Suq Bag Breaks

     The mumbled sound of indistinct voices in a crowded place. People shoulder to shoulder, back to front, front to back.  They slide by, they side step, they push through.  Make way for the vegetable carts, the old women, the families shopping together.  Children scamper through the interstices, knocking into legs and hips.  Indiscriminate.  They look up and hold out a hand full of plastic bags.  Only ten cents.  Venders hawk their wares, giving prices and guaranteeing quality.  The yell to their cohorts asking for change, for weights, for bags.  Buyers prod and poke, smell and taste, check for firmness, freshness.  They argue prices.  They walk away.  They come back.

     The thud-thud sound of vegetables piled on top of one another.  A kilo of this, two of that.  Put the potatoes on bottom.  Dirty and heavy.  Don’t squash the tomatoes.  The peppers.  Carrots slide vertically along the walls. Pile the rest up.  It’s been a month, maybe more.  Kitchen is bare.  The vegetables pile and the weight increases.  Heavy bag.  Shoulder dips.  Pile grows.  Almost done.

     The creaking sound of woven plastic fibers straining.  The result of years of tension, pulling, stretching.  Untold loads of products, hefted about.  Carried here and there.  Each causing a little more strain on the aging plastic fibers.  They’ve held strong thus far, but.  Tearing.  The tension breaks.  The fiber snaps.  An unheard ‘pop’.  Two released ends wave freely in the air.  The pressure released is divided and spread among the others; their workload increases.  For the neighboring fiber, the added strain is too much.  Another ‘pop’.  The weight is divided again.  Now the avalanche.  A cascade of tearing moves through the remaining fibers.  Rip.  Rip.  One more.  One more.  Lasts only a second.  It’s over.

     The snapping sound of a plastic handle breaking in two.  The shoulder rises imperceptibly with the momentary lightness of free falling food before it dips again with the violent jerking of a sudden shift in weight.  The head turns, the free hand swings round.  Reflexes too slow; the eyes can see that which the hands cannot save.  Broken strands of handle hanging limply from the fallen side of a woven plastic polygon.  Greens and oranges and browns levitating.  Inches off of the soggy ground.

     The plop-plopping sound of vegetables landing in new mud.  Peppers, carrots, potatoes.  Sticking out of the ground as though they had never been picked.  The tomatoes land on drier ground and roll into the crowd, under feet, under stands.  A half empty woven plastic bag placed in the dirt.  Kneel down.  People pushing, bumping.  Stepping over hands.  On hands.  The struggle.  Bending, looking, finding.  Reaching, straining, grabbing.  Vegetables wiped and put in their spots.  Some left for the dogs.  And donkeys.  The last vegetable placed.  Stand up.

     The disgusted sigh of annoying.  Muddy.

     That’s the breaks.

The Engagement - Epilogue

     Months later, a friend came by to pay the boy a visit.  They sat on the stoop of his apartment building, bathing in the sunshine and talking about school and work and vacations and people they both knew.  The friend’s sister had grown up with Aicha and he asked if the boy had heard anything about her.  The mere mention of her name caused a knot to grow in his stomach.  He had not heard one word from her since learning of the engagement, despite several attempts at contact.  The friend smiled knowingly and told him that this was to be expected; no self respecting married woman would keep in contact with former male friends.  He went on to retell the story as he had learned it from his sister.
     The marriage was arranged by the girl’s parents over the course of a few weeks.  A French suitor, the friend of some distant relatives, had inquired about the girl after having seen her picture during a short stay at someone’s house.  A dialogue was begun, offers were made, and the girl was informed only after the negotiations had been finalized.  There was a small ceremony in the south for extended family and a larger, more elaborate ceremony in France thereafter.
     And so it was that Aicha, the girl with the acorn eyes and wild hair, now lived in France, a country she had never visited, married to a man she had never known. 

The Engagement - The Message

     Summer arrived and he became busy with work.  Gone for weeks and months at a time, he seldom saw the girl of whom he had grown so fond.  As each project finished, he would return to the city with a light heart, exhilarated by the thought of being with her again, only to find that she had just left on vacation with her family.  They seemed always to miss each other by just a day.  They still kept in contact, sending the occasional phone or internet message, but the ‘hello’s and ‘I miss you’s couldn’t fill the growing holes they felt inside their hearts.
     As summer wound down, so too did his work.  He found himself more and more in the city until his days away numbered no more than two or three per month.  He sent message after message to the girl he so desperately missed, asking to see her, inviting her on walks, but he received no response.  Time moved forward.  Weeks went by.  A holiday came and went.  But the holiday was not a cheerful one, for he had still heard no word from the girl with acorn eyes and wild hair.
     Then one day he found a message in his inbox.  It was from her.  Immediately, everything was righted and all doubt floated away.  He realized then that she must have been traveling somewhere without quality phone coverage, or had no money on her phone, or had lost his number, or had lost her phone, or had even just been too busy.  Whatever the problem had been, it didn’t matter now, for she had responded and soon enough they would be together, strolling through the crowded streets, side by side, smiling and laughing once again.  Elated, he opened the message and read it eagerly.  There was only one line of writing; four short sentences.  “Hi Tariq.  How are you?  I am engaged.  Take care.”
     The message made sense only once.  He read through it quickly and understood completely.  But when his brain compared this new information with what it already knew to be true, the two were so violently opposed that he immediately doubted that he had read or interpreted the message correctly.  So he went back and tried to read it again, but this time he could find no meaning in the words.  He recognized the letters.  He saw how they combined to create the words and how the words, individually, were all perfectly clear.  These were, in fact, words with significance, words that expressed some thought or idea.  The problem lay in the way in which the words were combined.  Arranged as they were, the words lost all meaning.  He stared at the four sentences, trying to pinpoint the idea they had been intended to convey.  But the longer he stared, the less sense it all made.  The words became hazy; the letters, scrambled and foreign.  The whole line of text morphed and melted together, swirling and dancing on the page until his head hurt.
     Somewhere at the other end of time, he blinked.  Immediately, the screen raced back towards him, bringing with it an idea that nearly knocked him from his seat.  Engaged.  The bottom of his stomach gave way and fell into a murky hole of infinity.  He felt sick.  His head swam.  Questions circled around his brain like out of control satellites, orbiting wildly, spinning faster and faster until finally losing balance, falling of their axes, and crashing into one another in tiny explosions.  How could she be engaged?  It had been barely two months since they had last seen each other.  And only a couple weeks since they last spoke; she had mentioned nothing.  He read the words over and over, convinced he had missed something, convinced he had misread something.  But the words did not change when he read the message again.  The meaning was still the same.  The girl with acorn eyes and wild hair was engaged.

The Engagement - Aicha

     She would walk with him every few nights.  Often accompanied by her younger sister, they would stroll through the town, talking and laughing and translating and smiling.  More often than not they had no specific place to go; just walking together was enough.
     They met when the sun was low in the sky at an old, green and white mosque near her house.  He always arrived first.  Standing under a beaten light pole they shared, he would search for her among the passersby.  Time dragged on during those few minutes of waiting.  He was constantly coming up with reasons why she would not come: her parents objected, she had work, she was ill, she was with another.  The longer he stood alone under the light pole, the more preposterous his reasons became until finally, after forever, he would see her.  Heartbeats were skipped and smiles were spread when their eyes locked.  Once united, they would head off towards the north, walking along the main roads, waving hellos to friends and acquaintances.  These first minutes were devoted to recounting recent events, catching up on the other’s news, and asking about upcoming plans.  They walked slowly, dodging potholes and piles of trash, nodding and laughing and throwing sly smiles at each other.  Occasionally their hands would brush past each other, each begging to be held by the other, but neither could make the first move.
     They would carry on farther and find themselves in the crowded part of town.  Sellers stood behind blankets covered with various trinkets, yelling at the throng of people as it flooded by.  Men with carts of fruit snaked through the crowd, rolling slowly and asking for space to be made.  The pair made their way through the maze as though strolling through a wax museum, noticing occasionally a particularly interesting individual, but concerning themselves, for the most part, only with each other.  At every narrow passage he would hold back, allowing her to move through first, gently guiding her along with his hand on the small of her back.
     Coming out of the seller’s street they would arrive upon a large, open square where the town collected after the sun had set.  Here they would sit together and watch the crowd; little boys playing soccer in the open spaces, little girls chasing each other, old women catching up with one another.  The men sat at the cafés in the peripheries.  They smoked their cigarettes and drank their espresso, eyes fixed on the giant, flat TVs hung in the corners.  Their wild cheers rolled through the square in waves, momentarily displacing the calm.  The couple didn’t notice.
     She sat with him and she laughed at his jokes and her dark, acorn eyes sparkled in the moon light when she threw her head back.  Her hair was long and wild and always put up with bangs swept right to left over the eyebrows.  She was just as comfortable in jeans and a t-shirt as in jalaba and scarf, and was just as stunning in either.  A thin layer of pink lip gloss covered her full lips but no other paint touched her face: she didn’t need makeup and therefore didn’t wear it and was all the more beautiful for it. 
     They would sit like this for hours, sometimes talking, sometimes not, simply enjoying each other’s company.  They liked each other.  But they could only show it in the most subtle of ways, for nothing could come of it.

Things You May Not Know

Donkeys have feelings too.
The desert sun races to its zenith.  Then it just stays there.
I am the Forest Gump of Moroccan souk busses.
Riding a camel uphill is far more comfortable than riding a camel downhill.
Camel sweat reeks and is difficult to get off your hand.
Tourists screw pricing for the rest of us.
Roosters are not as clever as they appear: they crow all day. Only occasionally does their crowing coincide with dawn.
Going there is much better than coming back.
I bring rain to the desert.
I can go many, many days thinking I smell just fine when, in fact, I do not.
People are nice.
Doorbells are useless.  Shouting names is the way to go.
The brain of a sheep tastes about how you think it will taste.

An Excerpt

...
     Once, after some lively repartee with a rather astute jackrabbit whom the river had known for some time, it came to a small, flat clearing and flowed out, away from the woods, towards the edge of a rocky cliff.  Upon arriving in the open, it was stunned by the majestic view: like an ant looking out from the center of a crumpled and ripped piece of verdigris construction paper, the river was surrounded by a jagged, cuneiform earth.  Vast expanses of lush valleys dotted with enormous, gray boulders and bushy treetops, and soaring, snowcapped crests stretched forth before it in every direction.  The land rose and fell sharply, folding over itself in blooming corrugation, juxtaposing deep caverns against tall, vertical ridges.  Distant, looming peaks shrouded in delicate, egg-white mist appeared unnaturally tall, seeming to rise to the farthest reaches of empyrean, stabbing at heaven with their incredible height, unafraid at the prospect of poking holes in God.  A half circle of glowing orange peeked out from behind the western mountains, miniscule compared with the colossal mounds of earth surrounding; a mere pixel of light among oversized pyramids.  Soft rays of amber shone out from it, bouncing off the bottom of the clouds and casting long shadows in the world below.  The river stopped and stared.  It unfocused its vision and still couldn’t take everything in; the brilliance of the forest canopies, shining like jade in the light of the slowly setting sun, stretched way out into the peripheries of space, wrapping around the mountain like a living, green model of the universe.  A solitary white bird, wingspan like a private jet, glided gracefully through the breeze, turning summersaults over the pointed, rocky islands rising out of the bowels of the earth.  Gusts of wind stroked the leaves in the trees and a thousand animals crawled over the mountains’ surfaces; to the river’s unfocused vision, it looked like the land was breathing. 
     The river crept out farther still, enamored with the beautiful landscape.  Across the valley to the right, a sprawling tree shook with thunderous force and a shapeless cloud of black arose.  Like a giant swarm of gnats, the cloud flew away from the tree, shifting and rearranging but maintaining its structure with the fluidity of a floating, amorphous blob.  The hushed echo of distant, beating feathers pulsed through the mountains in waves like sonar.  The black mass climbed higher, expanding and elongating, recentering and condensing; each individual pulled in his own direction, eager to lead, yet the whole remained intact.  Then, with impressive groupthink, the cluster of birds descended onto a new tree, disappearing into its depths with the quiet rustling of leaves. 
     The fertile milieu swelled uncontrollably, engulfing the river as it flowed farther into the open, pulled forward as though hypnotized.  A gentile shushing filled the air and grew louder as the world became larger.  The river stopped staring.  It lay back, floating along in comfortable absentmindedness, relaxed by the verdant serenity, resting happily in its bed and looking up into the fading gold of early evening.  Then, suddenly, it wasn’t.  The sky fell down and the world spun around in a tumbling orgy of rock and tree, animal and cloud.  The shushing increased and the water smashed into the mountain’s side, tore off chunks of dirt and rock, and threw them down into the chaos below.   Valley green and blazing orange and dirty brown and foamy white images slid over one another in rapid succession, melting together and replacing each other like a psychedelic kaleidoscope on fast forward.  The shushing became crashing and the river was stretched to its limits; it broke apart into sections, each falling on its accord, and raced itself to the bottom with violent celerity.  These oversized, speeding teardrops were swallowed up by a mist so dense the river could no longer tell if it was falling, floating, or flying.  Inside the viscous opaque of wet, gray molasses, directions were alien and meaningless; up and down, forwards and backwards, left and right, these were words without context.  The river hovered in uneasy paresis, unable to flow, going nowhere, discerning nothing in the foggy purgatory. Then: a brutal collision and spreading darkness, and the world turned black.
...

Government Run

A line of folded papers winds around the counter corner
Like a snake painted by Picasso that was hurriedly made to order.
The line grows longer every time a new victim appears,
Drops his papers, finds a seat, and waits to pay arrears.
The new ones can tell from disgruntled faces The Man hasn’t yet arrived.
They hope it won’t be long now, but aren’t prepared to be surprised.
Eventually there are no more seats and the new arrivals stand
And crowd around in corners, speaking softly, and discreetly
Looking over their shoulders every so often just to see the
Papers they brought have not been moved by other’s impatient hands.
Time drags on as though it were burdened by heavy weight.
The payers sit and stand and walk and talk and think and wait.

At the other end of the office, a large mass of people cluster
Around a service window at the counter in the corner. 
The Other Man behind the glass tries occasionally to muster
Up the strength to yell for them to keep themselves in order.
But his pleas only fall upon deaf ears; these people are accustomed
To situations where strong survive and weak given no quarter.
Aggressive newcomers come in and slide along the western wall,
Or else they circle round outside to get ahead of all;
They take advantage of interstices left by those departing.
The timid are stranded in the middle, surrounded by obnoxious
Folk who won’t push to close the gaps the sly ones fill so smartly. 
The elbows, glares, and arguments are inherent to the process.

Beside the throng is another window, the front of which is empty
Save two men in leather shoes with white papers aplenty.
The Woman behind the glass is busy typing on her screen.
She sometimes looks at papers and asks the men to sign here please.
When the last contract is printed, and all the signatures are written,
She alights from her chair and heads to the back of the office for a rest,
To have a snack from the private kitchen, or call the man with whom she’s smitten,
And generally not work or worry about the office guests.

Meanwhile, the owners of folded white papers are sitting, getting restless.
“Don’t they want our money?”  “They really must detest us!”
“The Other Man told me nine o’clock, its fifteen to ten right now!”
“I have to deal with this every time I step foot in this place.”
Facial sweat is sponged away as a shirt sleeve wipes a brow.
The women wave their hands to cool the air around their face.
They talk amongst themselves, but to whom could they complain?
This is no private business, no, the government runs this game.
The only game in town, in fact, this electric monopoly.
I’d switch providers but lack of choice is what is stopping me.
So I sit and wait, like all the rest, to pay my portion due.
Hoping that The Man will come and I’ll quickly be through.
So listen with care and heed my words, for I’ve been there and done it:
If you want it to work as it properly should, don’t let the government run it.

Extraordinarily Average

      He was extraordinarily average and had decided long ago to be so.  It wasn’t one, life-altering, conscious decision that had been made, but the cumulative effect of a collection of smaller, less imposing decisions that had turned him into what he had become.  He was average in a way that few are; good at everything, great at nothing.  He was the jack of all trades that would never become king.  He had no aces up his sleeve and no queen on his arm.  Surrounded by jokers in a world unfit for his acquiescence, he lived a life too short for his ambitions.  Too lacking in attention to ever focus on one thing long enough to master it, he preferred instead to move on to the next once the average had been achieved; the modern day Renaissance man.
      Most things came to him effortlessly and he paid no attention to the rest.  He remembered with ease the names of people he deemed important enough to remember and quickly forgot without second thought the names and information of those he did not.  He spoke multiple languages to varying degrees under the pretence that he wanted to be able to talk to everyone, but in fact, he preferred the silence and would raise a solitary eyebrow when he heard people describe it as awkward.  His modesty was a byproduct of trained politeness and, when outshined by his natural confidence, appeared forced to those who lacked their own and were threatened by anyone who walked with their back straight and chin up, though his gait was different.  He was fit but not muscular; body of a runner.  Light tan in the winter that he’d kept from the summer.  A writer and a reader.  More a giver than a needer.  A low-income housing builder and a soup kitchen feeder.  Raised as a Christian, he lived like a Buddhist.  Tried to be Muslim but kept following the Tao.  He was two continents short of seeing the world and he knew that once that goal was accomplished it would mean nothing in the scheme of things and he would therefore have to design a new goal which, once completed, would be replaced by yet another.  There would always be more so he would never be done.
      His lack of passion often led to ennui, which, in turn, would have led to depression if he hadn’t been too proud for that sort of thing.  He kept his sanity be challenging himself to accomplish certain tasks, large and small, and each item crossed off of his checklist was added to the collection without ceremony or enthusiasm; just another thing done. 
      Eventually he would find what he was looking for, but first, he would have to start searching.

To Marrakech

      Wind blasted through the open doorway and made the hair of all parties involved dance like deep-rooted wheat caught in a hurricane.  The grassy plains of Morocco swept past with a flourish; the foreground flashed by in milliseconds while the northern slopes of the Lower Atlas Mountains, rising just an inch or so above the horizon, slowly crawled along in the distance.  The air was heavy and clear, and redolent of rain, but no clouds were visible through the three-by-eight metal frame. 
      Inside, two men were handling with much asperity a third who, for his part, was working to free himself of their grip and trying his best to calm the pair with mellifluous speech; actions which did not serve to decrease the roughness with which they laid hands on him.  The shorter of the aggressors was dressed sharply in a conductor’s uniform and hat; buttons done all the way up, shirt tucked, shoes shined, and metal-framed glasses sitting way up on his nose.  His drooping jowls were flushed from prolonged physical exertion and his thick, graying mustache had tiny drops of perspiration collecting at the corners.  His partner was dressed in similar colors and fashion, though without the jacket, hat, or attention to detail.  He was taller and younger than the other, and displayed the diffident obsequiousness of a new employee.  Though his grip was tight and his feet were firmly planted, his wide eyes and dilated pupils betrayed his surprise and fear at the redoubtable situation.  The third man was facing the other two, back to the doorway, arms out to either side intensely grabbing at the various extraneous metal protrusions inherent in large, 20th century mechanical apparatuses.  His sallow face was lean and tan.  His dark, narrow eyes darted back and forth between the two on-comers and the sides of the car where his hands were fighting furiously for new grips to grab.  Never once did he look back over his shoulder.  A river of unctuous declarations poured forth from his mouth without stop; though he was constantly shifting and fighting and ducking and grabbing, adroitly maneuvering so as to stay erect and inside, his words never once halted; he spoke like a garrulous charlatan at a Gullible Peoples Anonymous meeting.  A tightly packed throng of bystanders stood staring over the shoulders of the two ticket collectors with rapt attention, eyes wide and mouths agape.  As the noise grew louder, more riders left their seats and joined the crowd, pushing and straining to get closer until all interstices had been eliminated.  And so they all stood, bunched together like cattle, calves burning from standing on tiptoe, watching the melee unfold.
      Next stop: Mechra-Benabbou, seven kilometers.

Without Emotion

       The beach is empty in a way that makes me feel like just another piece of sand lying among a billion others, carelessly blown by an easterly trade wind up and down the beachfront in a halting and tentative way; moving, stopping, and starting again, changing locations and meditating briefly in every new place, leaving behind a trail of footprint shaped miniature craters in the malleable piles of dry sand that are soon blown over and made flat again by more bits of sand; sand that is ever ready to be, at a moment’s notice, taken up by the breeze and dropped in some new spot like an eminent domain-backed mandatory government relocation program without all the picketing and letter writing and litigation and ‘you can’t do this’s and tears and long goodbyes.  The cratered crescent of a five day old moon hangs roughly thirty degrees above the horizon, motionless and smiling down upon me like a not quite fully invisible Cheshire cat with its head cocked, its reflected radiance veiled by a slow-moving and taciturn cumulonimbus who’s thoughts are centered not on the giant, pock-marked satellite of ancient awe or the mirrored brightness thereof, but rather on its own weight and density, calculating sans émotion the various factors at play which will, later that evening, all coalesce into a single outcome; namely, the collapse of the towering, rain-heavy giant and the following downpour that will ensue over a small section of the Moroccan north-Atlantic coast, the effects of which will be felt only locally as the Sebou and Bou Regreg rivers swell past customary early-Springtime levels, flooding the drying hectares of the surrounding farmland and stoking the long untended fire of optimism in the remaining farmers; farmers who are cautious but will allow themselves a secret smile and the expectation of possible reversed fortunes but who will ultimately be disappointed when the rains stop again before morning and the water recedes and floods back out into the Atlantic, finding itself once again trapped in the cycle of oceanic convection, dragged thousands of leagues under the sea where the darkness is as suffocating as the pressure until finally breaking free and escaping up to the surface, hoisted up out of the vast blue by the Sun in little pockets of warm air, rising steadily until the cozy, thermal pouches lose their initial warmth and the water vapor dilutes and mixes with the surrounding air, condensing and immediately freezing in the midst of an icy cirrostratus floating lazily above the breeze, alone and aloof but secretly glad for the new company; a cloud that at this very moment is just beginning to take shape six kilometers above and one kilometer off the coast of Mauritania but will cause little in the way of rainfall upon which the aforementioned farmers desperately depend.  The greenish gray underbelly of the growing giant is centered almost directly above me and extends out hundreds of meters in every direction on the x-axis, its overcast hue gradually transforming from the wrenching black-green of an eye which had been caught the day before by an impressive right hook to a weak graphite to a sea-sick yellow to a sort of muted golden-pink brought on by the various reflections and refractions of imperceptibly-tiny rays of light extending from a sinking March sun off of a well balanced mixture of decades-old pollution from a coal powered and industry heavy phosphorous mining town twenty kilometers upwind and the densely clustered water-vapor-just-recently-turned-precipitation of a thunderstorm waiting to break.  The semi-bright, quickly-fading-into-deep-purple-and-blue-but-as-of-yet-still-pale-orange-and-pink layers of sky hovering just over the freshly set sun make the contrasting murky green core all the more ominous looking.  Gazing down at the swelling cloud with the semi-interested attention of a gallery of would-be cultural aficionados at a tolerably well done rendition of some mildly popular, seven month old off-Broadway musical, pixel-like pricks of light from the brightest stars of faraway galaxies, the transmissions of which had been interrupted on numerous occasions by giant clouds of interstellar dust and gas during the multi-light-year travel that had had to ensue before arriving at Earth, Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, such that the tiny, shiny dots in the sky had an on-again, off-again flicker to them - the effects of which had played a prominent role in the whilom tradition of amateur, terran, stereographic projection folksong - had just recently become visible against the backdrop of multicolored strata of sky - the section not covered by the pregnant cumulonimbus – a section of sky that one very experienced but tragically mono-syllabic sunset connoisseur would describe later to her friends as, “like, so, so great!”, and gave the whole scene a sort of sports stadium feel during an especially impressive performance when the audience is compelled to retrieve from their purses and fanny-packs which have been strewn unceremoniously along the cement ground under their spring-loaded, plastic seats among the peanut shells and plastic cups containing a last few warm ounces of lite beer their overpriced cameras and click away with thousands of tiny flashes at a distance too great to achieve satisfactory results.  The majority of these stars, like the orbiting moon, are hidden, partially or completely, by the far reaching cloud but are there none-the-less and would appreciate mention of their presence considering the facts that they were there long before and would remain long after the brief and violent life of this particular collection of floating water droplets thank-you-very-much.  Spread out below the reticent thinking of the cumulous giant and the thousand year-old flashing of the faraway, globular nuclear reactors, the Atlantic Ocean, its boundless expanse restricted only by limited eyesight and imagination, tumbles placidly over itself, gently rising and falling and crashing and shushing, its distant horizon a mere black line separating the pale pink-turning-purple-not-sure-exactly-what-that-color-is-called of an evening sky still alive with the light of an already set sun and the deep blue of an ocean ready for the coming nightfall.  A crew of twenty some-odd men, most of whom are migrant workers from the nation’s south and have come north in search of work, who haven’t seen their families in years but remit more than three-quarters of their paychecks every month without fail in hopes of eventually returning home to the places of their families, friends, and birth to start life anew, pass the evening curled up in their bunks staring at old pictures of faraway people, remembering how life was outside of the metallic underbelly of a hulking 20th century fishing ship; a ship currently sitting idle under the moon and clouds and stars, as lonesome as the workers, imperceptibly bobbing, rising and falling with the rolling waves like a black shadow silhouetted against the tired backdrop of an increasingly darkening evening sky.  The light whistle of soft wind steadily blown through empty seashells and the just-poured-soda fizzle of gently crashing foamy, white waters still high from the gravitationally powerful coincidental occurrence of a week-old perigean spring tide and the culmination of a moon just beginning the principal lunar semidiurnal do not go unnoticed.  I am alone with the sand and the moon and the cloud and the stars and the boat and the noise.