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In a GardenI don’t know what all was said as we walked further, deeper into that overgrown and tangly place. All seemed silent, muffled by the green, deadened by the jungly plants. The silk cotton trees spread thick buttressing roots and the palms towered tall. Monkeys leapt from trunk to trunk and the turbaned man with his elephant turned off the path at some point and vanished in a swampy glade. A bench ahead was where we ended sitting. Where we sat. Slatted seat, cast iron legs. A bench like any other. I made the dog, our shepherd, lie beside me. There she watched and waited, like a dog, while first we talked and then we kissed. “What nah! The girl she fuh kiss dah man?” Yes I did and with that kiss the air shivered and broke, and there I found myself deep inside a feral garden with a man I didn’t know, and suddenly the magic had a dark bruised shadow. “That dog,” he asked. “That dog. She bite?” She cut she eye then, fuh good dis time, fuh good she cut she eye. “Oh yes,” I answered. “If I ask.” Well then we ambled back toward the gates. We walked and overhead the spider monkeys screamed and somewhere near the manatee pond we stopped so he could show me the green and slime-grown statue of seated Queen Victoria, crowned and sceptred on her marble throne, collapsed and tilting wildly into one of the many ponds surrounded all around by those massive, fleshy lilies that bear her name. I could almost see it slipping, bubbles leaving the only trace, into the very fertile mud; the last thing to go would be the pointy spikes of her headdress. Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net |
