Story for performance #196
webcast from Sydney at 08:09PM, 02 Jan 06

the unforeseen event
Source: Michael Gawenda, ‘Bush finally realised he must change course on Iraq’, Sydney Morning Herald online, 02/01/06.

The unforeseen event, to Mila, was an article of faith. She kept herself open to the appearance of fireflies, the intercession of saints, the uncanny swerve, the slips into gaps, the task no one wants because it isn’t part of a plan. Mila decided a long time ago to wedge awe into certitude, but, not having wished to be one bit a skeptic, she instead focused her certitude on the unexpected.

It was, after all, her name. Mila, milagros, milagrosa, was an unforeseen event. She was born after nine boys who all thought she was a bit of a gift. Which, indeed, she was. Mila by herself was enough of a counterforce to the male-ness of the household, though she didn’t do anything one might describe as feminine. Nor masculine. She didn’t knit, sew, cook, drive the jeep, play, clean the house, read to the nephews and nieces, lead the prayers, begin conversations, monitor the progress of termites on the floor boards, nor supervise parties. She once tried to water her mother’s rose bushes but they died. She was, simply, kind and all-knowing.

What she knew best is that unexpected things happen.

Because so—or perhaps in response to her open nature—Mila was never asked to be anything but be. Thus she quietly went about, keeping in her room tiny dogs whose scampering feet never touched the ground, any ground, neither the soil of the garden, nor of the streets, least of all the potting medium in the clay containers of rose bushes. The miraculously clean dogs thrived unexpectedly in this strangely sanitized purgatory. And Mila unexpectedly became her dogs: a creature thriving without touching the ground.

The accident happened one unusual day when she did travel. Her mother, her eldest brother, and her youngest nephew were crushed in that Mercedes Benz pinned between ten-wheeler trucks. Mila remembered not a thing. The rescuers described Mila safely pinned beneath the voluminous folds of her mother’s ample body, saved, it would seem, by a maternal response to an unforeseen event. Having become a fetus in an instant, Mila was, happily, drained of all memory.

Mila died years later, slipping into coma and then slipping into another draining her of all memory, after a battle with cancer so exhausted her, she could barely take care of her dogs. In those last years, she would be visited by a giant brown moth on her birthdays, which never appeared when it was so much as expected. The moth, her mother (Mila knew this as an article of faith), appeared always as a genuine surprise.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Marian Pastor Roces.