Spring
Part 1
Part 1
Spring had arrived pleasantly early, and she is savoring the longer days and sunlight that she had so dearly missed during the darkened winter months. Apparently, so is the black beast in the corner. He languishes obscenely in the warm rays filtering through the windows in her office, and his fuzzy exposed belly is a tempting target for nuzzles, which he doesn’t particularly like, but tolerates for the sake of human-feline equilibrium. She lifts her head from his lazy, furry mass and slowly strokes the top of his head with one finger, just that way that makes his amber eyes close tightly and evokes the closest thing to a smile that any cat could ever manage.
Every time she sees him so content and at ease, she is reminded of the first moment they met. It had been six years or more, and she and her husband were visiting a local pet store. She had strolled into the adopt-a-pet area, much to her husband’s dismay. And there he was: enormous and filthy, matted fur and feral eyes. He was pacing his cage, as a captive lion would in a zoo. He was intimidating and wild, and he had very nearly outstayed his welcome; with no prospects of adoption, he was on kitty death-row. She fell in love with him immediately. And while her husband filled out the adoption papers, she opened his cage, and he fell into her lap, purring and gazing up at her with those eyes, those feral amber eyes, and she knew her heart was his. And as she stokes his head now and he purrs that thunderous rumbling purr that completely melts her resolve, she knows that she must write about him.
He is curled up in his corner, purring as the glow from the candles casts their flickering and shifting light throughout the room, and she opens her journal. She’s not written in months, and she feels that familiar twinge of exhilaration and angst as she wields her pen once again. She looks at him, in his lazy feline grace, and her pen touches the page.
And the surge of ink upon paper is smooth and without consciousness; each thought flows seamlessly into a word into a line into a rhyme into a surreality that she, alone, can fathom and manipulate. But the room is too quiet, too still. The connection breaks abruptly as her pen leaves the page, and her mind swims in the silence. Jesus, how much did I drink this time? She looks down at the empty wine bottle on its side on the floor next to her chair, and she knows all too well. There are two cigarettes burning in the ashtray by her hand, and the candles have all died but one, and by its meager light she glances at the short prose upon the page before her, trying to determine how she could have imbibed so much to produce so little. It’s too damned quiet. She closes her journal, and looks to the corner for her beast, but he’d obviously gone to bed hours before. She snuffs the remaining candle and stumbles out of the room.
(to be continued...)