The Big Reading, and some Sloths.

Hey Myself. (let's not kid each other here) :)

So the big reading at Columbia went down the other night. I was the last reader of the evening, which I want to think is an honor, but might just be because I told them I was going to be late. Whatever the reason, it worked out great. There's lots of free booze at Columbia, that's one of the things they do really well over there, so everyone was pretty loosey goosey by the time I read and I really think they enjoyed it. I got a lot of really serious compliments afterwards and I can't tell you how good that feels.

I was just talking with a friend today about how graduate writing programs are such dour affairs...We walk around all day talking about how much of a lottery it is to crack into the publishing world and "make it". It's really a downer to any kind of ambition. There's obviously a lot of reasons why it happens, among them pure capitalism and certainly a large measure of false modesty and self defeat. But it's pretty ridiculous when you think about it. My friend and I resolved to be more positive, to try and change the "suffering under the burden of our calling" mindset that roams the halls like a frikin ghost.

So, it was good to get some validation from my peers. Plus, I wasn't sure how the dialogue in the story would read out loud, and it went over really well. I read a slightly different version of Cameo, but before that I read a story called "Sloth" that I haven't posted up here because it's always been in a state of flux. But my workshop last semester loved it, and now that I read it again, it does a lot of things I really really like. I imagine I have to post it here now with the big buildup.

Note: No profanity! Yaay. it was beginning to feel like a shipyard in here.
Note #2: Lots of italicized dialogue that might not come through on this stupid platform. Should be pretty apparent though
Note #3: This story was taken from some interesting real life experiences,(namely being on a boat cruise in Brazil) and I used my name and the name of an old friend in it. I have this weird thing with authenticity, and even though none of the people in the story actually did anything near what happens in the story, when I just make up names it seems fake. Maybe I'm doomed to use the names of people I know and care about, even if the stories have nothing to do with them. Makes it easier to write for me somehow. Enough notes, enjoy.


Story #8

Sloth

In the morning a wooden dinghy pulled alongside with a sputtering motor. It was two kids with a three-toed sloth. The sloth was cinched around the girl like a baby, ear to ear with her. It was as big as her whole torso with its arms around her neck and the fur of it greenish with fungus and matted and dark down on it’s back.

Gershon came out to the back deck and spoke to the kids. His portugese sounded quick and it was early. But it was warm and I was watching the kids. They smiled and the girl shrugged the sloth towards Gershon. The boy held the dingy alongside against the pull of the river. I went down to the cabin to wake Joanna. The sloth looked like something worth being woken up for.

I had a romantic plan to kiss her til she woke, but she was up, sitting up in the bed curling loose hairs between her fingernails.

When we came back up Gershon had the sloth and the dinghy was tied to the yacht with both kids standing in it, steady on their feet. The girl looked so thin and frail without the sloth in her arms and the boy smiled up at us, probably because by now he knew the trip had been worth it. They were dark kids, and short, and the boy had missing teeth.

When Joanna saw the sloth in Gershon’s arms she sucked in her breath,
Oh, is that what I think it is? Oh, look at its little bum!
It was part of her charm to always seem surprised. I had told her already about the sloth, and about the way it looked in the arms of the girl.

Oh, Gershon, can I hold him, is it dangerous?

No, it is super safe.

He reached behind his head to loose the sloth’s claws, to peel it off of him. It moved slowly. Everything about it was languid, like it was trapped in solution. Gershon too moved slowly when he took its arms from around his neck. He went up to Joanna and stood by her side, shrugging the weight of the sloth off of him, towards her. She took it in the same way. They both took their time in the exchange, both infected by the languid care the sloth seemed to give to the world. It was amazing to watch. The river going by regular speed and the breeze, and their delicacy with the sloth in a bubble of slowness that seemed to cover only them, with the sloth reaching one arm up around Joanna’s neck, and then the other, cinching to her torso in the same way it had held Gershon and the girl.

When Joanna had it she tried to bounce it like a baby. You could see the sloth tighten on her with the bouncing.

It’s so warm and so strong. Aaron you’ve got to hold him. He’s squeezing me everywhere.
He probably thinks you’re a tree trunk.

No, he knows me. Then to the sloth, to the back of its head, You know me don’t you? You know just who I am.

I turned to Gershon,

Gershon, is it a boy or a girl? Will you ask them?

With certainty.

Then he turned to the kids, steady in the boat and spoke to them in portugese. The boy answered in Portugese and I could tell it was choppier for him, a second language. He made a gesture to the sloth and laughed and Gershon laughed too, then turned to us to translate.

It is a girl, he says. He says it is clearly a girl because it has no…you know…
Gershon looked sheepish and did not continue.

And where did they find it Gershon, will you ask them?

He answered me without asking them,

They live in the jungle all along the river, super high in the high jungle.

Oh, but will you ask them particularly where they found this one? This particular one?
With certainty.

Then he spoke again to the kids and the boy again answered in rutty portugese, making gestures high above his head and then pointing to the girl. Gershon turned again to translate,

In the trees near their home, he found it. It was very high and he thought it was a nest of bees on the tree trunk. He climbed up the tree and gave it to his sister. This is his sister.

I looked at the boy and the girl. The boy looked at me and was proud.

And Gershon, do they live here? Do they take the sloth out to visit all the charters?

Yes, they live on the river. They are from a village closer to Manaus, I believe. It seems that way from their speak, from the way they speak. To take the sloth out is a normal thing. Those that want to hold it give them a small money or pay them to take away the boat trash, the trash from the boat. But don’t worry, it is taken care of. Everyone is happy. Yes?

Joanna spoke,

I’m only happy if Aaron holds him. You hold him, hon.

Love, it’s a girl.

I know. Here, you take him.

It was also part of her charm to act contrary. To fight those little battles, and win them.

She came up to me with the sloth in her arms. She moved across the white deck surface of the yacht. She braced at my side in the same way Gershon had done with her. I could smell the sloth, mold like old pillows and the smell of the river and the tops of trees. It was the strangest thing when it touched me, the fur more coarse than I had imagined, and I felt a tinge of careful slowness in me in the immediate presence of it. Like a whim. Like the smell of the sloth brought from far away on a breeze.

Wait, Jo. I don’t think I want to. I know it won’t make sense but I think I’d just like to watch you hold her. I guess it almost seems sacred.

She stood to process this, the sloth still touching my side, the slowness of it all around us, like humidity. Joanna spoke down, to the sloth.

It’s because he knows we’ve got a good thing going, you and me. Don’t you think we got a good thing going?

The sloth didn’t answer. They stood there and I stepped away and Joanna moved across the white deck surface of the yacht to where the dinghy was tied. She moved like she knew I was watching her.

She made eye contact with the girl and the girl reached up for the sloth. The sloth, on its own, took her arms from around Joanna’s neck, one at a time, and reached for the girl. It must have known her by her smell. Joanna leaned down and bumped her hips outwards to give the sloth something to stand on as it reached. For a moment, with its arms around the neck of the girl and its feet on Joanna, braced, the sloth stretched between them like a conduit of slowness. Like a filament. Stretched between the two of them and in that moment, I swear it, a power was loosed, what I had seen with Gershon and Joanna, what I had felt when its coarse fur touched my skin. A languid bomb of slowness epicentered out from their connection to swamp that whole scene.

The river almost stopped moving, it slowly scraped its wide banks. The mud of it eternally churned the shallows brown in slow eddys. The million leaves of the jungle all along that corridor of water stopped oscillating in the breeze and instead moved like slow dancers, back and forth. A split tailed swallow hung in the air above the river.

You could hold this sloth and stop everything. You could hold this sloth and the world would stop. You could carry this sloth wrapped around your chest like a time machine, calming your blood, making your heart beat slow enough to live forever.

It was the most beautiful thing. The ageless kids in the dinghy smiling and braced imperceptibly against the not-pull of the stopped river. Gershon caught in a smile he couldn’t erase because it would take an eternity to do so. And Joanna, her wit and suppleness braced on the deck in all youth forever passing that kind talisman to the girl. And the smell of the river and the smell of the tops of the trees.