SHE

for Marianne Beth Walter
(an excerpt from the forthcoming novel, IN THE SHADOW OF THE ALHAMBRA.)



He was one day shy of his seventh birthday when he had the vision that made him understand that the world was a lot bigger, scarier and stranger than his dawning mind or its half-formed, childish beliefs might ever grasp.
It was dusk. A smoldering carmine LA sun was setting behind a metallic haze over the city park’s baseball field at the end of the street. He and his nine-year old sister had been rolling again and again through the thick spurge grass down into the ivy in front of his family’s house. Running, rolling and tumbling across a sloping overgrown weed lawn into unkempt tangles of vines—the men who spoke a singing language hadn’t come to cut the ivy hedges in weeks-- then getting up again when they’d almost reached the gutter to scurry back to the top to start again. Both of them lost in whirling crunching contact with the grass’ wet mushiness, then the ivy’s crisp inertial tug of fronds.
Finally he couldn’t get up anymore. He was lying on his back almost hidden in the pungent ivy bed, too dizzy to make sounds beyond desperate breathing, his head still spinning after at least a dozen of his manic sibling’s singsong Jack and Jills go up the hill....time had slowed down, as it often seemed to do during the Angelus bell at school when all the pupils, big kids as well as small ones, were forced to stand as still as statues. He found himself much like a statue now, petrified by a loss of control over his body and his mind at the same time. Something went off like a bang at the top of his skull, leaving him seeing spots coming in waves instead of the waxy green fronds covering him. Abruptly, he could not even will himself to take in the slightest gulp of air.
Now he lay as helpless and motionless as an inanimate action figure whose owner had stopped playing with it and left the yard. He heard his sister by his side, giggling and breathing hard. There was a clapping noise between his ears. His jaw began to vibrate, and things started to happen.
He was looking up at a darkening blood streaked sky. Suddenly, he felt himself float up out of himself and up into the encroaching night. How strange! If fear had not already seized him, wonder might have won him over. For now he was looking down at himself from the outside, as if watching a film. He saw a small blonde boy in a grass-stained white T-shirt and ragged brown corduroy shorts staring upward with surprised wide open eyes.
Then the looking at himself changed. His face and bare arms and legs began to catch fire and glow bright orange and red. The part of him doing the looking floated further away from his own terrified face now covered in flames. He was hovering about ten feet above his own fiery body. He saw that his sister was gone; she had disappeared from the lawn, her mocking laugh no longer echoed anywhere. He was alone, buried in the entangling acrid morass of ivy vines, burning up!
Although he could not feel the heat of his flesh searing and unraveling, he could sense the agony he might have felt if he were not haplessly separated from himself at this instant. He knew he needed to—had to!-- get back down to his body, but didn’t know how. He flashed on his favorite story character: Curious George the monkey, who had hung from balloon strings above the city, unable to figure a way back down to solid earth. He felt like the grinning little ape now but in even worse shape since he couldn't grin and he wasn't just detached from the world but also from his head, his torso, his arms, his legs: every part of himself. He wasn't like the naughty monkey, after all. No, he was more like a ghost, floating above his own corpse.
Then She arrived. At first it seemed She was coming straight up from the ivy underneath him. Then he saw that Her fantastic presence was igniting into form out of his own blazing body. She was arrowing right out of him, a brightness rising up and taking shape into a gigantic dark-haired Goddess with a fierce crazy-looking exotic face and a bosom bigger than his Mom's and—strangest of all for his child mind to take in, despite its familiarity with monsters and dragons--long snakes extended out of Her belly, their mouths opening and clothing in dreadful resonance. Her legs wide open , and She was fully exposed in all Her womanhood, utterly naked in her ascent toward his dangling helpless view . He saw many things happening as She rose out of his body and lifted Her hands up toward him above the snakes' writhing copper heads glowing with swiveling yellow eyes. He tried to move away in full recoil, but after all he was only an empty place holder in space and She was materializing from pure light directly out of him, at him! He started to desperately recite the Hail Mary prayer in his speechless throat—“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord be with You….”—but there were so many fearsome snakes,and he was frightened half to death, and he could not hear their parlous hissing or the rippling noises of their coiling as they closed in on him.
She was speaking in a language he didn’t understand in a voice below him, perhaps into his body’s superheated ears. She kept rising slowly right toward him for the longest time--he was nothing but an abstract point of view at this stage. The pythons that grew out of Her midriff were swirling toward him frenziedly; Her own snake-like tongue wagging with urgent fervor while Her enormous cone-tipped mammaries jiggled and swung. At last, when Her incandescence was upon him, he suddenly collapsed into his boy’s body again. He wasn’t on fire anymore—his clothing wasn’t even smoking-- but his arms and legs and face felt scalded and raw.
Now he saw through his own straining, teary eyes Her ascent into the sky. He watched Her as if She were a spacecraft lifting off; Her undulating appendages emanated a greenish, purplish aura in their wake. He did not take his eyes off Her until She became the first and only star to twinkle in the bright smoggy firmament.
He lay there for a while, shivering, until he began to breathe again.
It was years later that he realized that this had been the moment when he'd lost all reverence for the holy statues in the church. In turn, he'd truly discovered the sense of awe that he would try to recapture for the rest of his life.
For She had been awesome. Yes, worthy of the awe reserved only for a god, or goddess.
There must have been a reason She had visited him. He knew this. It had to be--visions like his don't happen without a reason
She had reserved a mission for him. The mission still existed; it was as if time had not elapsed at all. As if he was still waiting for dthe Angelus bell to ring.
A divine mission, waiting for him to accomplish.
Only for him.
He alone.