Hey folks...I decided to include a little of one of the fiction pieces I´m working on right now...

Swallow
A few in my family are stuck with it: a throwback from the time when we were all chickens gathering feathers to paste into nests with scratched up mud and feces. In those days, we walked on hardened claws and pecked the ground for litter to fill our throats. For my family, something was passed down from those days; even I, the normal one, feel it sometimes at night when the fan is on, almost as if my pores sprout bristles and all the little barbs and barbellas on my wings need preening against the cool soothe of wind. And these veins and arteries and arches of capillary aren’t so reachable in my body, but are shifted inward, protected by thin bones so light I could just imagine a sky and my body would fill it. Or sometimes I feel it when I’m angry, my face getting so hard and long I’m sure I could snap the head off a fish, or crush a shell with a snap of my lip. But for me, the thought, the sensation of chicken or kingfisher or nuthatch, is simply a night visitaton.

It’s Monsieur, my grandfather, who really had the trait. Maybe he wasn’t the first, but he was the first to acknowledge out loud the full-blown deformation, if you want to call it that, which was to become our familial identificater. And boy, he suffered for strutting out the whispers that had blown around silently for years. Apparently, and this is all hearsay because there were never any reconciliations to allow me other perspectives, my great-great grandfather dropped dead at the dinner table when Monsieur demonstrated his skill. But his family was so proper and proud that they never even knew gg-gramps was dead until the end of dinner, when they lifted their eyes from their shiny-clean plates and saw him nodding over in what they initially assumed was a nap, but soon realized was not. And so, the gist of the interaction that was said to have killed the Great Great started when Monsieur, who was then thirteen, initiated dinner conversation by announcing:

“I think I have a skill.”

My great grandfather, Henry Barthel, who was big into modesty, simply nodded, and said, “Don’t we all, son.”

“No, but mine’s unusual.”

With this statement, everyone at the table looked expectantly at Monsieur. I like to imagine my great-grandfather as a stouch fat patrician-type fellow, the type of man who remembers, just before sitting down to dinner, to take off the hat and loosen his tie. He probably had thick eyebrows like cock-feathers, and was able to lift one brow up or down to suggest surprise, invitation, or disapproval, depending on the angle of tilt.

The rest of the claim was, I’m told, composed of three boys younger than Monsieur by at least eight years, and two girls, only one of whom was older than Monsieur, but who was hardly even noticeable, a brown sprat of a girl who never married, never spoke up, and who was the only one of the entire group besides my grandfather to live past the fifties fire that took down the house and inhabitants. This I only know because I once got nostalgic for folks I never knew, simply because I thought they might have some form of stability I could don in a surrogate fashion, and so looked them up on the web. I found the mousey newspaper picture of my great aunt, the survivor, and also the title “Young Lady Burns Her Family Alive.”

Along with my great-grandmother and the man who was shortly to die, this was the crew that looked at Monsieur, and waited for the skill to make itself manifest. I try to imagine what Monsieur was thinking at the time. At fourteen, was he less confident than he was for the rest of his life? I wonder if he was shaking. With pride? With fear? Did he really want to demonstrate deformation to his world? Regardless of emotion, Monsier lifted picked up a quarter he had resting on the table beside his plate. He considered it, the same way he had been considering it in his room: the flash, the shine of pure silver, the thought of machinery churning, churning, churning out such trinkets to hold the world together. He looked at the quarter, held it up to the light, where everyone in his family, I think, contemplated it like a wish before he opened his mouth, set it on his tongue, tasted the metallic glint and suggestion of palm sweat before swallowing it.

I’m sure that, at this point, my great-grandfather lifted one of the brows for which he was famous, and perhaps it was connected by invisible floss to his upper lip, which no doubt revealed evidence of sneer as the entire family contemplated Monsieur’s actions and tried to deduce the “skill” that it indicated. Monsieur has, for the entirety of his life, had some sort of natural drama about him, a sense of punchline and imminent hand-clap, and so I’m sure he waited for a sufficiently long time—just three seconds longer than anyone expects (the formula for drama)—to allow their incredulous emotions to set in. And right when he could see it in all their eyes—his father’s, sister’s, benign mother’s, brothers, and grandfather’s—that mystical scorn, he started the show of his true talent. At that time, and this is how I know it is a chicken-related inheritance, Monsieur needed to tuck his hands under his armpits. Once this was accomplished, he started bobbing and stretching his head, twisting around his throat, his mouth open and empty.

If any of you have ever held a loved one, or stranger who you nevertheless love, while they are spitting up their guts over the toliet, or on the wall of a distance subway station, you know that puking involves the diaphram. It starts down so low you can watch bowels move themselves upwards slowly like a backwards-climbing slinky. The lungs get pushed up against the clavicles and shoulders expand, and then deep down with the sound of an approaching tunnel train, out comes all the contents of the evening, mixed with the mystery of body we are so very unpriviledged as to never see firsthand except in uncomfortable moments. The diaphram, creature of hiccup and solid opera technique, muscle of extreme and ephemoral power, was not the muscle Monsiuer had honed, nor were the gyrations of his upper torso indicative of complete regurgitation of stomach contents.

Rather, his movements were centered above the shoulders, perhaps rooted in the apple Adam has choked on for all history. His head twisted up and down, up and down, never torquing off the course of linearity. Before too long, he stuck out his tongue, and resting on it was a perfectly dry and untouched silver piece. It wasn’t much, but his movements were so unexpected and unique that my Great-Great Grandfather’s eyes got sorta blank, and while everybody else in the family became so confused as to return their gaze simply to their plates, where roast beef and green beans waited for proper consumption, Great-Great Grandfather simply knew he had seen the beginning of something that necessitated a great leaving, and so departed the body that had once held my family’s future locked in miniscule sperm cells.

***

With bitter practice, the time given by embaressed ejection from his household, Monsieur was quickly able to store food the size of pebbles inside his throat. But it wasn’t really in his throat, the common reference to the esophagul passage each of us is priveledged to own. Rather, it was in a small bag located roughly in the place of ancient sin. Officially, the word for this bag is “crop,” but about two weeks into his lifetime stint at the traveling circus, Monsieur insisted upon calling it his holster, a practice that everyone laughed at until he started working up to larger, more ominous, objects than simple coins.

***

Hours before leaving the Zone, and all my sister, Sparrow, can do is cry. She goes to the bathroom, washes her face in cold water, comes out and smiles, pretends I have no idea what is going on. Her smile is, I think, so incredibly perfect for the job of masking (except for those two of us who know her so well she frequently asks us who she is, as if to check in or figure things out that are inexcessible from the inside), because it is so disproportionate to her stature. She has the type of body that people want to pick up and carry around like one of those fru-fru dogs that all the celebrities are suddenly toting in small bags to their hair appointments. People want to tuck her in bed next to them, pat her like a stuffed animal, and feel safer for having something to care for.

But her smile, her smile is something else. I once saw a comparison when I was traveling near the equator. Up where we’ve spent most of our life, the great Pacific Northwest of rain and omnipresent green, there are times in the day when the moon slips out and sits pale like a reverse shadow in the biggest blue. I’ve always called this daytime phenomena the Ghost Moon, a reference I got when once Monsieur told me that this type of moon is really a memory we can’t forget, even though we want to, sitting out there for everybody to ignore. Ghost moons, so slyly discreet, slipping between clouds and taunting us with the immenence of evening, when history grows so large we can’t help but see ourselves slipping through chasm.

But at the equator, there are no ghost moons for technical reasons having to do with the sun’s direct rays on a surface and the thinness of atmosphere in a place that is consistantly close to our sun in a way not found in places of fickle-passion where the sun pushes away in a fury, and then changes its mind come spring. During the day at the equator, the moon does not beat around the bush. It is a flashlight, a beacon, a glowing glowing half orb. Once I looked up and saw this dome as a great expectant brain eminating Idea. I wanted to touch that Idea, have it come inside me and make this small ignorant body fill with the type of understanding that makes faith possible. This is my sister’s smile, so very near perfect for masking.

And she uses it, walks from the bathroom to the kitchen full of smile, her tears hypothetically erased by splashed water and eminating Idea. Our mother sits in the kitchen at the table and sips her whiskey, pulls wispy gray hair out of her face. She sees Sparrow and feels sorry for herself, to be losing a daughter. I bite my tongue for once, try not to shout at my mother, who shuns the knowledge that Sparrow is running to get out of this crazy family, to leave twenty-three years of taking care of parents who can’t take care of themselves. What choice does Sparrow have but to flee, now that she has sold the stocks that were her inheritance from our dead dead dead maternal great aunt, in order to finance the first house my mother has ever had since marrying Taro, our father? We sit in the house that carries the Zone that Sparrow holds deep far incredible low down inside her crop.

Outside the dogs are lazing in the first true Bville spring heat, and Sparrow leaves the kitchen, throws herself on the turf near them, and curls her face close to theirs. Dogs, no matter what their insecurities are, always make Sparrow feel safe, like it’s all going to be okay. I can see Sparrow asking herself why she is crying nonstop on a day when she’s facing escapist adventure to another country. Tied up in a Zone she can see too well, not well enough, she’s been finding this journey for so long: the same sounds of her brain tic-ticking, with the main new occurances being buying houses, becoming pennylessness, finding out that she has a life-long disease, learning our brother has AIDs, and working through a series of jobs she always started with inspiration and finished with new disillusionment. She has been rutted, and she knows it, I know it, and anybody who gives a damn about her knows it.

It’s common sense to know that there’s no reason to be worn and sad all the time with all the Incredibles, but for Sparrow, it’s almost like there’s a bathrobe by the door of this place—blue and threadbare around the edges—and all she can do is put it on.

***

The holster registers differently in each family member who has it, as if it is a viral mutation rather than a consistant genetic disorder. Monsieur, the first to acknowledge the holster, made his living out of it, a fact that rooted a new rambling, lazy, nomadic quality in our family. He also got into some deep trouble with the holster. But I always remember the wonders of the crop, not the holster—the fact that Monsieur could gather food for us, deposit it into our open maws as we sobbed in hunger. He was handy on airplanes and long journeys. He was handy in the grocery store when there was not enough money to buy the food we needed. Maria Fernanda Garcia Cueva, also known as Mafer, fell in love with him because he always stored silver bracelets and earring for her, never once mentioning where he picked them up.

His daughter, Muebla, exhibited the holster in a slightly different way. Everything you ever said to the woman was just a weapon she could later point at you. She was fast on the regurgitation, and because she swallowed sounds whole, incredibly precise. Conversations recycled themselves.

“But you said you loved me,” she said to Taro when I was ten.

“Well, yes,” he acknowledged, not one to debate.

“And,” she continued, “if I remember correctly, you said: ‘May the sky belch feathers the day I walk away from you.’ You said you’d do anything for me. You said that love was unselfish and you’d always be good to me, and couldn’t stand it if I ever thought something bad about you. You said the soul matters.”

Or there was another time:

“You said you were going to the store to pick up pampers, a six-pack of beer, carrots, lettuce, Hamburger Helper, three cans of tomato soup, milk, sliced ham not the fatty kind, yogurt, bread, hummus, Lucky Charms, fresh coffee, hot chocolate, and eggs. You never said you were going out to pick up genital herpies.”

Or the time:

“In the interview, you said that you like people to take initiative, show independence, and think in unexpected ways.”

The thing about Mom is that she always had the holster prepared with the violence of truth, but never realized that truth always finds a way to hide underneath the cliché’s and words people parse out with little care for meaning. After a lifetime of her holster, I once broke down and bought her a book on linguistics, signs and signifiers, and the uncommonalities of reference point, with the intention of making her holster into a crop, but she was highly insulted and kept the book underneath our camper porta-potty.