Don't Want to Make a Meatloaf Now

Stepping out with Shab for a last chance just before sunset, I got the first for me but one of the last available blasts of the day's summer flower and soft beginnings of the night drums.

Living in Chukkachank I can't just walk to the wild patch up the street unacknowledging of who's else is there in the road, and neither can a flake pretend it's not an event, or at least salient, that Shab and I are in and around and among, in smelling distance.

I overtook a largish family grouping headed no doubt to the same tousled organic respite both appearing and disappearing in the gloom ahead. I decided to try out my Fleyk on them even though it's High Chank tongue.

I said Careful now incorrectly to a fur-loined child that had veered suddenly from a tight but getting fraught filial constellation in the glare of evening.

Explaining, I gestured for the boy into one of the larger roadside trees with abundant vinery spilling up and from it. I'd stopped him in his tracks, and I could guess which of the men was his dad because he wouldn't meet my eye while picking up his pace. This plant, I tried to say, has a venom. It makes problems of the skin. As I paused in striking senatorial pose, son looks up at me with serendipity, not at my lecture, I realize, but for certain my biology.

Perfect moment for just-arriving father to chime in, bowing, Yes, this is a poisonous plant for sure, a dangerous plant and one that the children should take care not to touch or even go near it. Son, did you hear? he stated, sophomorically, to my native ear.

But gratitude tingled just above my temples for I knew this honorable soul was acting out a ritual, and that it was cross-cultural.

As I smiled and harvested, reached, swam in the sudden sea of available smiles, including a commuter, entering scene on his bicycle, could tell it was a moment to use his years of practice as if he'd pedaled through this site, the green tunnel, the malicious tree, with his empty lunchbox and a bouquet for the wife, calling out Hello! Hello! to one and all at end of each working week and day.

The grandmother, the tiniest baby even seemed to go along and say, Hello! Hello! This is the language we speak here cotidianly, and we want you, who also speak this funny way, to feel at home.

Now the calling had turned to laughing and the laughing to forgetting to a low and murmured chanting, involuntary singing, a barely-conscious melody, the kind that someone sings when there's no medicine. Now the children were much thicker in their wave across the ashpalt, and other sounds, the crickets, now in rhythm once they recognized a cadence they could understand, and light was almost gone, and Shab and I were frightened.


by Illyn [shard]