Speaking of not shazaming, of trying to keep the moment pure, a truly mystical thing happened to us this morning.
It started last night after the nightmare situation of walking our bikes in the pitch-black darkness, home from the Mosquito bar, there on the side of avenida 27 de Febrero. Motors and flashes of light, nearly missing us. It started after we got salty pasta dinner takeout, walking our bikes through a million and one people, in circles, and then back to Natalia’s where we were nervous because the Argentine woman, a friend of a cousin, who had graciously rented us our bikes for an affordable rate, was a little bit on our ass because we had arrived so late.
It started when, back in the bungalow, Isabelle tried to take a – the only thing available – cold shower, but as soon as she turned the water on, soap in hand, she felt something on her leg and saw a cockroach crawling up her shin and three others on the shower floor. She screamed bloody murder. She made me kill them, the one’s I could, before they retreated underneath the gridded pegboard at her feet. She toweled off, hopped in bed, and retreated to deep breathing and her phone.
Yes, we were dead tired, and she was on Instagram. She saw a post about the New Year. Instructions on how to summon a fortune: at the beginning of every month, in the morning, say the word rabbit, rabbits, or white rabbits three times before getting out of bed.
Isabelle was all into it. But not me. I’m a non-believer when it comes to astrology, mystics. Instead, I watched a 15-minute YouTube highlight video of the Lions win over the Bears and fell soundly asleep. I slept until our bungalow host’s guard-dog chihuahua went ballistic at 3:40 in the morning.
Isabelle – I don’t know why – left the bungalow to go tell the peroito to shut up. That sketched me out. I didn’t know why it was barking or who it was barking at. I didn’t know if she should be out there. I was in such a new place, one that I didn’t understand, and as much as I love my imagination, sometimes it can double-cross me. I ended up in a sleep-deprived paranoia, a sleep paralysis half-sleep I’m all too familiar with. I listened to the stillness and the hushed symphony of frogs and wind and bugs, interspersed with the occasional lion’s roar of a truck. The lack of the neighbors jamming Dembow until 8am had somehow made tonight scarier than the one before. There was space in between the sound to see.
We woke up at 7:20am. The sun a coffee-creamer-colored alarm clock. Isabelle went to return our keys. That’s when she saw in the driveway, munching on curled-up brown leaves, a bright white rabbit, as plump as a turkey, the little chihuahua silently sitting next to it, propped on two limbs, looking the other way, at nothing, a little half-wall of stone and shrubbery.
Later, I watched Isabelle and Alina talk on the bus home to Santo Domingo. They laughed and geeked out together and gave each other complete and utter attention and it felt like a special friendship. It made me so happy and the thought just came to me. The rabbits thing on Instagram wasn’t random. 2023 was probably the Year of the Rabbit. I Googled it and sure enough it was. I journaled about this in my notebook, random and not-random assemblies of images and associations and experiences and futures. The serendipitous nature of everything, if you just kept your eyes and ears open. It didn’t make much sense, probably only to me, and only at that moment. Meanwhile, trash and buses and food stands and people and motos flooded across my window. The rainforest. Banyan trees. The bus was so packed that the attendant crawled through it in the air, one step across one armrest at a time. When he got to us, Isabelle reached into her backpack, and gave him mine.
Elijah Sparkman is a writer based in Detroit. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Sleepingfish XX, X-R-A-Y, and Maudlin House. You can read more at elijahsparkman.com Instagram: @elijahsparkman20