wow... it's been since June 20th that I worked on this piece. Far far too long... oh, how July has run by like a crack-addict pursued by the police.

anyhow, it's back to the Swallow story, taking off from where I left off--at a Mexican Father's Day celebration party. On to the meandering...

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Next to Cardito was the bearded woman, his wife, Marina, who had tucked her beard into her dress for the occasion. She was feeling gregarious and sexy, and was wrapping crisped pigskin around a tender cut, while laughing at her beer-blustering husband. And everyone else at the table—Mario, Max, Mariola, Maria Fernanda, Marita, Maritza, Monica, Mauricio, Maria Elena, Marlo, Melanie and Silvia—was either hijo or sobrino or tia or tio, except Monsieur who seemed to fit in, despite being relatively incapable of speaking Spanish, white as the underbelly of a dolphin, and at the moment, extremely sick to his holster.

Monsieur watched blurrily as Marina reached across the table and slapped the hand of Maritza, her young niece who was at the time picking her nose. Carlito took the opportunity to refill his whiskey on ice, jostling and elbowing his nephew Mauricio as he sloshed the quick jab of homebrew into his glass. After the slapping, Marina deposited barbequed pig on Mario, Marlo and Max’s plates, laughed at Marlo’s drunken joke, and sat back down, tucking her beard back into her shirt as she settled. Carlito, pleased at the chance he had well-earned to sneak a little more alcohol into his system, wrapped his arm around Marina and spoke loudly to the table.

To Monsieur, it sounded like: “This fatty woman takes care to shshshsha us, no?”

The word gordita, or fatty as he understood it, was a term that completely confused Monsieur. He was always wondering if it was extremely rude or extremely sweet to be called a little fat person? So gently, too. Whenever gordita was used, it seemed to Monsieur to be an act of affection with a potential little spike behind it. The spike was what confused Monsieur. In his book, either something was completely generous or completely a snub, and the in-between zone presented a huge range of potential hurt feelings that could bewilder any outsider, but particular bewildered Monsieur, who had always been known in his family and school for being a Big Jerk who took every opportunity to put his foot so solidly in his mouth that he had to constantly run to the doctor for de-jamming. Monsieur needed to be completely sure about the potential for face-slap before he even bothered to enter something into his vocabulary, and this gordita endearment kept eluding his sensors.

As he sat contemplating the hard g and soft almost-rolled r of this evasive meaning, Monsieur wavered around slowly on his chair like kelp in a changing tide. His eyes moved in and out of needing high-voltage lenses to help him find focus, but he was desperately trying to pull it together because he waited to see, physically see, if Marina was going to slap his boss. If it happened, Monsieur truly wanted to have a part in the public voyeurism and humiliation of the moment, as Carlito had already embarrassed the young wretched Monsieur a few times.

But apparently Gordita was not going to get angry at the affectionate verbiage, or even the new whiskey in her husband’s cup (which she was very aware of). Instead, as a joke, she took the beard out of her shirt and wrapped it around Carlito's neck, playfully, as if she might strangle him with the facial tentacles she had been gifted with.

This was quite a bit for our young Monsieur to swallow at the time. For a few months now, he had been wondering what it was like growing up with a female beard. Had Marina ever thought to shave it off? Because for him, a beard on a woman was beyond grotesque. He didn’t want to say it—and he knew that if he ever did, not only would he never again have a spot in the show, he would also probably receive some well-administered pain—but it was true; a bearded woman was horrifying. In his drunken state, Monsieur stared with the fascination of any horrified man. As Carlito pretended to choke with the beard wrapped tighter and tighter, Monsieur traced the way the whiskers sprouted from pores on Marina’s chin. He wanted to follow them down to the source, pounce on Marina with a magnifying glass and trace the heritage of cells down to the surface of her skin. This skin he would study. He would scour it over for an understanding. He wanted to compare it to the skin of the Mermaid, the Strongman, the Twins, the Caterpillar, the Queer, the Firefly, the Catman, and all of the others. The appeal of all these other show freaks made sense to Monsieur, but not the bearded woman, who, for him, was just a cross-gendered product of immense tragedy. A tragedy that everyone around him seemed blind to.

He could no longer watch, and his crop was desperate to be relieved of the jalapenos, which were actually resting against the side of the interior bag and it might be said, wanted to burn a hole right through the organ. Monsieur stumbled up, mumbled an apology to Monica, who was sitting next to him, and began to wind his way to the outhouse set up on the perimeter of their new grounds.

Once there, Monsieur peeped up the jalapenos, which surely no young birdlets were going to try to steal from his gaping maw, and then slid down the side of the outhouse. Outside the large tent of the fiesta, the world seemed quite a bit larger and easier to breathe in. At the moment, a day set right smack dab in the center of an unexpectedly brittle dry spring, the Show of Wonders was set up on the outskirts of a southern Texas pueblito. The tents had been pitched in the middle of a dehydrated field in which the usual tall papercut grasses had given up their hopes for the spring rains and fallen over yellow and crusty. Touching them was almost as good as touching a cactus, so furious were they at having been neglected by the clouds. Everything in the field exuded bristle, and simply brushing against any of the foliage was enough to ensure the lodging of several brown scratch-burrs within the interior of clothing. Places like this field rode around on the inside of trousers everywhere.

Sitting right in the middle of the field, Monsieur worked hard on settling his head down enough to re-enter the game. Already, it felt as if he were halfway there, but he knew that things, life, had a strange way of getting out of hand really rapidly whenever other people entered the human radar range. A field, an outhouse, the red dirt running through his hand leaving a pale ghost of presence along his cuticles—this was all manageable, and so he drifted in it. The soil was quite as still as a red scoured clay-pot with traces of dust on the surface from having sat too long on a solitary shelf. To Monsieur, it felt like if he were to speak, the soil might lift up and swirl for a few feet in surprise before gently touching back down. Monsieur admired the dirt, so red it was. Before venturing south, he had never seen anything like it. Where he was from, dirt was brown like it was supposed to be. Rich and loamy, full of earthworms and microbes. The soil in Texas looked like the pictures of Mars. In fact, when they first arrived, Monsieur spent a few idle minutes wondering if he had left the planet and touched down in a comic book.

Up overhead, the sky was clear and light, a few pigments of blue dipped via brush into a puddle of dry water. Shadow birds wheeled around down towards the south, a pinwheel of death perhaps, a rotation of quandary. Monsieur felt as if maybe he just hadn’t had enough time to notice his surrounding for a long time, so fast had things been moving since he had joined the show. It had been an exceptional six months, exactly what he was searching for in his life: something all unexpected, full of time nobody could have told him was coming. All his life, Monsieur had been in a panic that things might average out, find equilibrium, and he would be struggling for the rest of his life to fill his head while everything flowed slowly outward. Here, in this dry hot second with seventy Mexicans celebrating Fatherhood, life flowed into Monsieur and puffed him up like a vacuum cleaner full to overflowing. He wanted to empty the contents and search around in the dusty pile for all the incredible objects that were slowly disappearing through sheer accretion.

If he were to select the shiniest gift from the past year of his life, Monsieur thought it would be the Twins, who had first become very close friends, and then had become his bunkmates. The day they invited him in from where he slept under the lowest trailer was a day of Extreme. A day of rain and sun slanting through each other crosswise, with all the arches and wraparound therein.

He didn’t want to admit it, never would have, no matter what. Not to himself, not to anyone. But something had bust a little in Monsieur when his father, Henry Barthel, had asked him to leave. True, he had been getting in fights with the tight patriarchal fatman of the family, particularly over Monsieur’s increasing desire to practice and show his gift to the world rather than join in the family business of Running An Important Store. But still it was too huge and denying to be asked to simply leave, to not speak or be Himself within the confines of a group that wanted him, not somebody else, but him. As a unique and irreplaceable soul in a world so lost and lonely in potential borders and barriers. A severing of connection, heritage, bridges, the past from the future. The move, the ejection, the leaving behind to go live in a barn, while potentially exciting and full of adventure, still managed to insert a workable sliver of glass-like doubt into Monsieur’s perception of the world. Perhaps we could call it Doubt in his worth. Doubt of whether he would be invited inside again.

And he hadn’t asked the Twins, never said anything about this desire for someone to enter his field again, the dry and dust silt of float-away, and hydrate it with the simple need to have him around, but they somehow knew. They saw in bravado and full-throat show off and the huge cocky-walk of Monsieur, the sliver and helped him work it out. They needed him.

The first time he met the Twins, Monsieur had been leaning against a wheel of a trailer, his shirt damp with the sweat of putting up tents and the slanting wind-rain. The twins came together and sat down next to him, while Monsieur tried to figure something out. What he was trying to figure out was something from his learnings in biology class, the possibilities, and whether what he was seeing was even possible. The Twins were Siamese, which when you think about it, is amazing and incredibly unexpected in daily life. We don’t walk around and see people joined together—in this case, at the upper thigh and a singular elbow. If we were to walk around and see such a group of two, we might stop and stare, imagine what we would do if our life was so completely inextricable from someone else’s. We might have a morbid moment and wonder what would happen if one died, and the other lived. Would a dry and dusty corpse be dragged around the world through sheer unavoidability? To prevent gangrene of the living, would the dead life need amputation, or would a simple mummification work? After the morbid questions leave, or are at least put away, we might go back to simply wondering what it is like to shower, potty, eat, sleep, run, and go to the movies (where the armrests of seats can’t be lifted) together.

But this wasn’t what Monsieur was thinking about. Actually, he was thinking about genetics and birthing and canals. He didn’t want to ask, but finally couldn’t help himself.

“I thought you couldn’t have male-female Siamese twins. How is that possible?”

The head of the Male drifted away towards the flapping wind through the cock-rooster wind measure, the spin, while the Female’s lids dropped a little lazy and glanced at Monsieur with a slight amount of attention. A Tad.

“Well,” she said finally, “we’re not identical if that’s what you’re asking. That’s not possible.” She paused for a few seconds, her hand reaching up and scratching a tick off her shared elbow, and then she chucked, “Identical twin brother and sister. Haha.”

This, of course, answered approximately one-half (or if you were to weight the curiosity in terms of importance, closer to one-fourth) of Monsieur’s question. The second half, he went ahead and asked, having already opened the potentially bug-ridden box.

“Well,” he said, “if you’re not identical, then how did you come to be joined?”

This question came from thinking hard. Siamese twins, as he understood them, came from a single egg starting to divide, but then forgetting to finish the act, thus leaving the result of Almost-Two People. Perhaps there were various states of Almost-Two. One heart, four lungs. Two hearts, two arms. Four lungs, three breasts. Whatever the result; something, a body part that is remarkably not owned by an individual, but rather by two. Which is something that really just doesn’t happen too often, as most animals don’t make a habit of passing body parts to each other, whether while passing in the hallways, or via packaging and the US mail system. And so, if Siamese twins were a creation of a single cell, which is the definition of identical, then how did these two come to be not identical, and yet Almost-Two? Monsieur thought hard, whereas the twins seemed more interested in being extremely lazy and lollygagging.

Finally, Female decided to answer. “We joined later, but we’re not going to tell you about that yet.”

“Would you like something to drink with us,” asked Male, suddenly seeming to snap out of his reverie. When he was paying attention and looking, Monsieur noticed just how very sharp Male’s eyes were. He glanced over at Female to avoid them, but noticed that hers were quite the same. So, instead of looking at the eyes, Monsieur gave them a good lower-lidded gaze, a new sixteen-year old’s once-over. The Almost-Two were wearing what initially seemed to be two shirts. Actually they were two shirts, but they were cut away at the upper arm and shoulder so that they could be fit over the upper arm of each Almost-Two’s arm. Female wore a light blue blouse with a few lacy, or at least semi-delicate ruffles, along the neck, whereas Male wore a plaid shirt and had a pencil protector in his pocket. From this point, Monsieur glanced at Male’s hand to see if he was a writer and was pleased to see ink staining several of Male’s fingers. The Almost-Two’s lower torso was clothed in what looked to be a much simpler construction than the cut-away shirts. They were wearing two pairs of trousers that simply had been sewn together on one of the legs. Monsieur wondered of the Almost-Two had become such through a similar process. He wondered if the Twins would ever tell him. After examining the four pairs of shoes, Monsieur nodded his head quickly and simply capitulated to the moment.

“Yes,” he said, and before too long, Tonio (Male), Sharivel (Female), and Monsieur (Cropped Male) had made their introductions and were sipping beers together shyly, and then less shyly, and then not shyly at all. The clincher of their assured friendship was when Sharivel stabbed Monsieur gently in the hand with a pocketknife for having Obviously Cheated at a game of Go Fish.