PEACOCK

The day is made of water.

A vision:
     Two women make love.
     The hands of children fill buckets with water and drench each other to the bone. Hair and fabric to cling fast to skin. Eyes shut, mouths open.

     A strange woman walks through the streets unnoticed. She is dressed in black, regal with white hair, black clothes, black sunglasses, and a black hat. She is dry and untouched. She looks ahead, seemingly unconcerned by the children who pass her by with vessels still half-full of water.

II
     The day is July 24th. The women are finished making love. They embrace, their faces invisible, covered by dark and inter-tangled hair. They are perfectly still. They might as well be sewn to the sheets.
There is scarcely anything in the room besides their tiny, low bed. The floor is striped with long and handsome planks of wood. A small window by the door is open and air blows in, light comes in. A fan in the ceiling: off. Beaded pull-chains sway a little in the breeze.
     Sounds of life can now be heard outside. They enter the room, and with them, dancingly, some inkling of danger. Light from the window makes the far wall seem almost translucent, too thin. Children run barefoot in front of the apartment, loud, as loud as if they had run through the room itself. One of the women lifts her head, still wrapped in hair, to look towards the door.

III
     I am in the streets in my Sunday best. The year is 2008, the day of my cousin Alen’s baptism. A woman in our clan begs passing children not to drench us as we huddle around our taxi. We drive to the church with our windows half up. I look out and count young women with hair cut above their ears. I watch children screaming and moving wildly with bare arms and legs, thin and tan. The sights and sounds of outside excite me. I hear cursing and crying, “Samo, I’ll shit on your head!” I keep quiet. My nature, nervous. My spirit, longing.
     Alen is coaxed into the baptismal font, and coaxed out of it. He is cheerful for a few minutes while inside, but the arrival and departure are marked with tears. Water drips from his long lashes and into the shallow pool below as he is plucked from the bath, looking like a slick brown amphibian, like a tadpole
somewhere on the road to being a frog.
     After the baptism, I was instructed not to kiss him. Somehow my mouth would disturb his imminent salvation. Maybe the traces of myrrh and oil and water my lips would take from his cheek would degrade his bubble of holy protection. The saliva I’d leave behind would contaminate it. Whatever the case, I kissed him over and over, countless times, as he slid around on his walker shaped like a red
sportscar. Overcome with guilt, I confessed to my mother, and proceeded to forget and kiss him again. My playmates, his godsisters, scolded me. Behind my shame, incrementally, I lost faith.

IV
     Back in the room, one woman sits up on the edge of the bed. A pale nose protrudes from the curtain of her hair. Thin, brownish-red lips can be deciphered between strands, arranged in an uncertain
expression. At the very corner of her mouth rests a small shadow. She brings her face close to her lover’s and whispers, my beautiful, my love, I’m going.
     The young woman walks down the apartment steps alone. The sun passes behind a nearby building. As she steps onto the pavement, shade casts itself at her feet. The streets are not as full now, deceptively silent, some glittering black puddles spotting the ground. Old men and women venture out to

have a smoke. The woman walks back to her home, back to another apartment that smells of sweet mold and fresh cooking. She is looking into the future now. Though she has not yet made it all the way to her apartment, in her heart she is already there. Already flicking switches, opening windows, running the shower, and boiling coffee on the stove with wet hair.
     The strange woman in black, looking quite natural now, has taken off her sunglasses to reveal small, indistinct eyes. She leans on the wall and smokes anonymously. She drops her cigarette to the ground and steps on it, and it disappears like a crushed spider. From a distant street, impossibly, she is watching the young woman walking home to her apartment. The old woman smiles softly, breathes deeply, and shuts her eyes as if to dream.
     The young woman senses some change around her, some alteration in the composition of sounds. The same trees rustle, the same cars pass, the same voices fall from the windows, but seemingly out of their proper order, seemingly backwards. Nearby sounds come to her ears from great distances, and faraway sounds come to her from close by. Her heart is already sound asleep in her own bed, but her body has only just turned the corner into the gray lot in front of her apartment building. By now, no present sound reaches her at all, only the anticipated noise of the near future.

     Do not think that the city is run out of water. Do not think that the day is over. The sun has not fully set. Do not think that the children have retreated to their homes just because their mothers have called them once, or even twice to come up for dinner. Do not leave your body behind and let your heart go ahead, not even for a few weary steps.
     Water drenches the top of the young woman’s head. Water falls down her back and washes away the sweat, leaks into her pants, into her underwear. Her face is left dry except for a few tear-like drops that leak from her hairline. She looks up. And the old woman looks up.
     There is not a cloud in the darkening sky, not even a furtive bird.