Saturday, August 13, 2005

Shamrocks and Chocolates - Barbara Banta

Chocolate. Of all the things in life that would be troublesome to give up, chocolate is high on my list. Thankfully, not only do I *not* have to give it up, here in the cave, eating it is mandatory! I force myself to take another piece and as the silken delight melts in my mouth I look around my room for perhaps the 100th time.

My suite of rooms is in the shape of a three-leaf clover--a shamrock. I have no idea what types of quarters the others have been given, perhaps they are all alike, but something tells me that each of our rooms has been designed specifically to make that person happy.

My bedroom is one leaf, the kitchen another, and the third is, I think, waiting for me to design or tell it what it should be, for at the moment it is simply an empty shape. The stem of the shamrock, flanged wide at the bottom, narrower where it connects to the body, serves as the bathroom.

In the center, where leaves and stem converge, is the living-room or social area and here I sit, my box of chocolates on my lap, on a luscious fawn colored couch. Most of the furniture is rounded or freeform to fit the curving walls. Everything is either off-white or neutral tones, but there are brilliant flowering plants and ivy everywhere.

The chocolate prompts are lovely and the two words they've given me are words I cherish and claim in my writing: wonderment and conjure. An image in Archie's box of wonderments (a tiny bird's nest) also helped release a small golden memory.

One day, while sitting on my back porch, I saw movement in my garden and went to investigate. I found a baby bird, featherless, eyes sealed shut,
writhing in pain and covered with ants. Its movements had dug a tiny cup in the dusty earth. I lifted it into a trash can lid and poured water on it until the ants had been washed away. Not quite drowned, it lay there, gray and naked and gasping for air.

That night I sat looking at TV with the bird nestled in my hand. Every half hour or so it raised it's scrawny neck and begged for food and I fed it thin farina by eyedropper. After it ate it dropped into a deep sleep.

Suddenly it woke with a start and instead of begging began to squirm and wiggle, almost flinging itself out of my hand. I assumed the poison from the ant stings was causing it to go into a fit and feared the end was near.

Then it pooped.

Not a messy bird poop, but a perfect green and white marble fit for a box of wonderments.

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