ferus rex

The shadow of the portico is leaning out from the house a bit, so that it’s possible to come out into daylight gradually in steps of increasing brightness: from the cool interior, out into the breezy shade of the portico, then through a middle ground of half-shade under the swaying palm fronds. Beyond that, everything shimmers dreamily under the dazzle of a benevolent sun. A grassy area extends in a fan-shape from the back of the house; not a lawn in any sense, but an area where the vegetation that grows so riotously everywhere else has been flattened and tamed slightly by a repeated pattern of footsteps, and, where necessary, by the occasional action of a machete. Outward from that edge, the tall grass evolves quickly into a thicket where purple and cream-colored berries lure the hand, like jewels suspended in an inaccessible complexity of vines and twisted branches covered with sharp, green thorns. Still further out, the tops of trees mound out of the basic greenery at random intervals. And from within their leafy bosoms, resplendent in the sun, are visible the sculpted bodies of mangos, guavas and avocados. In this way, the land that surrounds the house extends for miles in all directions, in a green and bounteous homogeneity, except to the East, where only a quarter mile away the sea is grinding against black rocks in a fit of thunder and spume.
(more…)