Analena Revisited

My daughter has evinced no small talent when it comes to creative writing, and her story, Analena (link opens in a new tab), penned in 2016, and which I recommend you to investigate, inspired me to write my own stream-of-consciousness sippet like her delightful word and figurative play. She has categorized her beautiful bit of mental imagery as “Magical Realism”. I might like “Literary Phantasm”. Whatever its provenance, it is charming, seductive, and wholly fun. Once you have surrendered yourself, allowing your structured and relational inhibitions to vanish, you might very well find yourself tempted to try your own mentalhand at never-before-imagined juxtapositions, the result of which may reveal your susceptibility to the seductive power of the phantasmagorical. So dive in. The fictive water’s fine. Thanks to Fiona, you may never be able to read (or tell) stories again in quite the same way.

Analena pours the water from her eyes into the thimble next to her needles and her thread. It is her (strongly held) contention that the saline will help to slide the threaded needles more quickly through the fabric of her knees. But when she looks, she sees that dirt from the streets and from the floor of her bedroom interrupts the mending, so that all she can remember are his eyes and teeth, smiling up and sideways from her face to the man at the next table.

He fails to notice anything but the soup that he is feeding to his dog. When Analena has positioned herself in such a way that the dog cannot avoid seeing her ears and summer dress, he points his nose skyward toward the windows and wails and howls, and all the children come running from their yards, looking for scraps and for balls to chase. “Tudo o que ele realmente quer é um deleite,” says the doggy’s rumpled guardian, and gazes longingly at the city chicken greasing Analena’s fingers, which she has half-eaten, as though he were the canine on a short leash.

She decides that the cooking temperatures are too low, and pushes the flame higher on the pan, so that they lick the sides greedily, burning the oil, but fusing the flavors of the mushy fritas and bananas. She imagines that when they have finished bubbling and singing she will allow the books that she has placed above the refrigerator to make the pages of the formal language there intelligible, or at least pronounceable.

Paper wraps the tables and the mountains together in a crinkled scratchy mess, that seems almost perfect with the blue floating upon her door. She creates a mental reminder to open the once-locked portal three times when she returns, and kiss the jamb an equal amount as though it were a large mezuzah.

Jakob and his family have prayers and blessings for everything, which comforts all of his relatives, even the ones who have stopped breathing and thinking. Perhaps she would float to heaven if she could catch one millionth of one percent of all the world’s prayers in a nanosecond, and the waters of her city would run clean and cold and free and pure, the mountains’ snows pouring from the faucets in her kitchen.