Poetry & Prose

Tasks Given to Birodh

by Prawin | February 2008

When Birodh realized that he had cut one whole onion where half of one would have been enough, he also remembered the list of tasks he was assigned for the day and panicked about the extra handful of chopped onions. Upon reflection, he felt honest about the sting in his eyes, which scared him into thinking that the dangers he imagined were slowly congealing into a torso with real teeth and claws. His nose thinned and ran, eyes fogged, a thread of heat trembled under his temples and crept to meet at the top of his head, from where, he imagined, something escaped like steam and fear into the morning. The elements in the street outside his window didn't deviate from their chorus; although he listened with his eyes closed and mouth agape, sucking from dark air, nothing changed, no shift happened from the routine, no new call begot an answer. Through closed eyes he could feel the burn of letters on a sheet nailed to the wall—the dreaded list of tasks for the day—a burning rectangle tore into the chaos of his mind, edging out other thoughts, and each task shined and shivered like luminous molt, and dripped.

Oil sputtered first, then smoked; chili seeds cracked and burned and made bubble trails that propelled them in a dance. Birodh let some of the onions fall into the oil, stirred and sprinkled some salt on it, and wrapped the rest of the onions in a plastic bag. It had been a big onion once: there was a good handful left. The knife looked at him and said, what a waste, Birodh. He took the knife and threw it into the pile of dishes already waiting for him. It was a sharp, thin knife, not of steel like everybody buys at a store, but one honed from a hacksaw, softer iron that sharpened itself every time it cut something, so it vibrated softly for a full minute after impact, as if in apology. Birodh rubbed his hands together, slower than his sluggish thoughts, and searched his palm for lines—those that age graphed, and those the knife left, just deep enough to reflect light aslant, but not deep enough to break a capillary. He let his chest expand, breathing deep and exhaling through his mouth, with each count growing to occupy more space in the room, challenging the air between him and the room's skin of blue plaster and stained wood. Birodh tore the list of tasks he had been given for the day and folded it with sure hands, without looking at it, employing nails to crease it in half, his eyes averted to douse the burn of its glare. He resolved not to think of it. The radio wasn't loud enough, the onions were almost translucent and ready for more. Soon he filled the room with good smells and good sounds. His intense concentration paid off as a moist heat in his loins, and then he knew; then he was ready for anything that might ambush him outside the walls. He felt like a man and on this day that was enough.

Birodh looked in the mirror and checked if his tie was straight. It was. His teeth were clean. His hair parted cleanly, and the creases on his pants were razor-sharp, faultlessly dividing light from shadow. From a small box sitting above the mirror, he pinched some vermilion powder and put it on his forehead, wiped what had fallen on his nose, and replaced the box. He opened his mouth wide and shook his jaws, slapped his cheeks a couple of times, took a wet towel and rubbed behind his ears. He turned to the left and carefully inspected how the light fell on his thin face. Birodh buttoned his shirt, pulled out half an inch of the cuffs, clicked his heels just to make the sound and took a deep breath. He checked for the list again—it was there, in his jacket pocket. He looked at the door, took a step forward, slumped back, reaching with his hands to find the bed, and sat on the pillow. The streets were livelier now. It was nine-thirty in the morning. He took a last deep breath and stood to go.

Like any prudent man, Birodh liked to finish the most difficult task before rounding up his day with chores that could have been trusted to others, chores that weren't difficult. The bus to Budhanilkantha was on time. Birodh patted his pockets before stepping on the bus, a habit formed over years of cautious living, a reaction to those few instances when chance had got the better of him, leaving him in situations, without a knife, say, or matches, or desire, or protection, because he had failed to pat his pockets and match their contents to contingencies. He sat by the window after capturing in his mind the faces of people sitting around him. He closed his eyes for a minute and abruptly opened them wide, seeking and challenging anyone looking at him. He hadn't caught anyone's interest. Of the seven faces he had chosen to challenge, three were sleeping. Birodh was satisfied with the exercise. He put his head against the window and closed his eyes.

Birodh found that he thought best in the zone between alert wakefulness and stupor, when he gave outward semblance of sleep but kept watch over every thought and every breath. He had developed a mechanical method of creating order out of chaos: within his closed eyes there danced millions of points of light and dark. He'd wait patiently for them to meet and weld and spark, or separate and skittle and vanish, creating highs and lows, garlands of each forming contours that outlined ideas or translated a sound or astonishment into a picture. He'd then conjure a specific that needed analysis—gestures made by a friend or the rhyme of colors on a person's face as he talked or avoided words. Everything was necessarily an enigma at first; the spark within was a mere back-light, before a chink allowed the brilliance to stream through and illuminate each aspect with meaning, prefiguring the eventual transformation of knowledge into answers that actually served a purpose. After a while, he no longer needed to put to his mind any question—it threw at him vivid answers, complete solutions to every enigma, and he felt the brew in which his existence steeped change in heat and spice with every new illumination.

A child's face hovered outside the window. Birodh reached out and patted the boy's head. "Is it still there?" he asked. The boy nodded. "It is sitting behind the house," the boy pointed to a corner in the hills beyond the paddy fields. Above the hills, Bishnumati was a muddy streak as it fell downhill in cataracts that surfaced in places and plunged under mossy rocks elsewhere, bright stitches along the cleave on Shivapuri, adding the music of its water slapping against rocks to the sound of air whistling through the tops of trees on the mountain. "You have to hurry, Birodh," said the boy. "What will you do if it flies away? You have to hurry!" Birodh patted his pockets, pulled out the folded list and pressed it between his palms. The boy came closer to shake Birodh's arm. He looked familiar, as if the nose and the mouth had always been presented in a face Birodh frequently saw reflected around him, as if the boy's eyes matched his own. Birodh leaned in for a closer look and saw himself reflected in the eye—the same stiffness of shoulders, the same webs of worry around the eyes, the same rodent alertness as he kept watch for the amiss. The eyelash in the boy's eye was no eyelash at all, but a dog-collar, and the pupil was large enough that the darkness behind it induced vertigo. Birodh fell with flailing limbs before something as hard as his own name called by a ghostly voice hit his forehead and awoke him. The bus too a jolt over a pothole. Bodies leaped few inches off the seats and slammed back. A parched lump had lodged in Birodh's throat and his eyelids had thickened with a deposit of slumber.

The bus was still flying northwards on the road to Budhanilkantha. Adjoined houses made continuous curtains on either side, as if the bus were hurtling along a groove with walls of concrete and bricks and washing laid out to air outside open windows. Although the bus was filling up, nobody had chosen to sit next to Birodh. He cracked his knuckles and looked at the people around him, then wiped his eyes with a handkerchief that still carried a sting from the morning when he'd wiped his hands after cutting chili. A belch filled his mouth and nose with the smell of digested meat. The bus arrived at his destination—the penultimate stop on the route, just before the final climb to Budhanilkantha. It was damp outside. Birodh carefully stepped out, filling the outlines of footprints left in the dirt by an old woman who was walking away with a shopping bag full of colorful balls of yarn. He waited for the bus to pull out before he moved from the spot. Birodh studied the tracks left by the wheels of the bus. A path climbed a short bank and disappeared behind a house that looked like a relic from a bucolic past of the landscape. A large hole on the thatch of an adjoining shade gave the impression of a grimace of dismay and grief at its own decay and displacement from significance. Behind it, treeless spots on the hills and holes cut into the white sandstone of Shivapuri for houses abandoned long ago rhymed the same sentiment.

A short distance from the grimacing thatch, the path became an alley between the compound walls of houses. To reach the banks of Bishnumati, Birodh had to walk through a neighborhood of houses built on the edge of rice paddies. He came to a filthy depression surrounded by walls, as if a fifth house had been uprooted. A thin road encircled the absent house; in the pit was shimmering, frosty hollow of a pond. It was a very quiet neighborhood of houses that hid behind thick partitions of bamboo and bottle-brush and bougainvillea—there was no sound save a low thumping accompanied by the boasts and obscenities of an American ethnic song. Neither the rustle in a bird's nest, nor the motions of the inhabitants of a house progressing through its daily acts—it was an unnatural quiet of sealed walls with the habit of devouring sounds. Birodh knew there was a wash of sounds that came rushing over the neighborhood, bringing with it the corners of Shivapuri, the dash of Bishnumati, the chaos of Budhanilkantha's worshipers and tranquility of the nodding ears of corn in the fields. But the wash leaped over the hollow between the houses, as if that space, that pocket of air had been disowned by the world beyond its four walls.

Birodh's eyes caught the sun reflecting from a window. After he had finished blinking, he looked down and realized that the foam in the pond was not water—it was filled with the dull creases of crushed plastic bottles. Thousands of plastic bottles, whole ones and fragments, steeped in a reservoir that had been thirsting and feeding for years. Here and there was a speck of color—a piece of labeling, or a stray bit of glossy paper. When Birodh found a bottle that was relatively whole and close to the edge of the deposit, he kicked it, making it skip across the surface. The bottle ricocheted off the far wall. From the same window as came the rap song, an empty bottle came flying to dive into the center and sink beneath older inhabitants of the pond. A girl with bare arms and short hair came to the window, drank from a bottle, pulled the curtain across her face and stood behind it. Birodh looked at her and tidied his tie and patted his pockets. Then he walked on bottles, talking to the girl in dull crunch of footfalls, disappearing behind a corner, pleased to leave the pocket of still air and the girl in the window.

The view opened as if to a revealed answer, as if Birodh had been lost in reeds for years, as if he had wandered without memory of clear air and rushing sky, as if he now met each wonder as new. Walls that had surrounded him were left behind. Birodh felt light again, as if he had stepped off a vehicle, as if the brief and garish imprisonment between houses had been an unsavory dream and nothing more. He looked down and noted that dark clay is a necessary sub-note to the flash of living color that constitutes open country—green of unripe crop, algae in water and lichens on stumps, shadows where the sun reaches with crooked, reflected fingers, tips of bird-wings carrying swatches of color and flowers in the grass calling bees and ants. Shivapuri and its broken pearls of Bishnumati contrasted with the kaleidoscopic huddle of houses behind him, skirted as they were within seven-foot walls crowned with sharp nails and bits of glass. Irrigation water sieved to lower terraces in a continuous babble and birds dived to forage. Birodh was abruptly in nature. Amidst the slow growth of roots and blades, surprised as if by a promised breath suddenly scented fresh and fecund, Birodh walked, divided between taking this new space as an affront to his need for everything to be still and petrified, and seeing it as a tribute to the constant change within.

Water that trickled down from rocks high up on Shivapuri must have had its own map once, thousands of years before this moment, a natural movement charted by wind and water. Everything, after all, is an act of a distant sun upon a rock alienated from it. Birodh swept his gaze from the west to the east, scanning for scars on the mountain and in its shadows. A new species of animal wandered onto the land, redirected native gullies and trapped the brooks, to feed its lot of farmers, subjects and families, cattle and corn, to take riches from the land through deliberate design, and sustained it for five, six thousand years. They quarried for dark, hard stone and carved the most amazing bodies of gods, only a handful of whom now lived on this northern shore of an ancient lake. It couldn't have been more than ten years since a fresher breed came to settle the same land—an industrious horde, bee-like, who brought sweet wealth earned elsewhere and built rigidly geometric colonies on soil still damp with the sweat of the farmers, and filled their new edifices with European furniture and roofed their houses with marble quarried from mountains across the great valley. These inhabitants drank water brought in plastic bottles from faraway springs and listened to the songs of exotic people whose voice had never touched the surrounding forests. Their air was filtered and conditioned to be different from that outside their walls, and they shuttled each day in large, sealed vehicles to their place of work. Terraces that had been wet for thousands of years were dry now, except for the splash and trickle of Bishnumati. Birodh was confident that the only other sound which stood witness to the past life of this corner of Earth was the regular beat of hammer on anvil, regular as the beat of the land, that he heard coming from a hut by the edge of the river.

A plastic pipe propped on a forked branch gave a steady trickle of water, which was carried into the hut by bamboo conduits tied together with cloth. Birodh yanked at his tie and unbuttoned his sleeves. A boy came to the door and disappeared in a flash. The rhythm of irons stopped; an interlude of smoke rose from the hut. Somebody must have stoked a fire inside. Somebody ancient and sinewy as the land itself must be by the fire, Birodh thought. What does a blacksmith make these days that doesn't already come from China? He asked himself permission to go into the hut, to inquire. It would be a digression. Birodh closed his eyes and searched the air for the smell of decaying flesh, the untainted blend of carcass and carrion. What registered were milder odors: of mud bubbling around the roots of paddies, of worms and frogs and their miraculous eggs, of canned smells of big houses and their soaps and foreign food, of hot iron dropped in water, of onion chopped in the morning, of sun on the must of old thatch, of crusty froth in the river where sewage opened to air and river, of his own cautious, expansive breathing. He was close to what he searched for, Birodh knew that much, but he didn't know exactly where he would find it. When he opened his eyes, the boy was staring at him from the doorway.

"Come here," Birodh said, beckoning to the boy with both hands, his palms upturned, gathering the air around his navel. The boy looked back into the hut. Birodh kept his hands outstretched. The boy came, walking on the slippery mud borders between paddies with the ease of Krishna dancing on the heads of the demon serpent.

"Is this your house?" Birodh asked. The boy nodded. "Do you live here?" Birodh asked. The boy nodded. "My grandfather is inside," the boy said.

"Is that the river behind your house?" Borodh asked. The boy nodded, looked towards the river.

"Sometimes," the boy said. He looked upstream. "Sometimes I can't cross the river, when it floods," he said. "It isn't so bad today. There aren't any fishes. Sometimes there are bottles and rugs. There is a big sewer pipe over there." He spread his arms as wide as they'd go and waved them to draw a circle. Birodh followed the boy's gaze but the pipe was hidden. The boy pointed to a place high up on the mountainside across Bishnumati, just under the low stone wall beyond which was the Army Staff College. "Police came there with dogs a week ago. There was a woman hanging from that tree because her husband beat her. Do you know why?"

"A woman hanged herself?" Birodh asked.

"Yes. Policemen came with a dog this high. Do you know why?" The boy couldn't have been more than eight years old. He was playing with the mud between his toes, squeezing it through, kneading it back into the ground. "Do you know why?" he asked again, eager for an explanation. Perhaps he had an answer and wanted to let Birodh in on the secret.

"No," Birodh said. "I can't say I understand these things. I don't know why she hanged herself. You said it was because the husband beat her?"

"There's a vulture behind our house," the boy said abruptly. "Grandfather says it is as old as he is." He hooked a thumb into the waistband of his shorts and ran towards the river.

"I know," Birodh said. "Do you want to show me where?" The hammering inside the house stopped momentarily and resumed after a hiss.

Birodh found the list and looked at the first task, found a pen and crossed it out. There was an address under it: the name and street number of a house in the neighborhood behind the hut. Birodh stood by the boy, on a crumbling mound of dirt that overlooked the rocks through which Bishnumati flowed in a feeble stream. A scabby vulture perched on the fleece of a small, white lapdog of the kind Birodh had seen with rich women. There was a collar of red leather around the neck of the carcass. Birodh pointed at the vulture and then the collar. "I came all the way here for that," he said to the boy. He sounded incredulous. "Can you believe that?" he asked the boy.

"It's only a dead dog," the boy said. "They bring them here all the time."

"Every month?" Birodh asked, wondering how much the boy knew about a month, or a dead dog. How much does a child know, he wondered, about time and its corruptions, death being the ultimate?

"Every week," they boy said. "Over there, in those houses, they have dogs, and they die and they bring them here. Sometimes the vulture brings a not dead dog. Then my grandfather sends me out to throw stones at the vulture. Or the dog."

Birodh told the boy to stay where he was and climbed down to the rocks. He approached the vulture and clapped loudly. The bird flapped its wings, exposing bald creases under its wings and losing feathers. Its head bobbed on a very long neck. The wings stirred the smell of decomposing flesh. Birodh gagged and stumbled back. The boy threw a stone at the bird, hitting its beak, making it screech and flap in fury.

"Stop," Birodh called out to the boy. "Don't do that."

"Kill it," the boy said. He picked another stone. "It's a vulture."

Birodh climbed up to the boy. "Do you see that collar on the dog?" he asked. "I need to take it back with me. But I don't need to kill the bird." The boy made a disgusted face, stepped away from Birodh and spat in the direction of the bird and the collared carcass.

"Why?" asked the boy.

Birodh didn't have an answer. He could appreciate that it was a strange errand. He had been called into his supervisor's office the day before. There was no explanation given, but that was how it had always been. He was handed the address of the house to which he was to deliver the collar. From the depth of him, a font which he sometimes identified as his conscience, an urge to rebel had surfaced, extracted by indignation and revulsion. It was a vague notion about it being inappropriate task for a man of his position, by labor and by birth, something that smelled of oppression. Yet, he had consented. At home in the evening, as he patted his pockets to empty them of the detritus of the day, ashes from which the phoenix of tomorrow would arise, he had wondered about the flaw that must be at the center of his character, a compulsion that made him agree to such a meaningless and debasing expedition. Birodh had been convinced, as two pressure cookers worked on the stove and he sat on the bed, that he was close to identifying this fracture within, this kink on the surface of the mirror into which he looked in search of himself. Standing on the banks of Bishnumati with a murderous boy and an old vulture feasting on stolen flesh, he found himself ever as eluded, ever as stymied. Birodh looked at the boy and repeated the question back: "Why?"

Birodh stood at the opening of the hut: the door a portal between two worlds, the interior a dark pocket untouched by the concrete and whitewash of its neighbors. He could see the fire and the figure working it, and in the glow of the fire a few utensils and a mattress rolled-up in a corner. Strewn across the floor were hundreds of identical tridents fashioned out of iron rods of the kind used to reinforce concrete beams. The old man took a tong and grabbed a red-hot piece of iron two-foot long and bent it twice with measured, sharp strikes. The U thus shaped had prongs nine-inches long, with six inches of space between them. The old man then fused a longer rod parallel to the prongs, exactly down the middle. Then he flattened and tipped the prongs, cooled the trident in a wooden trough filled with water, tied a length of red thread around it and tossed it on the pile of tridents on the floor. He looked up once, finished another trident as Birodh and the boy watched, stoked the embers and picked himself up with some effort and came to the door.

"You must be the man they sent for the day," he said to Birodh. "I thought you would have come yesterday. Lucky the vulture has stayed. Sometimes it goes across the river, sometimes into the forest."

"Does this happen often?" Birodh asked. The old man wandered back into the hut and started shifting the tridents with his foot. He picked up a single rod with an end flattened and tipped into a lance.

"A lot more than you'd think," the old man stepped out into the light. The boy wandered into the hut, stoked the fire and dragged the hammer. Daylight glistened on the old man's skin and sharpened the etch of coal dust settled in the creases on his face and neck. His strong hands pointed towards Shivapuri in the north—from the dark crown to the thin meander that was an army road, lowering to the poplar screen of the big boarding school at the base of the mountain, the markets and the cluster of new houses leading to his hut—and his mouth moved with invisible words grasping for an elusive pronouncement. Birodh saw the old man settle for lesser words, lesser meaning. "Never before these houses," the old man said.

"But, after these houses," the old man said, "a lot more than you'd think. It is the food they eat. I can tell from the smell that comes here in the morning. It is the food they give to their dogs. Sometimes the stray mutts from the market come here because they see fat, small dogs barking from roofs and windows. The mutts slink under gates, climb over walls. Then they have to be poisoned. Where do you think they get thrown? Not more than four months ago this neighborhood poisoned thirteen dogs in a night. They cried all night. All dead before the morning. That brought the crows, then the vultures. The poison killed the vultures in turn—that old man you saw by the river is the only survivor. How do you think it survived? Because it was too old to fight the others. Every now and then he goes and picks one off a roof. Then somebody like you comes and tries to kill him."

"Here," said the old man. "I made this for you. It will make your work easier. Just give him a poke. He is old, and he has eaten. One poke will send him across the river."

Birodh held the lance in his hand. It was a heavy, solid length of rebar. Notches along its length communicated with the hand, showed where the weight balanced and where it gripped best. Birodh shifted from foot to foot, suddenly aware of the weapon which his body had become, fluid between knots of joints and muscles studiedly stretching or folding, instinct seeing prize in the distance, urge pointing with the lance-tip. The boy gave a little jump like a small and ferocious animal in a hunting party. The old man cleared his throat, wandered outside and wandered back in, looked at Birodh and gestured with one hand to the river behind his hut, saying why don't you go on now, now that you have what you need, why don't you go and do what you came to do?

The boy lead and perched on the bank, scrambled and gathered three stones to throw. Birodh raised the lance and shouted, scaring the vulture just enough to retreat. He raised the lance, lowered it gently like an arm. The tip touched the dog's carcass. Old vulture that had stepped back in curiosity snapped at the lance. Birodh could feel the sting in the strike, conducted up the iron length. He felt the surprise and indignation. In the vibrations that persisted, he felt the protest and warning, the confrontation between one animal and another over a shiny and meaningful prize. The boy let fly with one stone, glancing off the bird's naked neck. "Don't," Birodh said to the boy. "Wait," he said to the boy. "Don't. Wait. Not stones."

Once more it burned in his pocket, the list with which he had started the day, which hadn't been absent from his sleep. Birodh sat beside the boy and read the list again. He held the paper to this light and that, seeking out the different and the mild. It seemed no more daunting now than the land before him, no more urgent than the unhurried Bishnumati or the invisible waft lifting rain clouds over the top of Shivapuri. He folded it back and thought of it no more. No more, he thought, no more of this for today. Vultures and dead lap-dogs, tridents and chocked dirty rivers, plastic bottles and American rap, Budhanilkantha supine on serpents, Shivapuri's protected crown and denuded skirts, old man by a furnace and young woman behind windows, a floating specter just outside the forehead, the nag and the need of gaping thatch and shrinking paddy, the gulf between perfumes and underfoot fecundity, between walls and water bubbling from the ground—so much in one vial, so much in one performance. Too much for one day, Birodh told himself, too much for one man.

He thought of the walk back. Would he see the girl behind her window again, and would her gaze meet his? What would they communicate? Would the falling houses and crumbling paths reach into his mind and find their kindred—houses, roofs and corners, mud and plaster of a forgotten long-time-ago somewhere-else—and would they ask him to stay, to join and sit with them around a fire? What about the bus ride? What about the climb up to the room where chopped onion and a mirror on the wall waited? What of the street outside?

The boy tugged at the lance and took it from Birodh's hands. He raised it like a javelin, arched his back and breathed steadily. "Wait," Birodh said, although he didn't know what he wanted the boy to wait for. The boy held his stance and waited, seemingly, for Birodh's go ahead. Birodh thought of the lance-tip and remembered the talk-back of his kitchen knife. What a waste, Birodh, what a waste! The boy waited, checking at Birodh out of the corner of his eyes, steadying the lance as the old vulture's head steadied in response, like charmer and snake locked in a reciprocate dance.

Birodh stood and walked a few paces, touched the hut behind him, measured paces to the closest crumble on the bank below which dropped water and waste, walked back and forth again, recalling a purpose, a place. The vulture took a nip at the carcass under its talons and the boy, as if finally prompted, as if finally identifying what is the horror in a bird eating, as if finally liberated of commands and obedience, hurled the length of iron at the bird. He missed. The iron jumped off a rock and chipped another, dipped one end in still water and lodged the opposite end between moss and mud. The bird scarcely moved a feather. It looked at the boy who took a backward step, as if in naked fear, now knowing what the bird knew of his strength and accuracy. The bird looked at Birodh, bobbed its head and looked at the boy, shuffled on its talons to reposition the carcass underneath, made as if to pick it and fly, but didn't.

Birodh fished his pockets for the list. There wasn't enough time for the next task—he would need to get home and clean up a bit before he could start. It would take him across the valley to the foothills of Fulchowki. A trail of pamphlets came floating down the river—quite a few had been caught and folded into paper boats and carried small clumps of grass. Some had flattened coke-bottle caps and the shiny foil of cigarette boxes twisted into shapes. There were a few with bright flowers. One held the head of a smiling doll while her limbs floated past individually. The boy raced along the water and jumped in after everything shiny and beautiful, grabbing with greed tempered by delicateness of manner the disjointed doll and her floating retinue. The bird let out a shriek at the boy's sudden moves, but did no more than bob its head, peck at its own belly and shift an inch to the side.

Birodh waved his hand at the boy and the bird, a dismissal concrete in his mind but quixotic outside, and felt suddenly burdened by reality, the things and holes around him, reality composed of orders and disappointments, of lance and flap and floating limbs of unreal but represented children. Everything outside him seemed real but he felt as if made of cork and lightness trapped within, being pushed forever up and outwards, to the foam that skims atop things that are alive and move, have will and lethargy, while his bag was filled with ether that belonged somewhere far, far away from the mind's eye. He wanted to say at least a few parting words to the old man, but decided not to. The tap outside the hut was still the same small trickle of water, unceasing and same, falling and pooling, between spout and ground it was a line of clear beads, upon hitting the ground it disappeared entirely.

As he searched for the address on the list of his tasks, Birodh knew violently that it would be the same door behind which the young girl was listening to her rap songs. He knew that he was to meet and talk to her, elevate coincidence into a call of fate, to pull a tear into the fabric of what trapped him between day to day and show that a figure in the window could also be a face at the door, that the many parts of one puzzle could consolidate into a thousand answers. This new swarm of realizations attacked the inside of his ears and filled it with the shrieks of a thousand bald vultures. The closer he got to the address, the giddier he felt with a new perversion that had fermented between breaths and with every step stole him away from composure and clarity, as if the imminent meeting was a door to new kinds of madness strange to him. The door, when he finally found it, belonged to a different house than the one where he wanted to be found.

He knocked, felt foolish when he saw the bell and pressed it. There was no answer. Birodh waited for a minute more. He walked around the house once, spying for any sign of life within. He thought he heard music, he thought he saw a flash of color inside. A small dog scented him, pressed its snout to every opening pointed at his direction and barked in small, sharp barks. Birodh stood near it, hoping to attract some attention from anybody at all, anyone inside the house, so that he may tell them of his failed purpose. Nobody called the dog away, nobody came to the door. The boy whom Birodh had left in the river came running around the corner and halted when he saw Birodh, put his arms on his waist and waited for something to transpire. The dog grew quiet and licked its snout and ran in circles. Birodh walked away from the dog and the boy, away from the door that wouldn't open and the window that had been false. He thought once more of the walk home and the night to come, of the bustle outside his window and the late hour in the night to which it would keep. He thought of the next morning when he would wake to the same list of tasks and fear it anew. Birodh walked towards the road where buses would stop to pick men like him. It was getting cold. A mother somewhere shouted at her children as they ran back and forth across the road, standing with their feet apart to yell at headlights before darting to either side.

(Photo: Kashish)

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