#187 Under the Leaning Mountain

Naya hadn’t meant to frighten the girl.

It was past time for the villagers to come and leave their daily offerings, so Naya was surprised to see a small girl carrying a basket coming up the path. Naya stopped by a stone, still deep in the shadow of the leaning mountain, and watched the child climb up the sunny slope to the boundary between day and twilight. She was fascinated by the bright colors of the girl’s clothes, by the tan of her skin and the slight blush of her cheeks. The girl kept her eyes on her feet until she was almost at the altar stone, and then she looked up.

And saw Naya.

The girl screamed and made a clumsy, frightened throw of the basket. It hit the altar, but bounced and scattered its contents over the sunny slope. The girl had already started running back down the path.

“Wait!” Naya called out to her, but the girl never looked back.

"They don’t speak our language anymore," Naya’s mother had told her. “Some of them don't believe that any of us are still alive.”

Naya stepped closer to the altar, but she couldn’t reach it. This time of day it was fully in the sunshine. Later in the afternoon, in an hour or so, the shadow of the leaning mountain would fall across it, then continue creeping down the slope. Then Naya could gather the loaves of bread that had fallen in the dust and carry them home.

A black shape fluttered down from the trees. The ravens knew about the altar, and were always on the lookout for a chance to steal. Naya picked up a pebble and flung it at the bird. It squawked and hopped to the side, watching her, but it didn’t fly away. Maybe it figured she’d leave before it did.

She was ready to wait. She was so hungry, and that bread so close. She could almost reach out and take it.

But she couldn’t. It was in the sunlight.

“If the sun ever sees a single one of us, the whole mountain will fall down and crush us all,” Naya’s grandmother had warned. Over and over again.

Naya looked up to the dark grey stone that cut out more than half the sky above her. She imagined it shuddering, falling, tumbling down, crushing the fragile houses of her village. All the people she knew and loved, in spite of the curse, in spite of whatever they’d done to doom her to this prison of shadow, she would never want to harm them.

Naya picked up another stone as more crows came to join the first one. It was going to be a long afternoon.

#182 Why Am I Eating These Fries?

Why am I eating these fries?

I don’t even like this kind. They spill out of a greasy white paper bag like so many overgrown crispy-fried grubs. I could buy a whole pound of these exact same crinkle-cut fries from the freezer case at the grocery store for about the same price we paid for this one bag. Fat, greasy, bloated, they’re either overcooked and crunchy as too-thick potato chips, or else soggy and pale.

I bite into one. Salt and crunchiness, then the smooth, creamy starch at the center fill my mouth.

These aren’t real fries, I tell myself as I pick up another one. Real fries still have the skin on. These fries were probably made from dried potato powder mixed with glue and pressed into little crinkle-fry shaped molds.

One of the fries is bitter, a little too overcooked. I take two next time and drench them in ketchup to wash down the bad taste.

If I’m going to be stuffing untold fat and carbohydrate calories into my body, why don’t I choose a food I actually like? These fries are not worth it.

I’m eating them faster now, as if trying to get it over with. My hand, almost without my permission, keeps picking them up, dipping them in ketchup and popping them in my mouth.

These fries are not my responsibility. I didn’t even order them, my husband did. I’m not even hungry. I already ate my burger. That was more than enough.

I am going to stop now.

I try wiping my fingers on my napkin, cleaning off the salt and grease. I clasp my hands on the slightly sticky table top, which feels as if so many cokes have spilled over it there’s no more wiping it clean. Trying to distract myself, I look at the chipped paint on the picnic table boards, studying the progression of color. Brown, then blue, and finally now red. If I just sit here and wait, my husband will eat the rest of the fries. I know he will. They’re his anyway. He just asked if I wanted some.

I pick up the ketchup bottle and without even thinking, squirt some in the top of the Styrofoam box my burger came in. Trying to be artistic, I run a line around the place where the sides meet the bottom.

There are still a few fries spilling out of the paper bag onto a Styrofoam plate on a sticky picnic table in the strip mall where I’m having lunch with my husband. I can’t let the ketchup I just squirted from the bottle go to waste.

I pick up another French fry, dip it in the ketchup, and eat it.

#181 Banana Harvest

We were too eager the first time we harvested our bananas.

We’d waited long enough, we thought. I’d bought the tiny banana plant on our first trip to the nursery after moving into our new place. We had a yard, and it wanted trees. Lemon, tangerine, pomegranate, those were the ones I wanted, but I never considered bananas. But there it was, in a black plastic pot with “dwarf apple banana, $12.50” scrawled on the side. Why not, I thought.

It slept for months, years, unchanging, in the grassy corner of the yard where I’d planted it. Then one day it began to grow. A towering trunk, then another sprang up, and another. Green leaves unfurled like solar panels on an opening space probe. The architecture of nature built with astounding speed.

A flower appeared, a huge purple-red bud the size of my open hand, hanging down like the head on a goose’s neck from a long stem. Petals dropped off, exposing tiny green fingers. Proto-bananas. Embryonic. The stem grew longer, adding ranks of bananas until a bottle-brush of them hung from the top of the tree. We sent proud photographs to relatives, as if this bunch of bananas were a new baby in the family. Day by day we watched them grow. Are the bananas fat enough yet? Can we cut them down yet?

At last we couldn’t stand it any longer. We cut them down, solid and green, and hung them up to ripen. My sons gleefully hacked down the tree with a machete, careful not to damage the younger trees coming up around it. Its sheaves, peeled away one at a time, revealed a hollow lattice structure that hinted at the plant’s ability to spring up so quickly. Layers circled a center trunk, rows of cube-shaped chambers in every one, like the steel superstructure of a skyscraper.

The second time we harvested bananas, it took us a long time to get around to it. For months we said, those bananas look ready, we should cut them down. By then there were three other bunches coming on, one in our yard and two hanging over the side fence into the neighbors’. The bananas got bigger and fatter, far fatter than the first bunch we cut.

When they finally started to turn yellow--could bananas actually turn yellow on the tree?--we decided we’d better hurry or we’d loose them all to the myna birds.

One of my younger sons stood up on a stool and used the saw to cut them free while three more of us stood beneath to hold them up. Cold banana sap dripped into my hair, like an anointing. The bananas were so heavy they nearly knocked me over when they came down. The boys fought over turns with the machete, cutting up the trunk for the compost, while I helped my daughter cut the bunches of bananas off the stem. Afterwards I had to use paint thinner to get the latex from the saw and the machete and my sticky hands.

“This must be why Hawaiians share food,” my son said. “There’s too many bananas all at once for us to eat by ourselves.”

Would you like one? Ripened on the tree.

#179 Home Lunch

I usually don’t take a lunch with me to class.

Not that I’m not hungry at eleven o’clock when we get our break. The student center grill is right there, so I usually grab a sushi roll or something. Once I even tried their stir-fry, but there was too much of it for me to eat in ten minutes so I was slurping noodles while the teacher started talking again. Not cool.

Today, though, I had some leftovers of this fantastic ramen noodle salad, with carrots and peas and chicken and lettuce that had been marinading all night in soy sauce, vinegar, and sugar. That was something worth taking. Not something lame like a peanut butter sandwich and a bruised apple.

I’d spent the minutes leading up until the time I was supposed to leave cramming in the reading assignment, and after that I still had to blow-dry my hair, so I knew I didn’t have much time to pack up my lunch. I found a plastic container in the cupboard, scraped a generous serving of salad plus a few extra toasted slivered almonds on top, then snapped on the lid. Now all I needed was a way to carry it. I was pretty sure that container wouldn’t leak, but I wasn’t going to risk my computer by putting a cheap plastic container that had been through the dishwasher too many times in my book bag.

There were lunch carriers in the cupboard over the stove. I pulled down my favorite, a grey one with butterflies that might have been a handbag if it wasn’t made out of that soft cooler material. I picked up my container of salad, ready to slip it inside.

The lunch bag wasn’t empty.

A crumpled piece of greasy sandwich wrapper with lettuce bits sticking to the inside. Something blackish and furry and vaguely reminiscent of half a banana. A bloated foil wrapper that might still have a piece of chocolate inside.

When was the last time I’d taken a lunch anywhere?

“Not using that one,” I said out loud, soft but kind of frantic, because class was starting soon and I still had to walk all the way across campus.

There were other lunch carriers up there. That red one that had come from the grand opening of the new computer lab on campus, when they were giving out free lunches courtesy of the computer company that had donated all the machines in hopes of getting us college students hooked on using their stuff. That particular company had folded already, or had they been bought out by someone else? Oh well, not really my business. Anyway, I kept the lunch cooler, the boxy little red lunch cooler, just in case I ever needed a back up. Waste not, want not, and all. It was down at the bottom of a stack of paper lunch sacks.

They were too small for my container to go in, those lunch sacks.

The red thing would work. I pulled it out and unfolded it.

Patches of brown mildew encrusted the fabric lid. Not just vague spots like ordinary mildew. This stuff was three-dimensional. The Incredible Hulk of mildew. Grimy brown bits got off on my fingers. I was afraid I’d discovered one of those alien plants that was going to take over the world by the end of the episode. The kind that died in the rain at the last minute so the world would be saved after all.

I still didn’t have anywhere to put my lunch.

Ideas flashed through my head. A plastic grocery bag? So not environmentally correct. Put it in my bookbag with my phone and computer? Not on your life.  Carry it, along with the fork, in my hand? That would look great as I walked across the campus.

Then I noticed something. There was still something red up in the cupboard underneath the paper sacks. Another red lunch tote. I’d gotten two of them? I’d totally forgotten. That was sneaky of me.

I pulled it down, hoping the mildew beast hadn’t spread. This one, somehow, miraculously, was clean. I stuffed in my salad and my fork and beat it out the door to class.