Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 13:03:21 -0600 From: Robyn Herrington Organization: University of Calgary Subject: [WRITERS] SUB: HALLOWEEN CONTEST: Yes, Virginia Yes, Virginia Four days after she saw the man burn up on TV, Mariah began to worry about, of all things, the stairs. It was a little thing at first, an itch at the back of the throat, an angel of warning fluttering in the solar plexus. As light as dragonflies. Television is a demon, Mariah knows now. Too late. She tells the red woman who brings her lunch this, every day. Perhaps too often, but it is good to be reminded. The television knows about men burning. Men who rape pretty girls in faroff villages, villages you would never visit or even invent. And are then punished, by their own blood. She can not, behind the metal door, remember her husband's name. It was an S name, and they tell her she had a child who died, although Mariah cannot remember the child. Did he fall down an elevator shaft? There is never good light in the stairwells. Did he burn? Try to remember, Mareeyah. They do not even know her name,. Barry, the man who wants her to remember. What difference? Why should I remember? However, she remembers the burningman in detail, sagging against a tree, in some hot country, dead and walking, his eyes swollen with blood. They set him on fire. For some reason she could only focus on his lips, trembling in great wet daffy clack, before the night of his head fell forward over the flames. She, Mariah, watched this on her television in silence on a late dark afternoon. Arrested by the clarity of the wide video eye, the calm yellow smoke, the razoredge trinitron gelee zapatas of the crazed wisewoman who dropped a match on the kerosene grass and then wailed into the tepid foreign sky as if her head would snap off her neck. There were no children present, Mariah remembers saying to someone. Mariah wanted to stop watching, but she couldn't. Even her thoughts were silent, attentive, no signal. Then she had one very clear thought. They must have given him something. She remembers this thought, she told Barry once, because it was as clear as a silo pressed against the sky. A healthy defense, like food. The villagers gave him some narcotic to bear his punishment, or maybe they just crushed his skull with a flat volcanic rock before they looped his hands in twine and made him walk, dead in the plush tobacco humidity. Dead already. You have you have a child you have who died you have and you were married, once. Mareeyah. It's too hard. But I will try, she tells Barry. Barry is nice but she is embarassed, flapping out of her stupid blue clothes. She needs a haircut. She needs a bath. I need to wash, she tells him. There is never any good light in a stairwell. She tells him other things. It is very white here. My husband was Racer X. The head is here, she says. The ladyhead. Once she hiccups into a laugh and asks Barry for a cigarette. You are a big pain in the ass, she tells him. Then: Do you think I'm pretty? The yellow smoke luxes into her chest, heavy as bees. A thought comes, then, like an ache. Mariah hates thinking, now, but she is almost sure there was no child. They are lying, all of them, the trait of all demons. She is too smart to bear any child into a burning world. You will be punished, she tells the people on the stairs. All of them. -- =====================***********======================= Robyn Herrington rmherrin@ucalgary.ca Editor: New Currents in Teaching and Learning/InfoServe University of Calgary Ph: 220-2561 Leadership lifts a person's vision to higher sites, raises a person's performance to higher standards, and builds a personality beyond its normal limitations - Peter Drucker =====================************======================