Eulogy for a Missionary

It was a Sunday lunch. Summer streamed through the window screens, refracted off the crystal glassware, and rustled the linen tablecloth that grazed our knees.

“I don’t understand it!” she said. “There were people from church, people I had eaten with, worshipped with, shared my hymnal with, who were literally hacking up other members with their machetes! There was the revolting stink of blood and eviscerated bodies being baked by the sun... I saw a baby sliced from his mother’s arms!” she choked, though her eyes held a futile vacancy.

A fork scraped a plate, delivering its last plump glob of potato salad to a waiting mouth. A hand with flawless half-moon fingertips turned the stem of glass listlessly. Muted birdsong filtered in from outside.

“I got on the bus when they told me to. I was simply airlifted out of there,” she continued, her tone still desperate but more controlled. “Why couldn’t they be? I left them... Why couldn't we take them, get the Tutsis out of there? I left, and my friends died. They were tortured and died. And for what? …Absolutely nothing.”

Beginning to clear the dinner plates in preparation for dessert, the hostess moved efficiently about the table, her grey hair haloed by the sunlight bursting into the room.

“You need to have faith,” she insisted, glancing at the woman who had been speaking so fervently, before crumpling a paper napkin tightly in her hand and continuing to stack the dishes. “You know, what happened was all part of God’s plan.”

“Yeah,” the guest replied numbly, exhaustedly, before passing on pie à la mode and falling silent.

-kc

Bus Stop

The bus stop was built into the embankment. It consisted of three concrete walls, the tallest at the rear, the others high but sloping down to the ribbon of sidewalk and the open road in front. It was simple, unremarkable - a typical sign and a featureless metal bench bolted to the pavement. Damp newspapers fluttered on the ground and streetlights perfused the early night with grey.

She stood alone, lightly kicking her army surplus boots against the base of the signpost and fingering the loose change in her pocket. The firmament spat down a few stinging drops and she turned up the collar of her long leather jacket before clutching her arms more tightly against her body. She shivered.

A man walked towards her. Strided. His substantial bulk was not disproportionate to his tall frame, and his biker vest and leather skull cap only served to make him more intimidating to her inexperienced mind. He stopped decisively at the bus stop and glanced over at her. She sensed him smirk at her downcast face. She stopped kicking at the sign. 

Telling herself it was wrong to be judgmental, that it was unfair to draw conclusions from the hard edges of his unshaven face or the hint of truculence in his posture, she nodded slightly and ignored him. Squinting, she peered down the road in search of the cold rectangular headlights of the city bus.

His lip curled, his eyes still on her, he took a step closer. She tried to make her own step backward seem innocuous, casual. Again, he moved, and a hot flush of anxiety slipped over her. She took a long step this time, as if moving aside, making way, and her eyes still scanned for the bus.

"So," he growled suddenly, "Are you gonna kiss me now or later? Because you know... It will happen."

Rancor emanated from him. Automatically, she kept backing up as he moved towards her angular, teenaged frame. Resentment and helplessness welled inside her as her heels hit the wall behind her and her heart pummelled her chest. She felt his breath on her neck and was suddenly nauseous.

"Never," she rasped, as she heard the familiar whoosh of the bus' hydraulic door.

She ducked away and lunged onto the bus. Pushing her shoulders back, she paid her fare and then locked eyes with a tall, built twenty-something in the back of the bus. As she approached, he moved his gym bag off of the seat and she sat down right beside him, though the bus was nearly empty and there were vacant seats everywhere.

Following her onto the bus, the man in the leather skull cap sat down by the rear exit door. She breathed a long sigh before realizing that he was still watching her through the reflections on the window pane.

She got off the bus after he did and backtracked home in the rain.

-kc

Adrift

Adrift:  The drone of a blizzard supersedes the static. I sip my tea and wait, bob the bag-on-a-string and inhale the steam, wait for the crisp silence that will return eventually, the absence of sound that slips over everything when the wind finds itself spent and sullen. Strands of thought present themselves and then recede into the periphery. The radio mumbles.

Swift:  A word in your hand - incendiary device, enough to make my eyes burn, hurled and caught fast in my own. I want to drop it - quick! - let it slide through my fingers, fall to the ground between our feet. But you've always borne the truth, in your own way. So instead, I cling to it dumbly. After all, I've never mastered the dramatic flourish. I've always chattered redundantly when silence stung, left the party early with my aphasic tongue, traveled in shoulder seasons.

Rift:  A break in the numbing swell of the storm, in the hypnosis of sound. I want to rush into the lull, plunge my hot hands into the snowbank, hear the reassuring crunch of my own movement. I want the clarity of a single direction. But the barren limbs of the treetops begin to rattle again, the air gnaws at bare flesh and seeps under the door. Half-numb, I stand immobilized at the window and stare at the narrow streaks of a rabbit's footprints pressed into the powder.

Soon, it will all lift. 

- kc

I awoke from a dream

I awoke from a dream I fought to keep.

Pine needles and skin. Muted shafts of daylight.

Summertime. Perpetual summer. Pinpricks of perspiration.

You were there.

Your presence lingers still, despite the expanse,

the outstretched gulf

Always my familiar. Our throats tight with restraint,

no cataracts of words permitted to rupture; we come close

Not believers in destiny, adamant disbelievers

briefly colliding in near randomness, no why, 

carried by the currents.

Airport concourse, moss-covered boardwalk,

a record store - before they went defunct.

Shifting of pressure, clap of thunder,

sudden electromagnetic confluence

Then nothing for months, years.

Vaguely resigned to a fate we deny but

remember again

with just the faint smell of rain on humid air,

the sweep of a cumulonimbus.

I awoke from a dream I fought to keep.

You were there.

- kc