First off, I’m excited to share Rebecca Bergfjord’s new writing endeavor, Dowsing for Bloodroot. You won’t want to miss it. Here’s a teaser:
I am not on vacation, and there is a scorpion in the bathroom. He clings to the rough-plastered blue wall over the doorway, his tiny rose-gray abdomen curling to a swollen, alarming point. I walk through the threshold and imagine him dropping down onto me. It is too late and I’m too tired to bother wrangling him onto a piece of cardboard or into an empty glass, racing for the nearest window and tipping him out into the night.
For many minutes, I watch him from my own perch on the toilet-with-no-seat, both of us unmoving. At last, I tell him he’s welcome to stay as long as he likes—to enjoy any mosquitos he finds—but he must stay out of the bedroom. I clearly state my boundary and go out, shutting the metal door behind me. Arranging myself under the cascade of bug net pouring over the bed, I go to sleep without a second thought. When I awaken, he is gone.
I have gone somewhere hot and cheap in rural Central America. Somewhere I can afford to rent a small cold-water apartment with a hammock and the rare puff of breeze. My concrete block room (that would never meet any building codes, however creatively interpreted,) overlooks a ragged yard framed with banana plants, several leonine papayas, and a single squat coco palm. A flock of chickens work their way around the edge, scratching at leaf litter beneath philodendron and bromeliad. Shaggy Hooker’s sugar palms and acid-bleached magenta bougainvillea embrace awkwardly in the far corner. The neighbor’s heavily pregnant dog, teats hanging near the ground, wanders through every few hours, patrolling the property despite the 105-degree heat and her burdened state. Out front the highway grumbles then roars, jake-brakes juddering over the squaw and shrill of countless birds.
Our next book-club read is Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer and the next meetup will be in late October (date tbd)!
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