Sweating
Under ORS*
I sit in the shade of a large cashew tree in my backyard, a breeze blowing ascross my face. I am sweating slightly, but the breeze quickly whisks it away--my skin is cool and dry. It is hot here, 100F on a cool day, but it is manageable.
The breeze dies down for a moment; I grab some ice from my hut, wrap it in a wet towel, and rest the towel across my forehead. I lay down on a bed of leaves under the tree. This is nice. The audiobook I just downloaded, No Country for Old Men, is very engaging. So much that I don't want to pauce it when my younger brother knocks on my door and calls me for lunch: "Mamadou, konton!" "Awa," I reply, "Mbe naani saayin." I slowly sit up from my comfortable position and amble through my room, grabbing my spoon on the way.
I take my place at the bowl with the rest of my brothers and my host dad. Lunch today is a giant pile of squash and carrots, fresh from the garden. My favorite. We sit under the shade structure and eat slowly, enjoying the vegetables. The breeze picks up, cooling my sweat induced by the hot pepper I added to my section of the bowl.
After lunch a neighbor comes over and starts talking to my dad about when the rain will start this year. They talk fast and mumble, but I understand everything they say. We nap idly for a few minutes in the yard. A woman from a neighboring village walks through my compound selling bananas and frozen hibiscus juice. I buy some fruit for later and a juice for now. It is cool, sweet, and refreshing.
I saunter to my backyard and lie down again under the cashew tree. Though it is not yet 4:00pm, I can feel the temperature dropping already. It will be cool after the sun sets tonight. I might have to pull out my sleeping bag for my outdoor bed. I drift off into a lazy afternoon nap.
Awake
I open my eyes and am immediately aware of the pol of sweat under my back. I am lying on a plastic mat on the floor of my concrete-and-mud hut. In my right hand is a woven hand fan. It is 4:00pm--too hot to sleep. I must have half passed out from exhaustion after fanning myself for the last hour.
I get up and go to the hole in my backyard. I have had four liters of water today, but my pee is yellow. I reenter my hut and lay back down on the mat, worn out from the effort of standing in the sun for 30 seconds.
The sweat on the mat cools me for a moment. The moment ends all too quickly. I sigh and pick up my hand fan.
*ORS = Oral Rehydration Salts
P.S. Did anyone catch the reference to a Philip Roth novel?
P.P.S. I'll get back to normal writing next week after this foray into fiction.
I sit in the shade of a large cashew tree in my backyard, a breeze blowing ascross my face. I am sweating slightly, but the breeze quickly whisks it away--my skin is cool and dry. It is hot here, 100F on a cool day, but it is manageable.
The breeze dies down for a moment; I grab some ice from my hut, wrap it in a wet towel, and rest the towel across my forehead. I lay down on a bed of leaves under the tree. This is nice. The audiobook I just downloaded, No Country for Old Men, is very engaging. So much that I don't want to pauce it when my younger brother knocks on my door and calls me for lunch: "Mamadou, konton!" "Awa," I reply, "Mbe naani saayin." I slowly sit up from my comfortable position and amble through my room, grabbing my spoon on the way.
I take my place at the bowl with the rest of my brothers and my host dad. Lunch today is a giant pile of squash and carrots, fresh from the garden. My favorite. We sit under the shade structure and eat slowly, enjoying the vegetables. The breeze picks up, cooling my sweat induced by the hot pepper I added to my section of the bowl.
After lunch a neighbor comes over and starts talking to my dad about when the rain will start this year. They talk fast and mumble, but I understand everything they say. We nap idly for a few minutes in the yard. A woman from a neighboring village walks through my compound selling bananas and frozen hibiscus juice. I buy some fruit for later and a juice for now. It is cool, sweet, and refreshing.
I saunter to my backyard and lie down again under the cashew tree. Though it is not yet 4:00pm, I can feel the temperature dropping already. It will be cool after the sun sets tonight. I might have to pull out my sleeping bag for my outdoor bed. I drift off into a lazy afternoon nap.
Awake
I open my eyes and am immediately aware of the pol of sweat under my back. I am lying on a plastic mat on the floor of my concrete-and-mud hut. In my right hand is a woven hand fan. It is 4:00pm--too hot to sleep. I must have half passed out from exhaustion after fanning myself for the last hour.
I get up and go to the hole in my backyard. I have had four liters of water today, but my pee is yellow. I reenter my hut and lay back down on the mat, worn out from the effort of standing in the sun for 30 seconds.
The sweat on the mat cools me for a moment. The moment ends all too quickly. I sigh and pick up my hand fan.
*ORS = Oral Rehydration Salts
P.S. Did anyone catch the reference to a Philip Roth novel?
P.P.S. I'll get back to normal writing next week after this foray into fiction.
F
ReplyDeleteTavish, your sketch is evocative and the details are tactile and sharply defined. I got a sense from reading the sketch of the narrator’s being both a participant and an observer in the scene. The sketch communicates, to me at least, a sense of how foreign the pace of life is there compared to here. On the one hand, the narrator has contemporary technology in the audiobook, which sets him apart as he listens to the McCarthy novel. On the other hand, the narrator eats with a single spoon and what appears to be a common bowl (“my place at the bowl” – not “my bowl,” but “the bowl”) shared with his “brothers.” But as to how they are his brothers, the sketch is deliberately open-ended.
The sketch seems designed to refuse the reader undue access to the narrator’s emotions while conveying a lot about how it feels, physically, to be outside and inside in the space where the narrator lives. I like the way the scene ends with a sigh. I wanted to learn more about whether the sigh came from simply the heat and listlessness induced by it. Or was the sigh a sign of a deeper wish perhaps unfulfilled?
Thanks for sending this along. I’m afraid I missed whatever allusion to Philip Roth you embedded in the sketch. Haven’t read Roth in a long time.
Uncle Bill