the children learn again

Birds in an empty room, speaking to no one but members of their own flock. Chairs, curtains, windows, and heartfelt letters written for dead grandparents. All these strewn about the floor. 

The room rotates, every so often, and the items fall onto a floor that once was a wall. The birds remain in the center of the room, in perpetual motion flapping back and forth. 

The door inside is marked with bright yellow tape, and it disappears and reappears on a semi-annual basis. Sometimes the birds exit, and when they do, they’re replaced with pigeons. 

I’ve never seen a house so divided, than the one split in half. 

I’ve never seen a candle become melted wax, because it hurts my eyes to watch the flame. 

Yesterday a herd of zebra were seen migrating through the first floor of a downtown office building. It was once an oasis, thousands of years prior, and the zebra remember it better that way. 

Now cyclists are on the street teaching lorry drivers to use their horns. The drivers are remarkable students. 

In the gutters roll plastic cups with compostable drinking straws. The cups are washed into the storm drains, becoming boats for an organism yet to evolve. When the cup makes its way around the Pacific Ocean for the four millionth time, the life form is ready to sail. 

A traditional sailboat with a proper mast and stretched canvas is en route from Cuba to Miami. The captain’s sleeping quarters are stuffed full of illicit materials, pornography from the middle 20th century. The captain will be denied entry upon reaching the mainland U.S. They will sail back to Cuba with an empty cabin. 

Upon re-entry to Cuba, the captain will dock the ship and lay in the sand of the beach. They will mourn their lost items, and with it a lost opportunity to live in a foreign land with cheap thrills. 

Those already living in that land of cheap thrills gaze longingly at the screensavers on their computers, projecting a sandy beach into their retinas. They wonder if the water is warm. 

In a mansion on a hill, a woman dips her toes into bath water that makes her sigh. She lowers a full leg, and then the other. The water rises as she lowers her body, savoring the pleasant sting of descent. She breathes deeply of the warm humid air, and rests her head against a soft towel. 

A vacuum cleaner whines from the attached bedroom, and her eyes flash open. It is in this moment the fate of the housekeeper has been determined. The housekeeper will lose their job, and their children will eat unseasoned noodles for several weeks. 

After a month, the housekeeper finds another job cleaning another mansion next door to the other. They are well liked by the homeowner, who lost his wife to cancer several years back. The homeowner’s children are all grown, working importantly prestigious jobs in a city at the bottom of the hill. One child is a lawyer for an accounting firm, another rents duplex apartments to people who clean houses for a living. 

The housekeeper takes pride in her work, and cleans in a detailed manner. The homeowner appreciates this, but mostly appreciates her company. He feels lonely in such a big house, and shows his affection for the housekeeper by tipping her handsomely. He tips four times her salary. 

The housekeeper’s children begin to eat seasoned noodles, with meat and vegetables. They enjoy spending time with their mother, eating good food. 

But the homeowner begins demanding more time from the housekeeper. He begins withholding tips unless she arrives early, or stays late. She obliges. 

Her kids learn to cook their own noodles and wash their own clothes. They learn to clean the duplex, and take themselves to school. They miss their mother. 

Their mother is busy cleaning the mansion. The homeowner is busy making messes in order to justify keeping the housekeeper around. One night he spills a bottle of wine on her way out the door. He asks her to clean it up, without using any mops or towels. He makes her lick it up off the floor. 

She does not want to do this, but he insists, and promises an extraordinary tip. He’s already drank a bottle to himself, he doesn’t want to drink alone, he says. 

She drinks the wine from the floor, lapping it up like a dog. It takes fifteen minutes until the wine is gone and the floor is sticky with saliva. Her makeup is smeared. She had been crying. 

She fixes herself in the bathroom mirror, and the homeowner waits outside the door with an envelope full of cash. She takes it, avoiding eye contact, and makes for the door. He denies her exit, claiming she shouldn’t leave after drinking. He threatens to call the police and report a DUI. 

He offers her a guest bed upstairs, its been freshly laundered he says. When he goes to lead her up the stairs she runs out the door and drives away. He chases after her tail lights, but he shrinks in her rearview mirror. 

She drives home to hold her children. 

She enters the neighborhood and a police officer pulls her over, arrests her for a DUI. 

Her kids learn to unseason their noodles. 

The mother struggles to find a lesson to learn. 

When she is released a month later, she picks her kids up from their uncle’s duplex. She drives them to Miami, Florida, where she boards a sailboat for the island of Cuba. 

The seas are choppy, the wind is rough, and the kids are seasick. But the mother was landsick, and is now in love with the ocean. They arrive in Cuba, the sailboat is tied to a dock. The children play on the beach, and lay in the sand. The mother finds a job at a restaurant overlooking the ocean. She learns to shuck oysters, and de-vein crawfish. 

The children learn again to season their noodles.