into the discussion, even if simply to deny that it played a role. Green Lake Police leadership has taken note of our insufficient protocols for working with mythical members of the public. Green Lake Police leadership hopes that this can be a teachable moment, and promises that new protocols will be crafted at the regional level, in conjunction with tribal representatives, who would likely have used a more appropriate word than “mythical” in this alert.

All the unusual beings encountered end up interweaving and connecting in satisfying ways, with the turtle in love, singing, representing a pleasing culmination.

Enjoy!

Elsewhere on the interwebs, I've been doing microfiction, a tiny story a day, based on single-word prompts. Three of us create prompt words for the month. We intend to keep it up for a whole year! So far I've only missed one day.

I posted an entry here featuring one I wrote, then lost confidence and deleted the entry. The thing about microfiction--especially, maybe, mine, is it's VERY slight! Not much to see! ... But I deleted the entry more because I feared it might read as saccharine. I like the story! In the words of the immortal Krusty the Clown, "I don't mind the taste!" But I get shy of revealing just what a prissy moralizer I can be. (LOL, though if you've read me here for any amount of time, you've probably figured it out.)

Anyway, I'm going to post some of the word prompts I've written for, and you choose which one you'd like to see, and I'll give it to you in my reply.

(The shamefully embarrassing one was for the word "tree," and if you're curious, you can read it here.)

THESE ARE VERY SHORT. They have to fit in about 450 characters.

speaker
atlas
light
dunk
stock
case
vision
milk
plume
captivity
chest

There's something inherently mysterious about living on the edge of thousands of miles of rain forest. Mysterious things just happen; that's just the way it is.

My tutor sent me this video (and gave me permission to share it) of an eerie encounter she had with a horse the other evening. For the record, I saw no horses whatsoever while I was down there, and though I'm sure that there are people who do have horses, I find it hard to imagine them in the neighborhoods I was in. This horse was apparently out enjoying a nighttime stroll... alone...



.... There are mysterious horses associated with other Amazonian cities and towns--like the Peruvian Amazonian town of Caballo Cocha. That town exists near where long ago (so the story goes) there was a village of the same name that disappeared below the waters of a lake, a colonial town with houses, a church, and of course horses. Now, when someone passes by in the direction of the current town of Caballo Cocha, past the lake, one can hear the neighing and galloping of horses, the ringing of church bells, and the sounds of gunfire. Some people, passing by the lake, see people in the sunken town, inviting them down to share in a party. At the beginning of the 20th century, soldiers were afraid to let their horses near that lake for fear they'd be drawn down into it. (Source for my retelling of the legend)

And the current town has a statue of a white horse rising from the lake.

( photo by my tutor, from a visit she took there )

This story and video offered up to you for this season of spirits and mysterious things.

I finished my six-page picture book about planting eggs and incubating avocado seeds. Behold! The egg grew into a tree that has eggs on it:



And the avocado seeds that the hen sat on hatched some avocado chicks:



I sent the text and pictures to my friend and Tikuna teacher and said if she wanted to put it into Tikuna, we could create a dual-language book ;-) (And I said she should tell me if I'd messed up the Spanish, which is highly probable.)

The complete PDF is too large for me to send to my guides, let alone my friend, so I will try printing it up here and mailing it--though I'm not sure postal mail will reach anyone. But in any case, they have the pictures and (minimal) text to get a smile out of, and if my friend does put it into Tikuna, I'll add that in and send her the text and pictures again.