Tiny Little Ashes
by Evi Papagianni
“Yes, it is ashes” Moira commented on the quiet, thin rainfall of grey, weightless flecks that hit my windshield making me think of poison: something always effortless about poison, something marginally comical and simultaneously tasteless about the deaths it incurs. I thought of this in conjunction to conspiracy theories circulating about chemtrails and the like (Moira was a believer) but still could not refrain from thinking secretly that there was something enchanting about the slowness and the ominous nature of ashes drifting down from the sky in the middle of the night. Perhaps it was something akin to the giddiness of fake snow in a crystal ball, the liquid sadness inside the glass bubble, but also the childishness of the hand that decides to bring a world (of whichever dimensions and degree of artificiality) topsy-turvy, just for the heck of it really, just because it was in the palm of the hand and because the results of gravity in an aqueous environment are marked by an elusive grace, a seeming indestructibility of the falling object.
“Yes, it is ashes” Moira repeated with her trademark cringe that seemed to apply to a wide array of situations and somehow never failed to be comical regardless of the gravity of the circumstance. Moira reminded me of small angry children: condemned to harmlessness, to a quaint irrationality that often invites the sympathetic but essentially belittling mockery of adults (taller people, poised people with a supposed soundness of mind, gentle force and calculated, measured manners of exchange with the world). But these small children are impatient, menacing, rage-full little gods full of barbaric hope: small fists, teeth, feet ready to crush the insect and bite another’s hand or thigh on account of a misguided foolhardy omnipotence, a bizarre spectral irritation. Moira’s boyish cringe was full of these infantile teeth and this excitable childish cruelty. It shouldn’t make me laugh, but it did. The laugh was internal and not entirely condescending, although my relationship to her was less characterized by warmth and more by awkwardness. There was an irritating bond between the two of us; a decade of close geographical proximity and now the business of tending to neighboring graves.
The rough walkway carved through the cemetery was steep and long, provisional, inadequate in a way that gave it an unrealistic dreamlike quality. It was obvious that no serious efforts had been made to smooth or level the ground, to make processions and visits to the departed less physically demanding. I could not stop myself wondering whether a coffin had ever rolled down this parody of a walkway which had the gradient of a playground slide, but at that hour the descent along the irregular white cement walkway to the gate where I had parked the car (my grandfather’s old car with the scars of my reckless post-adolescent driving on its dry greyish white colored body- the hardy car which had outlived him) felt easy. There was something sweet about the afternoon air, the repetitive strain of the cicadas, the smell of dust and pine and the thought that he had specifically asked for this placement which tortured my mother’s bad back, obliging her to climb to the top of this steep walkway to tend to the grave - light the lantern, top it up with oil, and wash the white marble with a tantalizingly short hose. She went every Thursday and came back home with all the stories of his terrible life of wars and hunger, his temper and coarse provincial humor (“go piss your feet” he would say if anyone annoyed him, usually with their weakness and indecisiveness), and his stubborn wish to die on his feet which was literally fulfilled. Moira and I had lingered until the final flare of red light had faded from the horizon, and after Moira had speculated with bureaucratic detail about what would happen if we got locked inside the cemetery and got the shits. We decided to leave before we were swallowed up by the night and came out the other end formless and smelly as hell (her words again).
Across from the cemetery was a small valley with whatever bit of forest had survived the last wildfires about five, six years before: tall, shriveled, weary watch-guards or dry bones of massive obsolete creatures, the regal arid remnants of trees; bare and gnarly branches, gusts of thorny knotty hair frozen midair and on the long bodies smooth golden tissue revealed beneath the rough blackened bark. Had they been healthy they would be amazingly old, but when fire strikes twice there is not much chance of revival. So says agriculture and common wisdom. My mother often revisited this fact when we drove past these trees, beyond which you could see a cluster of houses (large bright, wealthy houses) and even further in the distance the sea. A cemetery with vistas, Moira joked. It seemed she could not help being mildly obscene or sarcastic around the dead, not that she was any more merciful around the living. When we were well past the narrow valley across from the cemetery– the remnants of the trees down below and the remnants of people up high on the hill, both domains dotted with small pieces of lightweight litter - I stole a glance at Moira and was visited by the hopeless sense of anger, isolation and obligation she stirred in me every now and then, usually when her always intended as studied but essentially naïve observations were too sharp in tone and when her calls to meet up and socialize coincided with my own loneliness, disappointment and bouts of misanthropy. I don’t remember when it happened - the misanthropy - but at times I’ve felt that I may be too far gone and may as well enjoy the liberty from decorum and elegance which it brings.
Moira was sitting in the passenger seat half-illuminated, blank-faced, picking her teeth first with her index finger and then with her thumb. Her upper row of teeth had a strange slant to it, as if it had been hastily stuck into her mouth and the left side had been abandoned to dangle like a loose hinge. Other than that her teeth were the right length and width, pearly white and in perfect alignment and proportion to each other, but this good proportion, vertical symmetry and hygiene did not serve to counter-balance the crookedness of the mouth that came about as a result of the unorthodox horizontal alignment. She could have been attractive, but in her stubborn and thoughtful moments Moira’s mouth remained slightly open on the left side and there had been one specific incident where during a pause in a heated rant she had not been able to contain a thick string of saliva from pouring out of her shallow lower lip. She had carried on loudly, avoiding acknowledging the incident, and her rant did not alter in intensity, try-hard wit and hurt bravado. Moira had always been politically confused but nonetheless quite fiery about the profound injustices of the world- the system, the office-bearers and civil servants, the injustices in the workplace, the trials of femininity, alone-ness (being “singular”). It was not quite convincing (it had grown overbearing, stereotypical) from her but it always struck me when I thought of Manos who was quieter and more industrious than his gauche indie cousin with the tiny little dark eyes and the crooked mouth.
No-one was quite certain why he had dived off the balcony on Good Friday that year. Perhaps it had been the cruelty of April, the fragrant incision of life’s urge for renewal rather than mere preservation (the difference between ‘revolution’ and ‘management’) that waved an impatient finger at him, and drove him to utter an loss for means and methods. “This country is a shithole” Moira always claimed when recounting her cousin’s history. “He was a shadow of himself after he returned from London” but I was so not sure that his gloominess was caused by the supposed “degrading” from the cosmopolitan London to his affluent suburb in Athens. It simply could have been this crazy fixation on an arid judicial as opposed to a compassionate existential approach to reality which was not place specific; this elbowing, this confused indignation of overgrown children, of menacing rage-full little gods, of big fish in small ponds. But who bore the blame? Who could cast the first stone? I found myself thinking the next minute that there was something more hopeful, more vital about Moira’s crude defeated anger at the world as opposed to her wiser cousin’s elegant philosophical ‘victory’. That of course did not eliminate the danger of horrific blunders on her part. But perhaps there are circumstances in which the most astute skepticism is inadequate and brash action, or a thoughtless life is much more fruitful.
“Yes it is ashes” she repeated. Her tone contained a feverish glimmer, a bitter satisfaction this time. Catastrophe invokes a certain enthusiasm in people: it quickens the senses and when it is remote enough it is wildly inspirational - the vengeful (whatever the cause of their vindictive inclinations) are strangely justified and carry on with their painful lives with renewed fervor. “There is a fire in Parnitha. We just can’t see it from the cemetery because it is enclosed by a hill. It must be blowing our way. It must be raining tiny little ashes all over Athens as we speak, if it’s reached us here all the way on the other side”. When we paused at a crossing I happened to catch a glimpse of her right dogtooth- a stone cold sharp little spark it seemed, a cruel moment, a mesmerizing thing, a token of terrible intimacy. “Tiny little ashes” I repeated and thought somewhat pompously of tragedy and guilty pleasure and then lots of other thoughts made their way in: how we all have a ridiculously limited ration of affection and how we must adhere to it for reasons of sanity; how I felt I had grown more handsome and comfortable, but strangely more alone as a result of this supposed achievement; how the price of complacency is not mere class contingent docility but a sweltering idiocy that in the end makes you want to tear your own skin off; and finally I thought (as I often did after my visits to my unforgiving feisty grandfather) of the neighboring grave: a miniature stone garden adorned with little wooden ships and a photo of a radiant man who must have led every circle dance in his day. The epigram on this grave was “Salt water –sweat, tears, and the sea- is the cure for everything”.
I haphazardly repeated the phrase in my head as one would a prayer (after several frantic repetitions, it was a mere jumble of words –saltwater, sweat, tears, the sea, cure) as I continued driving to Moira’s house in silence. At a turn I was able to look for a long moment at the sea- a smooth solid amethyst-grey stripe underlining the sky and on it a golden and light-green glimmer: a royal road, a grand shimmering walkway leading to the moon. I felt an unexpected nocturnal grief invade me. In a vain effort to fight it off I caressed Moira’s hand just as she was leaving the car and cursed at my own certainty that I would regret it. A few meters away from her house I pulled over and decided to have a cigarette across the panorama of Athens. I bemusedly stared at the flames licking the back of Parnitha, staring at me like the eyes of the devil, or the eyes of fate. The wind was blowing in my face; I realized as I was standing that I was bursting at the seams, and as I stared with my cigarette still hanging out of my mouth at the ruthless flames of the future above and the urban bowl, that uncanny moon crater of boundless cement and streetlights below, I consciously pissed my own feet.
“Yes, it is ashes” Moira repeated with her trademark cringe that seemed to apply to a wide array of situations and somehow never failed to be comical regardless of the gravity of the circumstance. Moira reminded me of small angry children: condemned to harmlessness, to a quaint irrationality that often invites the sympathetic but essentially belittling mockery of adults (taller people, poised people with a supposed soundness of mind, gentle force and calculated, measured manners of exchange with the world). But these small children are impatient, menacing, rage-full little gods full of barbaric hope: small fists, teeth, feet ready to crush the insect and bite another’s hand or thigh on account of a misguided foolhardy omnipotence, a bizarre spectral irritation. Moira’s boyish cringe was full of these infantile teeth and this excitable childish cruelty. It shouldn’t make me laugh, but it did. The laugh was internal and not entirely condescending, although my relationship to her was less characterized by warmth and more by awkwardness. There was an irritating bond between the two of us; a decade of close geographical proximity and now the business of tending to neighboring graves.
The rough walkway carved through the cemetery was steep and long, provisional, inadequate in a way that gave it an unrealistic dreamlike quality. It was obvious that no serious efforts had been made to smooth or level the ground, to make processions and visits to the departed less physically demanding. I could not stop myself wondering whether a coffin had ever rolled down this parody of a walkway which had the gradient of a playground slide, but at that hour the descent along the irregular white cement walkway to the gate where I had parked the car (my grandfather’s old car with the scars of my reckless post-adolescent driving on its dry greyish white colored body- the hardy car which had outlived him) felt easy. There was something sweet about the afternoon air, the repetitive strain of the cicadas, the smell of dust and pine and the thought that he had specifically asked for this placement which tortured my mother’s bad back, obliging her to climb to the top of this steep walkway to tend to the grave - light the lantern, top it up with oil, and wash the white marble with a tantalizingly short hose. She went every Thursday and came back home with all the stories of his terrible life of wars and hunger, his temper and coarse provincial humor (“go piss your feet” he would say if anyone annoyed him, usually with their weakness and indecisiveness), and his stubborn wish to die on his feet which was literally fulfilled. Moira and I had lingered until the final flare of red light had faded from the horizon, and after Moira had speculated with bureaucratic detail about what would happen if we got locked inside the cemetery and got the shits. We decided to leave before we were swallowed up by the night and came out the other end formless and smelly as hell (her words again).
Across from the cemetery was a small valley with whatever bit of forest had survived the last wildfires about five, six years before: tall, shriveled, weary watch-guards or dry bones of massive obsolete creatures, the regal arid remnants of trees; bare and gnarly branches, gusts of thorny knotty hair frozen midair and on the long bodies smooth golden tissue revealed beneath the rough blackened bark. Had they been healthy they would be amazingly old, but when fire strikes twice there is not much chance of revival. So says agriculture and common wisdom. My mother often revisited this fact when we drove past these trees, beyond which you could see a cluster of houses (large bright, wealthy houses) and even further in the distance the sea. A cemetery with vistas, Moira joked. It seemed she could not help being mildly obscene or sarcastic around the dead, not that she was any more merciful around the living. When we were well past the narrow valley across from the cemetery– the remnants of the trees down below and the remnants of people up high on the hill, both domains dotted with small pieces of lightweight litter - I stole a glance at Moira and was visited by the hopeless sense of anger, isolation and obligation she stirred in me every now and then, usually when her always intended as studied but essentially naïve observations were too sharp in tone and when her calls to meet up and socialize coincided with my own loneliness, disappointment and bouts of misanthropy. I don’t remember when it happened - the misanthropy - but at times I’ve felt that I may be too far gone and may as well enjoy the liberty from decorum and elegance which it brings.
Moira was sitting in the passenger seat half-illuminated, blank-faced, picking her teeth first with her index finger and then with her thumb. Her upper row of teeth had a strange slant to it, as if it had been hastily stuck into her mouth and the left side had been abandoned to dangle like a loose hinge. Other than that her teeth were the right length and width, pearly white and in perfect alignment and proportion to each other, but this good proportion, vertical symmetry and hygiene did not serve to counter-balance the crookedness of the mouth that came about as a result of the unorthodox horizontal alignment. She could have been attractive, but in her stubborn and thoughtful moments Moira’s mouth remained slightly open on the left side and there had been one specific incident where during a pause in a heated rant she had not been able to contain a thick string of saliva from pouring out of her shallow lower lip. She had carried on loudly, avoiding acknowledging the incident, and her rant did not alter in intensity, try-hard wit and hurt bravado. Moira had always been politically confused but nonetheless quite fiery about the profound injustices of the world- the system, the office-bearers and civil servants, the injustices in the workplace, the trials of femininity, alone-ness (being “singular”). It was not quite convincing (it had grown overbearing, stereotypical) from her but it always struck me when I thought of Manos who was quieter and more industrious than his gauche indie cousin with the tiny little dark eyes and the crooked mouth.
No-one was quite certain why he had dived off the balcony on Good Friday that year. Perhaps it had been the cruelty of April, the fragrant incision of life’s urge for renewal rather than mere preservation (the difference between ‘revolution’ and ‘management’) that waved an impatient finger at him, and drove him to utter an loss for means and methods. “This country is a shithole” Moira always claimed when recounting her cousin’s history. “He was a shadow of himself after he returned from London” but I was so not sure that his gloominess was caused by the supposed “degrading” from the cosmopolitan London to his affluent suburb in Athens. It simply could have been this crazy fixation on an arid judicial as opposed to a compassionate existential approach to reality which was not place specific; this elbowing, this confused indignation of overgrown children, of menacing rage-full little gods, of big fish in small ponds. But who bore the blame? Who could cast the first stone? I found myself thinking the next minute that there was something more hopeful, more vital about Moira’s crude defeated anger at the world as opposed to her wiser cousin’s elegant philosophical ‘victory’. That of course did not eliminate the danger of horrific blunders on her part. But perhaps there are circumstances in which the most astute skepticism is inadequate and brash action, or a thoughtless life is much more fruitful.
“Yes it is ashes” she repeated. Her tone contained a feverish glimmer, a bitter satisfaction this time. Catastrophe invokes a certain enthusiasm in people: it quickens the senses and when it is remote enough it is wildly inspirational - the vengeful (whatever the cause of their vindictive inclinations) are strangely justified and carry on with their painful lives with renewed fervor. “There is a fire in Parnitha. We just can’t see it from the cemetery because it is enclosed by a hill. It must be blowing our way. It must be raining tiny little ashes all over Athens as we speak, if it’s reached us here all the way on the other side”. When we paused at a crossing I happened to catch a glimpse of her right dogtooth- a stone cold sharp little spark it seemed, a cruel moment, a mesmerizing thing, a token of terrible intimacy. “Tiny little ashes” I repeated and thought somewhat pompously of tragedy and guilty pleasure and then lots of other thoughts made their way in: how we all have a ridiculously limited ration of affection and how we must adhere to it for reasons of sanity; how I felt I had grown more handsome and comfortable, but strangely more alone as a result of this supposed achievement; how the price of complacency is not mere class contingent docility but a sweltering idiocy that in the end makes you want to tear your own skin off; and finally I thought (as I often did after my visits to my unforgiving feisty grandfather) of the neighboring grave: a miniature stone garden adorned with little wooden ships and a photo of a radiant man who must have led every circle dance in his day. The epigram on this grave was “Salt water –sweat, tears, and the sea- is the cure for everything”.
I haphazardly repeated the phrase in my head as one would a prayer (after several frantic repetitions, it was a mere jumble of words –saltwater, sweat, tears, the sea, cure) as I continued driving to Moira’s house in silence. At a turn I was able to look for a long moment at the sea- a smooth solid amethyst-grey stripe underlining the sky and on it a golden and light-green glimmer: a royal road, a grand shimmering walkway leading to the moon. I felt an unexpected nocturnal grief invade me. In a vain effort to fight it off I caressed Moira’s hand just as she was leaving the car and cursed at my own certainty that I would regret it. A few meters away from her house I pulled over and decided to have a cigarette across the panorama of Athens. I bemusedly stared at the flames licking the back of Parnitha, staring at me like the eyes of the devil, or the eyes of fate. The wind was blowing in my face; I realized as I was standing that I was bursting at the seams, and as I stared with my cigarette still hanging out of my mouth at the ruthless flames of the future above and the urban bowl, that uncanny moon crater of boundless cement and streetlights below, I consciously pissed my own feet.
© The Treacle Well 2013