Consolation Our memory was burned in the adoration of her body. Buttocks made of honey; we understood we couldn’t divulge our secret preparations while we expected another misfortune to occur. Ticking of clocks lingered between bay and peninsula, tide that raised all our hope, little jasmine flowers, fragrant nuptials twice experienced. Heart beats, anticipation, until the new gathering was announced and we run to welcome Him, the one who, like a myth, sprouted from the roots of our ancestors. Our enemies died of anxiety and we based all our new joy on our enraptured premonition. I like those with overflowing souls who forget of themselves and everything is enclosed inside them because all together will cause their self-destruction.
Although she had suffered terrible humiliation at the hands of Gregorio, and possibly Baruta, there was nothing weak about her. She was undefeated, strong. Like the jaguar, I thought, bold and proud. Perhaps Tamanoa found her independent spirit was unbecoming for her sex. As she bathed, Apacuana told us more. The night before, apparently Baruta had gone to the river looking for her in vain. When she returned, they argued, for she had told him she was going to get water; instead, she went to feed me. That night she had cried in my arms because Baruta wanted to take her with him to Suruapo, Guacaipuro’s village up in the mountains, as his woman. Apacuana had refused and ended up telling him she did not want to marry him, at least not yet. Baruta had reached for the macana, intending to hammer some sense into his betrothed. As I had guessed, Baruta had pressed Yulema into talking. She sang like a nightingale, telling him everything except the precise whereabouts of the cave. Instead she had led him off the track, thereby allowing time to forewarn Apacuana. Fuming with his inherited hatred of white men, Baruta had set off to find me, but he had looked further east of the river. “Will Baruta keep looking for us?” I asked. She thought not. Guacaipurowas anticipating Paramaconi’s answer with the greatest urgency, and so Baruta’s duty to his father would have to take precedence. It was very important business, Apacuana told us. Paramaconiwas being summoned to a war council in Suruapo. The meeting would take place very soon, in a matter of days. All the principal caciques of the region were being called upon to unite forces in a major attack against Losada in the valley of San Francisco. I waded further downstream where I might discreetly disrobe and wash my privates. I was obliged, by my race, to warn Losada, but Apacuana had just run away from her betrothed because of me, she had been raped by Gregorio, and I couldn’t possibly take her back to the valley of San Francisco.
money we have should be placed on that … just for now though. Recommend it to whoever you think can wait a year or so to get results. Frankie is a patient man, but he does things right. Remember that.” “I’ll work on that, Dad” Logan said, getting up and going back to his desk. As soon as his son left the office, Eteo’s phone rang. Richard Walden was on the line and sounded excited, talking of an oil deal he was planning to get involved in. It was a prime southern Texas location, and a deep well with indications of plenty of reserves. “Come over and bring what you have on it,” Eteo suggested. Richard had not had much success with oil up to now, but Eteo was always ready to listen if a deal sounded promising. Half an hour later Richard walked in with a map and a letter of intent he had already signed. Eteo glanced at the letter and saw that Richard had agreed to contribute 20 percent of the drilling expenses to earn ten per cent participation in one deep well. “This all looks good, as far as I can see,” he said. “Ten percent is a respectable piece of the well, if it’s a good one.” “They’ve been very successful with other wells in the same area” Richard pointed out. “So far so good then. Just a couple of words for caution’s sake though. Make sure before you sign the final agreement that they have enough other participants signed up. You don’t want them using your paper to sell the rest of the well. Second, find out who their operator is in Texas and what he has been involved with over the last, say, five years. I’ve come across horror stories about some of the operators down there.” “Don’t worry, Eteo. It’ll all be fine. I’m flying to Calgary this weekend and meeting the brokers again on Monday morning. I expect lots of buy-in soon.” “That’s great, then” Eteo said, raising his coffee mug to toast the prospect. Richard marched out with his map and a broad smile on his face. Eteo chuckled to himself at Richard’s optimism. He wasn’t quite as sanguine, but he hoped the promoter would return from Calgary with some good news. Then he turned his attention to Golden Veins.
Knife In the talons of fear, all his life, a hell, a schism into which he hid his pride, an apostate in the rocky face of normality he promised to protect his body from darkness his imagination always created his psyche constantly on alert when fearful of all others he raised the knife to defend himself from the innocence of his victim in the body of who the knife dived proving the short truth that only evil can control a man, only the blood of innocent can justify the unnatural existence of the killer on earth he too settled on what his foul mind led him to spend his life imagining that he was human.
“That ideal has died, Padraig. The light has gone out. It goes out for many of us, I’m afraid. Because it’s only an idea, not a reality. The Greeks first had the idea when civilization was young. Didn’t they believe in the human community as commonweal? Didn’t they tell us we were all free equals linked by a shared concern for the common good? Come on, Padraig, you know more about these things than I do.” Padraig swallowed a mouthful of wine and thought for a moment. He wondered if he really did know more about these things than Finn. “You mustn’t overlook the Christian component of your humanitas, Finn: humanity as a moral ideal rather than a biological fact. From Christianity, not from Greece, comes that conviction you mentioned that human life has value. Man was created in God’s own image and was precious enough in the sight of God for God Himself to become man. This is what gives human life its value, Finn, and human life must be protected, must be saved at all cost and returned to God transmuted into spirit, pure and undefiled.” “Another ideal.” “Another aspect of the same ideal.” “But equally unrealistic.” Finn leaned forward and held Padraig in the grip of his eyes as the Ancient Mariner held the wedding guest. “You are still young. The torch you hold aloft to light your way through life still burns with the fierce brightness that youth demands. You are just starting out. But as your journey proceeds and the day wears on, the idealism that fuels your torch burns lower. The light grows dimmer, Padraig, till you no longer see your way with clarity. And you stumble and fall. And every time you stumble or fall you spill some of the fuel you still have burning. And the light grows even dimmer. Long before midnight it’s all gone. And you can’t see your way anymore. You look back for some idea of where you were heading, and of course it’s all darkness there too. The light is gone. The darkness reveals the idealism for what it was: a figment of the human imagination, a fiction born of the unique human capacity for creative thought and nourished by the unique human need to believe.” “It’s too pessimistic, Finn,” Padraig argued. “The light that guides us really burns; it really exists. You can keep it burning brightly right to the end if you have faith. Faith is the fuel, Finn. Pick up your torch again and find the faith to relight it and keep it burning. It will show you freedom, truth, justice, goodness. It will show you love. It will show you God.” Finn smiled. “As I said, Padraig, you are young. You have a fire in your head and in your belly. I am old. My head is cool, and my belly …
My Verses Verses are mine, my blood, friends they speak words and they become pieces of my heart that I give away like tears from my eyes which I gift you. They reach you like saddened smiles since I narrate my life with them I dress them with the sun of day to keep them like belts when I’m dead. My verses oversee sky and earth yet they question what is still missing and they’re bored withering like sons who met their mother-sorrow. The laughter of the smoothest tune the passion of the flute I gift you for them I’ve become the ruler who has lost the love of his people. There they flow and they fade never to stop yet slowly they cry out: turn your glance elsewhere, oh mortal bring your ship, oh forgetfulness, that they’ll sail on it.
Aspen How indifferent the shadows rise defining depth of self worth the aspen holds light at her straight trunk and behind an apparition pale knight rests his head under his left arm smiling with the aspen’s apathy in sentiment for spring and subtlety of autumn sighs princess weaves a kerchief to garland his neck while they ready to behead him for courting a tall shadow
HONEY, BE TODAY My blood is heavier in the evening, my eyes are blurred in the still air and the torches went out, it’s late, the gong has fallen silent. I’ve forgotten the air and the bread, pagan-eyed black sun… Honey, be today I’m without tomorrow the earth collapses along with the wells.
Lightness Endless voyages purposeful in search of perfection eternal flame sauntering upon lips red and promiscuous upon blades of grass fresh and resisting upright upon soil drenched in hatred and struggle one flag forever fluttering in air thinned by lightness or air thick in volcano ash falling on annulled borders nations erased from the map nations flying the colorless flag of unity listen to this tune for a while you said touching my lips with your pointer and I let my body relax under the spell of your Paradisiacal touch
A grainy monochrome archive snapshot: Nick, in tiny heptagonal smoked glasses, poses proudly under a giant pop art sign. Pauline, his smiling fellow- conspirator, is putting up a poster inside the sunlit shop window. Lucas suddenly feels wildly protective towards these funny silly people—and simultaneously enraged. All that rich energy. How could they blow it? What went wrong? Outside there’s a distant rumble. The picture wobbles for an instant, as if there’s a glitch in the power supply, the sudden gust of breeze smells oddly saline—Abbotsburton is miles from the coast—but Lucas mustn’t lose anything, even the pontifications of the commentary. “. . . less than a decade later was permanently hospitalised. How did Pauline’s nightmare begin?” His mother’s face fills the screen, against a background of bookshelves. She’s backlit, face in shadow, but he can discern her sharp nose, firm lips, large anxious eyes. Her chin was more cleary defined then. And she’s wearing one of those red t-shirts with a message. She’s staring through the screen, waiting for the right words to form. Lucas can confirm now that he was, indeed, almost there himself, off-camera, in his little bedroom at the end of the corridor, Uncle Larry minding him, and special new cars and trains to play with. This has always been puzzle corner, this dazzling fragment of memory. How old was he? He’d blundered into the beginning of the shoot, had flinched from the heat of the lights, had walked right into the anxious squint of the cameraman, until women with smooth voices and clipboards had steered him back, promising sweeties, better than grown-ups’ boring chat. No sweeties for him now. He pauses the tape for a second, kneels with his face only inches from the curve of the screen. He has to go through with this ritual, there’s no going back . . . Playback. Yes, that’s her voice, bright, edgy, slightly nasal, like a soprano sax, solo: “It’s hard to pin-point the beginning of the end . . . Nick had always been a little obsessive, a bit impulsive, his moods swung on a big pendulum, as it were. You had to anticipate the motion. Either I was a fairy princess or a hag fit to die in a garbage bin. In the first few years I was mostly the do-good fairy on the Christmas tree, as long as I stayed in the confines of that role it was fine . . . And believe it or not, I think I wanted to please . . .” She’s almost managing a bitter smile, as the take fades. This nuance matters to Lucas but the presenter, off-screen, brisk as a toothpaste advert, has left the rest of it on a cutting-room floor and sticks to the rhetoric of his script. “Did Pauline recognise those all-important early warning signs of mental disorder?” Pauline leans forward into the camera. It’s confession time.
Manolis Aligizakis 