Tiny Lights
Contest 2010
page ten
In the light of his vision he has found his freedom: his thoughts are peace, his words are peace and his work is peace. Dhammapada .
When the monk returns to an upright kneel, he gazes at us with peace and completion. We turn to each other. For a moment I believe we have been married within the bride city. We had the leg strength and the nerve. We just needed to be still. Under the monk‘s gaze, he gets up first, gathers his gear, places riel notes in a tray at the foot of the Buddha, and quietly slips out of the room. I linger, breathing the incense and lotus, in and out. I look around. He is already gone. I find the way out on my own.
Suzanne Farrell Smith has essays published or forthcoming in The Writer’s Chronicle, Connotation Press, Muse & Stone, and Hawaii Women's Journal. She‘s finishing her first book, a hybrid of science and memoir that chronicles her attempts to excavate lost memory. She and King J found synchronization—they are happily married.
Flash Prize: $100
The Watch By Kamil Dawson
are headed, but when he leads, the trail lit up only by the adventure in his eyes and the reflection from his glasses, I worry at every step that I will pitch forward into a pit and despair for centuries with the bone dust of Khmer builders. We step more carefully through the darkness that has become cooler now that the sun is retreating from the Buddhist Bayon. ―Do you smell that?‖ he asks, and I do, a faint scent of incense, so common to Cambodia, but not common here within these old dead walls. Somewhere incense is burning and once he knows it, he must find it. I imagine men and women gliding through these passageways, thinking of sacred text, of their next meal of rice and fowl and gingered vegetables, of staying out of trouble, of marrying into power and having babies to marry off into more power. I am thinking some of the same things. Of marriage. Of putting our decade together, our labor of love, into historical context, not just into history. The incense smell is stronger now. Its floral layer rides a wave of musk that draws tears from my eyes. We become aware of a red glow. Ahead in a corridor, a bit higher, there is light. I expect it is a red beating heart, the heart of the king, still alive and preserved within Angkor Thom‘s walls. I want my own heart to be preserved, to stop moving around, to stop aching, to just sit and pulse. I want my mouth to look serene. He leads me into a spherical cavern, what might have been the summit of the thirteenth-century Buddhist universe. In the center of the room, there is an old monk in yellow robes, nodding and swaying on his knees. While he, smiling, peers down at the monk, I peer upwards toward a tiny white dot of light at the top, a seemingly pin-sized hole that attracts and funnels the incense smoke now filling the little room. The white dot blinks several times. There are bats up there, flying back and forth across the hole, resettling on better perches, sensing the strangers who have just arrived. He squats, looks up into my eyes. We turn to the monk who beckons us to sit down, no, kneel down, and we do. Next to the monk is a flaking golden Buddha covered in lotus flowers and bat droppings. For the first time all day we put down our burdens, laying the cases and backpacks behind us. My knees are sweaty and itchy, but I am joyful that we are next to each other with no bags, and that neither of us is leading. I take his hand, hoping that mine feels both malleable and firm. The monk chants, hovering around one note, close to the E below middle C, I think, just sharp enough to live between the E and the F, a precarious crack in music. The monk‘s voice is clear; he must be inhaling and exhaling in circles. The incense carries the song up through the white hole, up over Angkor, up into the heavens now dotted with stars. And there, in front of the once-radiant Buddha and the aged monk singing, we kneel together with nothing else to do or think about but the proximity of our thighs and shoulders. The monk‘s voice stops abruptly as he leans forward. I think he is going to tip, to pass out, but he leans deep at the waist, bowing, his bald head kissing the floor in silence.
Ron Orem
I
didn‘t really need a watch. I didn‘t need to know the exact time. The day started when the black of night gradually turned to grey, when forms emerged from the gloom. It ended when darkness returned, usually with a suddenness that is typical of the jungle, of places where there are no lights to disturb the blackness, where the canopy is so thick one cannot see the stars even on the clearest of nights. During my turns at guard, the radio handset resting in my hand came softly to life every thirty minutes or so with a whispered call to provide a ―sit-rep,‖ or ―situation report,‖ of what was happening at my location. A barely audible ―sitrep negative‖ was all the answer needed. At the fourth call, two hours had passed; time to carefully touch the next soldier for his turn to sit quietly in the dark, his turn to count his heartbeats as a measure of the passing time. While we slogged through the jungle thickets, time was measured by the counting of paces. Every few hundred meters, we stopped. This may sound like a short distance, a brief stroll to those used to walking on groomed trails or paved sidewalks, but in the tangle of vegetation which we carefully, silently, slid through, watching for any disturbance of pattern that could signal lethality, it was the hard work of imprisoned laborers. A stop was a chance to
