minnie and the fatal family reunion

She fell into the earth without a sound. There was no shriek as the terrain revealed its flaw and gorged itself on the fatness of her body. She lay at the bottom of that hole asleep, for all we knew, and what she dreamed I cannot say as we pondered what to do and the well, a satisfied and grinning snake, held its prize fast in its belly, content to doze and digest her until she was rendered utterly back to the soil, speck and particle of the mute and eternal ground.

Minnie was round and moved through her life without apology, stuffing herself with all she delighted in, taking care that even the tiniest morsels of the cakes, pies and biscuits did not escape her mouth, ingesting each crumb like a mosaic of confections until she was beautiful and arranged from the patterns and currents of eating. Teasing and insults slid off her skin, unable to snag and dig into her, her body tight and shiny, impenetrable to the most merciless jibes and jests aimed at her with a cruelty that spoke only from it own misery.

Minnie was undaunted in her pursuit of food and it was that personal quest that flung her headlong into the gullet of the earth to waste beyond the reach of any of us and beyond her love of food.

My daddy asked me did I see her die and I told him no. I did not even see her fall. We ran across the field towards home, supper. My mama said she watched us as we came , Minnie running beside me and she just winked out of sight, there one minute and gone the next. She said you could almost hear the whole horizon pop with the sound of her leaving it so quick. She told me she thought for a second that Jesus had come back and Minnie had been the only one righteous enough to leave with him.

My daddy and uncles walked up the hill and over the fields looking for Minnie, their hands held like blades across their eyes, pulling cigarettes from their mouths to let her name and the smoke roll out and over the grass. They walked and smoked, speaking softly one to another, punctuating their quiet conversations with a shout for Minnie to come home.

It was my daddy who found her. I had followed him up and crawled between his legs when he stopped and stared down at the ground. He was staring at a hole, black and unfathomable. He called for a lantern and my brother ran one up from the house. Then daddy knelt and lowered the lantern down into the hole. I laid there on my stomach squinting to see to the very bottom, wondering what my daddy hoped to find there at the bottom of that old well.

Light can settle and drift. It takes patience and time to notice it but if you are still long enough even the dimmest light can reach the blackest, deepest spot on earth. The light drifted and settled on Minnie. It fell down on her soft as fine dirt, illuminating her with a wan and trembling yellow. I thought she was asleep. There was no unnaturalness to her body. One hand was tucked behind her head as if she had curled it there while she napped. She was propped against the wall with her face turned up towards the light. I expected her to open her eyes and ask me to throw her down a biscuit.

Soon everyone was standing over the hole, taking turns and peering in. some of them balanced paper plates full of food in one hand and discussed what should be done about Minnie and should someone go down and fetch her out. One of my cousins stood at the edge of the hole and dropped a few stones on her, to see if she might move or protest. She did not. She was silent and still but as I watched her I imagined I could see her breathe.

There was a stillness to the men by the hole, my father looking away along the horizon as if he might find Minnie there and not wedged into the ground beyond his reach. Some offered suggestions of rescue; others spoke with hope already gone from their voices. No one offered to call for help. It was our way of life and death. We raised and buried our own as God and nature saw fit. If we could not raise her from that place then it was up to us to seal her in it.

My uncle George pulled a piece of fried chicken from his mouth long enough to say that he thought it was too dangerous to send someone after her and she was probably just dead anyway. No one else said anything, each one absorbed in their food, as if looking away from it or articulating a thought would unravel the silent truce they were erecting between them that would allow them to walk away from Minnie and back to their lives, grateful it hadn't been one of their babies and it was not their grief that would be swallowed up in that Georgia field. We are a mute people, my family, when a child dies. We do not speak of loss because we have so little already. Poverty makes even grief a luxury and to mourn a child or speak its name is an extravagance of emotion best saved for the everyday hunger and humiliation we are required to carry. Minnie's fall garnered no comment beyond what was necessary to bury her, her only monument a stone thrown down to test her mortality.

That night I woke trying to scream, imagining that my mouth was filled with dirt, that I had opened my eyes to a black and soundless world, air in my lungs replaced with fill dirt and insects. I dreamed I was Minnie and I woke alone and hungry, beyond understanding of what had happened to me and where everyone had gone. I imagined her slow madness as she aged and grew beneath the earth, feeding on dirt, blind in the dark and clawing her way underneath the fields and hills where I played. I sometimes feared she would rise from the earth in the garden, blackened and gaunt, her eyes luminous from years spent in the dark to demand from me a piece of cake. I thought of her reaching towards me for my food and speaking to me as if nothing had ever happened, that she had just retuned from playing while I sat horrified and mindless by the specter she had become. Minnie became for me my own nightmare. I saw her in every tilled piece of earth, worried over tarrying too long by a crevice or a hole, fearful she would rise and pull me down with her, to play and forage among the bones of the dead.

I had been running beside her. Only a chance path towards home kept me from tumbling into the well while she careened forward to her place at the table and the food she loved so perfectly. Only a few steps to her right took me up on my daddy’s shoulders and towards the sun, towards light, warmth, movement and air. I told me daddy I didn’t see her die and I am still not sure she is dead. My memory arcs back to the moment she winked out of sight and how I watched them lay the dirt over her. I went back once, fifteen years later to that field and walked the ground, calling her name and scanning the earth for a sign of that hole. I called and heard nothing. I searched the ground and found the earth healed and seamless after all that time. I watched the sun go down and I stretched out over the grass, pressed my mouth to the soil and inhaled. “Minnie’s breath.” I thought, and I breathed out, singing to her a song from our childhood, pressing my body against the curve of the earth in an embrace I hoped would tunnel its way to her, rocking her in her constant night and willing her to sleep, dreamless and unafraid, a prayer that she never wake to the moment of her abandonment. I rise and I pull her from the ground and swallow her memory, taking her from that hole in the fields and into my body, into my life, into a home without shadows.

Minnie is light and I carry her everywhere, facing her towards the sun as we walk and leaving a light on in the closet when the night comes in. It is our truce. She does not enter my dreams anymore and I resurrect her every day to the phenomenon of the sun and the joy of breath and air. I breathe for us both and avoid the dark places, describe to her the smell of baked chicken and fresh split water melon. We find it impossible to grieve what happened. Neither of us believes she is dead. She is only sleeping, dreaming of supper and the sound of her name calling her home.

bigger than you

i have always been in the minority:

american indian
female
lesbian
cowgirl.

then i read a statistic that 70% of women over the age of thirty, in this country, are over-weight.
fat.
obese.
real porkers.
the very embodiment of "land of the plenty".

finally, i am in the majority.
both in numbers
and sheer mass,
fat chicks rule.

but i have always held for myself a certain aristocratic air.

dirt floors, screenless windows
no electricity
and no plumbing aside,
i knew i belonged to a ruling class.

big girls.

has a really nice ring.

i am big enough, strong enough
and take up most of the available space.

so back up super models,
the new oppressed minority.
time to get organized and take those waifish stick figures that pass for sexy
down to the chick-fil-a
and super size yourself.

join the growing ranks
(and i do mean "growing")
of big-ass women
who reckon with sexy on a whole different level.

luscious!
you can call me that if you like.
along with
ample.
bosomy.
plush.
generous.
gratuitous, even.

but don't call me anything less than lovely.

i am the majority.
i rule.
and i am way bigger than you.

i tell lies

i tell lies.

it is what i do.
a genetic imprint from my father, the preacher man.

you can call them stories, tall tales or sermons.
but they are all just a pack of lies.

someone walks in the door and shouts "chef!" and i answer.
it is a lie.

but i have already put on the coat, picked up a knife and used the word "chiffonade" without a pause, a breath or a blink.

i am not a chef.
i never have been.
i am not an indian, a preacher's daughter, a lesbian, a girl, a woman (with a "y" or without one), a feminist, an artist, a writer, a friend, a lover, a voter, a humanitarian or even "peggy jean".

i am inarticulate.
it is halloween every day.
i dress up in some sporty little personality and go to work.
or out to play.

but in between i am emily's mother.
that is not a lie.
that is the only true thing about me.

the meridian.
the arc of blue light.

but that really has no language.
a mouth cannot form around such things.
it was not designed to do so.
even if it is the truth.

the truth does not set you free,
another lie my daddy told me.

it just gives perspective to everything else.
like what can kill you,
shouldn't.
and what can't, should.

it's the lies that turn you loose to become
mythic, epic and holy, that fill you up and let you sleep
without hunger.

and like daddy always said:
"the truth never holds water."

so i tell lies.
easy, rich and full.

it is what i do.

ill-minded prophet

perhaps you have seen "hell's kitchen", the flamboyant "reality" t.v. show that is not very real but tends toward the dramatic.

i have seen exactly two episodes. i had to turn off the set when i realized there was not a hat nor a hair net to be seen in all of tv land's kitchen. apparently, hygiene and good old fashioned safety are not part of the "reality" tv realm. for want of a hairnet, a perfect health department rating was lost. all my years of building a conscientious kitchen staff died an immediate death with the LA notion that good hygiene just "doesn't sell" to the great unwashed called the general public.

but this is not really about hair nets and ball caps or erstwhile kitchen fashion and safety statements.

it is about one of the players on the show. perhaps you've seen him. they call him "dewberry", a round and saucy queen who scandalized angelina jolie with his references to being the next "mrs. brad pitt". he was the one who cried and walked off the line. and he was one of the most unforgettable characters in the cast.

and he is a fellow biscuiteer, working with me at the fabulous flying biscuit in hotlanta where he draws a crowd on the weekends and regales the clients (and the staff) with tales from the hottest parts of hell's kitchen.

it is the closest thing to celebrity i've known, despite the tenuous connections the restaurant has to the likes of the indigo girls, martina navratilova and ru paul. jeff dewberry is sweet, affectionate and pert as the breasts on a fifteen year old female equestrian.

but it is always the unlikely comment, the off-hand remark meant in all seriousness that really gets me going, like he is completely unaware on some level how absurd and hysterical the story he relates sounds. stories that make the goings on at hell's kitchen seem mundane and silly.

like the previous kitchen manager, he told me, who was a prophet. (i didn't see that one coming.) the one who had his own flock and prepared for armageddon and an alien invasion while carefully shaping tuilles and tempering chocolate. and who, in jeff's own words,"belongs to one of those weird kinda churches, you know, the kind without a steeple."

and the strange thing is, i knew exactly what he meant: the fact that the church was steeple-less gave strong testimony to how unorthodox the man and his congregation were. aliens and tuille ruining end of time battles be damned. all you needed to know about the man and the church was evident from the flat, unadorned facade.

and i feel like the "biscuit" is a little like that church: weird and off-set but charming, drawing a great crowd and quirky staff, not respectable in the way a restaurant with an actual parking lot might be but destined and ordained to be set aside despite and because of, its eccentricities.

we do what we are designed to do: me, jeff, brian(he is a blog all by himself.) and the rest of the biscuit fill a niche.

it's weird little place.

a church without a steeple.

with dewberry regaling the flock.