Some Beautiful Leftover Debris

The forgotten and leftover things that people do are forgotten and leftover. There are all sorts of untellings of things that nobody will have talked about. Fierce, blood-letting accusations are dropped as if they had never been. Hatreds seem to disappear. Easy betrayals, like jackals crossing the grassy lower backlands with bright yellow eyes at night, go by like northern ghosts. A cobbled together clutch of new-found friends all whispering together they make quickened decisions feel right. How mobs and rabbles work is generally like this too. Jellyfish with their huge poisonous red manes bob and flow in the sea, catching the bare limbs of this and that swimmer swimming unawares. And what later washes up as memory? What comes ashore as truths? It is raked up with seaweed and debris, carted off to a nearby garbage heap, or burned under watchful eye in the sand. As for infidelities, fits, or the other small but aggressive human cruelties? At length, his final handshake with the kind proprietor after the couple’s last meal is over is all that can be left to mind to bear, after his lips have spit out a pinch of mukhwas clearing the palate and very good for digestion on the curb.