Unyoked from the stretcher, Hermano took off his blue Goodyear cap. The cap had made a red indentation across his forehead. Insect sounds sizzled and buzzed around him, but apart from the sound of his movements – boots scraping in the dirt and the sound of fabric rubbing on fabric – and those of the insects, all was quiet and calm. But this wasn’t a place to rest. Not here. Not yet. (more…)
Kelapa mudah and kopi susu by the beach at Taman Yokima in Cipatujah, West Java.
Just look out for the baby praying mantis. They are everywhere!
On a side note, clearly I’ve spent too long in the city. The roar of the surf just sounds like distant traffic noise.
The view down to smoggy Bandung during my jog this morning.
After car after bus after car after truck. After this my lungs will be so fucked up!
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Around the warn-felt oasis of a pool table, fluorescent-lit greensward in a terracotta-tiled, garage-cum-billiard-room, we were monkeys in the time of chimpanzees, reflections faffing about in the tarnished mirror of an abandoned, empty art deco cocktail cabinet.
~
Humming past fields of forever, yellow stubble and distant stands of tamarack and spruce, under an impossible sky, slumping hay-bales marking invisible grids across the prairie rise and fall. Mighty Sol stabs crepuscular blades of light through waves of muddy stratocumulus, through an insect-pocked and road-grimed windshield, and the yellow lines down the middle of the grey asphalt conveyor-belt slide away beneath them, a ribbon of morse-code nonsense across the countryside.
“Anytime at all, if you want to.”
“There’s writin’ on the wall,” he said, swallowing away the waxy residue of tacky black coffee, before adding, “Sayin’ God bless ya, honey.”
He was serious. She misread his gravity, thought it was sarcasm.
Breathing out a thin cloud of tobacco smoke she said, “Well, that’s just the way it should be.” Thinking of better times, all long gone now, she brought the cigarette back up to her mouth, hesitated, and went on, “But, ya know, it’s hard to make the good things last.”
He wasn’t on the same page. Not even the same story. She sucked deeply on the filtered cigarette and, as his cup clinked on to the saucer in front of him, he said, “It’s the way it’s meant to be.”
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(more…)
Sabuga: I’ve come to know just about every pebble, every frayed bit of line-marking tape, every tree, and every dragonfly around this track.
‘Gedung Sipil ITB’ by Shane Bolitho, 6 April 2014
