The Bored Madonna

“The unhappy one sits and will sit forever.” (Virgil)

The Madonna is bored with the little Jesus in her lap and her arms barely encircle him; he is free to twist and turn as babes do. He is small and white and naked with a full head of curling brown hair and a golden halo that thwacks her in the face sometimes when he turns his head quickly to gaze and to point at one of the be-harped Seraphim that keeps dive-bombing them from the wooden eves of the stable.

The six-winged creatures are loud and bright and shout down at all hours of the night and day, “Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh is the Lord of hosts: The whole Earth is filled with His glory!”

They will not stop, though she’s asked politely. She hasn’t slept in ages.

The Seraphim are on fire. It is all-consuming and unquenchable. They burn with the fire of charity, dispelling and destroying the shadows of darkness. This is what she has heard. The Madonna wonders why the barn doesn’t burn down with all of their harping and flapping. But the tiny Jesus in her lap loves them. He is joyful when they swoop so close—“Kadosh! Kadosh! Kadosh!”—she can smell her singed hair.

The Madonna is bored with this tiny naked Jesus in her lap. She is bored with her situation: relegated to a stool for his display. Visitors wander through the heavy stable doors unannounced and uninvited. They crowd the place with their murmuring adorations. They shuffle past and whisper and point to the tiny Jesus in her lap, and he makes sweeping gestures of holy cognition to the awed visitors. He holds out a chubby hand with solemnity, beckoning them to him, and the throngs are struck dumb. He bows his head for a moment then looks up meaningfully to the dusty beams of the barn where the Seraphim circle, blazing and keening their “Holy is the Lord of hosts! Holy is the Lord of hosts! Holy is the Lord of hosts!”

The catechumens follow the child’s gaze toward Heaven and see circling doves and a fine white mist and a self-contained amber point of light that oscillates above them. Zealots gasp and faint and cry out in ecstasy, “The whole earth is filled with His glory!” They lay gifts at the feet of the babe: gold pieces, lambs, deeds, skins of wine, brocade with red and silver threads, figs, finches. They shuffle past and bow and pray and weep into the Madonna’s feet as she stifles a yawn. She is so very sleepy.

Her husband stands in line to see them. He has no idea why this is happening. He hopes it’s good. He cannot see the Seraphim above, circling ablaze, doesn’t hear their constant caterwauling. He complains of the heat in the stable and moves his shoulders in irritation. The crowds press up against him, give him looks when he attempts to move towards the Madonna and child. The votary holds him back. Because of the crowds, he and his wife have not been alone, have not touched in weeks. For some reason he worries they may never have another child.

The bored Madonna sits with Jesus in her lap as he twists and poses and gesticulates his understanding of the universe to the reverent visitors filing past. She looks down at him with heavy-lidded eyes, her face pale and impassive. The Madonna is not curious about these people or angry or sad. She does not hold grudges or feel that she cannot bear the weight of this life. When she looks down at him, she doesn’t imagine the future or clutch him to her breast or coo into his tiny perfect ears. She does not make his child arm wave to the pilgrims or pose him for their adorations. Instead, she sighs. She looks down, not believing him to be any part of her and sighs again.

 

Megan Ayers received her MFA from Bowling Green State University where she served as an Assistant Fiction Editor for Mid-American Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Red Cedar Review, EDGE, The Emprise Review, and Licking River Review. She lives and teaches in Cincinnati, OH.

Train Stops at Khaari

by Ajay Vishwanathan

The skies are the brightest above Khaari, they say, every star beaming, splattered generously across a dark blue awning.

Jamba had stopped noticing half a century ago since Father, his lap a white, sweet-smelling hassock, used to point out to his dead mother, the prettiest dot in the Milky Way.

“See it flicker?” he asked. “She must be happy today.”

Then, Jamba got busy unlearning being a teenager, taking on duties as a goat-herd when Father fell fatally ill.

Years later, in his desert village where people usually sang to the almighty for rain, eyes and palms appealed for respite from a strange disease that was killing people. Jamba regretted heeding village chief’s advice and getting married because that brought his pretty wife, Gauri, into an already blighted village, where she would die in a corner of his shack, alone when he had run out to get help, help he knew he wouldn’t find.

When hatchets from the disease finally stopped falling, the only drive for Jamba came from his baby daughter, Seva, born within a year of their marriage.

Now, a scarf wrapped around his head, Jamba, looking old from hurt not age, scuffs into the train station, cloaked in withering wool, chafing freezing hands.

It is well into the small hours on another cloud-stripped night. Two steel containers with roti and daal clink in a bag swinging from his shoulder. He squats near a lone bench and stares into the darkness to his right. A dog sleeps next to him, knocked out by extreme heat that days manifest.

Jamba nods; he can hear the tracks shudder. Hissing and whistling, a goods train makes an unceremonious stop, like it does every month at an hour when air pinches skin and grates ancient wounds.

Desh the driver, hooded in thick blanket, walks up to Jamba and hunches beside him. They sit grazing shoulders, sending slow puffs of white, and divvying up supper.

“Your knee doing OK?” asks Desh.

“The same since you left Khaari.”

Desh looks towards Jamba as if he reads something more in his reply.

“Still angry with me for taking this job up?”

Jamba doesn’t respond.

“You should be happy that I moved close to Seva’s village,” says Desh, tearing a piece of roti and rolling it into his mouth.

Jamba shifts positions and lets out a small cry holding his lower abdomen.

“You don’t have to do this every time,” says Desh, “not with your health. I can find food at the next station.”

Jamba doesn’t answer. He watches the dog rise from sleep and walk away half-dazed, his gait confused.

“Did you see her?” asks Jamba.

Desh shows surprise, swallows before replying. “Yes twice… at the temple. She always smiles.”

“You talked about me?”

Desh gulps, feeling a spatter of daal tickle down his cheek. He cocks his head and wipes the spill on his shoulder.

“Uh… briefly.”

“Liar.”

There is silence as a low mist rises above the train and pauses briefly in the glow of headlights.

Memories of a cold night drift into Desh’s thoughts when he had stormed into Jamba’s house and berated him for letting his daughter go away.  She probably expected him to stand by her side, he said, while the whole world rebuked her relationship with a boy of a different cast. The whole time Jamba had sat cold-eyed, shadows from a dim lantern flickering on the wall behind his head, beedi smoke snaking from chapped lips. Jamba soon stopped talking about Seva, even to Desh.

The mist lingers stubbornly. Desh scans his friend’s face, pallid, spider-web cracks crisscrossing his ebony features, and recalls the day Jamba got married to Gauri, when he sat beside them admiring their youthful faces.

“If she had her way she would have come and seen you… you know that, don’t you?” says Desh.

He notices a glint in Jamba’s eyes looking skyward. “See that star next to the moon?” They stare into space. “Father used to say that is Mother. See the smaller one next to it?”

Desh couldn’t see the second one but nodded anyway.

“Probably Gauri, flickering, happy.”

Desh forces a smile. “You didn’t answer me.”

Jamba shakes his head weakly in response. “Too many years have gone by… too much pain left to molder,” he murmurs, and waves away his friend’s counter.

Desh lowers his gaze, unsaid words dying in his throat.

Jamba shuffles, a grimace sweeping across his face. “Do me a favor, will you?” he asks, and without waiting for Desh’s answer, starts burrowing into his bag, and pulls out a plastic packet. “Give this to her.”

Listlessly, Desh extends his hand.

“Not much…Gauri’s saris,” says Jamba, “her parents’ wedding gifts… she looked pretty that day.”

The mist climbs up trees, sketching silhouettes around leaves and branches. They sit in silence that has grown quieter.

“You feeling OK?” asks Desh. Jamba nods yes. Thoughts of their childhood come to Desh, but they are unclear, fragmented, like a collage of torn black and white pictures hastily assembled.

It is time for Desh to get back to work. He gets up lazily and pats Jamba’s stooped shoulder. “All right… have to go.”

As the train departs, he sees Jamba receding in his mirror, a slouched figure sitting still on a deserted platform.

Desh is guilty about hiding the truth. But with Jamba’s fatal condition, he thought it pointless to reveal now that when he moved close to Seva’s village four months ago, he learned she wasn’t there. Like low wisps of heat on drenched asphalt, rumors still floated that someone saw her lug a rickety suitcase one night several years ago and leave, tired of being tortured by her husband and his mother for bearing a barren womb. Some tattled tales Desh didn’t want to believe. No one knew of her whereabouts.

As the train picks up speed, Desh closes his eyes. The only sound he hears is Jamba’s plastic packet crinkling in the wind.

 

Ajay Vishwanathan is mesmerized by the power of words, more now when he sees his two-year olds form them. Two-time Best of The Net Anthology nominee, Ajay has work published or forthcoming in over sixty literary journals, including elimae, The Potomac, DecomP, Drunken Boat, and LITnIMAGE.

Monster

When the first dog was found headless beside the courthouse culvert, people said it must be the work of boys. Boys having fun. But when the second and third dogs appeared near culverts, those dark holes where sidewalk corners met streets, allowing storm water to gush down into the sewers and from there to join the deep currents of the Tuckabaloosa River, a different pattern emerged.

“Head bites,” the chief said. “It’s down in the ground, whatever it is. Comes out at night and bites ’em off. Ev’abody best lock up y’ dogs, wanta keep ’em.”

By Saturday night the hunters and their sons had joined the police on shotgun watch, and the girls drove around laughing and screaming and bringing the boys hot wings and cold drinks. “All right,” the deacon said when he smelled the beer, “this is scarin’ off the thing, all this noise. Ya’ll settle down or go home.”

“It’s a monster,” said one of the girls, “that’s what it is.”

By the third week monster stories had made national news, and everybody was embarrassed and tired. The creature kept getting mangy strays, and sleek expensive dogs that somehow roamed free. The boys were angry because nobody had gotten a shot. “How come it only eats the heads?” they asked their girlfriends. “Shut up,” was the popular reply.

The chief and the head deacon of the Baptists met over coffee with the football coach. “The boys won’t sleep,” coach said, “and they can’t win if they’re tuckered out.”

So the town went on curfew. The dads locked up the players and guns, the girls lost their car keys, and the principal announced it was all a hoax. He blamed a rival football team, and the media. A few nights passed without the mystery creature making a kill, and the story began to fade. “I wish I knew which team it was,” the boys kept saying to one another.

The head deacon spoke to his wife in confidence, quietly, without any awareness that their son was listening. “Preacher thinks it’s a devil,” the deacon said, stroking the head of their registered collie.

“A devil? Surely not.”

“There are devils. You’ve got to start with that.”

Read the full story in MMR Anthology 2011.

 

 

Luke Wallin holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has been widely published — novels, stories, and essays — and teaches in the Spalding University MFA program. His newest book is forthcoming from Adams Media.