Night here is haunting, it is alive. Its creatures do not sleep. The street dogs run in their packs challenging others until the winners are distinguished through merciful squeals. Roosters strut and howl at the moon, longing for their time to come again. Women work into the night testing every piece of kitchenware they have in tiny metal-on-metal symphonies. The men, not to be outdone, bark orders at their children - who are up three hours past their bed time and scream back with tiny, tired voices.
The stars are a myriad and distinguished in Honduras's black, sticky sky. Their light seems to cluster in a cottony film right out of human touch, but does not reach my feet. Night here is haunting and thick and snuffs out the moon and the stars with velvety ease.
This velvet cloth sweeps aside to make room for the streetlights veiled heavily with orange and rusted plastic coverings, spilling light-goo through the alleys and into doorways, but never reaching "those places you must not go," as if legally contracted.
The night walkers are not the good kind - the sensible creatures have turned in. The sensible creatures know what the expect if they don't. Or they learn quickly, as we have...
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Tía Chica, a Profile
Tía Chica, tall and thin like the ivy plant that slinked around her sister's white-block clay house. Holy eyes big and white like the hen's eggs, and a thick brown tongue that perched on the edge of her caramel gums. Her skin nearly as brown as her quick, slug tongue, but stands better compared to the deep brown of the coffee beans she always kept tucked in her bosom and close to her heart.
At the bottom of her long patchwork jumper sat a thick pair of colorful patent leather Nike tennis shoes, dusty from her walk from her walk from her house, north-west from her sister's white-block home - across two mountain passes and tucked in the Honduran selva. At her highest point lay thick, straw-like woven hair, a mossy grey-green color that complimented her undershirt.
"Gatito!" I called to the house kitty, who made its home in everyone's lap. And at this she chucked, or cackled, or keeckled, really. A KEEKEE-KEEKEE that rattled every bone in her body, but not her hair.
"Gatito! Gatito!" she keeked through her gums.
My eyes returned to the cat and back up to the old woman's hard-worn face, but she had taken off in a half gallop, half waddle that looked as if she were tripping her way to the field aside the house. Over the sticks she crept, like a toddler test-driving its new baby-calf legs, until only the top of her mossy head was visible bobbing down the hill and out of my sight from the time-eaten porch swing.
At the bottom of her long patchwork jumper sat a thick pair of colorful patent leather Nike tennis shoes, dusty from her walk from her walk from her house, north-west from her sister's white-block home - across two mountain passes and tucked in the Honduran selva. At her highest point lay thick, straw-like woven hair, a mossy grey-green color that complimented her undershirt.
"Gatito!" I called to the house kitty, who made its home in everyone's lap. And at this she chucked, or cackled, or keeckled, really. A KEEKEE-KEEKEE that rattled every bone in her body, but not her hair.
"Gatito! Gatito!" she keeked through her gums.
My eyes returned to the cat and back up to the old woman's hard-worn face, but she had taken off in a half gallop, half waddle that looked as if she were tripping her way to the field aside the house. Over the sticks she crept, like a toddler test-driving its new baby-calf legs, until only the top of her mossy head was visible bobbing down the hill and out of my sight from the time-eaten porch swing.
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