Magenta Crocodile's Stories

Kashmir Earthquake, 2005

2008-03-22T00:51:03Z

Underneath our heels and the tiny bones of our feet, the bones of the earth heave and scream as a horse strains against a heavy load, as two palms pressed together bloom upwards. This eternal collision birthed long ribs and sloping spines furred green and cloud brushed. One morning, in the quiet sleep after breaking Ramadan’s fast, the sun shouldered over the horizon. One fragment of the world’s shell overcame its bonds and thrust a sudden edge over its sibling before friction halted it again. In that millisecond, the slip sent thunder rolling in waves that cut the legs off houses and folded schools like crumpled hands.

In a tiny New York hostel, a Pakistani girl wiped wet landslides from her eyes and gasped small aftershocks into her tiny phone.

Tide Paths

2008-03-22T00:49:17Z

Don’t speak to me of your wavy hair fluffed in frayed yarn crests or your black polka dot purse with heavy buckles fit to strap medieval knights in armor, or your unborn children hanging and swelling for your painful weighted milk. We took this journey to the field of the grayed ocean filled with cool apologies empty of any meaning or contrition.

The bare grate turned black with old burnt dreams. Your whispered gossip takes me from all these stale square windows, the grinning pans over the stove, casts me where the cold sea collapses in and in on itself, crawls forward and creeps back, gives up all the ground it has taken.

Even those occasional rages thrashing wind against cliffs and tossing logs like seed pods cannot dislodge your old patterns, the rhythm you never escape, rolling toward me and then away. Your placid face flickers, illuminated then locked in shadow.

Succulent

2008-03-22T00:47:04Z

The succulent on my window ledge fades into a slow death, not for lack of water or sun, but something buried too deep for withered roots, some fathomless hunger beyond my ken and capacity. Its once plump, cool appendages sink to hollowed valleys melted from their once ripe hills.

One day I saw a girl with shining buttercup hair and gentle eyes pooled beneath her thick glasses, the beautiful face of a nymph at dawn. Her long white arms had faded to dry twigs with bulging knobs for elbows and wrists, the swollen joints of reeds dried and hollowed by winter famine. The column of her windpipe bared sharp ridges raked by desert winds.

Succulent, juicy, thick, fat, full of liquid wealth. Where have your full curves flown to and what strange medicine must I brew for their return?

Basalt

2008-03-22T00:39:43Z

The cliffs cragged and scowling, the ragged stones that line the river’s banks scummed with algae. The mammoth rock sprouting tenacious trees through its jagged hide—all rose from the same source. Many years ago, so long that even the sky-scraping fir can’t remember, armies of mountains spouted and drooled ropey red hot strings of liquid stone.

“Lies,” the fir will answer you. “I’ve never seen such events and I’ve stood sentry here since the beginning of time.” Sheep graze among boulders coughed from the throat of the earth. They roll their yellow eyes at you when you ask and only tell you, “Don’t be foolish. This is all the world has ever grown: herds of grass, purple thistle, and bent wire fence.”

But you have heard the elders whisper, traced the clues in the rainbow grains, dug elbow deep in the old tales. And though the land rolls warm under your bare soles, you know it once wore a skin of molten fire. In the absence of that heat, that fury, the earth seems very cold and hard indeed.