Romanticizing Zanzibar

Karisa, weighted by two grocery bags in one hand like an unbalanced scale, whooshed the door open from the carport. Decaying leaves and chill blitzed ahead of her. “What’s all this?” The Harry Potter closet vomited its contents across half the room, air mattresses and sleeping bags leading plastic tubs of half-forgotten memories. “Those need to go,” she nodded at a translucent bin of outdated teaching aids that survived the last cross-state move.

“Remember my idea book, the one Josie told me to keep?”

“The little black one?” Karisa thumped the flour on the bottom step, besides the broken beach paddle and divorced dumbbell. “That one?”

He mumbled vaguely, gingerly digging through crocheted blankets as if a mummified cat might be buried under them.

“That little black book?” she repeated severely. “And who's gonna clean all this up?”

“Don’t worry about the mess.” He focused his eyes on the bin furthest back.

“I haven’t seen that book since you took out those letters you wrote home from Peace Corps. Did you look in that bin yet?” She plucked her way over the minefield for the second load, toeing the air mattress. “This one has a hole. It needs to go too. Why is it still here anyway?”

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Shadows of diesel exhaust and burnt trash smoke wisped from its pages. The scarred teardrop burn from a long ago elation, inspiration for one of these stories, pocked it’s matte cover. Three sentences. A half page. A run on sentence. Lists and lists of characters. Would he ever write their stories?

He glanced out the window at a squirrel digging in the yard. Was it hiding something or had it found a treasure?

Karisa poured espresso from the battered stove top pot, its angles like a 1940s pinup, dribbles sizzling on the element, smelling acrid and bitter and earthy. “Apply for anything lately?” She hoped, stretching her faultering expectations. Clinking of the ceramic cup on the saucer punctuated NPR’s narrative.

“Found these in the bin, too,” he motioned at the coins stacked in pillars, three inch tall monuments of shillings and rupies from collapsed empires. Even these relics mocked his current scarcity. “Forgot I had them.”

She tapped one pile as she delivered the espresso cup. “Apply for anything?” She repeated, exasperated.

“I’m going to the strip on Lacey Avenue later,” he pinched the handle of the tiny cup, staring at the steaming black liquid and appreciating the cardomom Karisa added to the grinds.

Yellow and orange and brown leaves danced in a swirl of wind as he braved the late autum to bike to town, and suddenly he was back in Zanzibar stepping from his flat into the street with a swirl of dust rising between him and a parked car. Behind the window of a sedan, in the back seat, head wrapped in a kaleidoscope scarf, her eyes caught his. The driver waited as well, glancing to the butcher shop where half a goat hung on a hook baiting flies. She stared, absorbed and unblinking, back at him. Her cinnamon eyes and flawless nutmeg skin over high cheekbones mesmerized him, they merged as one in that brief moment, a perfect romance. His wink broke the spell. She blushed and buried her face in the scarf and he continued to the fish market.

He pedaled towards the restaurants, stopping at Jo’s Juice Joint with its plea for workers in the front window. Emerging after a cold handshake with a folded paper application, he dipped his sun-starved hand in his pocket while scanning for possibilities. A Doc Marten store, cupcake bakery, imported gift boutiques and convenience stores lined the street.

He pulled a coin from his pocket. Its warmth quickly faded as the sign for the coin and stamp gallery announced itself to him.

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Karisa stood expressionless and unbelieiving. “You sold all of them?”

He repeated, “Twenty grand. Twenty-thousand dollars, more or less. I’m rounding.”

She confirmed the number on the bank app. “And what’s this?” she pointed to the airline withdrawal incredulously.

“A plane ticket.”

“Just one?” Her eyes sought his, unsuccessfully.

“Twenty thousand dollars goes far in Zanzibar,” he replied unapologetically.