Zazen - By Vanessa Veselka Page 0,19

make it feel more real but the buildings looked like cutouts and I felt like a paper doll. Annette gave me a white dress with little bluebells on it that belonged to her grandmother. I was wearing that but I could have been wearing anything else. I could have been dressed like a prom queen or for a day at the beach with a bucket and shovel. The background was fixed but I could have been stuck anywhere, made to lie flat on the lakes, hover above intersections, or placed askance on the painted ground.

I got off the bus at a plaza. It was paved with manufactured rock carved to look like flagstones. I thought they were real at first but then I saw the gutters between stones were too even to be actual masonry and that they weren’t real and never had been, just like all of this.

The travel agency was on the other side of the plaza. I walked across the fake red rock and the sound of air brakes and wheelchair ramps faded. The air was dense. A boy threw a handful of pennies at some pigeons and they scattered to the skies. He laughed and ran after the rolling coins. When he found all the pennies he put them back into a Styrofoam cup, waited for the pigeons to land and threw them again. Beating wings fluttered by my head.

I had come there as a kid when it was still called Redbird Square. My earliest memory is of being there with my mom. It was full of people and someone was speaking into a microphone. Every few minutes the crowd broke into cheering. Their voices rose and turned to a wild chant. I could feel the ground shudder with the rhythm of the words. It scared me and I leaned into a fold of my mama’s red wool coat and squeezed her hand tighter. I put my cheek on it. It was as if the world came into me through her fingertips alone. No one’s called it Redbird Square for years. They renamed it after the bank that paid for all the fake rock.

The travel agency stood before me. The window was full of fake snow, palm trees and sombreros. On a large white board, fares were listed:

Athens $ 759

Belize $ 386

Istanbul $ 399

Mexico City $ 284

Paris $ 438

Panama City $ 512

Phnom Penh $

I saw my body reflected as a faint outline on the glass. Some of the cities were outside of me and others were inside. Two were divided and started in me but streamed out in lines of letters and numbers. Belize was over my eyes. Mexico City began in my heart and over my abdomen was Phnom Penh, but most people probably wouldn’t have seen that one. “Get away. You deserve it!” floated backwards over my head in the white sky.

Inside the agency, a woman with frosted hair and terra cotta skin sat at a desk next to a large rubber plant. She was on the phone and typing but waved me over to the seat opposite her. She wore coral lipstick and a diamond solitaire on a thin chain that rolled back and forth across her breastbone when she talked.

I looked through a brochure while I waited. There was one with a collage of jungle and rice paddies behind an old man’s brown face. He was smiling like nothing had ever been wrong. I wondered if he liked macaroni and cheese.

“So,” the travel agent said, “what can I help you with?”

Her eyelids were slightly wrinkled and weighed down by pink shimmer.

“Travel,” I said.

“Well, that’s what we’re here for. Where would you like to go? We have a great special on Southeast Asia right now. Four nights in three capitals and two bonus days on the beach. There are six to choose from. I went last year and had a blast. Do you like spicy food?”

I saw tiny liver hearts hanging like peppers, bound and bunched in doorways and storefronts.

“Yes, I like spicy food.”

“Good, ’cause boy they have it! I can take it in Mexican but it was a little much for me there. My boyfriend loved it, though. Couldn’t get enough.”

The diamond bounced against her chest.

“I like beautiful places,” I said.

“Well, it’s about perfect for you then. I recommend Thailand or Vietnam.”

She took the brochure from my hands, opened it to a page and pushed it across the desk.

IN AN ANCIENT LAND…(Women in cowry shell hats enjoying re-colonization on green) BEAUTY IS