The Malleable Morning Bruises
Installment One
by Philip Graham
Delia, dreaming, is somehow able to look down at herself sprawled across the bed, hair tendrilled about her head like dark rivers. A bed? The pillows and crumpled sheets have vanished, and the mattress seems to give way beneath her body, then like a trampoline it rises up and throws her in the air.
She has been rising and falling in the undiscovered air of herself all night, yet as the early morning light brushes her eyelids, a part of Delia knows she has two, maybe three flights left before she wakes. But she must wake up, she must.
Still rising in the air, she lifts above the crest of a dune, to the sight of a long stretch of nearly deserted beach. Someone in the distance runs to the water’s edge, then runs from the curling rush of waves. A man, a woman? Delia can’t tell, because the figure is a shadow, deeply dark and yet glinting in the sun.
Down Delia falls, beneath the dune’s crest and back to the bed that gives in to its secret trampoline self, receiving her body and hugging it briefly before flinging her again in the air. This second arc of her body brings her to a peephole in a wooden fence, and Delia squints one eye to see clearly. And what does she see? Herself in midair above a grassy field, a field encompassed by this fence, the fence pockmarked with peepholes, each peephole filled with a single staring eye.
Delia watches herself rise above the field, embarrassed how her faded white nightgown clings loosely to her body, embarrassed by all those open eyes that follow her slow path in the air. Who do those other eyes belong to, she wonders, as her hands search for a hold on the rough fence and fail, and down she falls again, straight to the bed, and will it stay a bed this time or will she be given one last bounce?
The mattress stretches beneath her weight and tosses her high again, and she knows this is the last time, can already feel the invisible fingers of invisible hands joining to push her down, but first she slips into a narrow side street, hovering before an open doorway without knowing why, until a voice from inside whispers “You do not belong here,” and then Delia falls again, or perhaps that voice said “You do belong here,” she’s not sure, and there is the bed, its pillow and sheets awaiting her.
She must wake up, she must. And she will. Meanwhile, the many places she visited tonight start to vanish, all but the last three, and their tiny, coiled presences already begin a slow unwinding.
˜
The sun remains a secret behind thick clouds, and each puddle left behind by the morning rain reflects Kwame’s face as he continues along a street of this city that still overwhelms him. With one small coin in his fist, he heads for the market to pay for tomatoes his grandmother will add to today’s meal.Already he can taste the chunk of seasoned yam that will be his.
But how can he hurry when those puddles return his face to him, allowing him to see what others can see, especially his eyes, so large he is sometimes teased. Kwame tries to squint them small, and then grins at his foolishness.
He walks past a parked car where two whites argue behind closed windows, the woman’s face strained with anger, the man spitting sharp words. He has never been this close to white people before—how stark their faces look, so empty of color! Kwame steps behind a palm tree and stares, though he knows that his grandmother is waiting. Then the car door opens, the woman steps out and hurries off, the man quickly following her. They are both silent now.
The woman dropped something as she escaped the car, the crumpled wrapping of a chocolate bar. But the wind doesn’t lift it across the street. There’s something in it, something to eat. Kwame waits, waits until the couple can’t be seen before he runs to this treasure and grabs it. Squatting, his feet flat on the ground, he picks away the wrapper to see a half-eaten chocolate bar inside. He has never tasted one.
If he can be patient he will make it last three bites.
His eyes blink, startled at the first taste, a kind of delicious darkness wrapping around his mouth the way the darkness would surround him back in the village on a moonless night. He remembers resting beside his mother while she suckled his latest younger brother, while she murmured a song of the moon, the mother of the sky, all the tiny bright sparkles of the stars her children. Kwame closes his eyes, takes this taste and holds it, hides it inside him.
But his grandmother is waiting for a handful of tomatoes to flavor the sauce, so he takes a second bite. The taste, already familiar, transports him to the corner of a small shop where he sits and watches his uncle repair a bicycle, a skill Kwame is training to learn. His uncle spins the front wheel to ensure all is well, and the glint of its blurred spokes, the promise of its speed, is the taste of this chocolate.
The last piece has softened between his fingers, and Kwame settles it on his tongue to continue melting while he regards the empty wrapper. It’s covered with those markings he sees everywhere, on street signs, on posters at futbol rallies, even on the coin in his fist (his grandmother is still waiting), marks that he doesn’t understand and that never really concerned him. They are dark, like him, and they are also the third taste of this chocolate. If only he knew how to speak these markings, how wonderful it would be to turn something that can be seen into something that can be heard.
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I won’t try to be too “structural” or Levi-Straussian here…but in a quick read one gets the sense of being transported into the Proppian world of threes, the essential patterning of fairy or folk tales worldwide. There is in this a sense of a rite de passage for a girl Delia and boy Kwame, and the dreaming and its challenges enliven the liminal betwixt and between of growth toward newly learned stages of adulthood ahead: all reflecting a tension that requires responsibility to adult needs, like the food necessary for life or the language marks (the letters) that loom so central to the “laws” of this future thing called adulthood. These tales and rituals of dreaming and passage are possibly echoic of the author’s African fieldwork and his appreciation of the playful and fearful nature of male and female children’s growth through dreaming into and toward the uncertainties of adulthood.