Flamenco With a Cane

Sparkle Ditch - #18

I’m compelled to deliver a disclaimer to new subscribers: this post includes a story that’s different from my usual stuff. I hope you like what’s in here, but if you don’t, I invite you to visit some earlier posts (such as #6, #8, #11, or the previous #17) that more represent what I do.

There was a section of a longer (*gasp* 13 pages!?) story I’d intended to use for this, but at the last minute felt like something short, sharp, and heavy (not so much heavy with emotion as with page-weight). This one, from a few years back, was quick to arrive. It was as I said unusual—an unintentional, different approach. I’ll never say experimental.

Nearly every sentence in this story, if pulled out and forced to live alone, could survive as a story by itself. I guess that’s what I meant by page-weight.

Like many writers I might write about places I’ve never been, and of course people I’ve never met. But in this case I did once genuinely take the boat from Buenos Aires to Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay. The town was indeed nearly empty, and each footstep I took on the aged cobblestone roads felt like a story.

Does that make sense? Does anything really? Stray dogs, motorbikes, and me, with the night before’s club in Argentina on my mind. This is what I came away with. Dance with me. Just watch your step.

I love you.

xo—JO

FLAMENCO WITH A CANE

So how is it she winds up nearly dead in a city in Uruguay that’s nearly dead. Just off the Buquebus from Buenos Aires. She’s sober now. So there are the advantages—balance, wit, cognition, though wouldn’t say confidence. But she still barely makes it. She met a dog. It was a dog that did it. Yes a stray but a familiar one. You can tell in the eyes she’d have said. He followed her until she sat on a curb and looked in his eyes. Then she took him to a place for a chivito under a Norteña sign. They sat with more flies than people she’d ever met. There was a hot winter wind that she knew, that she’d once known. It wasn’t long before she became the stray. She began to follow the dog. She left herself be led around.

She’d once been married. There had been an engagement party and her drunk fiancé and his friends swatted a hornet’s nest and a dozen people got stung. Her mother included. They got married anyway and then the fancy old Rolls her dad had rented to drive them from the church to the reception broke down on Route 128. They rode to their own reception in the back of a van full of guests. She should’ve known. But you can’t ever really know, can you?

So it wasn’t so much the dog that did it but a motorcycle that hit her. She didn’t think it such a big deal but she was split wide open at the hip. But motorcycles don’t usually hit single women do they? Not even stray dogs so much right? And hit no less in a city nearly empty. Oh the odds of life. She’d not seen another person out walking freely much less a motorcycle—until this one two seconds before it struck her and put her back on the curb. Who would run her down. Perhaps the man with the cane she met at Lo de Roberto last night but he was gone. And now the motorcycle was gone and she was in bad shape. There were more dogs now. More would come. The hot winter wind blew in again. Get down you dogs, you best wait until it’s past.