Bengal light (a short short story)

Bengal Light
By Arlyn Montas

How does a fully-forced 1971 Plymouth Barracuda end up encrusted on the ridges of the Charlotte pond? If I had to put my finger on it I would say that that it starts with the placing of your hand on the palm of a boy that swears to you that the green water in that abandoned neighbor’s pool is not that cold despite the early January temperatures. You have never stripped down to your floral underwear before but you do it because you are the only one in the crowd with no tattoos and didn’t know what BYOB stood for. The water felt like a razor but you stay in because when you jumped in his grip on your waist was stronger than the panty’s band and your legs around his felt nice.

Faster than trading your fruit of the looms for the lacy, polka dot, low cut skinny like a trail kind you practically made a tent out of his chest every night because “it felt right”. You began cutting the neck of your t-shirts because of that one time he said that you reminded him of that girl in the Star Trek re-make and went and cut all your shirts that way. You know you also cut it like that to show his friends the new rose with thorns tattoo on your right shoulder. Like a sudden deviation of time zones his texts reply to yours every other hour, then an hour later from the last one until he doesn’t even answer altogether. Your virgin brown hair from your mother’s side was your pride and now you asphyxiate it in a charcoal black pharmacy dye. It is embarrassing (I know) to show up in people’s houses at 3:30 am but it was valentines and if you wouldn’t had found the courage in the bottom on the can you wouldn’t had seen her. Her and all of her lankiness melted vanilla taffy between his skinny jeans as you dropped one by one the pages of the letter you wrote for him.

You don't remember the name of the movie where the main girl gets cheated on so she breaks all the china in her house,however that kind of therapy didn't help you anyways. The pieces on the floor winked back at you with the glare of a thousand fish eyes so it is only natural to take a quick stab at yourself. Blood was warm,warm like his stomach under the pool water. The wide awake nightmares where jittery on the ceiling like a silent film so you instigated the blue part of the diminutive thirty-cent lighter flame with no pleasures.

You waited on the roof of your two door Honda civic until everyone left the same gas station where you bought the lighter from to keep the vice (the only thing he left you) & steal five or six gallons of gas.
The wind of your own car’s leather burning inches from your cheeks was not enough, and the crackling of the windows didn't even evoke a shiver. “Civics are for punks” he used to tease you so as soon as the sun showed all of itself you cheated your insurance agent with tentacles of tears because “that was my very first car”.

No questions asked when handing you the money because of your spheric marble eyes filled with helium. The same reason why the corn-fed used car dealer thought It was amusing that you where interested in his remodeled 1971 Plymouth Barracuda. “Where the fuck are the keys” and his chuckles came to a sudden halt. You gave him your back knowing that that country motherfucker won't say a word when he sees the ass cheeks that peaked out from the shredded shorts that you cut yourself.

You where scared to turn on the engine but when the roar rose climbing on each other's rumble you felt something, at least under the seats. You called her a she and named her Eleonor.
When you bypassed the roads recklessly zig zagging between the brown and yellow trees you got high off the stares that you got off of Eleonor and it felt nice but that night there was no one in the road.

The feeling of feeling was again escaping so you pressed the gas with all the weight of your six and a half size feet. With one palm dividing the wind out one window and the other scratching the foam on the roof the rare view pine cone flew fully horizontally . You forced your eyelids closed with your heart at unison with the engine and a Bengal light exploded in front of you. The silent buzzing almost felt like being alive again and that is exactly how a 1971 Plymouth Barracuda ends up in the Charlotte pond.

Mimosa Pudica

Mimosa Pudica :"Sensitive Plant" folds up its leaves when touched or exposed to a flame.

Flickering city lights that alternate,
like fireflies,
drop one by one as xylophone tunes
all for my sight.
And I,
still cannot see.

A midnight buzzing,
croaking orchestra that only this world knows how to direct.
Sounds
that swing hammocks and make beds
and still I
can't make amends
with my sleep.

Did you know that pain is shaped like roots
that unwind and hold you closer to the ground?
Firm
to find your core
and then sink its teeth
into that sweet
ripe,
Georgia fallen peach.
Now I,
I cannot taste I cannot feel I cannot see
because of all the swings
in the back of a boy.

A boy yellow and fast like urban cabs
but pretty,
pretty like a Sunday dress
like a size three on her mother's pumps.
Pretty like the first time wearing pearls.
He is not the tart yellow,
but the cream
that makes you lick the tip
of all your fingers
kind of yellow.

The boy with the speech of grits
pants with the fit,
eyes kaleidoscope
all the green Neptune can hold.
My friend and fiend
with a watch gold
that doesn't find the time to see
that this mimosa
just pretends to be an ivy.

Joke

You profess in a fiddle's note to have something I can long for.
Sit and let me tell you the true story of vigils,
stories about re-filling oil lamps and coughing out worms and myths.
We howl to the thunder in our stomach walls.
My coca-cola crystal bottle body blows up for my people's Exodus,
to follow, not for your cardboard cut-out of a touch.


I was not born from that romantic comedy of the time Jackie met Phill,
I was born from the pain of folding motel beds,
from the pulse of a slap to the head of a streched-skinned drum.
Came out head first, nose out steady to fire,
aiming high like an arrow ready to land and jolt the world as we know.
Chew into me with a sack of sugar in hand.
.
Child, you still eat cupckakes made out of your mother's breast milk.
You don't want me, you want sprinkles with that.
So before you “hit that” remember that beds are risen hot air balloons
white, to drop barrels of butterflies into the world.
They are not your fields, your altars of sacrifice, not your thrones
when you are done trumpents are mute, carpets ufolled.


Shame, If God gave you shoulders in the shape of anchors was to save.
Instead you brag of a yougurt kind of satisfaction.
You can sure kill like a butcher but wipe the blood on a pstel print apron.
I make nightmares vivid, and you need a girl.
If you let me Iwill teach your mother how to make men worthy of a suit.
Real women can only sprout out of folk.

Lunatic

Fire spirals instigated by powder fed off of each other's sparks.
Wake up blue hue in white to light the room she unwillingly shared.
Violent sparks like carousel mirrors called her through the blind's teeth.
With her hands she shuffled backwards the walls as grey as wedding cakes.
Her hair swam the halls downstairs in a vivacious concerto continuous.

I saw then, they were not few, but instead legions;
Some in cocktail dresses, some with hair still in springs, some in suits,
marching in unison to the claps of orange bottles filled with Technicolor.
With labels on their wrists that know them best as dates and numbers
they gathered like sour-green crickets to implore aimlessly.

I never noticed the defeated characters in her robe because under that tent She Was.
She was the elastic girl, the mermaid, the lovely assistant, the mouth that huffed aplenty
to decay as glaze on the corners. Eyes true as beetles but still the cannons,
the pair of metallic balloons that plotted all afternoon to leave my wrist.
Now they wander way up high elsewhere.

I want nothing of her, but you night;
You are kind, stitching shadows into gowns, grant her time alongside owls.
Keep the freckles of your sky wide for her to count when she can't fall asleep.
I am surely not strong enough to heal the sore wounds that open like attics.
Scars don't open unto daylight.
Lunatic.

Dominican children

Dominican children from the country cease to sleep,
they turn back home when they leave their crucifix
they go around the damned fountain on the park
with mangoes on their heads, they will not stop.
They recite the anthem and each prayer seven times,
add logs for the fire and turn the rice around five.
Collecting bottles for the equivalent of cents
to pay lenders back for an arm’s worth of bread.
They take off their clothes to bathe in the creek
and lay them on the rocks to dry as they shiver.
They run from the mother’s cold belt on the ribs,
they forgot to separate the worms out of the peas.
They run to find Miss Morena to cure their colds.
She recommends holy water and picks some herbs.
They bend to pick some seeds, pick out the weeds,
pick up the books that just fell from a paper bag.
Mosquito tents rise fastened tight on each corner
around the house to blow the candles out in order.
Kiss mother, your aunt, five sisters and six brothers.
Kiss grandma and a portrait of your diseased father.

All the holy people: Folk

Faith is making the longest line in Mexico City
to witness you, my Madonna on a slice of toast.
The one Immaculate Conception that we swore
to believe in since your apparition on the well.

Faith is the war chant that gallops down the fields
trotting on a stallion that stomps on the cactus.
It is evading the unfolding of the night sky’s quilt
and burning candles until all the saints perspire.

Faith is the power of the cat black as charcoal
and the first communion dress as white as a bone.
It is a coin that winks back at us from mid air
and petals cascading into a tub of boiling water.

Faith is the way you forgot how I look but never
to put a straight jacket on your umbrella indoors.
It is a drunken white ball on a Russian roulette.
It is my bible and your kiss sealing a lottery ticket.

lady in waiting

When I asked you, if you wanted me to wait for you
I would have waited until every raindrop, every ray, every leaf, every snow
would have crowned my head.
I would have opened my palms to non-existing birds with letters and envelopes.
I would have sat in my doorstep pulling out cherry stems after there where none left.
If my friends where to come in their bicycles to ask my parents If I could come out to play and I would have told them "I have homework to do".
Strangers would have murmured about a girl with the fill-in-the blank stare west.
If I where to leave the stove on, still I would have stood there with the ashes of my own house between my toes.
Kids would have rounded up to pick on the old lady in the doorstep.

But you said no, not necessary.