Sloths to a Flame

 

Felix and Gilbert were hanging in a tree doing what sloths do best, relaxing in the hot afternoon sun. They were also observing Dale, who was busy collecting buds that were particular to the season and also considered a delicacy to the species.

“That Dale! Who does he think he is, making us look bad for doing what we’re supposed to do?” Felix grumbled.

“It ain’t natural, Felix” Gilbert lazily answered.

Dale overheard the conversation but he didn’t let it bother him. He was used to it. Ever since he was a kid, he had more energy that the other sloths. He was never content just hanging in a tree.

The council of elders tried many interventions. There was counseling, homeopathic therapies, even pseudo-medicinal rituals involving chanting, rainforest plants and dancing. Nothing took the wind out of his sails. The elders reluctantly gave up and let him be an active sloth.

Dale spent weeks collecting and stowing buds in hollowed, fallen trees. He garnered enough buds for many times more sloths than were in the group in which he lived, yet he felt compelled to gather more. When he slept he dreamt about buds.

A few weeks later Felix and Gilbert were hanging in their favorite tree when the sun was slowly covered by a thick grey that wasn’t cloud formations.

“What do you think that is, Gilbert?” Felix asked.

“I don’t know, Felix but it don’t look good” was his only response.

Little did they know, the rain forest all around them was ablaze. Pure coincidence protected them. A few geographical features, like a wide stream to the north and a sheer rock face to the east were keeping them safe.

Close to evening a massive group of foreign sloths slowly dragged themselves to their safe spot.

“We’ve made it! We are safe!” the leader said as he looked back to his comrades. The news was met by a hail of cheers.

“Not so fast!” Felix said, “What do you all think you are doing here?”

“We’ve escaped unthinkable horrors! The forest is burning. There has been a lot of death and destruction. Please, show mercy, let us stay. At least until the fires die down…” he pleaded.

“There aren’t enough leaves in this patch of land for all of us! You might have survived these fires, but we’ll all die from starvation if you stay!” Felix shot back.

“Can I say something?” Dale meekly interjected.

“What could you possibly have to say, you busy body?” Felix snapped.

“With all due respect” Dale said, “We most certainly do have enough food for us and them. And for a good while”

“How so?” Felix asked, genuinely curious.

“I have buds stored all over the place. Almost every fallen tree from here to the outer edges is stuffed with them. There might be enough for months” he answered.

The group was so quiet one could hear the distant crackle of the burning jungle. “All right, you can stay until the situation improves” Felix said.

The crown roared with joy. In a few weeks the rains put out the remaining fires. The displaced sloths found a suitable home fairly close to their new found friends.

 

Greener Grass

Rodrigo lived in a poor neighborhood in the small city of Sorocaba in Brazil. His father was a street vendor, he sold popcorn and his mother was a housekeeper. Rodrigo was never satisfied with his lot in life. He wanted more. He dreamed of one day moving to the United States.

Stan lived in an upper middle class neighborhood in New Jersey. He worked as a lawyer in Manhattan. His life consisted of a commute, work, sleep, a minuscule amount of time reserved for eating and little else. He had no family. He wanted to live more but he never turned down the firm when it needed him. He dreamed of one day moving to a tropical location and having daily adventures.

A step in Rodrigo´s dream came true at the U.S consulate in São Paulo. He was awarded his B-2 visitor visa. He could only stay six months and was not eligible to work, but as his grandmother used to say, “those are man´s laws and not God´s laws.” It was this convenient reasoning that he and his family used to skirt a lot of rules.  

Stan was called to H.R. one Friday afternoon and was given news that he wanted to hear for a long time. “Due to the negative financial climate in our great nation, we are going to have to lay you off.” With that news came a fat severance package. He immediately booked a trip to Rio de Janeiro. He was going to test the waters for a longer term move with this prolonged vacation.

After three months, Rodrigo found that the US wasn´t all he thought it would be. First of all, he arrived in the Boston metro area in December and it was already colder than his freezer back home. Secondly, he had to work. Work hard. Hard work was an even more foreign concept to him than the awful microwave dinners he was subsiding on. Lastly, he missed his friends and family.

In the same period of time, Stan was having a similar experience in Brazil. First, it was HOT. He sweated through three shirts a day. He also wasn´t learning Portuguese as fast as he thought he would. This isolated him. Lastly, he couldn´t get over how nothing worked properly. There were always lines to nowhere. Everywhere he went the system was always down and he found the workers to be unhelpful or incompetent. There was unavoidable corruption at every level of daily life.

Rodrigo decided he needed to pray. Nothing else was working and he figured it wouldn´t hurt. He walked to the nearest Catholic Church and to his surprise, they were having a mass in Portuguese. He took off his down coat and took a seat.

After repeating some sentences in a lifeless droning fashion and transitioning between kneeling, standing and sitting for what felt like fifty times minimum, Rodrigo felt better. That feeling went away quickly when he heard screams and shots. Rodrigo took five bullets from a self-proclaimed patriot who was tired of people praying to his God, in his country and in another language.

Stan realized that he was spending so much time dealing with bureaucracy of trying to get his affairs in order that he had taken very little time to go to the beach and live life. This was specifically why he chose to move to Brazil in the first place. He got his things together and went off to Copacabana Beach.

Stan sat in a chair in the sand under the sun with a delicious cold beer in his hand. He felt that he could get used to this. He watched beautiful women in bikinis walk by while he slowly rounded the corner from buzzed to drunk.

One lovely lady stopped to make small talk. It was a ruse to distract him. Her boyfriend came from the side with a knife and demanded all of Stan´s belongings. Stan refused. The thief plunged the knife into Stan´s heart with such precision he barely felt a thing. The murderous thief laughed with his girlfriend about how stupid the gringo was as they surveyed their booty while walking away from the scene.  

Game Over!

Foot volley, which is a mixture of soccer and volley ball is a way of life in Guarã, a small city in a remote part of the Amazon valley in Brazil. Players use their legs, feet and head to get the ball over a net. It sounds like a fun way to pass the time and it can be, just not in Guarã. There, winning a game can mean you get to live another day or will be burned alive bound by old car tires and doused in gasoline. It harks back to the worst days of the Roman empire but instead of Caesars presiding over the tournaments, there are drug dealers deciding the fates of athletes.

If parents see that their child is particularly good at foot volley, they sometimes will sell all their possessions to ensure their child has a bus ticket, one way, out of Guarã. The child will sometimes grow up in the company of relatives without their parents because the parents are too poor to make the bus fare to get themselves out. In some cases, parents end up dead for sending away a good prospect.

José had no parents to care for him or to sell possessions to get him out of Guarã. José lived on the street in a pack of about 10 boys. He was the best of around 4 really good players. When they weren´t playing foot volley, training foot volley or trying to get something to eat from the trash, the pack was usually either sniffing glue or trying to get their hands on it. Not José. Some time ago, José found some text books in the trash while looking for dinner. José was taught to read by the church and he was grateful and did not want their gift to go in vain.

José had won so much that he had built himself quite the name in Guarã. He was like a local celebrity. He was forced to go to the big outdoor “funk parties” as they were called, thrown by the local drug dealers. He was paraded around like a mascot. He despised them all. He despised the drug dealers who he saw as poisoning the community. He despised the party goers and useless people lowered even further in his eyes for idolizing such horrid people. He despised the cops who were easily bribed by the drug bosses and would abuse street children in every sense of the word for their own pleasure.

One night José lay in his concrete bed, in reality a sewer tunnel opening, trying to get the images out of his head of what he saw that day. He had won a major day long tournament closed with not only the murder of every loser but their depraved torture as well. José had seen a lot up to this point but this was worse than anything he had seen. His mind went back and forth from the torture to the faces of the spectators who watched in ecstasy and cheered on the torturers. He was forced to watch from a rickety homemade throne that was spray painted gold and had worn purple pillows fixed to it to make it look like a real king´s chair.

As he laid there, tears rolling down his eyes, he smelled smoke. It was not the usual smell of bonfires which were frequent during the nights after a tournament. It had a more chemical smell. He went out from his makeshift bedroom and climbed an electrical tower. A few thatched roofed houses were on fire. There was little to no response, probably because of the level of intoxication of the people. For the most part of the population, they were passed out drunk.

José thought quick. He knew how he could help. Help himself, help his city, help his country, help the world. He made his way to the police precinct which looked no different than the front office of a land fill. He went to the patio where the few broken down vehicles were parked. He grabbed two 20 liter canisters and went running. As he approached the burning huts he poured some of the liquid from the canisters into discarded water bottles and aluminum cans. He then proceeded to throw them near the flames.

Where the bottle and cans hit, great little explosions took place and the flames quickly spread. He was throwing containers of gasoline into the flames! He then moved on to huts that were not on fire and started to throw flaming soda cans onto the roofs. When they were sufficiently ablaze he went to the only houses in the village, slipshod building decorated by what looked like by psychopathic children, and started to fling his mini Molotov cocktails over the walls. In no time they were on fire as well.

José, satisfied with his work, started for the outskirts of the village. It was getting hot as the fire was spreading rapidly. He was surprised by the lack of commotion on the street. Surely some people were not so drunk as to burn to death without waking. He didn´t care either way. He made his way to the outskirts of the village, climbed a little foot hill and watch the fire do its cleansing.

The Trash Collector

 

Bernie struggled as he pushed his home made trash cart up a slight incline to get to a particularly enticing pile of rubble he saw while scouting the neighborhood the day before. He looked up and saw three vultures circling over an abandoned soccer field. He loved birds and felt a special kinship with vultures.

Bernie arrived at the recently demolished house. He wasted no time looking for the most valuable materials. He was lucky if there was any of the metal rebar left behind but the demolition crews usually kept that for themselves. If they were in a real hurry, though, they sometimes left behind even copper piping and wiring. This was a jackpot for Bernie. No chance this time. Bernie noticed that the pile had already been rummaged. Crack heads probably.

Though a lot of the best stuff had already been taken, Bernie still saw a lot of good stuff. As he mined the pile he found a little, locked metal box. He didn´t think anything of it and threw it into his cart.

Later that night after a hardy dinner of rice, beans and today, a little chicken, he told his wife Sandra of the day´s haul and they went outside to pick over it and see just what he had scored that day.

“What´s this?” his wife asked.

“Oh, that little box? I found it at that demo a few blocks up. I don´t think there is much weight there. Ain´t gonna be worth much” he said.

“Aren´t you curious about what´s inside?” she asked.

“No” he answered with a grunt as he threw some pieces over into another pile.

“You think you can get it open?” she asked.

“Yeah, probably” he answered.

“Then open it” she said.

“Not now. Ain´t gonna make us any money opening boxes. Let´s separate this stuff. Trucks coming tomorrow for a pick up. You know if we ain´t ready, he ain´t stopping” he said, now getting a little annoyed.

She set it aside. She went back to separating. When they were finally satisfied with the night´s separating they made their way to the house. Later that night, Bernie´s wife woke up. She had a strong feeling that she had to do something but couldn´t figure out what. She went to the kitchen for a glass of water. Then she remembered the box. She went out in her pajamas to retrieve it.

She realized that it would be more difficult to open than she thought, so she slipped it under the bed and forgot about it.

A few months past and financial difficulties starting to tear the small family apart. Even though they owned the tiny piece of land and the shack they lived in, they hadn´t been able to pay property taxes for a long time. The government was threatening to take their property away. To make matters worse, their land was on the projected path of a new highway so the government had extra interest in seizing the property.

Things got to the point where Bernie was ready to bolt. He had family in the North East and there was a government program that was giving free money away. This was very enticing. He would practically be given what he currently earned for his backbreaking toil and he would be close to old friends and relatives. Besides, his wife was really starting to get on him about their financial woes. He had nothing to lose. The government was going to take his house anyway. Might as well let them pay him to do nothing, he thought.

One night when Bernie was sure his wife was asleep he gathered a few meager belongings and went to the local bus terminal. He bought one, one way trip to Bahia, his home state.

Sandra woke up that morning and did not need to think too hard to figure out what had happened. Bernie was gone and so were his things. They really did not have much so it was all the more apparent. A single tear ran down her face when she said out loud, “Stop it! It´s over”

She now would have to work even harder without Bernie around. She bent down to get her shoes from under the bed. As she felt for her shoes her hand brushed upon the metal box that she had put there months ago. She decided that she would take it to the locksmith on her rounds looking for recyclables.

Sandra arrived at the locksmith “Pedro, can you open this for me?”

“How much you gonna pay me?” Pedro said with a playful smile. He always had a thing for Sandra.

“I´ll split with you whatever is in the box” she answered.

“How about you just have dinner with me, my treat” he played.

“Well, Pedro, as of today, I am a single woman. I just might take you up on that” she played back.

“Deal” Pedro said with a smile.

Pedro pulled out some rusty tools and went to work on the tiny lock. In no time it was open. “Ain´t nothing in here, Sandra. Just some papers”

Sandra looked in the box. He was right. Just some papers. But something gave Sandra a feeling that they weren´t just any papers. They looked official.

“Thanks Pedro” she said as she carefully put the box on the trash cart.

“How about our dinner?” Pedro said this time more shy than playful.

“I´ll come back and we can work out the details” she said.

Sandra thought of all the people she could show the papers to. Who did she know who would know what they were? Then she thought of Marcos. He was an attorney who always separated his recyclables from his trash just for her and Bernie. He was a nice person. He would help. His office was in his house so she knew he´d be there.

She rang the buzzer. “How can I help you?” a voice asked through the intercom.

“Is Marcos in?” Sandra asked.

“One moment” the voice said.

The door popped open. It was Marcos´s secretary. “Come in please. Marcos said he has a few moments to spare”

“Thank you” Sandra said.

With the box tucked under her arm, Sandra entered Marcos´s office.

“Hello, Sandra! How are you? Would you care for a coffee?” he asked.

“No thank you. How are you?” she asked back.

“I am spectacular as always, my dear. How can I help you today?” Marcos asked.

Sandra told her short story about the box and asked if he could give an opinion as to what the contents were. She handed over the box.

Marcos´s eyes opened very wide and for a moment Sandra thought they would fall out of his head.

“What is it Marcos?” she asked.

“These are gold certificates, Sandra. And many of them” he told her. Sandra had a confused look on her face so Marcos added “this is a lot of money here!”

Sandra went blank. She could only muster the question, “How much?”

“This first one is for 10,000 DOLLARS! United States dollars. And there are a stack of them!”

A small smile flashed across Sandra´s face. She pinched off a few of the certificates and handed them to Marcos. “You have always been kind to me. Take these” she said.

“No, you don´t….” Marcos started.

“I insist and if you don´t take them I will rip them up and throw them in your waste bin” she said with a smile.

“Well, if you insist” Marcos said, Sandra´s smile was so contagious he could not help but do so himself.

Sandra carefully put the box back onto the trash cart and started to make her way back home. She could not help but to think how her life was going to change. She thought of the freedom this money would afford her. Her mind flashed to Bernie but she quelled that in an instant. Good riddance. He showed his true character when he walked out that door.

She made one stop on her way home.

“Pedro” she called.

From the back of the cramped shack she heard “Yes dear? Come to accept my proposal?” he said jokingly.

“Yes. I have. And I´m paying”

 

São Paulo- Life Stopped, Stopped Life

São Paulo- Stopped Life, Life Stopped

 

 

Daily, people sit crawling towards destinations- stopped life

Daily, people get hit floating towards dysfunctions- life stopped

Sensical absurdities, beautiful ugliness

Sad happiness, rich poverty

My São Paulo is an island surrounded by an electric fence

Invisible danger all around that exists in the hearts of men

On the same street a child goes hungry, another eats despite satiation

Here a man is not measured by the content of their character

but by the name stamped upon his garments

Slavery still exists here; it just took on different forms;

like traffic, taxes, low wages and a civil war that has become the norm

People throw rocks, police shoot bullets, nothing comes to change

Love it or leave it, because to São Paulo none of this is strange