Faris Dajani & Tamara Nassar
A gust of wind was hovering above the vista, fresh and brimming with sin.
With hesitancy in its whistle, it alone recalled what had happened here. Lifting the stench of the dead over the vestiges – now drab and devoid of colour and form – chemtrails incongruously contoured the horizon. Below was muck and sepia and noise.
The idle oil well was a stubborn figure defying the dejected scene. The sad erection of a humiliated landscape.
Everyday, the cockroaches in these parts were treated to a desolate medley – tired sirens, dense air that crackled off of rocks with an acoustic hiss, and when all was still, the sound of the well rusted in the distance, making no secret of its age.
That day, however, the ensemble was led with fiery cadence by steel-toed boots scorching through glass.
Three white hoods trudged through a collage of needles and plastic debris, appearing from above as synchronised sailboats cutting through an ocean of asphalt. The fumes arrived months ago and bred pitiless ash. Only now could hazmat suits ward off their potency.
The rescue mission was about to come into contact with its objective. A yellow presence had been observed from the gaping eyes of desire above, protruding in its bloom among the waste. Unaware of the absurdity of her presence and the grim gaze that possessed it, she was only moved by the dust-laden winds that ruffled her petals westward. Piety on piety. Slender and young. How can the eyes demand more beauty from beauty? She was impossible to miss, jutting out like a cricket in a bowl of yoghurt.
Five gloved fingers coiled around her neck with such grace. A specimen of celestial perfection could not be afforded the mercy of mortality. The wound incised before the pluck, a holy slit. She had to be executed to be apotheosized.
It was months and miles away, in the vignettes of a marble hall adorned with ornate hoods, that desire was again satiated.
A carnal dance: Japanese screens caress Corinthian columns. Balloons veil an elevated jar, gently pecking its lime green glass with every bob and sway. Garish whiteness traces the curves and peaks of every item on display. A proud archway spreads itself open into the hall, with a placard clumsily covering its groyne that reads, “Botanical Heritage.”
Below the mensch pace to and fro. Heads looking groundwards, muttering sweet nothings to virtual somethings.
The balloons are jerked away. A mother pulls at her son’s hand to move him along. Behind the green glass sits a perfect specimen.
Her amber crown, brighter and yellower than virtue. All throat and bristle and fluff. Perfumed with glycerin and powdered with silica, she stands expectant behind her window. Stolid and stout.
The patrons rush by, or are rushed, the same difference; to her, the same promise of gift. They offer her no more than a sidelong glance.