100 Minutes of Solitude, for Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It was during those days that she began to think she was dying. She felt as if she had swallowed poison, and it was softening her bones and burning her organs, until finally her insides would rot and boil down and stream out of her rectum in a torrent of sludge and sewage, black and putrid like the pipes overflowing after the heavy rains, flushing the gutters of the narrow dirt streets. She felt that time was reflecting itself in the bathroom mirror, trapping it in a moment that could never be escaped. She sat and glared at her image in the mirror, like an angry cat mistaking its reflection for another angry cat, scared and threatened and ready to attack itself. The bathroom was small, and the mirror so large it took up most of one wall. To avoid it at first she pulled a towel over her head when she had to use the toilet, bathe, or wash her hands, but still she felt the ghoulish presence of the reflection watching her, and she feared that obscuring her eyes only left her more vulnerable to attack and entrapment in the endless moment of fear frozen in the mirror. She began avoiding the bathroom, preferring to shower under the garden hose, and pee in a clay flowerpot which she emptied in the far corner of the yard.

Touisset

Clams, quahogs, mussels, mud. The smell of something dying and something being born. Something green and black and slimy, like sludge, slurry. Protein rotting. Eel grass, slick rocks and seaweed, bladderwrack. The air is heavy with moisture and salt. The wind picks up suddenly in gusts and calms again, balmy. Sometimes there is fog so thick you can't see in front of you, at night shining a flashlight only makes it harder to see through.

There is shoreline all around but no open ocean. There are coves, bays, and salt marshes. Soggy ground, inlets. Cow ponds and cow paths and corn fields, old barns and stone walls and rotting wooden gates.

A strange, watery place. Water all around, in front and behind, East, West, and South. Salt water. I have salt water in my veins.

A place lots of people had lived before, where other people's memories clung to the slimy rocks and pylons of the dock, other people's lives depended on the fish they caught and the oil they left puddling in the cove where the kids learned to swim.

What happened there before that? Were there always boats in the cove and paths in the woods and fields of corn? What spirits live in those trees and stones vines and ivy grass sumac and clover moss. What ever happened there?