Steve Katz - Kissssss - A Miscellany

“Mr. Sir. Please. Over here.” The voice of a young woman beckoned him. “Sir. Over here. Please.”

A young woman sat by a glow of embers beneath a mahogany tree. She held out a bowl and gestured with her chin for him to sit down beside her.

“Cassava and greens,” she said as he took the bowl. She wasn't, he thought, more than sixteen years old. She handed him a spoon, and touched the sandal Tignee had forgotten was buckled to his wrist. A whistle from above made Tignee look up.

“My brother,” she said, and she removed the sandal from his wrist and placed it on the ground. Without straightening from her squat she shuffled to a small stash of possessions that was hidden under some leaves, and pulled out an object wrapped carefully in newspaper.

“This is that,” she said, and placed it next to the sandal.

The food she had given him was delicious, the cassava hearty, the slight bitterness of the greens balanced by pea-sized cubes of fragrant meat. He thanked her, and they sat for a few moments staring at the package and the sandal.

“My name is Sylva,” she finally said, and took his hand in both hers.

The warmth of her hands and her gentle dark eyes reassured Tignee, and restored him to himself enough so he could say, “My name is Tignee. I am a weaver of nets. I repaired nets by the sea.” A dull swell of pride crept up. “I taught myself to spin a whole new fiber for my nets, like threads stronger than steel. And I invented a knot that allows it to stretch, but never to break.” He extracted a small square of netting from his pocket, and handed it to her. She wrapped her fingers through it, and stretched. The netting disintegrated, as if it had been baked and only ash was left. He remembered now that this wasn't his netting, famous new and unconquerable, but it was a random piece of old netting that had been caught in the mango tree, that he had taken, just to have something.

“That is not the net. Not mine,” he explained, and as if the faucet had suddenly opened he started to tell her all that had happened. Everything had disappeared — his wife, his children, his business, all his miserable story.

“The water suddenly rose, without warning, to drown away the whole world. I always thought the ocean had been my friend, gave nourishment to my village. We lived from the gifts of papa ocean. But now I realize that was nothing but a foolish enchantment. The waters are indifferent, and can as easily slaughter as sustain. Ocean has no intention and no regrets.”

The compassion in her look was far more mature than what he took to be her sixteen years. Her youthful beauty had been deepened, toughened, as it was annealed in the fires of loss and despair.

“I was hoping,” he said softly, afraid to say it aloud, “that if I came in this direction, by luck or by chance I would find my wife, my older son here, somewhere. My baby. They were all torn away from me.” He had never expressed this hope before, not even to himself.

Sylva lifted two skewers off the embers, each of which pierced three small birds. Their skin was crisp, their wingtips charred. She handed one skewer to Tignee.

“My brother catches these.” Tignee looked up at the tree limb. The brother watched them, without making a sound. “Our father was a gamekeeper and with our mother, brother and sisters, we lived in a bird sanctuary on the outskirts of the great city of Avnikra, where we were all happy. Tewly learned these skills from father, so he knows how to invite small birds into our pot. Our father was a gentle man.”

The birds, stuffed with nuts and raisins, filled his mouth with flavor. He raised the skewer to the brother in the tree, to thank him. The boy was already asleep. Sylva placed some chips of bark on the embers, so fire flared up. She and Tignee watched the flames.

“What became of your father, your mother? Where are your other brothers, your sister?” Tignee asked, afraid of what he might hear.

“My father adjured me to take my little brother here to these woods, where children lived in the trees, like the birds and the monkeys.”

The description of her father pierced Tignee's heart, as if it was an arrow aimed flat into whatever else he might have done as a father. “Where is he now? Why did he send you two here alone?”

“He knew they would take him. There was nothing he could do, one man opposing all the power of hatred and war. You look at the situation and nothing makes sense. Nothing ever recovers the price of war. Nothing undoes its misery. He was one man against the surge of violence, a tide of blindness.”

“Who are they? Why your father?”

“They are who they are. Some of them live in here,” she pressed a hand into Tignee's chest. He shook his head to negate.

“He is a strong and capable man with many skills, as are my older brothers. My mother he told to escape to the sea, with baby Viska.”

The thought of escaping to the sea made Tignee shiver. Sylva took his hand. Together they listened to the wind. The fire warmed their faces. Sylva's tears dried into streaks. “War, my father told me, is a dragon with many heads that devours everyone, everything around it. He knew we would be safe here; at least, he thought so. One of my older brothers ran away, towards the sea, and my mother followed with the baby.”

“When was this?”

“It was a month ago, I think. Some day soon Tewly and I will go to the sea to find them.”

Tignee let out a cry. Could it be that she didn't understand what had happened? “Which way did your father go?”

She pointed in the direction he had seen the men march off earlier with their tools. Tignee tried not to weep. She touched his shoulder. “Don't worry. I expect my father to come back, though I don't think he will ever again be the gentle man-of-the-birds.”

They both looked down again, back to the sandal, and the package next to it. With the tip of her foot, she pushed it towards Tignee. He looked at her in a confusion of thoughts. Who was she? She was very young, yet he had these feelings for her. She gestured for him to pick up the package. He looked through the deepening darkness into the reflections of the small fires in her eyes. He slowly removed the newspaper, an advertisement for cosmetics, free giveaway with every purchase. What it had wrapped was the other sandal, a mate to the one he had been carrying. He turned away from it as if it was a light that blinded him.

Sylva steadied Tignee as he was about to stagger backwards. He dropped the wrapper into the fire and it flew up, a wing of flame burning past the brother asleep in the tree. “You know what it is, yes?”

He was sure it was the other sandal, his Marti's other sandal. He knew the imprint of his wife's small foot in the footbed. The blue stones glistened like eyes. He stared at the pair for a long time, numb to his own confusion and feelings. He thought he could see his wife step into them and run away into the forest. “Marti,” he called. The children in their sleep let out brittle cries as she disappeared, their voices like glass bells struck in the trees.

“I was, I think, waiting for you to come with this other one. I thought and thought about it, how I wanted to wear them. I wondered where the mate could be.”

He picked the sandal up and held it in front of her face. “How did you get this?”

“Do you think I could…?”

“Where did it come from?” he insisted. “I want to know, did she…?”

“I would like very much to wear them,” she said.

Tignee threw the sandal to the ground. “Then wear them.”

Sylva slipped her feet into the sandals, and stood before him as if she was his wife. She smiled at him. This smile was too familiar, and it made him feel ill at ease in his confusion and anger. In a few moments she left the ground and rose like the paper he had burned, to her brother's place in the tree. She smoothed his hair, and kissed him. As Tignee watched her circle, in the darkness above the tree, seven times around the fire, he knew that all this life was a charade, and that he had come to rest in a forest of ghosts.