vision girl

Head down, just the steps, just focus on the steps.  Close my ears to the noise of grinding metal, of horns, of hawking and selling, of coughing, of brakes of shouting and jibbering madness.  Close my eyes to the urine-covered walls,  a jellyfish shaped shadow left to evaporate and sour after each pissing ; close my nose.  Close my heart to the tugging of my sleeve, to the little hand reaching with the plea “una monedita, por favor”.  My own pockets would be empty for a lifetime if I placed a coin in every one of those hands.  Close myself to the trash, the plastic bags, the cartons , the bottles, the broken glass, the phlegm, the green trickle of snot, the seeping wounds, the dying flesh, to the rotting food, the decaying corpses of strays, to the emaciated and scarred and blank-eyed, to the feral children, to the humanity cast aside, to the fumes of paint and resin and thinner and oil and gas and glue, and exhaust, and smoldering refuse and burning tires, and all that reddens eyes and blackens tears, to the crumbling sidewalks, mouldering buildings, wilted  plants, sooty windows broken and jagged, uneven brick facades improbably high, like something drawn by satan, to the bright chinese plastics, the gaudy lights, the people buying things that won’t work from people who don’t care with money they don’t have.  Head down, just the steps.

Then I see her, right in front of me.  In a rough smock.  Sackcloth.  Deepest blue.  Cut to her knees.  Brown-water legs, her wide, calloused bare feet.  Thick hair, abyss-black.  A baby hangs on her back.  Secured with a red blanket.  Head lolling.  Asleep.  I walk behind her.  She’s so young.  Just a child.  I register that her feet move, but still she seems to float.  She walks slowly.   The streets scream at her.  The buildings loom, the shadows congeal.  She’s untouched by it.  We walk forever in two blocks.  I see her face as she glances indifferently at this rust-bladed world I’ve been trying so hard to keep out of me (I’ve kept so much in already).  Native.  American.  Indian.  Amazonian.  She doesn’t belong here.  In this.  That tiny figure in that worn dress, carrying that baby.  She’s much too young.  This is wrong.  This can’t be.  It cannot.

I imagine that she flickers an instant.  I imagine she’s an image cast here from afar.  In a vision.  Some rite of motherhood.  She sits, two thousand miles away in a darkened hut separated from the village.  A wizened woman tells her to breathe in deeply the smoke that fills the cramped space.  “There are other hells, child.  Some much worse than ours. Go and see.” 

And  she appears, right in front of me.  Rough smock.  Sackcloth.  Deepest blue.  Untouchable here in this particular hell.