five strange death

1

full purple lips, like ripe grapes, gave second grandma – passion – her extraordinary appeal.

the sands of time had long since interred her origins and background. her rich, youthful,resilient flesh, her plump bean-pod face, and her deep-blue, seemingly deathless eyes were buriedin the wet yellow earth, extinguishing for all time her angry, defiant gaze, which challenged theworld of filth, adored the world of beauty, and brimmed over with an intense consciousness.

second grandma had been buried in the black earth of her hometown. her body was enclosed ina coffin of thin willow covered with an uneven coat of reddish-brown varnish that failed tocamouflage its wormy, beetle-holed surface. the sight of her blackened, blood-shiny corpsebeing swallowed up by golden earth is etched forever on the screen of my mind.

in the warm red rays of the sun, i saw a mound in the shape of a human figure rising atop theheavy, deeply remorseful sandbar. second grandma’s shapely figure; second grandma’s high-arching breasts; tiny grains of shifting sand on second grandma’s furrowed brow; secondgrandma’s sensual lips protruding through the golden-yellow sand?.?.?. i knew it was an illusion,that second grandma was buried beneath the black earth of her hometown, and that only redsorghum grew around her gravesite.

standing at the head of her grave – as long as it isn’t during the winter, when the plants aredead and frozen, or on a spring day, when cool southerly breezes blow – you can’t even see thehorizon for the nightmarishly dense screen of northeast gaomi sorghum. then you raise yourgaunt face, like a sunflower, and through the gaps in the sorghum you can see the stunningbrilliance of the sun hanging in the kingdom of heaven. amid the perennially mournful sobs ofthe black water river you listen for a lost soul drifting down from that kingdom.