April Littrell
Happiness
The first of a new series on sound. Alt. links: Apple Music or Spotify
An undisclosed island. He was on paradise, enclosed. Clothed in sand-lined pockets sewn onto sand-colored pants.
Nightfall in the cabin strikes the way the villagers do their bamboo with hand-ground axes to a rallying cloud of volcanic dust. A light island train trickles down the half-piped bamboo gutters lining a clean rubble road.
Fires twinkle in windows twixt the tall rice grasses rolling whispers down terraced hills. A small black bug looks up at the biped above or appears to the way one looks at the sky when the clouds shift ’fore continuing their own scurry.
The man is heavy an’ light, lifted from the neck like a diner syrup lever to press on amid unfamiliar trotting ground. Suppose it’s good here.
The man’s hungry, further off-road down-stream done rambling ’til light’s apparent in the distance. One chance at food this night. A parent in the distance, that sign with a plate and lotus and tall tiki torches splashing glow onto entrance rocks rounding up to the terrace.
The man’s decided here he’ll eat. The man’s me and I take a seat where the one waitress wipes confusion off a tired, friendly face with one swath splay of the menu. A stranger sits far back, outta sight, sipping a stick of tobacco. His embers dance in the distance against a deep black jungle wall, buzzing.
The night-dwellers, friends of the fag-dancer, flip conversation across another round table in the grass. I’m into my colorful meal.
She comes by again, dream-like archetype, the type to take you from one wistful slumber plot to the next an’ never to be seen in that form again.
“Excuse me, happiness?”
Now I’m scarfing a shrimp dish and hear this and get slammed by the heat of that rice doused in that question and thunder a thick reply from a throat satisfied by what it’d needed for some time until that moment. She was talking about the dinner.
As she grinned that kindly mouth-slice reserved for anonymous clientele and took plates and dashed noiselessly away, the man stared out across waves of rice. He’d eaten a whole field o’ that tiny tasteless fruit from the fringe of a tall green spire among maybe millions.