Free Radio Belly by Buffy Cram

another.
    Meanwhile, I am moving south with Pinky and Constantine and the rest of the hybrids. We enter people’s homes and, while the others deplete the food and drink the wine and lather on expensive shampoos, I find a patch of sun-light to curl up in with a good woman—Pinky, or Scarlett, or Arabella—and she is wearing my father’s sweater, and spooning me, wrapping me up in my father’s brown sleeves, tugging me down, and my eyelids are filling with fire colours and I am drifting into dreams, dreams large enough to haunt the hollow rooms of another man’s home, dreams of poetry and of history, of freedom and of motion. It is the future and I am right where I belong, dreaming troubadour dreams older than me.

Mrs. English Teacher
    A T FIRST IT’S about money, or its opposite—student debt, that big red wrecking ball swinging above your head at all times.
    â€œSo you can assure me the country is no longer at war?” you ask the recruiter before committing to a year.
    â€œNo war, promise,” she says.
    You sign and fax the contract the same day.
    Then, for a brief time, it’s about the adventure. “I could’ve chosen Tokyo or Dubai,” you tell friends, “but I’m tired of safe.” You have visions of twisty alleys, old women retreating into darkened doorways, spicy air, dusty sunsets. It’s about leaving behind a peculiar kind of emptiness you’ve always associated with home—your lightweight life, like a hollowed-out shell.
    At your going-away party your smart friend, the one writing a dissertation on everything that’s wrong with the world, asks, “Don’t you worry ESL teachers are just agents of modern colonialism?” So you spend your last nights at home worrying about exactly that, dreaming of angry white men preaching in tents in the middle of jungles. Then, finally, you stop to consider the source of all this doubt: your smart friend who refuses to shave her legs and bikes her dripping compost to her mother’s house across town once a week, your smart friend who always speaks about her “footprint,” who is in fact footprint-obsessed at the expense of romance and career opportunities. You recall the time she scolded you for whitening your teeth and decide, if anything, she is the one raging in the tent. If anything, you are the one out in the jungle holding hands with the children, singing fun and educational songs.
    In the end you are grateful to your friend for exorcising your doubts, for helping you home in on what this trip is really about: a desire to do good in the world and a war-ravaged village that needs you. You write her to say thank you for the exorcism and that you will be sure not to leave a single footprint in this foreign land, other than those footprints you’ve actually been hired to leave. It is the last thing you do before takeoff, mailing that postcard from the airport.
    SOON YOU ARE in the back of a van, queasy and sweating, being driven through the landscape you’ve imagined and reimagined for months. Everything is as expected: the blue-green Tolkien hills in the distance, at the foot of those hills the small, dust-coloured village you will call home. Everything looks exactly like the past. One-room houses with dirt floors and woven walls are scattered across the land like upside-down baskets. There are stray chickens and barefoot boys, goats and mules, men in fields leaning on shovels to grimace at the sky. They know it as well as you: somewhere beyond those hills there is a village flooding, a river slipping its banks, people drowning, mud bubbling. This is a country at the mercy of weather and war. Someone is always dying, but you feel more alive than ever.
    The two men who met you at the airport hardly said hello. They nodded gruffly, said what sounded like “yuh-yuh” and helped you into the back of the van. Now they are seated up at the front, hardly watching the