Jane, Not Jane by Zen Sutherland

Again Jane dreamed of Morocco. Jane has never been to Morocco and knows almost nothing about it. It is a place where wild men in costumes from ancient civilizations whirl and spin and dance madly in an effort to keep vines and lianas from snagging their legs and rooting them. In a room where she knows she shouldn't go, the fossil of a woman shows her a beaded box with something unmentionable inside. Jane wants to scream before the box fully opens, but she finds that her mouth and neck are wrapped in a fine gauze making this somehow impossible.

Jane knows that Jane is not her real name in this dream. It is something that only the little boy squatting in the ditch can pronounce fully. Jane suspects this little boy is the one that will grow up to be her lover, her completeness, but when she approaches him, he runs off, his little brown butt bouncing off in the distance. Jane stands there frozen, gawkish. A bird tricked by a mirage lake.

"The heat is something that gets in your bones like a parent dying," the Arab clerk-woman tells her. "...and it keeps you from thinking properly." The black holes where some of this woman's teeth should be suck the back of Jane's eyeballs in. "You cannot send a telegram to anyone today because the wires are down. The electricity is fading. The world is down. Come back Friday." The words are spoken like the singing of railroad tracks before the train can be heard. Jane’s breath draws in too.

As she walks the squalid streets of this tiny Morocco town, Jane realizes that the entire town, like a carnival, is packing up. Market vendors strapping their wares in leather satchels on hateful, spitting camels. Shops she visited are merely corrugated tin shacks that can be folded against themselves and stacked on truck beds like sheets of cardboard.

Jane realizes in 10 minutes the town will be gone. She should have run after the little boy squatting and slapped him until he told her Jane's real name. Slapped him until blood oozed from that bastard’s face. Consumed with guilt for even thinking such a horrid thing, the girl once known as Jane lies there in the soft sand crying until she hears nothing but the wind.

Hi guys, my name is Zen Sutherland, and i'm mostly a photographer in the Asheville area (what i do, not what i do for a living). I just started a blog in Asheville called 'zenography' (http://zenasheville.blogspot.com) and have maintained a visual blog on flickr for quite some time.