WEBVTT

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"It is time for him
to tell a story.

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He could tell a
story if he wants,

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but he doesn't have to
explain what he's doing here

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if he doesn't want to.

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Instead, it does about being
in Afghanistan as a hippie.

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It was a long time ago he
says, and I believe him.

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His hair was that long, he says.

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He says he had
plenty of it then.

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It hung in clumps, the blue
and pink dust of the cliffs

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that they passed clotted
with the grease that

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was part of having that hair.

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Why am I telling you this?

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He asks.

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You said you don't like things
hanging, I point with my pinky

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at the twist of straw and
feather dangling over us.

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Someone hung it there.

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The Valkyrie who was away
was coming back any minute.

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Who has just gone right now.

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Oh yes, he says.

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Velu is afraid of the tupuqa.

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You know ghosts?

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This is supposed to catch them.

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I touch my hair the
way a woman does

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was born brunette who
remembers she's blonde.

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Ghost?

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There she's called
a ghost earlier.

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I start playing with something
soft with long tiddly

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fingers, something that
would scare boys in the bush.

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She was hung, the
woman I was with.

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He says.

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Good grief.

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I stopped playing and sip with
a scotch from the coconuts rim.

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Hung how?

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She drove the truck.

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I was a hitchhiker, the hippie.

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She was going somewhere
she was told to

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and she was sad because in the
same mail is the assignment,

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the man she wanted wrote
that he wanted someone else.

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She drove the truck fast
through all that pink and blue.

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She was a cloud with wheels
when she picked me up.

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We camped when she came to
a stop and a cloud of blue

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and pink settled in our hair,
our teeth, and our necks.

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We zipped our bags together.

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We wormed our way
over the cinders

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of the fire I built from
blowing around bushes burning

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the bags a little and
we laughed about it.

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About that kind of love.

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That was the only time
I heard her laugh.

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I'm looking out his window where
the moonlight is too bright.

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I want to interrupt but I
can't get the words arranged.

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He stops talking.

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And what am I supposed to say?

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I sit up and watch the shadows
the twist of straw and feathers

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make against the moon.

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She could drive fast over
those rutted washed out tracks.

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She drove as if she could
drive out the bad letter

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she carried as if driving
away drove him away.

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She drove hard into
a herd of goats.

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Goats were always
on or off the road.

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She drove in and
hit one or so she

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thought the dust of the goats,
the dust of the her truck

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slowed down, who could tell?

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When she saw what it was,
she was out of the car.

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When they bore him
away, she followed them.

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I followed her.

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I wasn't going to sit-in
the truck and wait around.

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I wasn't going to
drive away with a truck

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either though I did later.

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What I remember
most about following

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is the women who rose up out
of the big clumps of dirt

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and wailed over the boy.

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The blue and pink walls
of the cliffs wailed.

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We waited a day.

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It was decent of us, decent
of them to bring us food.

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They unrolled mats and let us
lie in a warm room all night.

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Lie without sleeping.

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The room had a hole in the
roof that children and birds

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passed over.

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Only those who
brought food came down

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the ladder that was left
for us against that hole.

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I used it only once in the
night to pee off the roof.

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She didn't talk about how much
she loved that man that night,

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she didn't even talk about the
boy who he could have been.

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I didn't make hippy talk,
I showed her my flute.

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Did you have a flute in
those days or just a piano?

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I had a flute.

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Well then, you know
how I could try

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to sound Afghani with my
flute there in the dark,

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but I also did Yankee
Doodle, high-ho silver.

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She wanted me to play anything.

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I didn't know her.

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She was an older woman with
a man who didn't want her

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and a job waiting for her
at the end of her drive.

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She dug latrines
because she was a woman.

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That's what women did
then to be a woman,

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to show they could be
men if they wanted.

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She was helping
the people and she

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had another job at
the end of the drive

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to show she could help though
she hadn't been helping long.

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She knew about as much of
their language as I did.

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After I put down the
flute, I smoked what I had.

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She was asleep by then and
I listened to the wailing.

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We climbed out in the morning.

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Goats were swarming all
over the place as noisy

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and jammed up as they had been
the day before on the road,

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but now no one was
straightening them out.

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More people than lived in
these places had come to wail.

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Men to one side of the clearing,
wailing women on the other.

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The boy was carried between them
on a litter, wrapped tightly

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and blue and pink cloth.

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You could believe
cocoons made butterflies.

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I remember thinking then.

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I wasn't so stoned that I
couldn't get the ladder out

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of the hole and over
the side of the wall.

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She made a big deal out of
helping me and almost fell off.

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The men met us at the bottom.

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They were all weeping
now not wailing.

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I'd never seen so many
men crying before.

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One of them put out his
hand and she took it.

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That was dumb, I say.

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She said, it is raining
and pointed at their eyes

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full of tears and they smiled.

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She lived with them or
with people like them

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where she came from.

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I don't think it was dumb.

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So they hung her?

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He doesn't look up
at the pleading that

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hangs from the ceiling, the only
thing hanging, the thing that

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makes shadows out of the
moonlight, the place here.

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They ignored me.

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I waited around for her to
come back but she didn't.

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So I walked back to
the truck thinking

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I would drive it over,
pick her up, and get going.

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But once I swung myself
up into the driver's seat,

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there was still blood
on the windshield.

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I realized she had the keys.

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I had to walk back to
the village over all

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that humped Earth the women
seemed to come out of the day

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before.

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And yes shit, there she was.

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I was so set in the
keys in her pockets

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in that weird way
you get when you're

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stoned that I remember
panicking because she was nude

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not because she was dead.

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Then I tried to run away,
nobody would let me.

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Not even the goats that
came swirling around

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the first corner of my running.

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Who can get away in the
middle of a bunch of goats?

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But it turned out that all they
wanted was to give me the body.

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They didn't want a body
that wasn't theirs.

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They didn't want to bury a body
that had buried one of theirs.

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It was up to me to cut her down
to wrap her in her clothes.

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Her arms and legs already
with no good to move and carry

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her now wood heavy body
over all those dirt

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clods back to the truck
and to drive her away.

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And the moral of the
story, he looks around.

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Is someone listening?

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He says, don't
think you can help.

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