Mirupkai

Content Type: Fiction, Shorts Subject Matter: contemporary

Pickled chilis- there were enough of them there to burn down a Midwesterner’s family tree to its very roots. No spice in those people. None at all. Angelina moved on past the pickled mangos and more pickled chilis to the plain old chili powder. Product of India.

Once upon a time, Angelina had been from India, too.

But all the man behind her in line saw was her pale skin and her hazel eyes and what was that silly Midwestern girl doing buying extra-hot chili?

Angelina stepped out of the International Foods Emporium and into the cool fog of a San Francisco autumn. She slid the plastic shopping bag over one wrist, crossed her arms over her chest, and started walking toward the nearest trolley stop. The driver was a man with long, curling gray hair and Ringo Starr spectacles.

A long, long time ago, Angelina’s parents were hippies who kissed the sky and named her after the angel that had visited them when she was born.

Two years later, they divorced, and Angelina’s father moved to New Mexico.

Ding, ding, the city toured past them up hills and down avenues. People came and went; not so many tourists this week as there had been last month. Angelina liked it better this way. She didn’t like a lot of outsiders cluttering up her living space.

After the break-up, her mother had moved to Kansas, braided her hair in one thick rope, and sworn off men and moonshine forever. Angelina’s grandparents approved.

An old woman with jagged, sunken teeth grinned a mischievous warning at her from across the trolley aisle. Angelina did not smile back. The woman was a local; she ran- or, more accurately, now supervised (read: criticized) her son who ran the family restaurant in Chinatown.

Once upon a time, Angelina has flown to China and had lunch with a genuine midwife. There she learned that heat and cold in the blood can endanger, and heal.

The trolley dropped her off a block from home, but she took the long way around just to be able to walk past the window of the Portugese man who worked at the green grocer’s.

Last summer, a mysterious man with a dark, thick accent had seduced her into putting aside her responsibilities for a weekend of sensual exploration.

Her key was buried in her pocket below old gloves and movie ticket stubs. She took a while to fish them  out.

In Africa, she had sat beside monstrous rivers watching youths and men catch shining, scaly dinners for their families. Each time they checked to see if the fish could speak, and apologized even it couldn’t.

Up three flights of stairs she walked, with the chili powder burning in the Emporium’s bulk-stock “Thank You! Please Come Again!” bag. Another key turned the lock to her very own apartment, and she stepped-

Into a midwife’s clinic.

Onto the bank of the Nile.

Through curtains to a lover’s boudoir.

-over a pile of old magazines left there by her aging, hippie mother, and into the same Midwestern Kansas home she had grown up in. Almost-chili smells mingled with a library’s worth  of books, and Angelina breathed them in deeply.

Miles from anywhere, she knew she was home.