In the Shadow of the Lieve-Vrouwetoren

“I’m ready for the rekening,” my wife says to the waiter in Dutch, which is the Dutch way of asking for the check. Humor in translation is difficult to explain, how a bill as a reckoning can be made funny, especially when asked for by two lesbians drinking wijn on the consecrated grounds of a once church, which once men had turned into a storage shed for gunpowder. Guess what happens to gunpowder when stored in enough quantity over enough time? According to legend, all it took was a single guard with his careless knife, a single pebble stuck in the treads of his heavy boot. He used the knife. He mistruck the steel, there was a slash of stone, a single spark— Today, only the Lady remains, the watchful tower resting beside the canal with her stomach full of bells. We still pray to her for miracles. She responds only in song. We drink in her shade. Across the ocean, another reckoning remains. Our country a storage shed packed with gunpowder, tended to by careless men who like stabbing knives onto stones.