Tag Archives: Brian Michael Barbeito

Brian Michael Barbeito, FICTION, JULY 2023

the sewist

Leave a comment

 

the sewist

Marty Laura McNicol Mills

Prologue 

Inside the world that lost its way, Mary Laura McNicol Mills did not. she had no choice. not having what others had, she didn’t have the luxury of time, or the upbringing, to know the things like fine clothing or travel, languages and literature and a hundred other things besides. she had to work. yet, she was special because of her ordinariness. higher than special in her grounded-ness. we will learn about her and see that she is mostly invisible to the world. a salt of the earth soul, that by being herself, maintained integrity and goodness, a smarts better than the educated. a heart, though not untouched by sorrow, by sadness, a heart whose rhythm’s value outweighs most others. nobody would notice or laud such a character, yet the universe is creating a mystic and seer in the midst of melancholic metropolitan streets and their secular vacuity. Mary is not in tune with her times nor is she successful by societal standards. the world can’t see her. yet she is like an avatar or path lighter, whose dreams are more valid than even the harshest realities. Mary will prove to be the penultimate survivor. 

the factory is cold. the streets are colder. I wore two sweaters today under my coat. my coat is old and part of it is ripped. but the zipper still works and there is nothing wrong with it overall. sometimes Janice drives me to the bus stop. the industrial road is long. and it’s already almost completely dark by the time we punch our cards. there are horrible looking old buildings to the right on the way to the bus stop. and long empty fields to the left. I don’t know which is worse. the fields even have a path. but nobody walks it. nobody in their right mind anyhow. not at that time anyways. I am always cold lately. sometimes I shiver. I wonder if I am sick again. I don’t know. will see. for now I need to get home. Janice is a good soul. she asks me if I want a drive further along the bus line, but i don’t want to put her out. I go in the other direction. it’s raining. it nearly always rains in this town or so it seems to me. the air bus brakes and the flickering lights aggravate my headache. I take a pill and swallow it with no water because I forgot my water bottle in my locker. there aren’t a lot of people on the bus. nobody here talks to anyone. I look out the window at the darkness and the lights. I begin early and end late. I realize then I haven’t seen the sun in days.

there is a howling wind. it pulls up debris and throws it against the tenement buildings. the contrast between inside and outside is too much. yellow lights flicker here. somewhere out there the rains find their way down industrial grates. I have to mail a gift to my nephew. warm pyjamas. the design I don’t know if he will like. and a book. it is a book about the sea. stories about the sea. treasure. islands. ships. divers. I will send it tomorrow and hopefully it will all get there in time for the holidays. I drink tea. it warms me. the wind rattles the old windows. they are not much better than the single pane factory windows. I stare at them both, both sets of windows. one day, there will be something better on the other side. for now, there is physical and spiritual darkness. but there are people like Janice. I have to think of her. I have to buy her something, if even a card. or a book. but I can’t afford that. I cannot buy her a used book. I know where to get them though. I must read more. besides Bible passages. I must teach myself. i reuse the tea. there is nothing wrong with this. I wash the few dishes. i will change out of these clothes. and pray and go to bed. why can’t I warm up? I put on two pairs of socks. maybe i am sick and don’t realize it. tomorrow will come too early. I hope I dream of something nice. last time I had the recurring dream again. i am on a ship. alone. the crew and passengers had left. it was sinking. it was nighttime and the sea was lit by the moon. there was nothing I could do in the dream. I couldn’t find a life raft. hmm. I must pray. i wonder sometimes how that storm wind doesn’t break those windows right in. maybe one day it will.

Janice wants to pick me up for coffee. I’ll go. It’s the weekend. the problem is that her friend Cassandra sometimes tags along. they call her Cass actually. if she is not a demon or does not have one or some crawling around inside her then she is a good candidate anyhow and displays similar characteristics. she is manipulative, lying, self centered, spiteful, worldly, materialistic, untrustworthy. how I try and avoid looking her in the eyes, not because i am afraid of her or shy around her, but because I would rather not. i sense so much darkness about her. but I’ll go, for I need get out and maybe she won’t. it’s the weekend. the factory is closed Saturdays and Sundays. I’ll walk back home after coffee. the branches are barren since it is winter, and some of the trees have strange dark marks from pollution or disease. but I don’t mind the outline the branches make against the grey sky. they are sad and lonesome trees on the way yes, but in spring green blooms and other colours appear on them. spring. far away. but it always comes, one way or the other, doesn’t it? and I’ll stop and try and find a book to keep me company. something. plus find wrapping for my presents. I can hear the traffic outside. tires slushing through dirty street water fallen and melted. the exhaust fumes will make the little snowbanks even dirtier. a distant horn, sometimes sounded lightly, but sometimes laid upon, a horn signifying anger and even hatred.

I have wrapped the gifts and sent them. I feel good about it. my sister lives far away. I won’t see her this holiday. she has a family. I don’t. but we write letters and she calls sometime. I might take a bus there in the summer. the factory gives me two weeks holidays so that’s good. and i am allowed to take them at once or separately. and I found a book. it’s about St.Theresa the Christian Catholic mystic. it says she used to levitate but was embarrassed about it and didn’t want people to know. the reason I am interested is because my other life path would have had me out of the grim city and living as a nun at a convent somewhere in a countryside. that was my idea of life anyhow. but for now St.Theresa will have to do. I like soft cover books not hardcover. they are lighter and easier to carry. I went out with Janice this morning and her horrible friend couldn’t make it. what a nice time we had. Janice I won’t see until Monday at the factory now. she lives with her boyfriend. I don’t have anyone. it has stopped raining. the sun even came out to shine on the dirty city. but it’s cold. I long for the spring and suppose most people do. for now, work in the weeks and keep to my books on the weekends. I am okay with that mostly, but when not, that’s the way it has to be anyhow.

there is a missing girl. a teenager. I try and not watch the news, but there was posters up at the bus shelters. it’s a horrible world. I hope they find her safely but my gut tells me otherwise. I said a prayer in my head for her while I rode the bus. though this is an industrial zone, there are ravines everywhere. polluted, graffiti stained, murky air and low vibrational ravines. and as anyone knows, a city houses too many people, and makes it hard to find the bad person or persons. I am a sewist, and work at a table with other women sewing whatever they give us. sometimes emblems, patches on industrial work clothing, and sometimes putting together clothing itself. it all depends on the contracts the company gets that year. I have worked there going on nine years now. my grandmother taught me since I was a little girl. but her main thing was crochet and her hands were always busy making something by hand for someone. i am good at my work and proud of my work. I just wish they paid us more wages. in my locker which is in the lunch room, I have a prayer book, a needle work book, some mints in small metal containers, and a picture of my sister and I with my nephew from when we went to Niagara Falls a few summers ago. in the photo it is bright, sunny, and we are all genuinely smiling. sometimes I don’t notice the picture but on difficult days, especially in the middle of winter, I sometimes look at it and touch it with a finger as if to connect with that day, a time of happiness, again.

the walking foot of my sewing machine is broken. I was let off an hour early and walked halfway home before catching the bus. my boots are old, but I have begun wearing two pairs of socks. all my socks are in great shape because I can sew them, reinforce them, stitch them, anything. I can mend or even make socks that last a lifetime. I had a plan taking the foot route. I stopped past the old graveyard. it’s not far enough from the road to be very peaceful, but it is calmer than the city streets and I brought a flower to the grave of my grandmother. both grandmothers were good ones. the one there is the one that taught me to sew. she made homemade popsicles in the summer, and great stews in the winter. I am sure she made many other things but these things i remember mostly and with the greatest fondness. we used to go to the fairgrounds in the city. I recall the lights. it was cheap. this is one of the first words I learned. therefore, money was a large concern. if something was ‘cheap,’ to her, it meant good whereas it sounds like it has a bad meaning to many people. if she was angry she was ‘vex,’ and if a doctor could not fix someone, though a Catholic, she would whisper sometimes that so and so ‘…needs to go see the Obeah Man,’ which was a type of mysterious healer she knew about. so a few worlds converged in her. the main thing was crochet and sewing though. well, I left the flower and said a few words, told her I missed her and said I hoped she was doing well wherever she was. a strange wind did arrive then, and I wondered. I made my way home. a regular night. reading about St.Theresa. mending some socks. drinking tea. I just had a bowl of soup for dinner and one piece of bread. I don’t eat a lot anyhow and wasn’t very hungry. they said come back tomorrow and if the sewing machine is not fixed they will find other tasks for me to do. fine. fine with me I thought.

the sun only showed up here and there for a short periods. it’s mostly grey and dark. lately the days have been extra monotonous. some of the workers went out to eat and invited me but i didn’t go. I didn’t tell them, but I couldn’t afford it. I don’t know how they can. maybe they save better, or borrow from family members back and forth. I don’t have anyone family-wise, to borrow from. Janice would lend me, but I don’t want to. I think I dreamed of the missing girl. I feel she is deceased. there was water and she stood beside it and asked me, ‘What do I do now,’ and I didn’t have an answer. then the dream changed or ceased. soon I woke up in a sweat. I don’t know if it was real, a vision or psychic sense, or just a dream. sometimes I dream real things. I prayed the rosary for guidance. that was Wednesday night. today is Friday. I don’t feel well. I have a cough. the rains are getting to me. my sister sent me the warmest quilt ever. it has a high thread count and is green and blue, my two favourite colours. the earth and sky living together. how I love it and shall cherish it. I will wrap myself in it. there is sometimes hope, a hopeful thing from the universe. if I do dream of the missing girl again I hope I can help her cross safely to the other side if she is deceased and lost. I hope I can do that. I don’t talk about it much, but I have helped people before, lost souls transitioning. May God help us all.

I walked to the small lake in the early morning that is a few stops past the work stop. then back. I headed out early because I couldn’t sleep. the air was crisp and the area plain. I liked it. I have drank two teas to help keep me warm and I have tea in a mug. there are houses at certain points along the shoreline and ones seen in the distance. some are old from generations ago, white clapboard, hardly any brick, more like cottages than homes, with screen doors in front. but sometimes a stream of smoke comes from a chimney. then, there are monster homes, overdone, too opposite, vulgar if you ask me. I can hardly afford rent. but I wonder. what is wrong with just a structurally sound brick home? one that would be neat and comfortable and has a few rooms and a fenced yard perhaps. I don’t know. my socks are warm and guard against any problems with my boots. there are winter seagulls that saw me and flew off somewhere. two crows interested in something in the road, their black so different than the light and snow and ice. I like nature, but don’t get to see much of it. and any green space they seem to build upon. I wonder in half seriousness if someone will one day propose to fill in the lake and built a housing development upon it. 

~~~

Janice was crying in the lunchroom. I put my hand on her shoulder and asked her what was wrong. ‘They found the missing girl. Didn’t you hear? In the forest.’ and by Janice’s tears and slouch I knew they hadn’t found her alive. I sat her down and wiped her tears. ‘She is in heaven at least,’ I said, and Janice nodded. we went to the sewing tables and began our day. it was a solemn day and they talked about it once on the radio. we are allowed to listen to the radio but can’t hear much of it. in a gap or at lunch or break though one can. they caught the criminal. he will not be getting out of jail. and we are safe. from him anyways. after work I took the bus again and sat in the back, with only two or three other passengers. before I got off i had a strange feeling about the girl, like she was around. I hurt my finger at that point while mending a button to a sweater. so I put my things away and just waited for my stop like most other people. I like to keep my hands busy. like my grandmother. she was never idle. never lazy. always doing something to add to the world. I guess she is my only mentor if I had to name one. and I like St.Teresa, the mystic nun.

10. I had put down my book and stood by the window looking out. then the phone rang. it was my sister and the pyjamas and book had arrived for my nephew. he thanked me on the phone and it was the first time I’d heard his voice in a while. I hope he wasn’t being dutiful and really liked them. but overall it’s okay either way. it’s the thought that counts, right? I told her the blanket is great and that I would write her again soon. I put the phone down and closed my eyes. I suddenly saw the girl, the girl they had found. she stood in front of me it was windy around her. some of the wind lifted her long messy hair. she didn’t say anything. I told her to go upwards, to the next world, and that there was angels and light and God there. she didn’t move. I lifted her upon my back, and stood up, and her hands held my shoulders. I stood as straight as possible and told her to climb upwards into light. suddenly she was gone. but I feel she was assisted by the light. I felt a mix of puzzlement and fright and goodness- many emotions at once. I have soul rescued before and put people on my shoulders to get them to light. no angel or message arrives before or after to say whether it worked or not, though I feel it did. I received no good mark or review, and no bad mark or review. I was tired. I fell asleep right there on the couch for a few hours before waking up and moving to the bedroom. I told myself I had tried my best by her and that everything would be okay, somehow. I held my rosary in my hand tightly. I fell again into a deep dreamless sleep. 

Epilogue

Mary continued at the factory, and though Janice moved away, she remained in the city. it was her home after all. her sister took her away the next year to the sand and salt sea for a week. and for Mary, who had never seen the sea, this had been like having been taken to heaven on a tour. the memories and photos would sustain her for a long time. the factory remained the same, and she went on to read about other saints, though none resonated quite as much as her St.Teresa, the one she adopted as her own guide and spiritual mentor. and the souls. the lost souls still came for help sometimes. mostly she didn’t know who they were, but tried to assist them to the heavens or at least higher places in the astral worlds. who would think, if they saw Mary, not too tall, not too interesting looking, adorned in her torn coat and old boots, entering up the bus steps after the factory shift in the rainy city, anything much about her? who would notice her at all? and who would know that she was perhaps the best sewist in the city, and the hardest working? what’s more, who would guess she was a helper of lost souls?

Brian Michael Barbeito, FICTION, JANUARY 2023

the city beautiful

Leave a comment

the city beautiful  

brian michael barbeito  

for Tara  

Every angel is terrifying.  

-Rainer Maria Rilke  

part one, the rabbit county and the angel that never was 

I enter the long winding roads of Prince Edward County. the destination is a house built on the water, industrial chic, and with Art Deco paintings and ornaments. I know I will pen belles lettres at some point, episodic epistolaries about the good and bad, fleshed out from napkin notes and field journals. I have to in order to frame my experience, if even for only myself. it seems that all around are dark brown rabbits. they blend at first with the summer chaparral and the shrubs, the dense thickets and the long adjacent field both. I sometimes slow to a stop for I don’t want to hurt any of them. go rabbit, go, I think and sometimes say, away from the danger of the vehicle. there is no signage and even the locals don’t know about the place. it is only for the elite but I am a guest. a guest in another world. there are eagles that fly around out back because there is a nest. in the county, there are wine vineyards and lots of space. one has to drive everywhere. I am an artist, a creative, a photographer and writer-poet, and wish that I was driven and not having to focus on the driving itself. an impossibly large turkey vulture alights and waits atop an abandoned barn. I stop to take a photograph. there is nothing for miles in every direction. the vulture flies away. they don’t eat rabbits that run through fields. they eat roadkill, dead things. I have a feeling that the county itself is a ruse or racket or empty vision. a bit of a dead thing if something could be a bit dead. but later a driver picks us up and we go for dinner at restored affluent hotel. pickerel. fresh obviously. soft lighting and clinks of glasses. but strange. these for the most part are not my friends and we have little if anything in common. I am as well read as any of them but would rather not say. some of them are bright spiritually, which surprised me, and a few are not and border on darkness. I like the rabbits and the eagles moreso. run rabbit run, i pensively wander in my mind’s eye, and fly eagle fly, over the lake pristine and somehow lonesome, yes the lonely lake in the county. on the way back the moon is shining full and brightly over an old brick movie theatre and lighted marquee, and through a series of clouds that frame it all. mysterious. whimsical. saturnine and sanguine at once. oh moon. more people have been enlightened during the full moon than at any other time. crestfallen seems the day when the night is endowed with its brand of magic. nature’s night anyhow, not the social reality of humans. soon we are travelling and I tell the driver to stop and everybody wonders why. there is a large deer in the road that nobody saw. the driver, a woman, thanks me. ‘You have the keenest of eyes and a quick word,’ says the rich man, and I tell him thanks. the industrial chic house, a mansion, has all the switches and faucets one would think of, but because of the design, everything is hidden. and there is no balcony. I don’t like it. I long for normalcy. it is far past nightfall and the rabbits must move as rabbits do, but under the moon. rabbits watching the witching hour. if there is an angel around the angel is hidden. the angel of place is absent. does not speak to me. in the wind or in the reeds or even through the rabbits. I am stuck. I have missed something or it has missed me. and if the moon knows a secret it keeps it to itself. how lonesome and spiritually vacuous seems the county that I have no affinity for. ~~~ 

part two, the rich lagoon and the angel that had to leave 

outside or the lagoon the roads travel long and straight. the sides are farm fields or forests. fields house clapboard barns atop 

concrete forms and most are the foundations for faded wood. what it was like for the generations that farmed there I know little of, but place usually has a spirit and one can sense at the least rough goodness in the terrain and air. whatever is there, good and bad, is not disingenuous but rather wholly confident in itself, in its own being. it is ironic that they say, ‘…salt of the earth,’ when there is not much actual salt around those towns. I can see the old style petroleum stations with faded signs and ways, open but soon to close and be taken over by multi national conglomerates. the two worlds old and new stand in many ways next to one another. Osho said that when it comes to people, centuries live contemporaneously. too true. and also true of places, their mise en scene and their spirit. they might create a mall and subdivisions, urban sprawl, for such things climb out of areas like a cancer spreading and take over healthy pastoral lands. all our cells and bones are susceptible. who cares for instance about the old stone walled church where some priest grey and bent over the lectern gives his exegesis? nowadays it’s the gospel of pure materialism people can only hear. inside the lagoons, past the trains and their tracks, is a large series of waterways built in the 1970’s at the same time I was borne. there can be no basements on a marshland. I used to fish there and live there sometimes. the corner store had friendliness and good prices, and next door to that, an actual ice cream place. I would walk all around with book in hand, Conrad, Heller, Steinbeck, Camus, so on, all the rest, the usual suspects, trying to teach myself. little aluminum vessels bob and away inside the light of day and receive say, the summer robust but also soon the borne autumnal air cool and its leaves orange red yellow brown green fallen but then leavened by the lee of branches over the ground in a dance of unseen but heard and discerned whimsical whistling wind winding like a spectre. phantoms in the courtyard. spirits in the far off ripples on the lake face. I want to know what is all there. too shy to talk to people, I stayed to myself. the affluent houses, some not three but four stories tall, and the sailboats and fifty, sixty foot power boats wait outside. I like instead an army type boat, something boxy and from another generation, maybe like the toys I played with as a child or the ones in comics I read. something. something soulful. rivets exposed and you can see the welds and store strong things. not this sleek fibreglass fakery of the rich. it’s precisely your figurative and literal scar that makes you interesting. show me your cicatrix. oh well. there were more square vessels before. they are disappearing. now they are a lark, ‘…oh look at that isn’t it neat?’ for a while the angel was there, this I know. in and about the books and the sandy shore and even the shore walls inside the lagoon. the goodness of a Saturday afternoon. energy. benevolent Sunday sun. sleeping. walking. reading. fishing. life worked out. but looking around the rope bridge and the canals, I can’t find the angel of place, that old angel that spoke to me in non linguistic ways. I can’t quite catch my stride or find my way. why did the angel leave and where did it go? did I do something wrong? ‘This place has changed,’ I tell the old and sagacious man, ‘you used to be able to go for a walk and buy an ice cream cone or bag of milk, but it’s all closed down due to high rent and has been for a long time now.’ he smiles and says, ‘Don’t you know everything changes? That was a long time ago.’ I just nod. but I don’t like it. maybe he is right. a long time ago it was. and everything changes. but I don’t like his answer. maybe because the simplicity and truth of it hurts somehow. I don’t know for sure, but I want to find the angel. I want to feel how I felt before. yet the angel has left. no note of explanation was provided. I was left alone to figure out what time and change, innocence and maturation, karma and providence and the fates mean. it was a tall order, w/no teacher. and all I had really wanted to do was maybe go for a walk and get an ice cream cone.  

part three, the city beautiful and the angel ever present  

immediately I can sense the angel. then she shows herself. she is in not one thing or place but in all things. I can smell and taste the Floridian air, the air of my childhood and even beyond. the angel has not left or become coy, been defeated or ignored, but is omnipresent. I look up, and breathe. the sunlight shines upon the parapets and interlock, the cement and the verdant palm leaves that sway a bit for the humid breeze. i am in Orlando. but Orlando is in me also, and that is part of the secret. like a beloved. I never stopped loving her. even when she was far away I held her close. I refused to let her go. pox to those who say let the past be the past. and pox to the entire spiritual canon and all conventional wisdom if need be. i choose only the mystic sensibility, and I love always the angel. she is in the water, for can’t you see the ripples illumined by the bright of day? she is in the conversations of the good hearted and in the dusk when the electrical lights blink on against the stormy mood ridden firmament capricious, unpredictable. what will it do? feel that wind? it is ancient. it is a spirit. it is an angel. the cab driver says, ‘If I can say one thing for sure in fifteen years of doing this, it’s that everyone wants to come here, from all over the world!’ and I nod and say simply ‘Ya.’ soon I walk the lakes and see the flora and fauna, herons and smaller birds, lizards, and even a wild alligator that is fed up with me for trying to take its picture and soon leaves under the water again. the sun warms. I see immense lands of wealth, opulence, even decadence, but that’s not my problem, for it’s the air and sense of nature ancient and hard to name atmospheric sense I am after. and I find it. in the walkways and near the indigenous trees utterly and continently green and thick with leaves that scream health and beauty. in the gates and pool pump motor sound and sometimes smiles of others. at the outdoor stores someone calls me and I turn to see. ‘You. Hey you, come here,’ and the woman looks a bit like a famous singer. ‘Me?’ ‘Ya you, I want to talk to you.’ i go over as told. she has a kiosk. ‘You want a vape?’ I tell her I have one. and cigarettes. lots nicotine. she frowns. ‘Okay then. is that all you smoke, just nicotine?’ ‘Yes.’ She gives the same frown. it’s fun and funny and in jest, telling me I am a bit of a nerd for not smoking anything stronger. she is more down than I am. soon i move on and she keeps waving at me here and there. but it’s a higher angelic presence than woman or drug, than even music or poetic word, that I listen and watch for. and it is there. it is everywhere there. thick grasses and roads and buildings have received the rains. it is hurricane season. wondrous. magical. powerful. insightful. beyond psychological sets. it is mystic. the skies are a major arcana, The Magician, manifesting much,- sun moon storm clarity cloud bird plane hope inspiration danger caution and other and all. and the grounds are wild with love. I breathe. I can breathe again for a bit. I am in the midst of the light. I am in the city beautiful and have returned to where I belonged. see, for better and worse, things are always right, if you are in the presence of the angel. 

~~~~ 

image by Brian Michael Barbeito

Brian Michael Barbeito, FICTION, OCTOBER 2014, Prose

LISTENING TO THE DIVINE SHOUT BEFORE DRIVING AROUND THE FROGS THAT LEAVE THE LOAM

Leave a comment

LISTENING TO THE DIVINE SHOUT BEFORE DRIVING AROUND THE FROGS THAT LEAVE THE LOAM

by Brian Michael Barbeito

 

I went to the place where the urban meets the rural and walked down sandy pathways to see ponds. The dusk was going to announce itself there. I had been trying to escape the day because the day had been a lurid artifact- too bright, too angled, and in point of fact, too new. I just needed to see the tree lines where the difficult storms had grown vexatious taken the leaves and branches ragged across tornado –like skies fluttering like a bat can seem to flutter. At the bottom of summits I watched the rocks grand and small. There was a great stillness, a preternatural quietude and so I, in turn, to honor such a natural silence, remained quiet. It wasn’t difficult as I was alone. I had the queer idea that some metaphysical presence might make itself known. Not a deva or sprite, no, nothing like that. And not a guardian angel or whispered message from the large Bur Oaks, Pines, or feral shrubs. Then what? To tell the truth, I did not and do not know. I just thought something might happen there. It did and it did not. I didn’t hear or see anything, and cannot tell a lie. But there was something in the silence. Maybe it is something they speak about in the perennial philosophy, if the perennial philosophy speaks anywhere of a silence that seems to shout the divine. It was. It was. It was. It was a grace that rang out from the quiet dusk pond by the crescive and verdant meandering path walls, from the thunder miles and miles away that did lightly erupt into the air across pregnant and warning cumulus, and from the dense thicket making a perimeter around the outside of the back of the water that sat still and stoically as a rooftop for the water spiders. I was grateful. I had not seen God A Person or a burning bush, but I had received through the agency of nature some calmness. That is how I felt after hearing the sum of the sound of the forest and water. Afterwards, it started to rain. I had to use my high beams or ‘Brights’ as some people used to call them. I noticed that the rain disturbs the frogs and they begin to come out to the roads, the one-lane highways I had to traverse. I tried to maneuver around them so as not to hurt even one. Difficult. I managed well enough. I was glad, even a bit heart-swept to arrive home.