Cuento de Mi Id

“Overheard at the Door of a Cottage on the Shore of a Dark Scottish Lake”

For the last time, Beastie, Tokyo is thataway. I don't care what your GPS told you.

Cuento de Mi Id

“Caged”

As he looked out between the gray metal bars of his current residence and stared at the lady he adored, he could not help noting how much more attention she seemed to pay to the apple on her desk than she did to him.

Apparently, what the bards of old had said was true. Sometimes it was not so easy to be the teacher's pet.

Cuento de Mi Id

“The Surprise Party”

It was a scenario that Ashley had seen in a thousand sitcoms; the hurried single woman rushes home to take a quick bath, undresses in her darkened foyer and then enters her living room just in time to be greeted by a surprise party.

And yet they never say what happens next.

Does the poor woman run back into the darkened foyer in order to hastily redress and then rejoin her guests?

Does she eventually lower the hands she raised to unsuccessfully safeguard her modesty and then pretend to be a good sport about the whole thing?

Does she choose to play the role of the modest maiden and faint, hoping against hope that her guests will be gone when she awakens?

Or does the sitcom woman do what Ashley now does -- reach behind her upper back and start tugging on the small, flesh-colored zipper which is hidden there?

Aye, there's the ticket. After all, Ashley had already revealed enough of herself to the crowd before her. Why not go ahead and reveal the whole thing?

She smiles as the zipper descends and her real self emerges from her skin-tight birthday suit. Already the smiles are fading and the laughter is becoming more and more nervous.

“What's the matter?” she wants to ask them. “Haven't you ever seen a naked woman before?”

Then the last of her covering drops onto the floor and Ashley steps out of it in all her true glory.

“Surprise,” she starts to say, but her words, alas, are drowned out by screams.

Cuento de Mi Id

“Love in Bain”

The hot bath water pressed down upon Diana's less-than-flat stomach like an insistent hand. It surrounded her limbs and pubes -- even her torso -- and would have covered her neck and head if she had allowed it.

But she did not allow it. She had kept it at bay -- just as she had kept her ex-husband Dennis at bay. The water flowed into orifices of Diana's body that only Dennis had known. Flowed there because Diana allowed it to flow there. She and the water became one in a way that she and Dennis had never become. Yet she still remained Diana.

That was important to her. Dennis had never wanted her to be Diana. He had wanted her to be “Diane” -- that giggly little creature she had been in the early days of their marriage. The one who shied away from confrontation. Who depended upon Dennis to kill the mouse. Who preformed oral sex when Dennis wanted to have oral sex without ever getting so much as a back rub in return. That Diane was gone. Drowned within her flesh. Instead there was now Diana. Cool. Calm. Assertive.

Taking a hot bath in the middle of the afternoon because she wanted to take a hot bath. Not another hot shower like the ones she took before she went to work. Those were over all too quickly, and no matter how long she spent taking them, she always felt a chill when she got out. As if the water had flowed over her, not into her.

Baths were different. You could take a hot bath in the dead of winter, and if you stayed in long enough, you could get out without shivering. You just didn't soak in the water. You became the water. Your body's temperature and the bath water's temperature became one. You didn't lie there, naked, waiting for someone to hold you, waiting for an embrace that never came....

Enough fretting about the past. Almost time to get out of the tub.

Diana still had weekend errands to run today. Shops to visit. Groceries to buy. Weeds to uproot. Dry cleaning to pick up.

She glanced at her scattered clothing and imagined going to the mall to buy a whole new wardrobe. Perhaps that blue dress she had seen at Joske's. Or the red dress in the front window at Dillard's. Or perhaps she could just go there as she was now -- without a stitch on. Just walk through the mall naked and watch the customers squirm in embarrassment and avert their eyes. Converting to nudism would no doubt help her save a fortune on her clothing costs. However, her heating bills would probably go through the roof come wintertime.

And in any event, why stay here?

If one were going to be naked, why not migrate to a warmer climate?.

She imagined herself naked on a beach at Cancun. Mariachis were playing in the distance, and dark-skinned men were dragging reluctant señoritas up a nearby pyramid.

Strange. She never realized that there were pyramids in this location...

Perhaps Egypt.

Egypt where the sand invaded every orifice and the smart women learned to shave down there for sanitary reasons. A whip was cracking over a relucant work crew in the distance. A naked servant was massaging her weary back. She looked into a brass mirror -- and saw all the worries of the world reflected in her eyes...

Diana was old. And growing old. But she had not really lived yet. She had not even seen the Library of Alexandria. But no, the Christians had burned that down just last year. No, the Muslims did. Never mind. The two cults always blamed each other as cults always do. And crawling across the floor was a scarab. She looked at the scarab and remembered...

Lying outside a villa near Pompeii.

Mount Vesuvius was smoking in the distance, and one of the maids was talking about a possible eruption. Impossible, Diane said. The volcano has been quiet for years.

Besides, she added, gesturing towards her lares and penates, do you think that these would ever let any harm come to me?

Meanwhile, the outside sky began to fill with ash...

Diana was modeling for the great sculptor Praxiteles, and the studio was cold. There was a draft upon her body she did not care to think about, and she hoped that the old man's fee was worth it. To be immortalized in art, he had said. And yet her stomach rumbled.

Forget art, Diana thought. One life is enough for me. Just let me be prosperous in this one. And not end up like the aged ones who started out in the temples of Aphrodite and ended up becoming priestesses of Artemis...

The revolution was coming.

Diana's lover was upon her. He still had her cunt in his mouth when the mob burst through the bedroom door. They dragged them both out by their hair and made her kiss the severed head of her dead maid-servant. Then, of course, they threw her onto the wagon...

They wanted answers, of course. But Diana did not have anything to tell them.

That did not matter to the Inquisition. One of her neighbors had known something and now they wanted confirmation. They tested her with a pin, searching for a spot on her body where there was no pain, and instead they found that her body had an infinite number of spots that were sensitive to the touch of a pin. They stripped her naked so that their search would be more thorough and then they cursed her for her nakedness.

Then they showed Diana the tub.

They showed her the tub.

The tub. Where she lay awaiting a summons from the Grand Sultan. A black eunuch scrubbed her back and a white eunuch caressed her toes. Briefly Diana thought of another tub.

Then she forgot it...

Then she remembered it...

Then forgot it...

She had no life now that her husband had been killed in battle. Now she was the sultan's wife. One of them, at least. Or at least she was a concubine. Or a...

The tub, she thought. Something is within the tub. A dark shape. A mosaic, perhaps. It looked like...

A wasserliche. That's what they called it in German. But it was still a dead body. Diana glanced at the innocent young face and regretted having stayed so long at the factory. If only she had come home sooner, her daughter would not have died. She would have been --

But wait...

Diana had no daughter...

Yes, she did. She remembered giving birth to her. She remembered the fun she had conceiving her, and the pain she felt when her husband was killed in the war, and the misery she had felt trying to get by in the dark time afterwards...

And yet...

A bird flew overhead. It was a raven...

She pictured herself in the raven's place and seeing with a raven's eyes...

She saw a distant city ahead...

Then a distant ocean...

Then a distant harbor...

There was a lady in the harbor...

A tall, green maiden with a big torch and a spiked helmet...

And within the city, there was a skyscraper...

On the skyscraper was a balcony...

The balcony led to an apartment...

The apartment had a bathroom...

The bathroom door was only halfway open, but she could see that the room was occupied by someone taking a bath. Or at least someone who had been taking a bath but who had apparently fallen asleep while doing so...

She started to brush the curtain aside. But the curtain would not yield to her fingertips even though she was once again human...

However, she could step through the bathtub curtain and look down upon the tub's occupant...

Look down and see a middle-aged, heavyset brunette floating like Ophelia upon the waters...

Only this brunette was not quite floating...

In fact, her head was under water...

Diana gasped. That body in the water was her...

She once again reached out, this time in desperation. But her hands passed right through the body in the tub. They passed through everything, in fact. And as her hands passed through the bath water, she could tell that the water was really quite cold -- as if it had been sitting there for a long, long time...

. Now what do I do? Diana thought.

What could she do?

And yet...

No more periods, she thought.

No more weight problems.

And, of course, no more ex-husband to worry about.

Why should she complain?.

She was free now. .

Hadn't she always wanted to be free?.

Not like this, she thought.

Then she once more glanced down at her body.

Remembered the sensation of the warm bath water upon her skin and within her genitals.

Oh, well, Diana thought. Now I have all time and space before me. Come to think of it, who really needs a body anyway? Had I not just traveled quite a long way just using my mind?

Diana walked off and tried to imagine herself wrapped in silk.

But for some reason, she still felt naked.

Cuento de Mi Id

“The Eyes of a Revolutionary”

Never trust a revolutionary, my father used to say. You have only to look into their eyes to see what they really are. For their eyes aren't normal eyes. And they look right through you as if you weren't really human. Which readily explains the things they say. And the things they do.

I never laughed at my father when he said this. I could tell by the expression in his own eyes that he was serious about this. He would joke about a lot of things but never this subject. He never told me how he knew all this. Did he read from a book somewhere or did he learn it from someone who had lived through the last revolution in his homeland? He never said. But each time he told it to me, he had the air of someone revealing a great truth.

And, of course, he never told me in front of anyone else. Not even my mother.

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Five years into the War and my mother and I were staying at her mother's house. The news was always on and my mother was tired of always having to work two jobs. We had not seen my father in ages but my mother still jumped when the phone rang. Her mother always scolded us whenever we got home late but my mother ignored her. And tried to ignore the black sedan parked outside across the street...

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My father used to tell me about the old woman he knew back in his hometown. How contemptuous she had been of the last batch of revolutionaries to ride through that town and how much she liked to compare them to the men in uniform that she had known in her youth.

“The French, you see, now they knew something about uniforms. But today's bunch... They're little more than barbarians. How awful!”

My father was home early because the boss had decided to let him go. He had been working at the office six months -- longer than some of his Anglo co-workers -- but in the end, they let him go.

My mother asked him in whispers what he will do next.

“Don't worry, mi amor,” he said. "I'll find something.”

“But if you don't...”

“If I don't, we'll move.”

“And if you still don't find something...”

“Then we'll move again.”

Five years later, my father took us both aside and said that the two of us were going back to Detroit to live with my mother's mother. My father would follow but not for a long time. In the meantime we were not to mention his name or speculate where he might be. He made us both swear that we would never tell anyone about him.

“If anyone asks about me,” he said, “You don't know. If anyone claims to know something about me, you don't know. As far as you know, I went away one day and did not come back. Believe me, mijo, as much as I would like to pretend otherwise, it's better this way.”

He hugged both of us quite strongly and then left. I have not seen him in the flesh since then.

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My grandmother was talking about the news again but my mother would not listen. “Shut it off, mother,” she said. “It's almost time to eat.”

“Why do they do it?" my grandmother asked. “Why do they act like such ingrates? Don't those people understand the concept of loyalty?”

My mother seemed on the verge of saying something but instead she cleared her throat and said, “Loyalty is a two-way street, mother.” Then she fell silent as if she had accidentally confessed something.

Outside across the street, a black sedan was still waiting. Every so often, it drove off, only to be replaced almost immediately by a vehicle of a similar color. What the men in the car were waiting for, my mother would not say. As far as she was concerned, the sedan did not even exist.

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When my father was still living with us, he used to teach me English using flash cards. He would write down English words and sentences and then teach me to say them over and over again until l could say them in my sleep. He was never prouder till the day came when I no longer spoke with an accent.

He used to go to old book stores throughout the city and buy books about the last revolution in his homeland. He often said that he preferred the books that were written by Americans because the books written by people of his homeland tended to be more personality-oriented. Americans were not always as objective about the revolution as my father would like, but at least they tended to focus more on what actually happened as opposed to what so-and-so did or said. “Of course, the way things are going in this country,” he would sometimes joke, “American history books will someday be the same way. But hopefully neither you nor I will be around when that happens.”

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Last night there was a knock on the door.

A man in a black raincoat said we would have to leave. There had been an incident at the local nuclear plant and the entire neighborhood was being evacuated.

“I just knew they should have dealt with those people while they had the chance,” said my grandmother.

My mother just held her breath and fingered her rosary.

As we packed up to leave, I noticed that the black sedan was no longer across the street. Nor was there any car in its place. I finished packing my suitcase and took it out to my grandparents' car.

My grandmother was looking worriedly toward the north -- in the direction of the fallen power plant.

My mother as always looked in all directions.

Then she got into the back seat beside me and hugged me.

She said something in Spanish but her voice was so low that I could not hear her.

The next day, after we entered the relocation camp, my grandparents bought a newspaper. On the cover was a sketch of a man who looked like my father. But it could not have been my father for my father's eyes were brown and the man in the sketch had black irises. More to the point, the eyes in the newspaper sketch seemed to look right through me. Just like the eyes that my father had once described. The eyes of a revolutionary.