A Night in Cameroon - 4

by Kelly Jameson

I stay up. Watch the Weather Channel. Sleep late. The next night, I drive into the canyon, park my dented midnight blue Ford in a patch of grass and sand; the tires settle, send up little puffs of grit. I grab the blanket and beer I've brought and, on foot, climb a little higher.

I spread the blanket under a cavern of domed sky, sit down where the wind drags itself roughly across my face. I open a beer and take the first long, cold sip.

When I was a young girl, my father, before he and my mom split, brought me here. We sat on a blanket like this one and looked up at the sky. "People see stars differently," he said, ruffling my hair with his big hand. "So until you learn the sky, you aren't going to know what you're seeing."

He told me stories about clusters of stars, myths and legends, about groups of young women, sisters, wandering the sky. The sky. A late gothic painting. In some of the stories, the sisters were lost. Like the Pleiades. Seven sisters. With the naked eye, you can only see six. The seventh, the story goes, the youngest and missing sister, sheds tears that dim the light from her eyes. Or, she cries because all of the sisters except her have married gods.

My father, a man who worked a pharmacy, who scraped slid counted medicines into plastic pill bottles all day, his fingers and the dark hairs on his wrists covered with the fine white powder of pills, taught me about goddess lore and when I was a junior in high school left my mother for a man. The Pleiades are a cluster of stars in the constellation Taurus. Electra is the youngest sister, the one nobody can see. "Maybe once she shone more brightly," my father said. "Maybe once there were seven sisters in the sky."

The seven sisters:

Alcyone—seduced by Poseidon, the God of the sea.

Asterope—raped by the God of war.

Celaeno—seduced.

Electra—seduced.

Maia—seduced.

Merope—married a mortal man.

Taygete—seduced.

I take my clothes off and lie naked on the blanket, absorb the earth's heat. It's like being on the ocean. I listen to the wind's hot breath through ledges of stone, feel it rock and lick my body. Orion is near. My sisters before me knew this. But they ran away from him. I wouldn't have run from a man like Orion.

The earth groans beneath me as if it can sense my thoughts.

Naked, I am time and space and accident, the youngest sister, a cellular memory, a star seduced by a sea god. I imagine Cronus throwing the severed genitals of his father into the ocean, the salt water churning and foaming about them, Aprhrodite rising up from the sea foam.

I lift my fingers from between my legs to the sky and trace their forms. The sisters. I listen for their croaky whispers.

Astrologists say the constellation of Taurus rules the throat. I can still taste Jones. See him in the liquid pool of time that is the club. Bosch is pronounced Boss in Dutch. I've never minded being drenched in black light, moving center stage, silvery and animalistic, men's chairs in a circle pointed like stars toward my center. Bouncers like Jones circumnavigating the space. I sit up, sit for a long time until the sky bears the faintest trace of lighter blue, like the veins under a pink tongue, drink beer, get dressed, take a last look at the sky without feeling anything, anything anything, walk back to my car. I grab Jones' shirt off the passenger seat and press it to my nose. He left it at the club and I took it, well, after. I wanted something of his. How long before his big, ungainly, male smell fades from the world? I drive down, out of the canyon, with elastic slowness.

I haven't seen a shooting star in years. I wonder, has anyone else? Shooting stars drifting grit from space colliding at high speed with air molecules. That's all. And you're a shit if you believe anything else.

Over the next few weeks, I get a tattoo that covers both breasts and meanders down my torso and inner thighs. When I'm naked, it looks like I'm wearing a kimono. I fall in love with pain. And veils. The back seats of taxis. Hypocrisy. People magazine. And Jones all over again.

When I dance, I imagine I'm the corpse of a young African girl; I'm starting to burn. I fly around the village market, frightening the vendors into upsetting their displays of produce as they flee in fear. I am drums, song, food, palm wine. People bring offerings of pineapple, bananas, sugar cane, a live chicken. We all bring what we have.

At the club, a Pygmalion thing standing in the street between an old church and a crack house like a giant erection, men watch me dance, their eyes eager for a flash of wet pussy, their hands eager to squeeze a mound of tit, their dicks straining at their zippers and eager to be sucked. I am, with my hot red dragons burned into my soft flesh, a church of sorts but only in a mathematical sense. Norwegian stave churches have dragons at the tops of their multiple roofs just in case the spirits of Viking ancestors aren't happy with the Christian activities inside. The music changes, the light changes, and now I'm a white heap of cotton waiting to be harvested by long tan fingers of a peasant thinking only of the coolness of a Mosque that awaits. A colorful fiber prayer mat with oil spots ground into it.

I wash myself in a river of light. God's done waiting for me to fuck up. And if you believe anything different, you're a shit.

I like the taste of men. I like the clumsy, twisted mess of my underwear drawer. The rooms are big here, the ashtrays dirty. Pubic hair clipped down to stubble with a Mohawk along the mons. Nails of electric blue polish part and spread pussy lips. Light harsh and artificial, and I love it. My breasts are burning.

Am I scary? I'm not always pretty. Most of the time I'm not pretty at all. You know, I could be you…could be. Here, in this light, where the whole world strains against me.

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A Night in Cameroon - 4

by Kelly Jameson