Ana Toader

The duckling was yellow and soft, it knew nothing of the world except blades of grass and pebbles.

Food came with the shoe. Each day, around the same hour. The shoe stopped and food started pouring from heaven all around it. It was a beautiful sight that appealed to the duckling’s stomach and so the yellow, soft duckling fell madly inlove.

Hours passed and the duckling lived for its daily moment of bliss. All throughout the day, etched in the duckling’s chest, the image of the shoe swayed through showers of food. It was security and seduction, mother and lover. It was purpose. When the time came, the duckling ate and made love to the black leather of the shoe, simultaneously.

Because the shoe came with food, the duckling imagined the shoe is also inlove. “Why else would it feed me?” Lulled by this deduction, the duckling’s world was perfect.

One day, the duckling realised the shoe squandered its graces and food to other ducklings. It was the worst day of the duckling’s life. It cried over its lost uniqueness and cracked beliefs.

So when feeding time came, the duckling ate bitterly and cried. The beauty of the treacherous shoe hurt its eyes. The duckling wanted to be proud and leave the shoe, but food only came with it and the duckling wasn’t as unhappy as to starve either.

Days went by. The duckling got used to things. Life became boring, but at least the crater in the duckling’s chest wasn’t there anymore.

Another day, as the duckling was ingesting its meal next to the shoe which was equally beautiful, but less mysterious, it came out of nowhere. The duckling thought it was dreaming and stared very hard to make sure it would not vanish. Next to the unfaithful shoe, unspoiled by common history, naked and pure, having begun its existence moments ago and only for the duckling, there was another shoe.

I bloom outwards. I bang against my skin, my jail, my boundary. It stops my chaotic growth, my dissipation.

“Who would have known
A saintly trance”

It is enough, it is all I need, to be contained in this white powdered skin. Anything beyond it is not mine. 

“He slides inside
Half awake, half asleep
We faint back
Into sleephood
When I wake up
The second time
In his arms
Gorgeousness
He’s still inside me”

Inside white, I am velvety and fluid. The red in my stomach spins silk. Curve of the neck engineered backwards, eyelids iron. Expel. Watch. Silence.

“From the mouth
Of a girl like me
To a boy” Bjork, Cocoon lyrics

My appetite for ripping hearts has increased. My heart, to be more precise. I barely stitch myself up after one exercise and I start the enhancement again with things I know enrich me and harm me at the same time. I rely on my new spine to ground me into balance and drag my fabulous claws over the kardia, with tenderness, curiosity and, if I’m lucky, with a pen in my hand. All this is a metaphor.

Last night, Dominique Swain pouted stains of red under braided hair in Lolita. Was Humbert supposed to be redeemed by the fact he still loved her, 18 years old and pregnant, when the immediate nymphet substance had dissipated into vice and growing flesh? Love that transcends fetish? And the things we do in the name of love. Oh I am sure, we always end up doing them, but love does not justify everything. We might as well stop calling lily what is in fact a toad. The immense arrogance of believing *I* know what is best for my lover. I can decide when to tell her that her mother is dead, if she should be in a theatre play, how to comfort tears by physical intrusion. I think that was the saddest part I discovered in Lolita. Humbert realised it at some point. That tears of a 14 year old girl who uses lollipops as bookmarks can not be cured by something foreign in her body in the name of hypocritical tenderness, real lust. For that matter, neither can tears of an older nymphet. Selfish lover disguised as father. And he is first and foremost defined as a lover, even as he irons her clothes and buys her magazines.

Lolita is, as always, a great enhancement.

I clean my white shoes of my city’s dust and I know they have been purely white for a day, the first day, no matter how much I try now. I will still wear them, I am not perfect. I suppose that somehow I curved from a flat kid right into a woman, never passed through Lolita stage. But I also know what they saw in my collection of fragments, what I share with her. It is that thread of similarity that today makes me wear on my ankles these plasters with cartoon characters, sticking incongruously out of my white shoes.

My Latin vein pulsates with orange-red blood. White clothes hung outside, swelling like lovers in the wind. I am no Remedios Buendia the Beauty that Marquez’s pen made ascend to the skies while hanging laundry. The time spent at home has rounded my hips like a colourful Mexican pot. I walk barefoot and my soles get dirty; this roots me in the earth, it presses heavy on my airiness.

With red nails and round earrings, I do housework. My hands are dry. The honeyed-smoke-and-roar voice sings La Bruja and no translation is useful for this. I feel you in my stomach and throat and heart.

“Volar y dejarse caer
En los brazos de tu hermana”

Flying with eyes closed into 2 a.m. skies and the clay calls me back. I know where I belong. It is the same call that brings lovers back from lovemaking and people into graves. The endeavour towards death. The mechanism. The oxidation of our living cells with this one purpose. Destruction.

“Me agarra la bruja,
Me lleva al cerrito,
Me sienta en sus piernas,
Me da de besitos.”

The witch is kissing me as if I were her favourite daughter. I sit on her lap, cunning peasant with dry hands who is here to kill her. We kill out of distrust and impossibility to understand. We kill abominations with their own weapons because this is an earthly justice beyond religion that us peasants can understand. Serves you right.

“Burn this house.
Burn it blue […]

Come to the fireworks
See the dark lady smile
She burns…” – Frida OST