Now There is No Lull
by Nathan Robison

A metro train stops with a grind deep beneath a city. As sometimes happens in such situations, the lights flicker out and the car of strangers is left in darkness. I can't tell you what any of them looks like. I am in the dark as well as you. But it is easy to imagine that many of them are uncomfortable, sitting in close proximity to others in total blackness. Perhaps a woman fears the man's creeping hands next to her. That man clutches his briefcase to his chest. Another moves his wallet to an inner jacket pocket.

The car is silent. Silent is the wrong word. The darkness is littered with small noises. A woman sniffs. A body breathes. Skirts and jackets rustle like leaves. Eyes do not adjust. I am waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. Seats make shifting noises. The blackness wrings out sounds. Still the car remains without light. Someone wonders when the train will come back to life.

And then a voice, a male voice, nervous for drowning other sounds and loud, and then firming itself as it accustoms to its own sound.

Once I was walking on a dirt path in back of my apartment building. It was late in the afternoon and through a vacant lot I scared up hundreds of little green insects. I don't know why I'm telling you this, but it's stayed with me. I can't explain it. There, in the city, surrounded by a vacant lot and all the piled-up garbage were these brilliant jade bugs, moving up into the air around me. Like confetti. It's like they were shining.

I think those were tiger beetles, another says. I've seen them do that. Did they have big pincers on their mouths?

Yes, I think so.

It's quiet again for several minutes. The strangers in the car slip again into uneasiness. The voices had made them begin toward comfortability, but the moment has passed and the darkness has enveloped them.

Suddenly a new voice begins.

I knew a place like that, a path behind my building down in Brazil, out in Minas Gerais. It lead through the mato behind this old church and the wall of the church graveyard. I noticed one day in the piles of dirt behind this wall a skull sticking out of the soil and a long bone and ribs. I kicked around a bit and found another skull and more long bones. It looked like somebody dumped all the old bones from the graveyard over the wall to make room for the new. I took one of the skulls home and kept it on a dresser in my room. When I left Brazil I buried it out back, in the little garden.

Now there is no lull. A woman's voice begins.

I grew up in a poor barrio on São Miguel, right on the edge of the sea cliffs outside Ribeira Grande. When we dug into our small gardens we found human bones and fragments of bones and teeth. Some got frightened and called in a priest. Others just threw them away or into the sea. We lived so close the walls of our little houses touched. Sometimes it was like living with ghosts, so many voices carrying through walls. The boys hunted sparrows with air guns and their sisters cooked them up in butter.

And did they hunt bats too, at night with long strings and small stones tied to the ends? asked another. Did they swing the string in long arcs above them at dusk and beat the bats when they followed the stones to the ground? I knew boys who caught bats like that on summer nights, but it was not in the Atlantic. Out here, near the city.

When I was sixteen a girl I was in love with, Fatima, and I sneaked one night over the wall of a pool in our neighborhood. I convinced her to swim naked with me. She turned around and I leapt into the water. She made me turn my head and I listened to her remove her swimming suit and slide into the water. The only light a chlorinated blue from two dim lamps under the surface of the pool at each side. We swam in wide circles around each other, becoming bolder and closer, laughing in tight whispers. The fear of being caught trespassing and naked with this girl Fatima... I learned that bats sometimes drink from swimming pools. I put my hand on the small of her back and we noticed the small brown things skimming over the water from end to end. Fatima screamed and pulled herself from the pool. I saw everything. Water ran across her naked back. I watched Fatima run along the wet concrete and gather her clothing. Her footprints trailed into the dark. I stayed in the pool with the bats, naked and floating on.

The near-silence again has its say, breathing and rustling in the close darkness. However, the passengers leave their unease and turn inward, toward water and bones and bodies they have known. There is a secret place in each stranger, a hoard of memory each has kept hidden and now releases, and now pools here in the blackness with strangers.

I want to tell something too, begins a man. Don't worry this is not a confession. I stood at a street corner, waiting on traffic. The woman in a car near me began to apply makeup. She looked into the rearview mirror, and I looked at her. She had a small pencil and she drew a line along the edge of her eye. It felt too intimate to share with a stranger, but I watched her look at herself in the mirror. I was a part of a moment that no one else shared. Not her lover or husband or mother or father. We were joined for a moment.

For me it was a kiss from a little boy in Spain.

I had a vision of Our Lady of Guadalupe at a bus stop in El Paso, Texas.

I awoke in the middle of a summer storm afraid for my little baby girl.

This old woman passed me in an art gallery, pacing and muttering.

The boy was selling melons with his mother at the side of a dusty road.

My cousin was late picking me up for work early one morning. It began to rain and he didn't show. I began to walk along the road toward a bus stop I knew.

Standing at one end of the cradle I saw a white angel, her dove-feathered wings held out over my child, protecting her. She looked like an old woman.

The old woman was saying over and over, I've come to the heart, I've come to the heart, I've come to the heart walking between the art and people.

I bought one of the melons and the boy's mother cut into it with an old brown knife. I watched the woman's black hair, looked into the fruit as she cut and the boy wrapped his arms around my shoulders, put his mouth to the nape of my neck.

The angel moved through the wall and into the storm.

I came into the light of the bus stop, in from the rain to find Our Lady waiting beneath the glass shelter, inches above the floor, crowned in glory and sparrows held her train.

I've come to the heart, I've come to the heart, I've come to the heart.

The train floods with yellow light. The concrete gray of the tunnel streams across each window. I can see them all now, can see every face. I locate some who spoke, guessing by the direction of the voices in the dark. I will not describe them for you. I sit in the aftermath and watch the strangers go, endless legs on endless steps.

© 2007 prickofthespindle.com

Nathan Robison is a creative writing MFA student at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. He enjoys writing and running, and is obsessed with old maps, especially those depicting nonexistent places. He was born on the island of Hy-brazil and currently divides his time between Roanoke and his palatial estate on Isola de los Demonios.