Her Voice

In the distance I can hear her soft voice singing. They are small little words on her short little red tongue.
"Tini-tini-tini-tini..."
Such a tiny little voice in a tiny little body. I can hear her singing somewhere in the distance. Maybe a few feet away, perhaps in the garden beyond the window, or maybe, even closer. With each note she shakes off a little more dirt, finding her way out of the coffin hidden in my scattered memory. The broken rusty nails have done their job, but now is another time, and the song awaits. The melody dances in the air, like a silk curtain catching a spring breeze. It comes out into the open air, wild and slightly chaotic in its form and carries me with it. I see it all.
I see El Salvador and my old small house. The house I left for the great open and cold expanse of the north. The people and buildings that are made of steel and scrubbed clean of their sweat-filled dirt. The people I left that lived in the sun, in the thick air that threatened to choke us all. We lived with the threat of fire, of revenge and anger. Even the ground birthed its demon and left it there, left it as a signal for all of us to remember. I looked out the window each morning at the volcano that shadowed us, always waiting, lurking so close, speaking only with a silent threat.
And I hear her voice. It has never faded. I hear my name and the voices of my sisters and mom slightly further away. Are they still nailed in there? Are they out there or in here? The darkness shows me nothing. I look and look. The garden is empty, the rooms are deserted. They must be in here. Buried deeper beneath a thousand memories and desires. How did they get there and how do they call to me now? They call my name in unison, like a chant. I take a deep breath and lunge forward. The corridors are dark, almost black, but the air is hot and so sticky. I drip with effort as my bare feet carry me further in.
Then everything explodes. The black turns into a million crystals and I watch them tumble towards me…all those little moments of light. It happens so fast, but I watch it stretch through lifetimes. Her voice calls to me and I watch the little beads fall. There is no end. No ground. No place to ever fall to. So I watch them move, up or down no longer matters. The categorization is as useless as the thought. They just go, and I watch the little beads of light trail away like shooting stars.
I hear her voice and see her little tongue once again. Her little body. The broken nails. The melody that drifts over me like a soft river. I look into the darkness and see an explosion once again, we tumble together, sounds, flesh, and memories, all dying together once again.

The Warm People

Oh the things that they do, the warm people, the people with lovers and pets and warm beds. They have rituals. At a certain time, food is prepared, stories are read, television is watched, baths are had. Things are cleaned and prepared for the invocation of life. There is a woman in the kitchen and she cleans it and then she cooks in it and all of the many creatures of the household are fed. Her life, her love flows out from this central place, the hearth, the kitchen where the stove burns warm and she dances from counter to counter preparing the magick that will keep them all turning and dancing. They will dance out the doors and into the world and will toil and work there. They will find reasons to smile, moments of greatness, and also moments to weep, moments when they are injured by cruel words or harsh glances or casual accidents. Then they will dance back into the home, drawn by the golden threads of the hearth, led back to the place where they will be nourished and prepared for new conquest, new triumphs, new failures. Each one has a place in the dance. The soft cat curled on a chair, the bristly dog sniffing in the yard, the woman and the man and the little people. The warm people thriving in their special place, their place where they can be all together.
Are they real? Or are they a dream? A dream of the cold people who lie alone and gray, who rise and wonder why, whose stoves are cold and whose refrigerators are empty. They eat ramen from the microwave. If there is more than one sharing the same roof, they eat their ramen separately at different times whenever their stomachs growl. They watch television, but not together, each in their own room, each tuned to a different station. If there is a man and a woman, then they sleep with their backs to one another, aching with loneliness. If there is only one or the other, they sleep very little, staying up late to chat in online forums, to play computer games, or to read penny romance novels in a bathtub scented with lilac bubbles until the precious heat is gone.
Are there any warm people? I have always supposed that there were. Watching the Cosby show on the television late at night in a giant empty house where the lights are kept off to save electricity. A house set at the foot of a dark mountain where there are children and a mother but the father is gone, where the dog and the cat sleep in a wooden house set in a lonesome field. Sometimes the mother brings the cat inside, because it is a baby, small and white, and the father is not there to enforce the rules of the house. They eat cold food off of a platter and sit on blankets spread over a hard wood floor and watch the warm people on the television set.
For a while they are the warm people. The people who laugh and hug and have what they need and are happy with what they have. Then the kitten goes back outside to huddle with the dog and the children travel down the long dark hall, running so that nothing grabs their legs from the inky darkness. They crawl into an enormous bed and the mother sings until they sleep and goes away down the long dark hall and finds her own enormous bed adrift in the black night and then she sleeps or she weeps.
I know that the cold people are real. I have lived among them. I am still one of them. I strive to be the warm on one hand and on the other, my life unfolds as it was set to unfold. In the beginning I was among the cold, and in the end I will be among the cold. The father is always missing, the kitchen is always cold. The darkness is always encroaching, and the kitten is kept out of the home.