Beads and Candy

©2025 T. Agnew-craiyon.com

Agnew’s prose is hypnotic in this meditative character study about disconnecting and revival between two people in a beautifully decaying New Orleans setting.

The city’s beauty and rot mirror their relationship — romantic, sensory-rich, but crumbling underneath.

A fascinating vignette of a relationship and disconnect.  — Zoetrope

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This is the first piece for my new short story collection to be published soon.

In India, you’re taught that there are certain qualities that make you a divine human being. — Deepak Chopra

They had breakfast in the little courtyard at the back of the house. Surrounded by larger, American townhouses, a testament to the age of the old house, the 1920s shotgun cottage, raised on brick piers and garnished with lacy Victorian motifs, now sat in the shadows of a progressive New Orleans.

Leti made him a bowl of fried eggs over buttered grits, with avocado, bacon, and a side of fresh fruit. He made them coffee using her stainless-steel French press, and she instructed him to wait five minutes before plunging the coffee.

Under an ancient Spanish oak, he closed his eyes and felt the morning sun bleed through the branches. He opened them and studied her smile.

“I want to draw your lips,” he said, sketchbook in his lap.

“I’ll pose naked if you want.”

His phone pinged. He typed a message and set it back on the table.

“Who was that?” she said.

“My daughter. Teens. Always a new issue.”

She stroked the front of her neck.

He put his notebook on the table and went and sat on the edge of her chair. He kissed her ear and her nose ring and her pufferfish lips. He slipped his tongue into her mouth and tasted buttery avocado and doubt.

He’d been in New Orleans promoting one of his self-help books months ago and she had sent him a message after a podcast entitled Finding Your Construct.

“Sorry I missed you in NOLA. If my construct is still being assembled, where am I?” she wrote.

“You are where you need to be,” he had replied. He couldn’t recall where he got that one. Chopra?

The conversations had gone on for six months and they still had never met. He saw her in the chat boxes during podcasts. They eventually sent pictures and began to converse over the phone.

Initially, he enjoyed only emailing back and forth when no one hand wrote anything, when cursive writing was no longer taught in schools, listening to her typed words, her tone, the intonations one never gets from verbal communication. Words get wasted, lost.

“I want to know you through our words,” he told her. He knew he could help her, it was his gift, a gift that he liked to believe came from East India American parents he barely knew.

The first night they slept together in the New Orleans house, he woke early, the full cerulean moon still hiding in the window. 

The room was small, and the entire cottage had original terrazzo floors that spanned the entire floor plan. The rectangular design elongated everything, creating a maze-like effect. 

At first, he forgot where he was, believing himself to be in a hotel room or his Bogota flat. She stirred and at first he thought she was dreaming.

Leti’s spiraling, Creole hair framed the pillow, hiding her brown porcelain face. She was on her side, facing away from him in the bed, her hand buried deep between her legs in a measured stroking that reverberated across the mattress.

It aroused him. He wanted to touch her shoulder, kiss her neck, join her, but his curiosity stopped him. He waited and watched and listened to her breath and how it changed with the shape of her mouth as it twisted into rapture.

Why had she not awakened him? He was naked next to her. It troubled him and created a sexual malaise in his body that he’d never felt before.

She sighed and lifted her chin as though looking over her shoulder at him. Did she know he was awake, that he was watching? 

He turned toward the wall and let the blue moon swallow him.

He was in New Orleans for a few weeks, and this time it was February, Mardi Gras season. 

He strolled the artery of streets in the morning, waving to people on their creole cottage house porches, greeting their dogs, dodging pieces of ripped sidewalk jettisoned to the sky from water damage and neglect. On some parts of the cement, wiry tendrils of sweetgum tree roots spiraled around severed strips of rebar.

As he walked, he wondered if one day people would recognize him on the streets, Ved, the Asian Indian guru.

Mardi Gras was not a one-time parade, but an endless celebration that went on for weeks. He knew Leti’s friends had risen early days ago to snag a place along St. Charles Ave., their colorful lawn chairs and portable bars and elaborate handmade laddered platforms ten feet off the ground, strategically positioned for the best view of the parade. Some were probably already in costumes with beads and green hats. Most started drinking in the morning.

“We should go to the parade later this week. My friends set up this morning,” she said.

“Too many people. Too many Guns.”

“There are more police these days since the Bourbon Street attack,” she said. “And they put additional barriers up.”

“Crowds. You know, I told you how I feel about crowds.”

The other night she had wanted to stay out after a full night of salsa dancing in a crowded bar and he balked. “Just one more place,” she whined. “It won’t be crowded this late in the morning.”

He compromised about the parade, worried he would age himself. “Let’s go early before the masses. We can visit your friends.”

In the morning, he walked to a café in a historic building off S. Claiborne Ave. and wrote for most of the day.

The barista told him the building had many histories, and it was a salsa club in the 1930s. Wooden floors, marble framework, and a second-story balcony gave the place a remarkable acoustic alchemy.

From his table facing the street, crowds of Mardi Gras revelers paraded by the floor to ceiling windows wearing vibrant clothing, some blowing horns, others banging drums. As he watched the colorfully veiled shadows pass the window, he wondered how many were in emotional pain, how many he could help.

He kept his phone in his bag when he wrote, but as he packed his case, he saw that Leti had sent him a dozen texts.

are you coming home soon?

I made you lunch. come home

where are you?

should I wear my hair straight?

I left the front door open

I’m going to feed the neighbor’s fish now

The last text puzzled him. She told him she had been feeding her neighbor’s fish while they were in Key West, but that the fish had died under her care. It devastated her and she blamed herself, even when she knew her neighbors rarely cleaned the aquarium.

Other patterns emerged. Leti began disappearing into the bedroom where he’d find her endlessly scrolling through video clips or lying in the dark with her sleep mask on.

Other days, she didn’t get out of bed. “It’s a void,” she said. “The abyss. I must assemble.”

He sat on the bed and looked into her brown, ricocheting eyes and stroked her forehead like she was a child with the flu.

Some nights he woke to find her again in rapture, the bed shaking intensely as she no longer hid it. Now she did it on purpose and he helped, listening to her commands, allowing her to grasp his hand and move it where she wanted.

“One finger. There. Just keep it there. Don’t move it. Now lick my tongue.”

He slept in the spare room the second night because she was getting up and disappearing into her office space at the far end of the house.

In a shrouded sleep that seemed to tumble through an endless cavern, he dreamed of the closets in foster homes from decades and decades ago, the only spaces he felt safe. When he woke in the night, he placed a blanket in the closet and spent the rest of the night there.

In the morning, when she appeared outside of the bedroom and found him seated in the foyer reading a book, she was ebullient and acted as though she hadn’t been absent for almost two days. “There you are! Let’s go see my friends. Mardi Gras! Vamos! We must go!” she said.

She darted around the room and kitchen as though on amphetamines, assembling a cooler and charcuterie board and wine, humming a tune.

That night they left before the parade started, the rowdy crowds pushed together, cutting a human hedge through both sides of St. Charles Ave. A man covered in beads wearing a yellow-scaled sport jacket blew a saxophone, his torso rowing up and down as he pranced along the human hedge.

Throngs of children shrieked as early vendors bicycled up and down the parade route on dazzling, multi-colored LED-lit cycles, tossing beads and candy.

As they said farewell to her friends, revelers snatched beads tossed over their heads and a woman in a black-jeweled dress fell from her viewing platform. A throng of revelers swarmed around her sprawled form on the ground, laughing as they slurped their drinks.

His mind flashed. He was a child, lost at a State Fair, the crowds enveloping him under yellow lights. All he saw were shoes and purses and sticky ground.

He blinked now and held Leti’s hand tightly, trying to lead her away from the chaos. He wanted to be in his closet.

“We can catch the trolley before they shut down for the parade,” she said, sensing his anxiety and squeezing his hand.

As they waited for the Trolly, he looked at his phone and thumbed a text.

“Really? Who now?” she said.

It was still early when they arrived home, so he poured them both a bourbon and went to sit on the patio. 

This time, her phone pinged. “Oh my god,” said Leti, “A little girl was shot during the parade. She is only six.” She studied her phone. “She’s in critical condition.”

He waited a breath. “When will they ever fix the goddamn streets in this city?” he said.

They heard cars zoom by in front of the house, going way too fast on the neighborhood street, somehow avoiding the gnarled asphalt and potholes that lined every street in New Orleans. 

From the patio, the sound changed as the cars slowed to avoid the craters, then hiccupped in a metal thud as they caught a corner of the scarred road.

Leti had replaced her car suspension system twice in two years in every decade she lived in Jefferson Parrish.

“Did you hear what I said?” she asked.

He sipped his bourbon. “Did you see the black T-shirt on the light post on the corner? I saw it this morning on my walk. Your parish!” They were all over the city, placeholders marking the various gangs to claim a parish.

“I’m making gumbo tomorrow,” she said.

Leti spent three days making gumbo. Her grandmother’s recipe, everything was made from scratch, the andouille, ham, seafood, and vegetables all farm to table. The only thing she allowed him to do was dice the tomatoes and onions.

He adored seeing her body from the hallway, stirring the iron pot and taking sips from the wooden spoon. He came up behind her and embraced her hips, pulling her to him.

She turned her head sideways and held the spoon to his lips. He managed a piece of crab with the sweet-spicy broth and it reminded him of the Indian spice store on his street in Bogota. He kissed her deeply, the texture of her tongue coated with broth.

During dinner, they ate in the foyer dining room surrounded by her grandmother’s antiques, a large, wooden Emerson radio with a glass dial and cathedral shape, crystal vases and a large Régence style carved Giltwood mirror.

His phone pinged. He sent another brief message and turned it over on the table.

“Who is that?” she said again. “You and your messages.”

He leaned forward and placed his hand over hers.

He heard her up during the night again and as he was about to wake, she slid into bed next to him. 

She lowered her sleep mask and turned away from him. “I need to assemble,” she mumbled.

He wondered if it would be another day before he saw her again.

In the morning, he made coffee and noticed multi-colored notes all around her desk. He’d noticed them before, stuck to walls in the kitchen and mirrors in the bathroom, benign notes with quotes or mantras or self-help babbles.

You are unlost

You are precious

He knew they were all stolen from some other guru, that his own mantras used in his books were all recycled from the Dali Lama, Ram Das, or Tony Robbins.

The posts were different, and they weren’t there yesterday. There were at least a hundred, stuck on a lampshade or plastered to the wall like wallpaper. 

Some were diagrams with arrows, others contained nonsensical text. Dozens of pens sat spilled on the desk, some on the floor, some stuck into a penholder.

A spiral-bound notebook was open and littered with small notes. Filled with paragraphs describing nothing, the pages in the notebook an enigma. It was as though she had typed one letter on a typewriter, over and over in her immaculate handwriting.

He sat at her desk and sipped his coffee, eyeing the illogical notes until he paused on one.

LIES AS A CONSTRUCT

His phone pinged, but he ignored it. They all wanted something all the time.

Cars groaned along the street, thumping over potholes, even in the morning hours, on veins of the city that were perpetual like the heartbeat of Bourbon Street, vessels that never ceased but fed the gangs and the tourists and wounded little girls who only wanted beads and candy and the fathomless inane of constructs.

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