7:00PM - 2005-12-18
cleft
They cleaved the tail of that mermaid...the Peruvian one. I saw it on the news a few nights ago; humble charity doctors elaborating to international media types. Close-ups of the newly terrestrial "miracle baby". "God punished her for my sins and now she is forgiven", said mom, eyes shining behind a film of grateful tears. Dad expressed his hopes that "Soon maybe she can lead a normal life...go to dances...ride a bike" -- the phrase "normal life" stretching like diamond filament from his mouth towards a distant, rustic, deathbed. Forcing my perspective towards that ultimate vanishing point and skewing hard all intermediate angles. Causing her rural hometown slum to appear in my mind's eye as a "quaint village", a place where the rice and beans taste so good you can eat 'em every night; where open cesspools are as tolerable an annoyance as traffic is in LA. Casting her coarse and uneducated future-husband in the romantic light of a hard working "native type" brimming with "traditional wisdom", and providing a cozy image of her surrounded (provided doctors are able to reconstruct her reproductive organs) with future-grandchildren, captivated by the story behind those long-healed, leg-length, scars.
In the old days we'd have carried the infant mermaid to the rocks at Mollendo and returned her, reverently, to the hungry seals below.
