The Fat Man's Corpse

     No one knows how the fat man got into town, nor the date, nor the reason. All anyone can say is that there was a time when the bench at the end of the church steps was unoccupied and you were free to walk to Mass without being hassled out of your donation plate change.

     He was a narrow-eyed and dark-skinned mammoth of man who always looked drunk, though no one ever saw him in a bar. Sometimes he’d show up in different parts of town, squatting shirtless on the floor of the indoor market or outside the clothing shops on the main strip, with scraps of chicken and grease dripping down his breasts. No one ever saw him leave or arrive, though a few said they had sighted him in different parts of town with only a few minutes between the sightings, and  wondered how he was able to move from place to place so quickly with all that baggage and bulk.

    Truthfully, on most days no one really paid attention to him, and he wouldn't even be worth the story if he hadn't been found dead and bloated to the size of an ocean liner floating down the river, and stunk the place up.

Ana Clara on Her Wedding Day

       Ana Clara’s wedding gown bloomed like cabbages at the shoulders and smelled of unhung laundry. Despite dry-cleaning and altering, pressing and pinning, the dress was hopelessly dated. A yellow tinge and sour must from years in storage had set in the fabric and the smell wafted when she moved. 

       She looked at her reflection and thought to cry before remembering how much time Dona Maria had spent on her makeup. She laughed a little instead. Anyone who saw her would. 

      Beige lace rose to her neck and covered her arms, and the middle of her stomach bulged like a bread loaf in the satin folds where fourteen years before the fresh cut fabric had been tailored to the measurements of her perfectly shaped bottleneck waste.   

      Today she would marry Renoldo Artul, again, the second happiest day of her life, (what woman wouldn’t kill to relive her wedding day?), yet all she could think about were their misfortunes. First there were their financial problems, made painfully evident by her gown. Then of course there was the classic tragedy of falling in love with a farm worker, and the farm worker’s soon-to-be-realized misfortune of vowing to cherish and honor a laundry heap in front of the better half of the town.

      A green and yellow parrot landed on the branch of a dead tree outside of Ana Clara’s window. The last thing she needed on her wedding day was a bird in the dressing room. Wouldn’t that be the icing on the already sad excuse for a cake, which she had gotten at a discount price from the crippled baker, a cousin of her brother-in-law? And wouldn’t a dead bird add a touch a color to her veil fastener?

     Ana Clara was so busy counting all of her misfortunes that she nearly forgot what had brought her to them in the first place: the divorce. It was the bird’s fault for reminding her. She took it for a bad omen and tried to shoo it away, but the bird was accustomed to the treatment and ignored her.  

Running

      I jog around the bus station to the side of town that begins upwards. The path is cobblestone with chunks missing and I feel like an idiot each time my knees buckle. The chickens scatter and the white cat with the black mustache skips into the hair salon where there's no door, just a chair, some scissors, and an oval mirror covered in rust from the tin roof. The girl in the chair turns her head to see who's coming and the hairdresser snips a piece of earlobe. I hear her scream as I approach the curve and head downward. I pass an old woman sitting on a slab of cement under a laundry line where a pair of men's long-johns are flapping against her forehead, unnoticed. Today the woman is alone, but sometimes a young girl sits with her and listens, nodding her head - "Of course, of course," -  though the old woman says nothing. 

People from the Hills

    Hippies. They came down from the hills to sell their handmade good on the Avinida Paulista, on the steps of the Big Church. You’d see them at the bus station, arriving from The Cities – Sao Paulo or Rio, even Buenos Aries! - just to make the ten kilometer trek up to the commune in the waterfalls. Grasy heard they danced naked there. She heard they bathed each other in river water and dried themselves with a fire, crawling around it on all fours and shouting fowl words at the heavens until there wasn’t a drop on them. At least that’s what her mother said. Witches. Devil people and perverts.

     Two hippies had their hoods pulls over their faces and were hiding from the rain in front of the grocery store, poking sandwiches through the mouth holes they’d left for breathing. Grasy braced herself to hurry past them. The temptation to purchase something was too great. She already had a few bracelets hidden in an empty cream tin, but she wasn’t ever allowed to wear them. 

The Town Drunk

[February 2012, Espera Feliz, Minas Gerais]

    The town drunk fell down at my feet and I walked around him. First, he fumbled. Then, he grabbed onto the wall of my work building and his knees trembled underneath him. WAM! His knees gave way and there he was, laying at the edge of my boots with his legs twisted into a zigzag and his red face kissing the floor like a cold cement sandwich. I just walked around him. 

    I went upstairs and informed my boss that there was a man laying on the cement, maybe because of a heart attack, maybe a drug problem, but either way he had fallen pretty hard and I wasn't sure if helping him up was the right thing to do. 

    "That's my neighbor," she said without looking over the balcony to confirm. "He falls in that same spot every day."

    "Is there something wrong with his legs?"

     "Yes. They drink too much."

     "Oh, ok. Yeah, I didn't help him because I, you know, was pretty sure he was just drunk or something. His legs kind of fell out from underneath him though so I wasn't sure."

     "Yeah, his legs don't work when they're sober either. He's handicapped, actually. But he makes it home just fine."

     "Well, should I go check on him?"

     "No, he's probably gone by now. He drinks at Banana Bar around noon and then makes his way back home a few hours after that." She looked over the balcony and confirmed that he'd left. "He's just the Town Drunk."

     Espera Feliz has one town specialist for every occupation and title needed for the functioning of a small town, and every one of them are somehow affiliated with our English school. The Town Judge takes our 9am VIP class. My boss's brother-in-law is the town Dentist, her husband is the Town Pharmacist, and her parents own the big grocery store. 

     A few days ago the Town Priest skipped class to preside over the funeral of my boss's cousin, who died in a motorcyles accident. 

     "He was only 23," she said."Your age."

     My roommate and I are the Town English Teachers, known collectively as "The Americans." We're both 23 and fixated on the task of carefully planning the next few crucial steps in our lives. Dying is not on our list. The closest we plan on getting to death is at the age of 30, when we'll inevitably sell our souls for high paying jobs, or love, or both. 

     Last month an old woman died and her body was put on display in an open garage for three days. A skinny coffin held her thin grey frame and a mesh cloth was draped over her sunken face. Around the coffin there were a couple lit candles but not much else; just some scattered chairs with scatterfaced people sitting in them, staring at the body with their hands in their laps like it might come back to life.  

     I had to look at that body on my way to and from work for three days, maybe four times a day. On the third day I gave a lesson about New Orleans. I was trying to make my students understand the concept of a Jazz Funeral and why I thought it was hip. 

    "At first the music is slow and sad," I said, "and the women cry and wave their hankercheifs in the air, but then the music gets faster, and then they raise the casket in the air and dance with it. They do it to celebrate the person's life. They send them on their way to Heaven with a parade. Isn't that groovy?"

     Just as I was explaining this a car drove by the window and announced something from a speaker that was tied to the top of the car with a string through the window, like a Christmas tree. Sometimes the cars advertise what kind of fruits are fresh that day, or announce a sale that's going on at any one of the three furniture shops on the main street. On weekends they might even promote a party or music concert in a nearby town.

    But this particular moto-vert was announcing the death of the old woman and letting the town know that she wouldn't be on display for much longer. "Stop on over to the tiled garage next to the Boca do Povo Bar! Come see her while she's still fresh! Only a few more hours left before we put her in the ground!"

    I almost told my students how absurdly morbid I thought it was to drive around town screaming DEATH from the roof a Volkswagen, but then I remembered the lesson I was trying to give and stopped myself before I said it.

A Sudden Loss For Words

         The fisherman awoke in the night and remembered something he forgot to tell his wife. He looked at her  asleep next to him, curled at the edge of the bed with her hand around her stomach and breathing heavily into the sheets. When he shook her awake the old boat shook too, and Shannon looked around as if she had forgotten were she had fallen asleep.

       "What is it?" she asked. 

         Buuuh, he moaned.

        "Huh?" She sat up and turned on the lamp above their bed.

        Buuuuuuuuuh, he repeated.

        He couldn't seem to form the words with his mouth. How had he done it before? To speak: think of a thing, find the right words, say it. Usually he skipped the first and seconds parts and jumped straight to the third.

       "Your voice must be gone," she said. "I'll make you some tea."

         He admired the way his wife's body had filled in. Her arms were thicker, her breasts grown like ripe mangoes, and her oval face rounded.

         While Shannon waited for the water to boil she remembered the dream she was having before her husband had woken her. The boy with light brown skin and green beetle eyes was singing to the baby in her stomach, and in the dream she felt it kick, and that meant that it belonged to him. It had felt so real, but now, as the boat swayed back and forth and the plates rattled in the cupboard above her, she wondered if the jolt she felt in her stomach was just the waves  lapping against the boat. The boy with the light brown skin and green beetle eyes was her piano teacher. Over the weeks the idea of the boy being the baby's father had stuck to her womb and grew fat on lust. 

       "Here," she said, handing her husband the tea. "This will help."

        He took a sip, threw his head up to the sky and gurgled.

        Foo sloop arg foo dag! he declared. 

       “Wow, it’s really gone,” she said. “Why don’t you write it down instead?”

        She gave him a pencil and a pad of paper. The pencil shook in his hands while he scribbled some lines down on the page, but he had forgotten how to turn those lines into letters, how to use them to form words and build those words into sentences. The thing he wanted to tell her was there in his head, clear as if he had remembered it in the daylight, but its meaning was useless without structure.

       Shannon looked at the page and frowned. "This is just zigzags," she said. "I don't know what this means."

       He tried to gesture it with his body. He waved his arms over his head in a swooping motion like a bird, then wiggled his fingers as if sprinkling seeds on grass.

       "Did you have a nightmare?" she asked.

       He flung the porthole open and stuck his arm through it and pointed out at the sea.

      "Is there a storm coming?"

       He shook his head and slammed the porthole shut. A forceful wave knocked the boat and tea splashed onto the table.

      The fisherman realized that his thoughts were no longer composed of words and were now only feelings and images. Had it always been like this, or was he forgetting language? Perhaps he was regressing, and next he would loose his body hair, and his ability to walk. He imagined his wife finding him in the morning naked and small, tangled and bawling in the bed sheets.

      He had bought her a piano. 

      That was the thing he needed to tell her. There was no room in their little boat for such a thing, and she would be angry with him, even if he was only thinking of her. She would be angry that he spent the money, angry that she would have to crawl over it to get into bed every night, and angry with him for making important decisions without her. He would just have to accept the consequences when the time came, and hopefully by then he would have found the words to defend himself.

      They decided to give up for the night and crawled back into bed. 

     "Goodnight," Shannon said, and turned off the light. 

      Blaaarg, the fisherman grunted. Then he cradled her face in the ores of his hands and looked deeply into her eyes, meaning love, but all she understood was sadness. 

January 2012, Paraíba

     This past month I've had to think a lot about what it was like to be a kid and the only thing I can remember is lanyards.  

      I don't do games. Never did. I'm no good at them.  I think I realized this about myself pretty early in life because when I think back to being on playgrounds, the few game-related memories are painful, and the rest involve me sitting on a benchseriously making shit out of string. I had one of those little clear craft boxes from Micheal's with the separated compartments so you could wrap the string around cardboard files and organize them by color, and I wrote String World on the top of it in sharpy, cause like, I had a store and stuff.

     I was going to keep writing more about lanyards. I was somehow going to make the fact that I made lanyards today tie in with what I really want to talk about, and have a nice, neat little bloggy blog ending. But let's skip the bullshit. 

      I saw poverty for the first time this week. I mean really fucking saw it. Not like the kid you see on the TV with the bloated stomach and the sad music and the skinny dog eating trash. I'm talking about the kind of poverty where that starving kid is a kid on your street, and the dog is a dog that you walk sometimes, and the music isn't sad, it's just music. 

      That kind of seeing. 

      I've spent a month with these kids who think that they are the absolute center of the universe. They want everything and they want it first. 

      But when I meet their parents, or I go into their houses, I think, How many years do you have left? How many years before you realize that not only are you not the center of the universe, but that the universe has nothing for you. You. Get. Nothing. 

       I was talking to a 13 year old drug addict today. Half of his face was disfigured. No one knows why, but the last time his face looked like that a cop had beaten him for robbing someone for drug money. They don't have correctional centers for minors in Brazil, so the cops just beat the shit of little kids and throw them back in the streets. 

      I've spent a lot of time with his little sister at the play center over the last few weeks. It was so weird to see her in their house, standing barefoot on the dirt floor under a roof like a lid on a toy box laid crooked, with the stray cats coming in and out because their were no doors, and to see here smiling at me. 

     And her brother was there too, laying on the dirt floor with a towel covering half of his face, and a dozen other kids trying to get a look at what was underneath it. 

     So back to lanyards. 

     I bought a bunch for the kids to make at the center today. It was a huge hit and everyone had lots of fun.