Chapter 6 - Joshua and Stewart's story from 11-24-09

Chapter 6 - The Beginning of Knowing


While he slept, the cool, thin water swirled around him, and Stewart dreamed. Dreams were new to him. They weren’t scary, like some unknown world suddenly dropped on him from the sky. And they weren’t terrorizing like the hunting rock, or suspicious like the shadow. They were new…and old…at the same time.

In his dreams he swam in his pond and caught his meals and thought about what was beyond the green algae ceiling of his home. In his dreams he remembered things. Like small hands and big eyes and a gentle touch. He remembered clear, hard walls and tiny rocks and the smallest pond anyone could ever have to sit in. And he remembered shouting, being lifted very high in the air, and the fear of falling. He remembered the small hands reaching towards him. He remembered wanting them to take him down from the high place and put him back by his tiny pond beside the clear, hard walls. And he remembered sunshine and warm green algae and deep water filled with all sorts of places to hide. No shouting, no high places, and…no more small, warm hands and big eyes. He didn’t feel good about the last memory. Something about it was sad.

Stewart opened his eyes and looked at the surface of the pond. It glowed a faint light green. The sun was up, but not very high so the pond was still cool from the night. He crept to the edge of his shelf and looked down into the beyond. Not much moved in the darkness. The water swirled in slow circles around him as it made its way to the hunting rock. He looked up and then side to side before he pushed himself from the shelf and into the center of the pond. He was still the biggest swimming thing in it, now that the carp was dead.

He swam slowly, all his legs pressed against his sides and the base of his tail. The water slid past him as his whole body undulated from side to side, his long tail propelling him forward. When he saw something edible he swam faster, cornered it, and then ate it. But there were less and less things to catch. Even though it didn’t move, the hunting rock was better at catching its prey than he was. After all this time Stewart was sure the nasty rock took up the whole bottom of the pond.

Throughout the early morning he swam in lazy circles and thought. He did this every time the cool, thin water bathed him. It was in the swimming that he came to realize that he knew. And it was in the knowing that he was beginning to appreciate the cool, thin water. So it was this morning as well. He swam and he thought. As he circled the pond he stopped off on the few ledges and shelves that lined the pond, resting and investigating them. He rarely found anything new. But sometimes something would be different. Sometimes something from above would fall in. Other times a new plant would have started to grow. And still other times the shelf or ledge would have changed. The rock that made the walls of the pond was not very strong, though it was very flat. If the hunting rock sucked the water down too hard, or if the shadow hit the pond walls with its nasty stick, then the shelves and ledges often became different.

Stewart glided onto a shelf and settled himself. It was big and flat and broad. Nothing grew on it and nothing hid there because nothing grew there. It was a good place for resting and watching other things swim past, so he rested and he watched and he thought. And while he thought he realized that he knew something. He knew one of the voices from the day before. The smaller, higher voice. This bothered him and he lashed his tail. The voice had been angry and afraid. He had heard it before. It had been scared and angry then, as well. Remembering made him anxious and he lashed his tail again. Remembering made him fearful so he paced on the shelf. A dull, muted snap sounded behind him and he could feel the rock he stood on tilt and fall away. The old fear of falling from a high place flooded back so strong and sharp that he darted through the water like a fish to his sleeping shelf. He remembered small hands reaching and big eyes wide and watching. He knew. He knew. Those hands and those eyes had been taken somewhere.

He backed himself into the tightest part of his shelf and wedged himself into the smallest space he could find. His heart beat hard in his chest and this scared him even more than the knowing. Where had the hands and eyes gone? Why had they been yelling so scared outside of his pond?

Stewart pressed himself flat against the shelf and tried to become the rock he lay on. Suddenly his home was not safe and he didn’t know why. Suddenly he felt grief and fear and confusion all at once and he had no idea what they were. He closed his eyes and tried to think of other things, any things, things that were not himself.

Below his shelf, in the deepest part of the pond, the shale ledge that had cracked and fallen from beneath him settled against the outflow grate. The draw of water through the out flow pipe slowed. The system drew harder on the rock to no avail. Inside the Wurton Biologic Research Facilities building a message was generated and sent to a dozen email accounts regarding water pressure, time elapsed, estimated damage within an estimated time frame. No one noticed the email. They noticed the irritating alarm that beeped in the main control room 12 hours later. It was another 30 minutes before anyone actually responded.



~ Peace and knowing

The Right Hat

There is a photograph on the wall of one of the coffee shops I spend time at that fascinates me. It is a black and white photo from what I believe is the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s of four women in dark, one piece bathing suits and straw hats. They rest on the sand, three of them with their knees drawn up to their chests, their backs to the camera, their faces completely hidden by the large straw hats they are wearing. The fourth is kneeling in front of the other three. She is smiling, her lips parted and her teeth partially showing, though the rest of her face is obscured by the straw fringe of her hat. I imagine her lipstick must have been a rich shade of red since her lips are so dark in this picture.

Because she is kneeling, and the others are seated, the one facing the camera is taller by about a foot, the heads of the other three tipped up to look at her. Each woman is wearing a different bathing suit, and perhaps they were even different colors, though it's impossible to know this now. The hats are different too, and I can't help but think they have put on the wrong ones. Only the woman who is smiling and turned towards the camera seems to have the right hat; the narrow palm fronds that it is woven from corkscrewing from the crown into a brim much like a lampshade hat with the pointed fringe spiraling counter-clockwise, hanging low enough to hide her eyes, but not her smile. I get the feeling that if you ran your hand along the flow of fronds it would feel momentarily stiff and then give way gently as you followed the curve of the weave. Try to stroke the fibers in the opposite direction and learn what a sharp edge soft can actually have when forced into an unnatural direction.

The woman on the left is wearing a modified Chinese peasant hat, the weave not as tight, since only the sun must be avoided in this instance. She wears a one piece bathing suit with a bow tied at the middle of her lower back. The suit hugs her curving frame, a body that seems to have lived 40 or more years, had children, eaten just a few too many slices of dessert from time to time, but not enough to hurt her. This softer, curving shape, the bow at her waist, is incongruent with the hat. I want her to have the hat on the woman in the middle. It is a tightly woven, softly curving, typical straw sunhat with a wide patterned ribbon around the crown and a bow with long tails flowing off the back.

The middle woman, also in a one piece bathing suit, is thin. Her shoulder blades stick out and her vertebra undulated like a small rise of worn down mountains under her skin. Her suit cuts a straight line across her lower back. No frills, no decoration, clean cut. She seems older than the other women, her body feels to me like it has fought life or fought for life and she is harder because of this. She should have the hat of the woman on the right. It has sharp lines and definite points to the fringe that sticks out defiantly from the brim. This hat is certain, unbending, absolute. It does not flex, even in high wind, but resists and endures and maintains its shape at all costs. Even if that means being pulled violently from the head of the one wearing it and being tossed recklessly in a gale. When it lands it will still look much as it does now. It could still be worn, still be useful, still exist out of shear tenacity.

The woman on the right should be wearing the Chinese peasant hat. The stiff, sharpness of the hat she currently wears doesn't quite fit her. Almost, but not quite. She is wearing a bathing suit that wraps, halter-style, around the back of her neck and then leaves the majority of her back bare. The lines and edges of her body are somewhere between those of the other two seated women, softness and angles intermingled. It is hard to tell her age, the flow of skin over bone coy. The slightly open weave of this particular Chinese peasant hat, completely ineffective for keeping off the rain, is intricate enough to allow snatches of sunlight to flash through and sparkle around her face. It is a weave that reminds me of the beautiful caning of an antique chair my mother once restored, open and fine and strong, the beauty of it lying in the pattern and not requiring extra decoration to catch and hold the eye.

I want to change the hats around, want to set things to the way I see them. But I can't. This moment is long past. The women now exist in some other way. And there is also the fact that I have only seen them from behind. What of the faces that were hidden from my view? If I were privileged enough to have witnessed the curve of their cheeks, the line of their noses, the tip of their smiles, would I have chosen a different hat again? Or, would I have left them as they are in the photo? Then I wonder, did each one chose the hat she wears or was it chosen for her, in some way, through some impulse, after some moment of knowing? And then I think, Who am I to say these hats are the wrong ones at all?