It was a basement smelling of musty books and sandalwood incense. I walked down carpeted stairs. Someone played an accordion in the corner. Eleven people sat cross-legged in a circle. There was an open spot for me.

There were four hundred people on the hill wearing black. The rain fell steady. The police told them to disperse. They ate vegan cookies in the park.

The moon rose, as big and orange as a prize-winning pumpkin, trembling in the icy sky. It held up the bridge for a moment, then pulled itself over the railing, silhouetting cars and trucks against its cratered face.

I sat down and folded my legs beneath me on the plush red carpet. The others in the circle closed their eyes and hummed. I watched, breathing calm, feeling the breath enter and exit my lungs, my throat, my mouth and nose. The man at the head of the circle stood. He wore sunglasses and had a long, dark ponytail.

After the park, the four hundred walked down Broadway to the bars and coffee shops, warming the chill from their hands. White vans filled with neo-Nazis began to chug up the hill. The police tried to stop them at Melrose. The Antifa and the Nazis could not meet with the police between them.

The moon slid up the sky sleek and quick, shimmering golden orange like the belly of a koi. A photographer circled the mound, snapping pictures. We heard a seagull cry.

The man with long hair approached and motioned for me to stand. He whispered in my ear a mystery that shivered me with hope, with promise.

“How do you know this?” I asked.

“Because,” he said, “I’m the High Priest.”

The white vans vomited their cargo, then swallowed it back up again. The police went home. The Antifa squeezed the rain from their sweaters and scarves and rolled up their banners by the oil drum fires in the Pine Street alleys.

Someone broke a window. Someone else sprayed graffiti on the college walls. And everyone went home.

The moon exhaled, and in its sacred contractions it journeyed ever upward in the sky, pulled along on invisible strings. It shrank, its orange light no longer visible on the rippled surface of the lake, competing as it was with the city lights.

We stood on the edge of the mound, facing east. The photographer left. We descended the shadowed slopes, clasping our cold hands, bursting our warm hearts.

~

This post is the result of a collage writing exercise created by Karen Brennan. The pieces of the collage are 3 different storylines: (1) a personal memory or dream, (2) a current news story or cultural event, and (3) a detailed description of the natural world. This exercise and more like it can be found in the book Now Write! Fiction Writing Exercises from Today’s Best Writers & Teachers.

Or, what can happen when you give a cat a can of tuna in front of Trader Joe’s. About 85% of this story actually happened. 🙂

~

We started out strangers, but after I bought Bath-sheba a can of tuna, I learned all about her.

She spoke through her servant, a human creature named Herman. Herman had spent many long years in service to Bath-sheba, and as such he cared more for her than he did for himself. This was obvious in his unkempt hair, second hand clothing, and the careful way he opened the can for her and laid it before her with a dip of his head.

Herman opened his mouth. He said, “Bath-sheba thanks you kindly for her tuna, madam.”

I nodded. “I’m glad to help.” Bath-sheba gave me a look from gold-flecked eyes that let me know the conversation was not over, and some mystic power compelled me to linger.

Herman picked up one of the many crumpled parchments of sheet music that lined the floor of Bath-sheba’s domicile. He began to sing from it.

“She flies over the city, you know! One night they left the window open and when the moon came out, she flew over the skyscrapers… along the train tracks and the alleyways and the interstate. You say a cat doesn’t have wings? She doesn’t need wings to fly!”

Uneasy with the idea of Bath-sheba flying by my fourth-floor apartment window and spying on me while I couldn’t sleep, I said, noncommittally, “Wow.”

Herman conducted an invisible orchestra with his left hand, as the power of Bath-sheba possessed him fully. “And she flew over the trees and the people and all the dogs in the world couldn’t chase her,” he sang. “She flew around the Space Needle, and over Pike Place Market, and the Great Wheel!”

He clapped his hands in climax, and then the time of Bath-sheba’s speaking passed, and Herman settled down on his haunches on the bare sidewalk, staring blankly at the sheet music in his hand.

Having partaken of the tuna to her heart’s content, Bath-sheba groomed her whiskers knowingly.

The Conium Review Vol. 5 Collector’s Edition has arrived, and it’s a thing of beauty! “The Solitude of Fruit” came in its own banana-embossed pamphlet.

 

 

 

 

I’m staring out my window, where Bast guards the sill. She is wise and has hips of knowing. Like all cats, she sees the other side.

Beloved speaks into the phone. He is connected to his family. I feel disconnected, because I believe nothing.

But I want to believe everything: every chirp and boom and song and savior.

What am I trying to say to you? I am trying to say that without solitude, there is no life. You cannot know what living is when you are wrapped up in the sounds of all the other living. You must hear the music in your own mind, the voice of your own heart. It is strong and it will drown out all the others if you let it. And that’s OK.

I am forging on without a plan. I feel inspired, I am caffeinating. This is coffee, roasted in a small town on the estuary where the wide-mouthed Columbia River spills into the Pacific Ocean, where Lewis and Clark said “Ocian in view! O! The Joy!” The things they said are engraved on a series of stepping stones leading to Waikiki Beach where a man from the Islands washed up two centuries ago, the sorrows of his space-time long sucked from his bones.

The sorrows of my space-time are manyfold. Women and men and those on the spectrum must fight for equality. Every color of skin that is not pale must fight for equality. Every act of domination is honored and sustained although it destroys and continues to destroy.

There is a pinecone shaped like a rocket ship. But our days of space travel are long over. Now we are content to rot and desiccate here on this rock, destroying it with our neglect. We are pacified, entertained by all of the voices from without: television shows, movies, the internet, porn, cat videos, syrupy pop ballads meant to soothe the otherwise battered nerves of the masses, infinite theaters and pot shops and liquor stores where you can legally numb yourself in anyone of half a million ways and meanwhile

the libraries become cooling sanctuaries for the homeless escaping the heat waves of climate change…

soon, the homeless and the prisoners will be the only ones who know how to read and do so willingly.

Meanwhile, back in the Capitol, those competing for its future line their pockets with the flimsy gold of corporate interests and claim that all lives matter, an implicit denial of the truth.

This is a place for experiments, musings, napkin poetry, and shower thoughts.