
Hidden Treasures: Short Stories

Beautiful Dreamer Short Stories, Volume 1

Cathy Smith

Published by Cathy Smith, 2018.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

HIDDEN TREASURES: SHORT STORIES

**First edition. December 27, 2018.**

Copyright (C) 2018 Cathy Smith.

ISBN: 978-1386381389

Written by Cathy Smith.

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For my own sweet daddy, who read to me as a child, and made up his own stories every night before I went to bed. From a family of multi-generational liberal southern Democrats, if you need to know.
Hidden Treasures

by Cathy Smith

All Stories Copyrighted in Beautiful Dreamer or Castles in the Sky (C) 1993, Cathy Smith

All rights reserved. No part of these stories may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from the author, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

As the purchaser/owner of this E-book, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this E-book on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.

Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the author/publisher is a violation of the author's copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places; and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Other Books by this Author

***

The Silver Lake Cozy Mystery Series as Sophia Watson:

It All Comes Out in the Wash: Book 1

Snow Angels: Book 2

That Summer in Silver Lake: Book 3

Solstice: Book 4

***

The Bonaventura Cozy Mysteries as Zara Brooks-Watson:

Jitterbug: Book 1

Tie Dye: Book 2

***

Poetry and a Children's Book as Cathy Smith:

Waiting for the Sunrise: The Collected Poetry of Cathy Smith

The Tree People: (for ages 6-10)

# Contents

Hidden Treasures

Skipping Stones

The Wishing Well

The Sixth Day

The Magician

The Songs of Dolphin

The Bookstore Cat

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# Hidden Treasures

Copyright (C) 1993, Cathy Smith

1. Yunwi Tsunsdi: The Fox

Redbird had seen all of her children and grandchildren born in this house--even Charles, her youngest half-brother. Most of them had been raised here, in the Land of a Thousand Smokes. In fact, she had attended the birth of quite a few of the local children, being both a county and tribal midwife. Most of the people in the county at that time were Ani Yun'wiya, Cherokee. Cherokee usually from North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee.

She sat in the dark. The night was filled with odd noises, loose hinges creaking against the rain-filled wind and crashing rents of thunder. Tikwale'lu--thunder. Occasionally, violent flashes of light streaked across the room illuminating her unmoving, almost inert, figure which was set against an enormous dimly lit plaster wall. Elderly and small, she sat dwarfed by the shadows of chairs, tables and iron candle holders. Her usually straight back was ordinarily slumped over to the side in slumber at this hour, but tonight she did not sleep in her chair, she was wide awake, thinking. Her eyes flickered now, glowing like the still hot wood ash dying in the sodden ashes of the metal bucket she used to clean the bottom of the wood stove with.

Her fingers moved quickly and not with age, although some thought her to be close to 100 winters or even older. She had no birth certificate; there was no "proof" of her birth or the birth of some of her family members other than the verbal corroboration of family, friends and the like. Well, I guess they, themselves, knew who they were and how long they had been here.

She was not slow or labored by illnesses or exhaustion. The room was pulled deeper into the moistened darkness of the hour and the unrequited need for light, honored only by a temporary drifting brightness of the moon, shifting away momentarily from Alma Redbird's face. Tojuwah, that's how you say Redbird in Cherokee.

The drone of unceasing torrents of water coated the underside of her mind which moved from one object to the other in an arrhythmic way like a waterfall interrupted by boulders, then released to flow freely again. Ama'tikwalelunyi, waterfall.

Alma Tojuwah Ridden also had some Scots-Irish ancestry. She had grown up and had lived all her life in Beulah, North Carolina on the Tennessee/North Carolina border near Gatlinburg. It was 1950, and the times were not that easy for the Cherokee people. Segregation had forced them, along with peoples of African descent, to use "Colored Only" facilities and accede to the unfair laws of Jim Crow. This segregation created a sub-strata of multi-ethnic minorities that sometimes had some advantages in being together. As the famous Langston Hughes joke says, "The Titanic was devoid of any passengers of color, simply because they weren't allowed to work on the ship or even to buy a ticket!" No one is crying over not being allowed aboard the Titanic now. Are they?

But in terms of jobs or housing and even the education that her people had disliked so much - there weren't many opportunities. Redbird had seen a lot. Some of her people said she had even known The Prophet as a child. She could speak of him in trance, everybody knew that. If she had been a small child at that time, that would definitely make her over 100 years old. All of that would have made her closer to 150 years old and so that was probably not true. Possibly. Tecumseh had died in 1813. So, go figure.

The rain would not make her thoughts cease. The thunder also rolled like the ama'tikwalelunyi (waterfall) - over and over in one place, like a tumbler, an unceasing drum. Her thoughts rolled that way too. They would not go away. They followed the motion of the rain. She smelled the damp wood of the warn and broken sill by the door. She liked that smell. The seepage had molded her cotton throw rugs. A branch smacked into the window glass in front of her, startling the glow of the weak yellow porch light shining underneath the water-logged, draining door.

"Drat..." she said anxiously, mumbling to herself.

A loud rattling underneath the house disturbed her as a silver-red fox jumped against the window in its confusion. Alma gave a sigh, glancing at the light coming in through the crack in her front door.

"Oh, good heavens! Again?!" she exclaimed. "I hope you didn't fall too hard - clever though you are."

She heard the hoot of an owl, calling at poor, wet Brother Fox. Seeming to comment on the darkness and the clumsiness of his friend. Rising, Alma shuffled to the window and saw the fox, obscured in the shadow of the house, running crazily after his attempt to crawl in her closed window. Its tail shone light silver against the inky shadows of the woods' edge.

The roof leaked in puddles around her bare wooden floor in the living room, rain drizzled down the chimney in rivulets., splattering onto the top of her hot wood stove which used the chimney to put its pipe above her roof. Ama'tikwalelunyi, like a small waterfall. The fox disappeared under the dense foliage. Lightening split Alma's vision of the dank forest. Turning around, the red animal stared directly at her, its eyes dilated.

***

YUNWI TSUNSDI - A FOREST Spirit, she thought to herself. This fox cannot stay outside in any heavy weather. He has never been able to do that, even as a kit. That was how Alma and the fox had met, during another rain storm when he was a little one.

Alma had been in this house for many, many years. She had seen some of her grandchildren born right in this front room. Now, the house was in disrepair, but clean. The floors were wooden and bare except for an occasional rag rug. Her electricity, for the most part, had been shut off too long ago to be remembered, so she used mostly candles, and heated her living room with wood. There was a bed (really a divan) in the corner of the room near the stove. The animal's eyes had resembled lit, glowing embers.

She knew that particular animal well. The Yunwi Tsunsdi spoke to her in his own voice. He brought news and gave companionship to her journey. He was kindred and a very good friend. One of the reasons that her mother had chosen the English name "Alma" was because it meant "spirit" in Latin.

Like a familiar, the fox spoke to her in a clear deep voice and used his own Ani Yun'wiya name for her in speaking to her. He would call her the "White-haired One". She did the same for him, calling him the "Smart Red-haired Dog". Crawling into the house since he was a kit, this wasn't the first time he had tried to climb into her home through the window. Scratching at her jutting casement, the young fox was sometimes frightened by the rain and the silent flashes of lightning delayed in their jarring, thunderous explosions by the distance between the creation of the noise and the vulnerable dead timber, plentiful and scattered near his lair.

Alma hoped fervently that the forest wouldn't catch fire. It had happened before and barely missed burning the back of her house. A fiery streak from the heavens had lit some dry tinder near a shed and her younger neighbors had dug trenches, bulldozing part of the dry brush by the pond.

The rain splattered at her feet in rude slapping dashes, wetting her socks. She pulled her tattered blanket closer around her thin shoulders.

The animal had run through the woods the day before, frightening some of the folks picking wild berries. One of them and dropped a pail and exclaimed, "There goes Alma's fox!"

The fox had scampered faster than the breaking storm this evening, skittering sideways underneath the prickles of the berry bushes and running through the subterfuge of the denser parts of the woods in his accustomed passage to the old woman's house, barreling through the hole he had made near her back door after crashing into the window casement by mistake.

His mouth hung open as Alma let out a quiet exclamation of dismay, patting his fur over the naked skin missing one patch of his silken tri-colored sable which he had lost in his fear of an anguished chase. The berry pickers had not really had any interest in him other than to make a comment about his appearance and retrieve the lost or scattered labor reflected in the contents of their buckets.

Someone saw one of the Tsawa'si - or one of the Little People - smile as he picked up a dropped berry and scurry into the bushes again, singing a tiny melody in Cherokee. The Little People loved berries, too.

The fox still panted from the exertion of his undue panicked escape from Brother Thunder and lay down at Alma Redbird Ridden's feet, resting his snout on her shoe.

"Oh, my! You poor, little thing!" exclaimed the old woman sympathetically, making clucking and chuckling noises with her mouth. He spoke to her and told her of his run and his messages from the forest. He told her about the coming of some people that she knew. They would be here to see her soon. It was a good thing. They sat together, then, in peace and silence.

Later that evening, the sky darkened again with the storm. There was more incessant leaking from her roof and casements, which brought Alma to light the charcoal embers and bits of unburnt branches remaining in the wood stove. She rekindled her fire in the stove from a teat of that lit charcoal and added larger pieces of split wood until the fire was roaring again and drying out her room.

***

THE CHEROKEE, AFRICAN-American and poor white berry pickers had spoken of the fox (and Alma's affectionate, gentle caring of him) in their cabins - set far away in the forest. They slept on cots and in lofts with mattresses filled with oat hay and timothy (which was pleasant smelling and, of course, their mattress stuffing could include the ubiquitous corn shucks). There were now kettles boiling over their hearths filled with rabbit stew, venison and wild vegetables. The berries sat in a corner.

One of them sat down with a musical instrument and began to compose a riddle about the fox and the enigma of just why he would want to follow an elderly woman around that way. The fox whistled at Alma when he wanted to see her. He would hold his head up and whistle through his throat with his mouth open, as if he was going to howl like a wolf. There were many choices as to why the fox would do this. So, the singer sang some more and the people around the fire made up parts of the song and riddle just to help and have some fun. The fox and Alma were a conundrum.

One jolly man, a berry picker, said he thought that this meant that Alma Ridden was concealing something and the fox was there to reveal it. A lady began to play the spoons on the knee of her long calico dress. Another person shouted through the darkness of the cabin that he was, "Goin' home 'cause a storm's a-brewin' out yonder!" He ran off abruptly, banging the door to the cabin open.

The berry picker clanging the spoons stopped as he left. A few sparrows seeking refuge from the coming gale flew in and began to chirp up by the shadows of the loft on the rafters. The woman spoke. She said that there were two reasons that a male fox might behave the way he did.

The reasons took the form of a riddle with two different answers, both of which led to the same conclusion. The riddle went like this: "There were two doors. Each door had a gatekeeper. One gatekeeper told only the truth and the other only lies. How could you tell which door to enter and which gatekeeper to trust with your inquiry within the time you were given to ask? Each door went to just about the same place (although you would not know this). The place inside was very, very nice. And there was some hint of great power, prosperity and freedom.

The two choices represented the fact that the fox might have something good in mind, or something conniving and not quite honest. After all, he was a wild animal.

"But why," asked one of the berry picker's companions, "would anyone want to try and enter a door without knowing exactly what might lay beyond it?"

"No one would," agreed the storyteller. "What you would ask the gatekeeper and perhaps the quality of the passage also reflects the condition of the passenger and the questions cannot be answered the same way for everyone. But, remember, there were hints that whatever was beyond the two doors was wonderful. I think you could say though, that, 'Yes, you can ask the doorkeeper anything you want to.' It is generally agreed either door is not dangerous. You can easily find the doorway on the way out. There is no prohibition against leaving. Or, coming back in. But it is your choice as to whether you will talk to the gatekeeper that lies or the one that tells the truth. That is the real choice."

The thunderstorm had now begun to pour torrents down on the metal roof of the cabin. A member of the party noted that whomsoever was left inside, was probably stranded until the morning and most everyone there had to wait until the rain ceased or be drenched by the downpour - at risk of losing their way in the forest because of the wet, impenetrable darkness. The music from the back of the cabin grew louder and the hearth fire burned merrily.

"The real question is what difference it might make if the gatekeeper at either door told the truth or if he told lies," noted the woman who had been playing the spoons.

One person answered, "Well, if you can get in, but you might not be able to find your way out - say for a really long time, what is so good about talking to either of them?"

"The need for something better - the fact that you suspect that everything is better on the other side of the door," the berry picker with the spoon replied.

"Curiosity?"

"Yes, even that. You see how the question of motivation is very important."

***

ALMA HAD FALLEN ASLEEP that evening in her rocking chair in the middle of crashing noises of such thunderous proportions that she wasn't sure if her windows wouldn't be shattered. The wind was almost something that could be called a typhoon. It was not something she hadn't slept through before many years ago, especially as a child.

She had sat awake until about midnight, she estimated (not having a clock in the front room, only a wind-up clock in her bedroom upstairs.) The moon had been covered under a deep darkness, but she was sleepy, and actually too unconcerned about her worn old house to be bothered looking in her cellar for some caulk to hold the banging window glass still. She awoke in the deepest threshold of the inky tenebrous blackness - a cryptic of the night that held her inside some distant portico before releasing a particle of the light that adjusted the mere crumb of a halcyon hint of an early dawn to her weakened eyes.

Alma Red Bird knew that it was not quite the moon of Anoyi. April. It was close, though. She didn't need a paper calendar to see that. She knew it by heart, by feeling, by experienced observation.

At the end of summer would be time for the Green Corn Dance; a time of renewal for her people. It was a time when all the old clay pots were broken and replaced with new ones. When the old hearth fires were all put out in every house and new ones were lit.

It seemed as though that vermilion visitor, the fox, who had been so insistent as to scratch repeatedly at her back door, like a weasel burrowing near an old oak tree, was still there. Just as he had eaten a hole right through the corner of her back entryway, he was smart enough to slither in and out of it and scare the daylights out of her and back up into the sky again whenever he wanted to.

Alma took a deep breath, and the clarity of her hearing and the air in her lungs told her that the rain had ceased its hammered insistence on the tin parts of her tattered, leaking roof shingles. They now rattled dryly in the rainless wind, like a tambourine in the Evangelical church, like some other old lady was trying to sing a song at the end of the rainfall but could only manage some of it in snatches. One word - a short humming sound, a buzz from between the flat-headed roof tacks and aluminum recompense that she had had a workman (that her grandson had paid for) install when she finally felt she needed to stop a few old leaks. She didn't like to ask her grandson for too much. It did not snow much in her area. It warmed up part of almost every month of the year. That was natural here. That warming helped the life of her roof shingles.

"April - the Strawberry Moon," she reminded herself.

She had examined her bureau earlier that evening, for any trace of a sterling canister that held the letter to a beneficiary. In it, she thought, were some treasury bonds saved from the profits of a cotton gin that her uncle had owned. The coffer was easily misplaced because her own intuition was fading with her inability to take the steepness of the upper staircase to the smaller rooms in which the container might stealthily be covered by some old, discarded and folded draperies or her old, stained Japanese paper fan, or something else. She assured herself that it was definitely there somewhere.

"Could sure use some illumination right now -," Alma muttered to herself and lit the stub of a carbon-filmed candlewick. You know, it's hard to hear anything in the middle of such a torpid atmospheric confusion - with all the crackling and slamming going on in the forest during that storm. It was like there was a huge door in all of the Cimmerian gloom and all of a sudden, someone's child lets the air into the house suddenly and the doors bang shut unexpectedly with a dreadful roar.

As it was, Alma's carmine pet had curled tight into a slumber knot in the corner near her wood stove. Practically, he should have been given a common name in English. He acted sometimes as if he was her dog. Of course, he had a Spirit Name, but even so - both he and Alma found some amusement in regional jargon.

Every other week, he was there eating, snoring and rapping at any of the casements he could reach, cozying up to the warmth of the wood stove, the scorching heat trying not to catch on his brilliant fur. He had always been very gentle and was used to letting Alma stroke his fleecy coat. But still, he had kept a lair, occasionally running with sibling or bringing a progeny by for her to carry on over. The kit would whine eventually during a visit and the adult fox would have to bring it back to be fed by its mother. Alma clucked her tongue as she looked at him now.

Awakening several times during the night, Tojuwah folded her thin arms under the blanket, laying her head to the side of the chair as she sat - rocking and falling asleep again to the quiet sounds of the slackening bad weather. Her visitor leapt at her as the candle flame went out.

The wick dipped into a tail of hot wax, bending over as the liquid began to opaque again. The fox's soft head hit the underside of Red Bird's chin. She had fallen fast asleep, sputtering from her lips. The wild silver nocturnal creature of the forest curled into her lap, panting - licking his feet as he glanced at the puddles on the floor and the rainswept fog at the transom, putting the brush of his tail over to cover his delicate snout. Alma paid no attention to him. She was used to him leaping into her lap and curling up there.

"Alma's pet" is what the farm workers called him, as red as a maple leaf at the end of the summer - red as the ajina or Sacred Cedar which was used to burn and scare away anisgina or ghosts. But the Nunnehi, the Forest Spirit People, liked the smell of burning red cedar - very much so. Them, it attracted.

The lachrymose gloaming clung to the window glass like white sheet forgotten on the clothes line. The last of the wind was unable to pry loose the sash, despite its untimely and unexpectedly sudden arrival again. It yanked at the wood and dashed the sizzling coals with a few leftover droplets of rain water from the roof in an attempt to gain Alma's attention.

Alma Ridden snored between the crashing return of the wind on the siding of the house, even as it seemed to let out a howl of displeasure.

"Oh," she said in her sleep, mumbling a phrase in Cherokee, as the People do when they dream - but are awake in their dreams.

She awoke later that night, moving to her bed/divan underneath the loose window in the living room, and got out a deck of torn, smudged playing cards, arranging them into a Solitaire pattern on the blanket. She pulled out the Ace of Spades and stared at it, conjuring her next move.

***

THE BERRY PICKERS' cabin went dark, their candle had burnt out. Only the light of the fireplace was left. Someone played a harmonica in the darkness, quietly.

"It didn't make any difference whether the gatekeeper told the truth or told lies?" asked the insistent friend of the lady with the spoons.

"Yes, of course it did. Doesn't it matter if you tell the truth or not? It makes it more difficult for everybody if someone else is lying."

"So, the point is to see, simply, if you can be smarter than the gatekeeper and see what was behind the door, whether or not they were liars."

"Yep, just like life. When sometimes you meet truth tellers..."

"And sometimes liars," added the other berry picker. "And sometimes you have to lie to protect yourself."

"That's correct..."

***

TOJUWAH STARED AGAIN at the card in resignation and then looked for the whereabouts of the fox. He was sprawled on her cotton rug at the foot of the cold stove, on his back, snoring quietly with his feet in the air. The elderly woman reached over her disarrayed game of Solitaire and opened the window next to her bed which had been closed due to the driving evening rains. The air was resplendent with magnolia scents. The animal began to breathe heavily with the fresher cooler air being forced up into his sensitive nose.

Red Bird fell asleep with the cards falling off her blanket. The coverlet was torn into a hole where she usually bent her knee. She lay unconscious. The fox woke up, came over and nudged her hand with his wet nose. Jumping on the bed near her feet, he crawled out the window and ran into the woods.

The moonlight was still barely clarified from the torrents of rain. Dawn was still hours away, although peeking past the darkness. Leaves still bounced up and down from the droplets falling from the upper reaches of the forest trees. The conchineal fox ran, disguised in the darkness like a shadow from a pine bough overhead, waving in the dark and hidden from the moon.

A thick, almost myopic, fog began to slither behind him engulfing his entire form until he reached his lair, warm and dry - leaving only the charcoal of his fiery eyes winking under his sable rubicund lashes - alive and watching, observing the thickness of the night roll over the mouth of his den, only occasionally caught in the fading moon and small etchings of dawn.

In the morning, the sun shone spectral and hot. Yet the fox was sleeping coolly underneath the ground. Even at ten o'clock, the shred of Alma's blanket that he, by choice of his own, had torn from her good light beige coverlet - and dragged - running through the woods, was still stuffed underneath him in his slumber. His sable sides rose and fell softly as the sun grew in heat.

At the back of the fox's den, deeper underground in a sort of second floor lower from where he would sleep, was a collection of stolen mementos and toys. Among these toys was a hollow rubber ball with a bell in the middle. It was a cat's toy, actually, but Alma had bought it for him. Next to the rubber ball were three torn playing cards from the old woman's Solitaire deck. Two of the frustratingly stolen cards had been chewed into unrecognizability. Especially at the corners.

Another piece of coverlet lay on top of a partially tarnished, or oxidized, silver spoon. The spoon was a prize from his travail through the haunts of the woods. The handle of the eating implement had been bent and clamped with marks by the determination of the animal's theft - or, shall we correct ourselves and name it "sharing".

***

2. THE STRAWBERRY MOON

Frederick James Ridden reached over his carefully kept night table to grab at the telephone. It was a lawyer. He listened intently, and his eyes inadvertently glanced at the cheap Westclox windup that he had purchased recently at the new store "Walgreen's" down in the valley.

Frederick James was a door-to-door salesman, a Deluxe Electrolux vacuum cleaner salesman - and a good one. He traveled all over the southern United States and did well, normally. He was barely twenty years old.

It was too early in the morning for him to grasp what the lawyer was saying. He just answered him by mumbling, "Yes, sir, I'll speak to her. I haven't seen her for a few days - "He had stayed up late at a friend's house the night before to listen to a Will Rogers phonograph record, listening intently to the Oklahoma Cherokee comedian's jokes on politics. Rogers had died in 1935 in a small float plane crash in Barrow, Alaska with Wiley Post (who was flying the two of them), slightly before an expected announcement of Rogers' run for the Presidency.

Frederick had recently seen a re-run of Rogers' silent film The Ropin' Fool on a friend's TV with four or five other Cherokee friends - making an night of it with popcorn and sodas. Being what he considered a moderately successful businessman, this was his idea of a night on the town. Made for a lot of warmth to stay close to the people he had grown up with. Although he had died years ago, Rogers was popular well into the 50's.

Frederick listened to the crackling voice on the other end of the line again, and said, "She seemed fine to me. In good spirits." The voice interrupted again. Frederick repeated, "Yeah, sure. Bye..."

He hung up the phone with a puzzled expression on his young, sensitive mouth. In the soft profile of his face shone the smooth dark angles of the Cherokee people. His thick black hair was cut only moderately. He had retained a long slender braid on the back of his head which he could tuck underneath his hat when he felt that he needed to, as per his sales career. He disliked cutting his hair at all.

As Tojuwah's grandson, he had both a profound attachment to her and (although he was only in a modest financial bracket himself) a concern about doing what he could do to see that her bills were paid, and she had, at least - at the very least - a place to live, decent clothes and food to eat. Apparently, Alma owed a large sum in back property taxes. She had never been sent any tax notices, except for this one, due to a grandfather clause on her land which put her house inside the boundary of a newly created National Park. She had unconsciously begun looking for her savings bonds, just on a curious hunch, thinking maybe to give some of the money to her grandson as a sort of gift. She believed the tax bill was a mistake and had asked Frederick James to try and investigate it for her. The bonds would, obviously, also ensure a payment for the taxes - if it came to that.

Frederick had written the town and county offices several times without a reply and had even gone in to inquire, but he had been told not to worry (by the county) - that Alma did not owe anything. Their records had shown she owed nothing. The taxes that the town and another branch of the county said Alma owed now were an excessively exorbitant amount of money for either of them to be able to pay. The lawyer had sent Frederick's mind spiraling into a mass of confusion.

James Ridden usually went to dance halls on Saturday evening to amuse himself. The ladies were paid $1.00 per dance plus their salary. They were excellent partners on the dance floor and might go out on a date with you the next week if you were real lucky. Frederick knew all of the girls anyway. They were mostly Cherokee girls that he had grown up with. But it was a mixed dance hall, so there were other dance partners as well. That's all they did - dance and sit and talk with you. This dance hall was not used for prostitution. There was a difference.

This evening though was for grandma. Frederick James went to a local bakery and bought some big soft pretzels for snacks. He walked back to his rented hotel room and wheeled his bicycle out onto the purple paisley hotel lobby carpet.

A young bellhop commented that it was not the best idea to keep his bicycle inside the hotel when the streets were muddy, as it would mess up the hall and lobby rugs - and please to be careful of the ceramics on the end table and wall shelves. Frederick James snickered weakly, embarrassed but proud of his conveyance, which the bellhop couldn't possibly afford. He tipped his derby in assent and threw the man a silver dollar. The bellhop gaped at the money. Compared to a successful Electrolux salesman, bellhop pay didn't even amount to a hill of small beans.

Frederick began to whistle through his teeth and pulled his belt way above his hips, yanking his maroon derby low over his eyes. He flung the bike onto his large muscular arms and took the Hotel Belvedere stairs two and a time, to the tune of Dixie. That was a song he was wont to whistle or sing ironically with some humor when he felt the need.

***

[IN 1942, DURING WORLD War II, American troops joined the British in fighting Rommel, Bismarck and von Nehring across the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East. Charles Alexander Ridden (Alma's brother and James' uncle) had fought with the Americans in the U.S. Marines under the command of Lt. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower but had been reported Missing-In-Action in Algeria. In actuality, he had deserted first by traveling around General Montgomery's new American Sherman tanks and the British 8th Army into the Egyptian city of El Alamein (on the Mediterranean). His dark skin might have been a liability in the segregated military of his day, but in running from the ferocious fighting in the Middle East, it was an advantage. There was a violent racial incident that had sparked his desertion. He did not look any different than the local people who welcomed him despite the fact that he was an American. Being a deserter put him more inside of their own politic. Being brown-skinned did the same.

Alma Tojuwah was an older child of their mutual father. Charles was the youngest half-brother. Her father had married a 15-year-old girl (in their tradition) when Alma was sixty, who had borne Charles.

Posing as a local Muslim trader, Charles Alexander rode within the safety of a traveling camel caravan made up of other traders who had agreed to keep his disguise. He stayed with them until he had talked himself (with the aid of friendly local interpreters) onto a local merchant boat sailing into Palestine. Hiding himself as a crippled street beggar, Charles quickly became proficient in Arabic. Later, he converted to Islam due to his close and warm association with the people around him and attained a sort of black market citizenship - marrying several wives as was the custom for well-to-do merchants. A more than familiar custom with his own people as well.

He and his large family worked as rug merchants and weavers. Eventually, due to an offer in Osmaniye, they moved to Turkey and began to become absorbed in Sufism which became rather attractive to them. Soon, Charles Alexander's Arabic acquired a slight Turkish accent and his fluency in Turkish also became more than adequate.]

***

THE STREETS OF THE downtown area were still damp from the watershed that was created down the sides of the granite business district buildings. It was overcast when Frederick slid down the slick avenues and took a few jagged, precarious short cuts through the tilted alleyways. Paved back roads were a recent idea since the "pavement" was formerly only loose dirt or large chunky gravel - rather cumbersome for a bicycle. When cement came into vogue, the little-used byways became a paradise for the lonesome traveler, vagrant and handyman.

In wealthier neighborhoods, they were a haven filled with towering elms, maples and beech trees, pungent with sap. The trash barrels were architectural wonders made with stucco and painted with various pastel lacquers. They usually had heavy metal, latched doors on them. Some of them were even locked with heavy chains and padlocks. Exactly why people would lock their garbage up was cause for much amusement. Mostly, they didn't want hungry vagrants sorting through their trash looking for food.

Hot tar was poured into the joints of the cement pavement to accommodate shifting and stress during the frozen days of the winter. The smaller children were usually warned not to follow the tar trucks with the blazing liquid in them in order to play with the stuff when it cooled, rolling it into balls and throwing it at each other.

***

THE DAYBREAK WAS CHILLY, and goosebumps popped out on Frederick's upper arms. Since he did not own a suit jacket or an overcoat due to the fact that his biceps had grown carrying the heavy loads of his Electrolux vacuum cleaner samples, he gritted his teeth and pushed harder on the pedals of his bicycle - speeding down the hills and shoving his body against the handlebars on the way up to the next intersection. Under his arm he had slapped an old copy of The Cherokee Phoenix which he was studying, and he also bundled that with the Sunday edition of the Washington Post. He read parts of each aloud to Alma every Sunday, as she did not read or write either in English or Cherokee very well. As he pedaled, he was also thinking about a job he had been offered as manager in another gentleman's vacuum cleaner factory representing a different brand name than what he sold door to door.

The information about the job offer had come to him in the form of a hand written note from a co-worker that had been stapled onto his paycheck which included his last bonus on top of his commission. He was about at the top of the sales pyramid for his area. It was odd that this had come through the Electrolux outlet because, obviously, the new factory would pose some competition - beside taking away one of the company's top salesmen.

The note had said that he was now one of the few people that knew that the factory was going to be built in town. The pay would be three or four times what he made now, and he would not have to sell door to door or work outside. Frederick grinned to himself as he slid down a concrete hill.

The brim of Frederick James' maroon derby moved up and down, dancing with the pressure of the wind. It began to drizzle in earnest and he swore to himself under his breath. The pretzels that he had bought his grandma went bumping into his knees awkwardly as he tried to increase his speed in the passage towards the older streets. He pedaled on until there was no paved road and the streets began to turn into dirt. Finally, he found himself trudging between cattle pastures.

His grandmother no longer owned a farm. She had sold her pasture to another family of formerly migrant Cherokee farm workers. In her own family, many members - including Alma - had also worked as migrants. That is, until the profits from her uncle's cotton business had started coming in. Because he owned the business, he was able to hire Cherokee, Black, white and other tribal group members to work there. That was unusual down south at the time, so Alma was particularly proud of the cotton gin.  He had had some problems with the Klan but got past that and became very prosperous.

***

"ULISI? NANA?" FREDERICK called first in Cherokee from the doorway of Alma's house. He had ridden up in front of his grandmother's just as the light rain that he had tried to protect his burnished chapeau from turned into another downpour. He barely missed getting his carefully kept sales wardrobe (which he also wore on Sunday) spoiled from the unexpected soaking.

His hair had been done with Dixie Peach pomade to inhibit everything except the most cautious and least amount of luscious curls at the crown of his coif to brush against the softened cloth of his prized bowler. The careful greasing had been damaged, but the curls shone safe and impressive under the cover of his Nana's porch. He stowed his Columbia Special under the drier eaves.

"Frederick! Come in..." called Alma. "We have a visitor." Frederick let himself in and moved towards the sound of Alma's voice coming from her kitchen.

A very tall, slender, dark-skinned man moved over from the shadows of the hallway to sit beside Alma. In front of him, on the sparse kitchen table, lay a tattered sepia photograph of an equally tall younger man in a khaki United States Marine uniform. Standing affectionately close to the young man was Frederick's grandmother.

Alma's younger brother and son had both left her because of the war. Her son had divorced and left Frederick James to be raised by her as well. Her son did not contact her until after the end of World War II, until the early 1950's. He now lived in northern Georgia with his new wife. Alma's small home had been all that Frederick had ever known outside of occasional visits to his father's house. He and his stepmother did not get along, so he did not live there. He much preferred his grandmother.

As a child, he had run into the woods among the blossoms of the little star and deer eye to gather kindling for Alma. He had picked wild berries with other Cherokee, Chickasaw and Choctaw children (whose parents worked at his family's cotton gin) to bring home for his grandmother. He also spoke all three languages and could speak to the Tsawa'si (Little People) pretty well. Children, especially, like Little People.

He looked at the picture and startled, turning to his grandmother again.

"You're...?" he asked, choking and perspiring awkwardly in his dark, matching maroon dress shirt. His dark blue bow-tie angled towards the dimple in his cheek, moving with the stress in his neck. Feeling faint, he glanced at the distant man in the chair who seemed to have a slight accent as his demeanor faded between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

The gentleman answered, smiling at his discomfort, "Your great-uncle Charles, actually."

***

THE TREASURY BONDS had been nowhere to be found. Both Frederick and his grandmother had examined every nook and cranny that they could think of. They needed the cash. A great deal had been invested in the bonds originally bought from the profits of the family cotton business many years ago. Charles Alexander had more than enough money to cover Alma's emergency, though. It was he that was building the vacuum cleaner factory in town, pledging to hire Native Americans and African Americans, along with friendly poor whites. It was a liberal town to begin with, but opportunities like these were usually very welcome. He followed in his uncle's footsteps by caring for all of his community.

Still and all, one does not just lose over $50,000 in savings bonds.

It was, again, threatening rain and Frederick was thinking of staying overnight in his bedroom upstairs to avoid having to return in another heavy drenching onslaught of precipitation. His great-uncle was already asleep in the adjoining upstairs bedroom. A small weak candle's light yellowed the wallpaper near his shut door.

"Has the fox been here lately?" shouted Frederick James to his grandmother, laughing and joking with her through his bedroom door, after his great-uncle had retired for the evening. The fox, unfortunately, had left the house in the morning and would not be back until later because of Frederick's visit. He had a possessive streak with Alma and had hissed at Frederick before, not letting him talk to her by putting his chin up into Alma's face every time she tried to reply to something Frederick had said. He was gone to another lair where his mate resided and had abandoned, temporarily, the one that he usually stayed in.

Alma, surprisingly, was on the staircase landing, nearer to Frederick than he would have expected. She stood in the corner of the obscure vestibule, hidden from his searching eyes. Raising her voice, so that he could hear her, she mumbled without resonance, stepping into the luminary, diaphanous section of the landing suddenly. He opened his door and stepped out into the hall but didn't see her.

"Frederick? - I cannot find my sterling box. I wanted to search up here again this evening. Charles could not find it either."

The light stilled on Alma's face as she approached her own bedroom. Frederick turned again to retire for the evening, without comment, nodding his assent.

Alma searched her room again but could not find the container. She fretted quietly but retired to her upstairs bed. In the night, the back door blew open and slammed into the kitchen wall. Alma awakened to the turmoil that obstinately persisted in its cacophony. It was tiring for her to put on her cotton robe and try and walk down the stairs in the dark.

The banging door began to bother her, so she resignedly pulled her robe over her shoulders and slid her arms into the sleeves. Shoving her feet into her slippers, she laboriously - and with caution - inched her way precariously down the obfuscated staircase. The balustrade shook, loosening dangerously in her hand, as she tentatively neared the bottom of the stairs. She had promised herself many times that she would add some electricity to her house, secure the railing, do other repairs and fix the roof with the money from those bonds. Now she rued the fact that she hadn't done those things before now and most of the money could be owed in back taxes.

The battering echo of a freight train drove through her kitchen as she protected the weak flame of the sconce in her hand. The confabulation simulated travel through the corners of her dim walls, probing the joints with the timidity of a blind person, sensitive to the crumbling intersections of plaster and the dust mounds made by the empty spaces of old removed garden tools. The noise probed deep into her walls which pulled the sound of the train away and through the house, past the dirt roads outside at a careering angle and then straight across the fields again, tacking the din of cargo on them like a gigantic carpenter's hammer and nails, with a pause - then a fooling break.

The clamor broke wantonly again, sending a flying lantern of light across Alma's kitchen wall and out the door, sealing the door closed with a blast of wind and a stupendous bang. Alma jumped a little from the suddenness of the door closing. Her brother was still sound asleep, unaware of any assistance Alma might want. Frederick was equally deep in slumber. Alma didn't mind doing this herself, though. After all, she lived alone. The loud sound of the train was like a sort of music to her in a way, she had lived with it for so long. The dark staircase evoked a familiar quiet sense of intuition within her also.

Alma Ridden latched her kitchen door carefully after losing herself in thought for a moment, gazing outside at the aperture in which her torchiere was reflected, licking at shapes and things that were swallowed by her lack of accurate perception. The conflagration wavered and sputtered. She pulled at the tattered door again until she was sure it was firmly shut and locked tight. Another note to herself: she needed to put in a new kitchen door.

Feeling her way clumsily past the alcove, she decided to spend the remainder of the night on the divan in the living room. She lay down there and pulled her coverlet over herself. Her fingers lay alongside the flannel neckline of her robe as if searching for something, such as an answer to the many diverse noises that inhabited her house at night.

***

NO ONE LOCALLY EXCEPT Alma had actually known that Charles Alexander, her brother, was still alive. She had kept in contact with him, through her son, all the years he had been gone. The punishment for a conviction of desertion before the advent of the Korean War was court martial, life imprisonment or execution - unless an amnesty was granted. Charles had returned using a Turkish passport and name. All of them had to be particularly careful to keep his real identity a secret.

A brown Cherokee boy was easily hidden in the midst of a bustling crowd in Palestine, since he had looked just about the same as anyone else there. No one, except a few locals, could tell that he was not from the Middle East because of his pronounced Arabic accent. Alma's son (a career Marine) had clandestinely enabled Charles Alexander to return to the United States under his alias, but Alma had not been able to tell her grandson the real story of his great uncle until now. This was the first time Frederick James had met him.

***

THE CONCHINEAL FOX ran through the forest avoiding the searching light of the moon. He slithered past the undergrowth that would hide him as he ran his down his nocturnal passage away from any inquisition. Arriving at the back of Alma's house, he pushed his way through the hole he had made next to the back door in a weak, water-damaged part of the door frame. The fox ran over to her divan, jumped up on it and curled into her feet covered by her torn beige blanket. She, herself, lay fast asleep near her window, the stove banked and burning nicely, warming the entire room.

***

THE BERRY PICKERS ANSWERED their riddle that night: "If the gatekeeper at the mythical door is the one that tells the truth, your passage will be clear, if you too are a truth-teller you should be safe. If it is the gatekeeper that lies, then there is one solution: speak in negatives and do the opposite of what you are told, and passage will also be given to you. In other words, you can trick the gatekeeper because he, too, is lying. Test them with a small statement that would tempt them to lie to see which one is which. Ask about leaving."

***

"SO..." SAID ALMA, MUSINGLY, awakening again for a moment in her usual restless way - looking up at the ceiling of her living room peeling from the trapped seepage and moisture. The truth was something Alma Ridden was no stranger to. She folded her hands in composure. She knew of something, some situation, that was very similar to this riddle. Maybe her brother's life. The questions and paradoxes were familiar to her. They should be. She had spent a large part of her adult life protecting Charles Alexander. She could not tell the truth about him. Justice for him was more important. He had been wronged in the military and she, as a mythical gatekeeper, had helped let him go on to enter a better life.

"Beyond the door is a beautiful place. A place full of peace, duyukdah (justice) and happiness. Justice and truth-telling are not always the same. As Martin Luther King was to say a decade later, An unjust law is no law at all."

The money Alma needed lay concealed, her brother had made his way into the United States, just in the nick of time - not knowing about her perilous property tax situation. His real identity had been safely concealed so far. He had plenty of cash to cover her back property taxes and had already offered to do so. But her savings bonds still had lay hidden for over fifty years and she did not want to ask Charles or Frederick to help with house repairs. They had done enough already.

The door opened, that night, beyond her living room in her dreams and she saw the lost box. She was able to give instructions to her grandson in order to go and look in the place in which she thought it had been lost. She had done certain things, Cherokee things, to have such clarified dreams with her specific purpose in mind. Chanting in Cherokee, Frederick James had still been unable to find the sought-after object, despite Alma's assurances.

***

FREDERICK FOUND THE container, though, the evening of the next day - following new directions from his grandmother. It had remained empty and dented beneath Alma's bureau, as though a rampage of the gales in the days previous to this one had battered it open and rolled it underneath the furniture. Wind actually could have done that if the windows were open during such tumultuous weather.

The three of them felt at a loss since the savings bonds were not there. The canister was empty and coverless.

They remained silent throughout their meal. Frederick had taken this Monday off due to the visit of his great uncle, Charles. He was nervous, watching the motion of the sun towards the twilight. Alma could not remember if the treasury bonds had actually been in that canister or another one, not ruling out the loss of the bonds entirely. Perhaps she had given them to some other relative in need? She did not think she could forget such a thing. It was not at all like her to forget. She was no more perfect than the next person, though.

Charles Alexander reassured her that he would generously pay Alma's back property taxes for her, but the amount that would be lost in not finding the bonds far surpassed that of the payment.

"Let me go search in the forest," Frederick begged, pulling closer to his uncle, speaking in a tremulous whisper so his grandmother would not overhear him. He was angry, and he knew she would not approve of the object of his ire. It was the fox. He knew that fox was a thief. He was sure of it. He knew Alma had noticed things missing before and had never found them again.

This was the last time that creature would hiss at him, he thought with a strong sense of self-righteousness. He continued speaking, "Maybe the fox dragged it out there. Maybe he'll speak to me and tell me. He should be ashamed."

"Nothing worries me less than a lawyer looking for money could," replied Charles Alexander obscurely. "I can buy anything my sister needs. I am a wealthy man. We actually don't need those bonds. You'd be better off satisfying your own intuitions, though. I know Alma does not like losing anything like that. Don't hurt that fox though, she loves him."

Frederick James planned on taking another half day off work on Tuesday and slept over again that night, thinking to himself that he would arise early - way before sunrise and bicycle to the Belvedere and keep his appointment with the county's lawyer. As he dipped deep into slumber, he began to be overcome by the smell of burning cedar and sage. He felt himself struggle to awaken.

A muscular, thin man who looked a great deal like his great uncle dressed in old, traditional Cherokee attire (not in Euro-American clothing) approached him as he tried to awaken and pushed him back down onto the bed forcibly. Frederick felt himself fall more deeply into slumber, into what was pretty much a trance state. The Spirit Man sat down next to him on the bed, facing the unconscious Frederick James. His face was dark, and his hair style was very old-fashioned Cherokee - from before the Europeans came and changed things. The Spirit Man, oddly enough, appeared not to be much older than his great uncle. One thing, though, this Nunnehi had an unusual streak of bright red in his hair.

Soon Frederick was awake in his sleep. He stood up and looked down at his own body, still and quiet on the bed, breathing slowly with its eyes closed. He looked again at the Spirit Man next to him. There was the sudden sound of drumming and Cherokee singing as they both flew through the Spirit World deep into the forest. It was daylight. The Spirit Man spoke only Cherokee and smiled, laying his hand on Frederick's shoulder when he finished.

His touch changed the scenery. They both flew through the sky. Frederick looked down at the passing familiar areas of the woods. The long cry of hawks filled his ears. A bright red fox ran past him so quickly he almost did not see it.

"Nunnehi," one of the birds said clearly. The Spirit Man disappeared, and Frederick James fell again upon and into the body on his bed and slept. Frederick was pretty sure the Nunnehi was the spirit of the fox protesting his innocence. He felt bad about false accusation and his anger at the little creature.

***

THAT DAY, AFTER FREDERICK had returned to his room at the Belvedere, the lawyer inexplicably got in touch with him at an irritatingly late hour after canceling their meeting. He called after Frederick had showered and fallen asleep again. Alma's property taxes were not exactly due. The alarm had been a false one - it had been a problem with a new county survey map. The boundaries of Alma's property were as she had said they were - covered under an obscure tax shelter. She was covered under an old grandfather clause that included her within the boundaries of the National Park in her area which explained (as she had argued with the county and its lawyer) the fact that she had been sent no bills for the entire time she had owned the land.

She was, technically, barely residing within the boundaries of a relatively recently created national forest, exclusive of her old farm land which had been sold. They had recorded the proper taxes paid when she had owned her pastures. Under the public lands' code, private residences owned previous to the incorporation of the national park did not pay property taxes. These excluded residences could only be sold to relatives of the owner. Otherwise they must be returned to the national park system if that could not be done at the time of sale. Alma was safe.

Frederick James blanched at the lawyer's explanation that the county survey team had been wrong, sighing with pained relief. He had known that something good was coming because of the advent of the Nunnehi. They did not appear unless it was important. So, the spirit of the fox was helping him and his grandmother, even though he had, at one time, disliked him and knew he had stolen other things from Alma's house.

He had pedaled all the way back to the Hotel Belvedere just as soon as the rain had ceased that morning and was more than willing to get some more of his share of sleep. The sound of drums again drifted over his body as he fell back onto his bed after speaking to the lawyer. The sound began to buzz in his ears. He heard a chant that he had never heard before and saw a fox running past his eyes in his dreams. He also heard laughter.

***

THE NEXT DAY, FREDERICK grabbed his Deluxe Eletrolux sample case and headed - all spiffed up in spit-shined wingtips - out the door of his hotel room to go to his first neighborhood, far on the edge of town, in a rather wealthy area. It was early afternoon. It might be late, but as usual, he shyly hoped not to catch the ladies in their bathrobes and hair curlers as was a hazard of his profession.

Alma was notified of the tax reprieve, later, in writing, by mail, at her house, confirming what Frederick had told her earlier.

She fell asleep that night amid the magnolia scents coming in through her living room windows. The fox crawled past her to take his rest at her feet, pliant, innocent and guileless.

***

"IF THE GATEKEEPER AT the door is the one that tells the truth, your passage will be clear and easy if truth-telling is your way. Or, if you can afford to tell the truth. Your investigation into justice is the key. Test the gatekeeper..."

As Alma's friends thought about this, the day was brought forth by a pinkish, overcast dawning on the horizon. It seemed as if the clouds were moving away from Alma's house. She had seen an old hall closet in a dream and had looked among some cloth remnants, crocheted shawls and lace packaged for long term storage. She and Frederick had not looked through that cloth, thinking that nothing would be there. They had left the heavily wrapped packing untouched. Later, she rummaged through it without hurry or haste. Hidden deep within the cloth remnants, wrapped in an ancient newspaper were the treasury bonds, unexposed to the yellowing of age that had affected the sports pages of the old newspaper that they were wrapped inside.

The fox had not stolen anything, her brother had covered her former tax problems and, now, she could hold her head high and repair her home with the sale of some of her bonds. Her brother's secret was safe with her family. All was well.

The face of Sugar Ray Robinson grinned a mute greeting as she rewrapped the bonds in the sports pages and put them in a safer alcove. Beginning to hum to herself, she pattered down the stairs, thinking about the beautiful thing her uncle had done with his cotton gin - how he had employed all people, regardless of who they were. She was very proud of the origin of her profits. There were many treasures hidden in this family and house.

***

"AS WE ALWAYS LOVE WAKAN-Tanka

first, and before all else, so we

should also love and establish closer

relationships with our fellow men,

even if they should be of another

nation."

(Black Elk, Holy Man of the Dakota Sioux)

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# Skipping Stones

Copyright (C) Cathy Smith, 1993

***

"The Creative is heaven. It is round, it is the prince, the father, jade, metal, cold, ice; it is deep red, a good horse, an old horse, a lean horse, a wild horse, tree fruit."

[From The I Ching or Book of Changes, Richard Wilhelm, translation, English by Cary F. Baynes, Bollingen Series XIX, 1977, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, page 175.]

***

OBADIAH AND I (MY NAME being generally acknowledged as Willy Lee) ate our last sandwiches as we were skipping smooth stones over the surface of the water of a nearby stream that we had agreed, between ourselves, to pitch our tents, or just set up our campsite, next to. We had walked for about one hundred miles and had just about reached the edge of a huge forest that we had tramped through for three days now.

The forest, as we looked back, resembled an enormous shadowy bear; a monolith reaching over our shoulders in a silent cold receding assent that we were leaving it. It jumped down from its hind feet onto all four long-clawed pads and rumbled into itself for the night. A few spruce trees tried to capture the light which really was not there anymore. The spruce were like silver-backed wildlife or the sheen of some reflector. Reflecting, perhaps, just an almond sliver of the setting sun.

We lit a campfire of spruce, fir and birch logs--peeling the paper off the birch in order to hold our hot metal teacups and write imaginary letters to an imaginary home, which neither of us had. Or to our friends such as we might have considered living in nigh a place as we could call "home". We chopped a slot in a slender tree and stuck the birch paper letters in there, laughing to ourselves.

For grown men we could afford to do a lot of silly things--walking so far, the way we did. We had just been released from a state penitentiary after about ten years confinement each, more or less. We were not really criminals, being confined mostly for fighting in a few bars while drunk. Obadiah, who was a dark-skinned black man, and myself - just an ill-educated, poor, white guy, were cell mates for quite a bit of that time--and became close friends...like brothers. Got to say we got along pretty-near well enough. We were giddy with freedom and there were a lot of things folks would find inconvenient or intolerable that we paid no attention to whatsoever. We had a small amount of everything we would need in our backpacks. And we were both just plain happy. Obadiah was good at drawing, so he drew some pictures on the birch bark paper with a stick of charcoal left over from the fire and set them up to admire. Yeah, he was pretty good at that. Drew one of me, too.

There was a vein of statuary marble near here. The polished elegance of its relief was set right into the ground. A vein of red-grained agate flowed close to where we sat--close enough to run our hands over a smooth, small, rounded, exposed ridge of its long buried stone surface. It was set inside a knoll which made it seem like jewelry on the outstretched arm of an emerging mountain. We sat on top of it as we roasted ears of corn (which we had "found" in the cultivated fields surrounding the forest the previous day).

Our fire shone red in mock-anger and yellow in mock-askance and snapped at wood-buds, spitting damp tree sap. We heated our faces and warmed one side of our thick-knit sweaters (a little too much) so that we had to turn over to warm the other side.

"Well, this is sure right nice," said my worn-looking friend Obadiah, trying to fight off the chill of the fast-cooling night by saying nothing much, except that that was true. He handed me three ears of corn and some cooling roasted 'taters for my dinner. I was partial to cold, roasted, plain 'tater.

"Don't rightly know how far I can walk tomorrow. I'm plumb worn out," I replied skipping another stone across the nearby stream, gnawing on the corn. We were sitting just like cowboys in the desert in some movie. We would have liked the cows just for company right now, or just to stroke their sides. There were no cattle to watch here, though. Not lest y'all dream, like me. Jail can make a man lonely, even for animal company...anything living and breathing.

Wouldn't you know a stray dog just right then walked up to the fire, as if in answer to my call for company. It was gentle-brown and wagged its rear end rather wild like. Obadiah took to her right away. She licked our faces and we fed her as she curled up close and warm near my leg. Her hair was both smoother near the roots and curly a bit beyond that. She was, like I said, real friendly and reminded both of us of this one girl in particular. We named her "Harriet Harris Singleton".

She had skinny coyote-type legs and thin ankles. Hugging her up to my stomach, I rolled over and done stretched out next to her, playing with the hair on her back. I fell asleep with my fingers spread on her side. All night that dog slept, curled up next to me, Willy Lee, such as I might be.

Early in the morning (as soon as the sun touched us with its summer heat rising in mirage waves - simmering up from the ground like water being heated in a skillet) Harriet got up and went towards the edge of the woods.

I took the opportunity also to get up and stretch, arching my back so that the feeling of the heat from the new day reached to my spine, small wood chips and leaves falling off my jacket. Last night it had been too cold (and we were too tired) to leave the side of the fire and crawl into a tent. I scratched my head, bending over to pick up my tarpaulin and sleeping bag. Shaking them out, I whistled at Harriet Harris, getting smaller in the distance as she ran, swerving to her left right before the trees. She bounded into the air like a bird and turned, disappearing behind a rise. Must have had some serious business over there. I figured she knew how to hunt, and there seemed to be plenty of rabbits. I figured also that we could use a rabbit stew with some wild vegetables and herbs, maybe tonight.

That girl dog didn't come back for another good four hours. She seemed filled with a mighty thirst when she did though. Pretty near hungry too. We gave her some bread and figured she could catch game later for herself, as she must have been doing before we showed up.

Obadiah set a tin pan of water down on the ground. The sun flashed off it as the dog lapped it up, rocking the shiny tin on its scrubbed and dented sides, ticking it against the rocks as she drank. The sun pushed itself into the pan of water and the ground until everything done got so dry and brittle. The tan stems of dead grass broke off as they absorbed the dehumidification of the early light.

The dampness of the moon had long sizzled, spit and disappeared. Only the cool breeze of evaporation remained close to the greener grasses. Blowing underneath the forest entrance (which was now far away), the winds that did kick up now and then swept across the distance from miles of plains that edged the woods we had traveled through already. The moisture hid underneath tree branches, in the damper denser part of the woods, but not here. The only relief from the sun were those plains winds. The rest of the night's coolness had been driven away by the arid lack of shade elsewhere.

We were ready for a good long rest anyway.

Harriet Harris Singleton got some lunch. And we made our own as well--stamping out the rest of the salty ashes when we were done. Ashes slid on our boots as we doused ourselves, the fire and the dog with buckets of water from the nearby stream. We took our clothes off--laughing, butt-naked and slippery--and jumped into the stream. The dog barked, picking up sticks to fetch to us like she was trained to do so.

She jumped into the water after us and we splashed her gently as she swam past. With a stick still in her mouth (looking for anything like a beaver), Harriet might have been building a dam, slicing wood with her teeth like an ax, diving under the water until the stream began to swell.

Brown, short-haired and sleek, she paddled alongside the real beavers until the field nearby became mush to our feet because of the large amount of water splashed onto it by the waves that we made. We laughed as we crawled upon the sharp rocky shore.

Singleton shook herself dry and her pink skin jumped in excitement. She had white marks on her feet and swam like the thrashing of a salmon in a run. Most of her strength was in her legs which were marked with white on the right shin bone and the right foot. We dried off, dressed and packed everything into our knapsacks.

The dog followed us for a short hike as we walked deeper into the plains area, running ahead and trotting behind the rocking movement of our canvas backpacks. We followed the same creek and soon came out in what seemed to be a large abandoned orchard.

We stumbled over apples half-eaten by small creatures and many apples that were whole but starting to rot on the moisture of the ground. They scented the area and juiced themselves under our feet. We had them for lunch, snapping our teeth through their unblemished skins. Some were still too sour to eat, but most had ripened just right and were sweet. Harriet put her nose to the air sudden like, and ran off, leaving us. Obadiah was just beside himself, him getting so attached to her. He was sure she wouldn't come back this time. It is a shame to see a huge, muscular, black man cry like that, but cry over that dog, he did. He was, as he had always been, a sensitive, brown giant. That's one of the things that made me love him. Neither of us had much in the way of family, so we hung on each other.

He was so upset, he decided to bake an apple tart using a little whole wheat flour we had left over and some wild arrowroot flour he had dried and ground himself, having gathered it along the way, plus a little dried slippery elm for thickener added to powdered milk we still had. Thought it would take his mind off the dog. It was sort of an elaborate production to do that with a campfire. I didn't mind it either. The thought passed my mind that maybe I should train Harriet to worry Obadiah that way so that I could get more of his cooking. If she came back that is. He was one hell of a good cook. He knew his wild plants, too.

Oba added some fresh wild raspberries into the cooking apples for the filling. I had ground a little cinnamon from some tree I had found days back. We added that too. Plus, some wild honey. There's lots of that in some woods. You can follow the sound of the bees and they are a lot more docile than you might think. With a little experience, you really don't even need to daze them with smoke as is some folks' ways.

And just who do you think pops up again?

That's right, Harriet. Obadiah was sure pleased. He acted like he had just seen his long lost sister. Harriet was ready for some of that popover and Obadiah acted like he cooked that way just for her. And a dog too! Hmmm...Well, just forget about me why don't you!

The dog, of course, ate a large helping of some extra cooled filling that was left over while the popover was cooking. She went to the stream to drink some water as the day settled like the top crust of Oba's confection, almost finished and sitting in our iron skillet. The popover curled away from the sides of the pan and tightened into an oval custard, sitting shrunken in the middle of the burnt-out embers. The embers were just hot enough to roast about two hatfuls of fresh chestnuts in the remaining flames. Not hard to get flames to kick up from the embers right now.

I went to look at Harriet as she drank from the river. The moon moved like syrup down the stream. The dog made slurping noises as she lapped the liquid thirstily. The last light of day cut downstream, stretching to the next bending elbow in the curving waterway and turning, encumbering the white mask of the rising moonlight, pulling a corner of the dark sky somewhere else.

The brown dog barked loudly and ran, lithe as a fox, sinking into a heavy thicket of bushes. She ran stark into the moonlight, hightailing it across the far open plains again - following the swerving path of a huge jack-rabbit. Obadiah's face fell again. For a full grown man, he was so stuck on that dog.

The rabbit flew away and disappeared with the light. The dog stopped, panting, digging desperately into the ground and sniffing until she crossed a hill and fell out of sight.

We whistled and called her name, hitting a wooden spoon against a frying pan like a gong. The sound of the pan sang a rusty old afterthought ricocheting against the hillsides of the abandoned orchards and plains. An owl followed the sound of our iron gong with a sharp "wooho?" on the edge of each resonance. We waited.

I saw the white spots on the brown dog's legs flash less than one half mile away. She galloped over the last ridge towards our camp, her sides wide, running at full break. Her hair was standing on edge as she pounded in the distance, seeming to roll the land closer. Set against the moonlight, she sat down suddenly in an open field, lifted her head above the distanced pinnacle of another hill, and howled.

As she was running down to us, the white saddle-marks on her back flying until she could jump against us, we noticed that Harriet was covered with burrs the size of a thumb. She licked our faces as we patted her, her long, sloppy tongue dripping saliva on the ground. Turning away to lay down, she barked a sharp short cry like a gull over at the ridge she had just left.

We looked at her. Obadiah combed her sides with his own hair comb until her hair was like silk, brown, smooth silk. He picked the remaining burrs out, one by one. And estimated just where he could go and dig up a passel of that burdock root which was quite tasty fried or steamed with some rabbit and wild herbs. Harriet lay down quietly in a circle. We folded a blanket for her to rest on, patting her gently and giving her something to eat. Crawling into our sleeping bags, we watched the moon glow eerily on top of the old abandoned hill. A twisted apple tree, its branches almost leafless, had a few scattered apples still outlined in the night against the shadows.

The air was scented by apples. The wind blew sweet as the fruit smacked the base of the trees, falling even at night. Apples were everywhere, rotting into the ground, smashed against the stones in the grass, floating half-eaten downstream, drifting up against the shore in bunches. We ate the good ones every day. They were still very sweet and, by the way, amazingly bugless.

Before dawn, the little brown dog ran up the hill again and disappeared. I woke up and watched her. She had been curled closely to my side, half of her on the blanket and most of her pushing against my stomach. She had pushed me with her feet dug into the ground until I was almost lying on the stump of a tree. I pushed back, but she made sure that I moved back over until she could curl into my stomach again and roll onto her back with her feet in the air. Her own comfort was obviously her greatest priority.

She had stood up suddenly in the early morning, her ears alert and the hair on her back rising into the still cold air, the cold air drifting away slowly underneath the building morning heat. I watched her raise her head for a few minutes, standing totally still, and then she ran. Before I could lift myself up to watch her, or call her to come back, she had flown over the side of the furthest hill.

Harriet had run past the orchard and the sound of still-falling apples. It was as if she had turned into a bird. She glided, sleek and silent. She seemed to raise her fingered wings, touching the sky just as the sun began to appear, right behind her. The sun rose now, fully lighting the crooked, old apple trees. Crows and raven called loudly at the distant edge of the forest.

The ground was warm as I put my hand on it. I could feel the warmth and a thumping like the heartbeat inside of a human chest. I put my ear to the earth to listen. Like the sound of the ocean, the sound of the earth was similar to a rush of wings and other small noises. The twisted apple trees held a flurry of dust behind them rising upward like it had been driven from the hooves of cattle, deer or antelope. Some of which were probably nearby. Near these plains, also, there were reputedly small herds of bison and wild horses. We hadn't seen any of them clearly, though.

I might have sighted a dark mare just below the rise the day before when Harriet had sprung yowling up the ridge. But now, as I looked through the illusive mist of the rising sun, all my musing about the phantom images of horses, bison and antelope appearing in my half-sleep awoke my mind and imagination until I could not remember if a real horse had stood on that ridge or if I had simply seen it in a dream.

The mare I thought I had seen the day before appeared, in reality now, high upon the ridge, rearing up on her hind legs and disappearing with a toss of her mane. Another gray, dappled mare appeared after her and began grazing. The sun shone red and the morning broke again with a dusty, pink light--low, now, sitting upon the horizon line slightly above an abandoned field we had seen before on our way in. It was no higher than its distance could conjure. The fields were half a finger tall from where I sat, blowing up under the dappled gray mare's hooves and a gathering of some other horses that appeared slightly behind her.

The orchard and wild grasses must have attracted these phantom-like horses and the rising flocks of crow and raven flying low over the fallen apples.

The little brown dog came back in about two days. She was just fine. We took her for a bath in the stream when we went skinny-dipping again. The icy cold water actually felt good on our tired bodies. Harriet carried a stick upstream as far as she could go against the current and sniffed at a nearby beaver dam until we whistled and called her back. We dried her off and brushed her. She went leaping back to the campsite carrying the stick she had been playing with and fell in front of the campfire, chewing voraciously.

It wasn't beyond our belief that she might've reached the edge of the forest we had left behind, but the reason that she constantly ran away left us puzzled. Perhaps she had run to the woods in search of rabbit like the one we had seen her chasing. She was partially feral, so we knew she was used to eating well, and could take care of herself.

Guess she just liked us, not that she needed our food. Now sound asleep on her back with her white-spotted front paw bent over in the air and her pink stomach covered with fine shiny hairs, Harriet was breathing quietly, her stomach rising and falling, her head turned to the side.

The side of her mouth moved away from her teeth, leaving her with a fiendish smile, her lip curled up. Trying to figure out where she had been, with her flopped on her back that way, and beginning to snore loudly, made both of us burst out with inadvertent and smothered laughter.

Obadiah looked up and whispered, "Look!" He pointed with his index finger to an area across the creek and into the scrubby bushes and orchard thickets. Bending low, her mouth to the ground, was a horse. We could hear her breathe even from our campsite as she walked, hid and peered over the edge of the rise.

The mare was an extremely large one and looked about ready to foal. I got up slowly from behind some bushes and swam silently underwater. I crept, crouching over, carefully, right up to her with my hand open, a few undamaged wild apples in it, pushing them towards her mouth.

The horse moved towards me. She followed me willingly into the water, as well, balancing her footing. She swam part of the way and took a good, long drink as soon as she could stand on the bottom. Her hair was dripping as she emerged on the other side. I gave her whatever clean apples I could find, and she munched loudly.

That night, that gray, dappled mare gave birth to two foals up near the top of the hill where the apple trees were. They were both females, one was a dappled gray foal like her mother and the other was dark brown with white pinto-like markings. Their hair was wet with afterbirth and they stood up almost right away and began to nurse as their mother cleaned them.

We left the mare alone when she was giving birth, but she allowed us to approach her when the foals were learning to walk about the next day. We offered her more clean apples which she gladly took. She seemed friendly and nuzzled us with her snout. The moonlight that night was dusty and the light across the horizon was bright enough to light our way. We could see the mare and her foals clearly. Harriet Harris followed us up to the hill that night. The hill was slippery with the excess moisture from the creek. We avoided hitting our heads on the low-branched apple trees. (There were still lots of red, fresh apples still on some of the branches. The apples were the size of small baseballs on average). The apple trees stood in front of us like carved statuary, silent, pointing the way with their crooked arms.

Apples slid underneath our feet and slipped away up into the air at angles, ejected from the soles of our shoes. The large dappled mare nodded her head as we neared her. Harriet barked one short bark and went over, sniffing the ground very loudly. She approached the foals as the mist began to rise like in a bog, almost covering the lower side of the moon from where we stood.

We looked up, and far away, upon the next hill, was a brown and white stallion. We could hear his hooves sounding like thunder on the ground. He saw us as he stood there against the dusky mist. The moon was sinking into the rising mask of another raccoon fog. The fog was a white mask leaving only two dark eyes, the two of us trying to find our way through this confusion.

The stallion reared and galloped away, thundering again into the muffled damp and cloudy night.

We could barely see our way back to the campsite. The fog lay upon us so thickly that everything below our knees was sealed in a milky cloud. We waded carefully as if we were knee-deep in the back-pulling creek. The fields and valleys looked like rising steam from a teacup. It would clear a little from time to time, so we could pick our way through it. It was as if you could pull long ropes of fog like white cotton cloth and wrap it around your head or waist.

Soon the dense vapor moved up to our chests like the suction of quicksand, pulling at our now covered feet, hugging our knees. We peered ahead of us in vain. We might as well have been sniffing, rather than trying to see our way back. The fog reached our stomachs and our shoulders and covered us over completely so that we both looked like white sheep sleep walking on black-banded legs. We were just using our intuition to head in the right direction.

It was okay to crawl underneath the fog, but there was no more hope in walking. We could not see at all when we were upright. Our eyes were wide open, yet they might as well have been shut. There was really no difference. As the fog had moved up, a space around our feet had cleared. We got down on all fours again, but still the thickness of the air made our hands grope as if we were crawling through piles of sheared wool. Piles of woolly fog hid our faces from each other occasionally. Like most fog, it would clear a little bit and then blind us again periodically.

Obadiah and I had to hold hands eventually, so that we would not lose one another in this murky cream-soup world. Oba banged his head into a tree, his nose skinned on the rough bark. He laughed as he slammed his forehead and backed away shakily. I grabbed more of his arm, so that he would not fall backwards from the impact.

Stumbling onward back to camp, we lit a new fire with our magnesium-flint moisture-proof lighter and made an effort to clear a space like a tunnel around our sleeping area. The smoke from the hickory got trapped inside the fog and made us cough as the flames licked the underside of a small scope of air. Rising upwards like a star trying to find an opening in the sky, the fire worked its way through the thick knitted encumbrance of the weather. It was a less than futile effort at first, but, then, it began to clear away some of the mist.

We both grabbed burning embers, looking like Greek torch bearers swathed in skirts of tattered fog, and carried plaid blankets to cover and bed the two new foals. I brought a small tin bucket of oats for the mare. How we found her, dressed in our ephemeral, cloudy skirts and togas of streaked hickory-smelling damp, I do not know.

Harriet Harris had curled up next to the dappled foal and got up as we approached. She wagged her tail, looking both chagrined and delighted to see us.

Apparently, she had gotten very attached to the newborn foals, especially the little gray one. The foal nuzzled her side as she barked quietly and tried to play with her. The two foals accepted the blankets willingly and seemed warm despite the damp evening raining on all of our heads.

The fog was still an unwanted (albeit pretty) blindfold in a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey contest to avoid pits in the ground. Stumbling over shin-bone shattering rocks and bushes that stood like mute men in steel-toed boots hitting at us below our knees, we still had the temerity to move about. The mare ate her oats. When she had finished, Obadiah, in an inspired gamble, hopped on top of her back with a broad toothy grin. He patted her sides as his hand grabbed her long gray and white ghostly mane. The mare stepped forward a little and turned her head to nuzzle his knees gently and check on her foals. He walked her carefully around in the half fog and came back into view.

"My guess is she is like to be 'bout two and a half," he said sliding off her back. She whinnied and nuzzled his face affectionately.

"Looks like you jus' made a downright good friend, Obadiah!" I smiled back admiring his skill in riding and mounting bareback. The mare swung her head to my side, stamping her front hoof. Smearing my face widely with her juicy mouth, she had a laughing look in her large, deep brown, heavy-lashed eyes. "Well, Harriet!" I shouted by way of a joyful expression, I played with the dog's hair.

Harriet started hopping around the horses, licking at their mouths and trying to get them to run after her or chase her in a game of tag. (Which the foals did a little bit, dragging their blankets a ways). "Looks like you made some very nice friends!" I teased her and chased after her myself, stumbling around a little, since she was in such a playful mood.

We bedded the foals down again, left a blanket over the mare to keep her comfortable and headed back to camp. Shore 'nuf, Harriet Harris Singleton refused to join us on the way back, complaining and whining at our leaving the newborn horses. Trying to lure us back to sleep next to them too, she played with our hands and pulled at our pants with her teeth until we had walked too far away to suit her, and she went back.

The invitation and promise of a warm fire and some hot food was too much for us. Obadiah looked longingly at the two playful foals and "our" dog, curling up next to each other on the blankets. We headed back to the campsite again, alone, leaving Harriet to run to wherever she usually did, or stay with the foals as she chose.

Our torches still burned away at the fog, which was beginning to drift up towards the tops of the trees, leaving a space of color in an otherwise blank night. It seemed as though the hickory flames of our fire and torches leeched the dampness from the sheets of fog around us. The lifting fog surrounded us like a day's wash, bleached and hung outside to dry on too many clothes lines.

We tore at the imaginary clothing as we walked. Loose snap-pins on twisted wires and imaginary straight wooden pegs went flying into the air. Cloth tails of fog were waving off the apple trees and flying away like kites broken loose from their strings. Flying too quickly upward, the mist was eaten by the clear sky and the wind.

Sitting down by the campfire again, we made dinner. 'Ol Harriet came loping down from the hill after a couple of hours, smelling our rabbit stew and begging from us as usual. Playing, barking and biting our hands, she ran away as soon as she finished, yapping at us as if she wanted us to follow her this time. Finally, she ran back to the top of the hill by the foals and the gray dappled mare, alone.

We slept late the next morning. The fog had totally disappeared, and the sun was still a little bit cool as the air swept across the hills. The sky looked brighter'n it usually was. Sunlight everywhere met a clear view of the ground around the clear water of the creek and underneath them apple trees.

The foals were awake and nursing down at the bottom of one of the ridges. The roan mare, the chestnut, was grazing up towards the top of the ridge. Harriet Harris Singleton had done come back and chose them over us to no one's surprise. I started singing loudly and walked down towards the creek in my shorts with a towel and another bucket of whole, freshly gleaned, oats from the fields nearby.

Obadiah began to pick wildflowers and put them in a bouquet to place them near the fire later in an extra water bucket, just for the heck of it. The wildflowers that grew there were purple thistle, chamomile, lupine, some sort of large daisy and something that looked like a blue petunia. Among others. He got some ginseng root too. That was a good dessert flavoring, as well as tea, with some wild honey. Yup.

I went up towards the horses and Harriet ran down to greet me, barking and jumping on my legs. I patted her head and yelled and whistled at the gray dappled foal and her roan twin. They came trotting over to 'ol Willy Lee, staggering a little like's a whole new thang, y'all. 'Cause everything was new to them. The dappled mare, their mother, ambled over slowly and put her head right smack into the bucket of oats. She looked up playfully after a few seconds, munching the oats and pushed at my elbow.

I started laughing don'cha know. She eats a little more and dang near pushes me over with her head, her eyes sparkling like she was trying to tell a good joke. She did. She did.

"What do you want? Hmmm?" I asked her, gently running my hand down her satin coat.

She took a step forward and pushed harder, this time at my back. I walked in the direction that she was pushing me in. Nudging me down a hill and up over the last small rise in the land, close to an area that we had camped in a while ago, by another agate ridge, she shoved me really hard and I fell down on my knees.

The mare pushed my arm until it came to rest on a very small brown puppy that looked an awful lot like Harriet. The gray mare stood breathing heavily over me. Her shadow blocked the sunlight and made the small crevice in the side of the hill amid the occasional brush and burdock sort of dark and hard to see. The outline of the large horse's body formed an arch over the little hole that I had found. It contained a few torn fragments of cloth and my old winter glove, missing the thumb, as well as some remnants of a few of our former suppers.

And rabbit bones, lots of them.

***

THERE WERE FOUR PUPPIES in all. there were two brown curly-haired puppies like the first one that I had found and a very small white and tan. The white and tan kept biting the cuff of my pants and hanging onto it, riding partially on top of my shoe. My shoelaces were attacked by all four puppies who tried to untie them and shred the cloth string with their teeth. They were all very small, probably weaned recently, and very obviously Harriet's.

I knew now, upon finding her puppies, where she had been disappearing to for most of her time with us. Obadiah might have guessed before, I think. The puppies were pretty easy to carry under my arms. I stuffed three of them into my jacket and the remaining one sat quietly in my free hand (stuffing that one in the large patch pocket on my jacket when she started to fidget). I jumped upon the dappled gray mare's back from a large boulder, holding her long mane. She walked slowly back towards her foals with me on her back swaying to and 'fro like an unwieldy canvas sack filled with grain.

The oat fields, which had seemed endless the day before when we had walked through them, were at the edge of the ravine that the dappled gray mare was taking me into now. The small rocks underneath her hooves sprayed against the sides of wild blueberry bushes that grew profusely against the rise to my left. The puppies bounced inside my jacket and curled into my stomach. They felt like they were made of soft brown and white fleece. Their heads rubbed up against me as they breathed quietly.

We turned onto the last rise, before the top of the hill, with the gnarled elbows of the apple orchard beginning to appear like pedestrians on the rutted country road. The path we were on was overgrown with weeds and bluebells and dug itself around the western ridge of the whole area.

Harriet flung herself into the air--wildly barking and running around the gray mare's legs, snapping at her ankles and leaping up at me, hitting my legs with her wet nose as I smiled at her. I got down from the mare's back and carried her offspring over to the blanket that the unsteady little brown foal had been lying on. She was standing upright now.

The foal's eyes began to widen as I laid the half-asleep pups on the plaid blanket, which woke them right up. They stretched and fell over, biting each other on the ears and stomach, rolling over again and again and again like small spinning tops. They tried to bite at their mother who had laid down, too, panting, next to them. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth, damply washing them as they rolled back and forth like little round, hairy caterpillars.

They also, ungratefully, stuck their teeth into Harriet until she yowled with pain and stood up, looking at the innocent brown foal for help with her pleading eyes. She laid back down with an audible groan. The roan foal walked over to the dappled gray mare and began nursing with the other foal.

Obadiah pushed his hat back in amazement and furrowed his brow with a worried expression. He looked at the clouds outlining the plain's fields, high upon the curved azure landscape. His eyes rolled up toward the rim of his squashy old hat, his hat falling backwards, almost down to his collar.

He started laughing. "Where did you find all those little critters, Willy Lee? They sure seem as if they belong to Harriet! Mmmm?" He bent over, playing with them and kneeling on one knee, his blue jeans scratching the ground.

His knees cracked as he staggered up, holding one of the puppies. The squirmy little brown and tan was quickly licking his face with her tongue and wagging her short tail. He gave the puppy a smooch right on the mouth and set her down again.

Landing by the fire on a log, he stretched his long legs out comfortably and scratched his forehead, looking at his fingers like they hadn't been there before. "That makes five dogs and four horses, counting the roan mare that seems to hang around this here dappled gray." He looked at the two foals and the mare. "It seems like we've been pretty lucky to say the least. Don't know where we're going to put all of these critters..." Oba spread his hands and grinned at me.

Turning to me, he spoke again, his eyes searching my face in the cascading darkness. "You want to move on tomorrow? We could rig up something to carry the puppies in. Maybe on the top of our knapsacks. We could just take turns riding with them or whatever." Obadiah grinned wildly, like nothing was going to stop him from taking those young'uns with us, and Harriet too, of course. He was so stuck on all of 'em.

"Yeah, sure," I answered, more than willing to give it a try.

We sat there for a while silently, as the puppies fell fast asleep and the foals nursed. Both of us staggered to our feet after about an hour and began to pack up some of our campsite so we could get an early start in the morning.

The evening dusk looked almost like rain. It was silent until the crackle of the newly set logs in our campfire began to warm our hands. The puppies woke up when we began to cook some blueberries, oats, wheat, apples and more slippery elm. They yapped, biting each other until we fed them. The night was so quiet and clear that it confused the hidden distances between our camp and the wheat fields that lay beyond our vision.

The forest we had traveled through was way off in the horizon to our left. The moon came up suddenly and lit the hills, fences and orchards with its fullness and reflected a dim light upon our faces.

The next morning, we set out after bathing and stamping out the fire at our campsite. The sunlight was warm on our shoulders and we both wore straw hats to shade us. At the top of our knapsacks we had tied baskets filled with old shirts and clean scraps of cloth. In each of the baskets we put two of Harriet's offspring, secure underneath the wooden basket covers. Obadiah rode the dappled mare and I walked until the side of one of my shoes cracked open. Then, we sat down (in the middle of the afternoon) on some fallen trees in a clearing at the end of the orchard. We had sighted a house not too far away, and decided to try and spend the night there, if we could. Maybe they had an extra pair of shoes my size, as well.

As we got closer to the wooden structure, we noticed that there were no signs of occupancy. The front door stood wide open and swung back and forth in the wind. The old pointed black iron hinges on the door creaked with a squeal. The two of us looked at each other and walked in the door calling out to whosoever might be there, knocking vociferously even on the entranceway walls.

There was no answer, so we walked into the living room. There were two old rocking chairs with embroidered cushions on them and a few hand-crafted oak tables. Candles stood in iron holders on the tables and papers lay dusty and in stacks on spiked spindles, in their owner's own intrinsic arrangement. I looked carefully through the old, yellowed papers for names, dates--any indication of the people who might have resided here. Or still did.

Bills intended for payment, orders of seed and farm equipment catalogs were next to stacks of faded sun-bleached paper, some of which had blown onto the linseed-oiled wooden floors. "Mighty fine wood-working job," I thought to myself. Each plank had (obviously) been hand-planed by the looks of it.

The wind from an open shutter had blown around the dusty room and had pushed chicken, duck or pigeon feathers and dried, mown grass into some of the corners of the floor. It had also knocked over some of the things that had once been on the mantelpiece. It was a well-built house with quite a few rooms up on the second floor (which we had not explored yet) and had not, obviously, been occupied for quite a while. The owners must have been gone for a mighty long time.

We walked into the kitchen. The linoleum floor was still polished and clean and the old metal utensils shone, gleaming but dusty, on their pegs on the wall. The pantry was filled with canned home-grown fruit, jams, tomatoes, compotes, soups, assorted vegetables and at least a dozen other things as well.

There were old enameled white pots on the third shelf up by my head. Somebody had tacked neat shiny decorative paper on the shelves with white thumb tacks. There was a small window in the pantry so that you could look out onto the enclosed back porch, where white and red painted rattan furniture sat as if it was still waiting for a gentleman or lady to relax in the cool evening breezes after supper.

Perhaps, they had chatted over a Sunday or weekday newspaper, watching the sun go down. Metal hooks were stuck in the ceiling awaiting an absent porch swing. The plain woodwork on the walls was quite nice. A square box stood in one corner of the porch. It was loaded with old newspapers that had been tied neatly with pieces of crisscrossed string and left there, to be read later in case someone might be interested in the progression of some old news story. A square box filled with magazines stood in the opposite corner stacked neatly and tied the same way.

In what was left of the back yard there was usually (at any given moment) about three or four goats (well kept) and a few young kids. I took it upon myself to milk a large nanny who was very cooperative and obviously had been patiently trained. Used to people still. It made me wonder. There seemed to be a present-day human hand here somewhere. Definitely nobody actually living here, though.

Cloth flowers with green cloth wound around wire stems stood in a milky glass vase on an enameled end table in the enclosed porch as if they had been set there only a couple of hours ago to welcome some guest. They somehow seemed inappropriate since we kind of thought no one other than ourselves was coming. Obadiah and I went back into the kitchen, took our hiking boots off and brought them back out to put next to the back door. Both of us started to laugh nervously, looking at each other as we sat back down on a couple of kitchen chairs to catch our breath.

Obadiah looked down at the kitchen table. There were still clean, folded and ironed, checked tablecloths in a drawer of the table next to some large metal kitchen utensils. The smaller utensils were all sorted according to size, shape and sometimes use, such as the corkscrews, bottle-openers and measuring spoons.

On the long kitchen counter there were three sets of canisters arranged according to size (largest to smallest) with different kinds of flours and condiments in them. One set of canisters was a set of four crockery jars, another set was metal, and another set was square white glass with yellow painted wooden knobs on the lids. Heavy metal scoops of various sizes stood tacked to a rack on the wall.

Obadiah looked down at his hands, sitting down after examining the containers, still laughing a little nervously. "Do you suppose anyone lives here, Willy Lee?" He looked around behind him and back down at his hands.

I answered, "Don't rightly know, Obadiah. Don't think so. It looks as if there hasn't been anyone here for at least, say, twenty or so years. By the looks of it, the papers in the front room all seem to be dated ending at about that time The place seems pretty much abandoned. Lot of folks have no relatives interested in living out this far in the country. Maybe they couldn't or didn't want to sell this place. The roof seems good and the siding doesn't seem to be leaking. House isn't sinking either. I think it must have an old cement foundation, still in pretty good shape." I coughed and paused a second or two. "Certainly seems like they were well organized, though. Somebody tried to prune the orchard and obviously cares for the goats. The adjacent oat and wheat fields are still productive."

Oba grunted in assent. He walked down the long hallway off the kitchen speculatively. His footsteps shuffled in his stocking feet as he walked on the tightly fitted wooden flooring. It was as if the ghost of an old rug, or the scent of store-bought talc from the ceramic tiled bathroom still remained. I heard the scuff of bedroom slippers from upstairs near the head of the staircase. "Dang!" Obadiah called out about five minutes later, "This bedroom's really nice! Come and look, Willy Lee. You should see it." The narrow hallway echoed with his excitement. "The quilts and pillows...everything is still here. And not too dusty, either. No moisture damage." He came into the kitchen in a pair of old red satin men's slippers, carrying a small book with him, his finger holding a place between the pages.

"I found an entry in here..." he said, rounding the kitchen table and sitting down on a caned chair. "It indicates that the people who owned this house might be close to one-hundred-and-twenty years old right now, if this is correct. Not likely that they're still here. See..." he mumbled as he leaned towards me, bending his head over my right shoulder as I looked more closely at the small notebook. "There's a notation right here." He pointed at a carefully penned name, written in old-fashioned 1800's cursive.

"Yeah," I answered him affirmatively after looking at his discovery in the little book. "It looks as if you might be right, Oba." I peered again at the little ledger and the neat thin blue lines on each page.

It read--"Cord. Machenuber--born 1878--died 1972." I put my head down, reading the next line in the text of the book to myself for a second time, just to be doubly sure that I got it right. My attention was drawn to this paragraph: "Sis Machenuber--born 1885--died..." I looked up and said in Oba's direction, "Um, no date for Sis's death."

"Mmmm...Not likely she could have posted the date of her own death."

Harriet scampered into the kitchen, her nails skittering on the linoleum floor. I scratched her head as she sat near my feet, laying down and putting her head on my shoe. The puppies had fallen asleep in the living room, some of them on our backpacks and some of the laying half off the rug. The both of us went into the bedroom upstairs with Harriet Harris and opened the windows slightly to get the musty smell out. I also discovered many pairs of thick, good stockings and a pair of men's work boots that fit me just fine. I put a pair of the new socks and the work boots on, feeling mighty pleased.

I followed Obadiah back down into the living room and closed the front door. Neither of us thought the Machenubers would be coming home. Anyone else could knock or open the door and introduce themselves. Lighting a fire in the fireplace after I checked the chimney for soot which was just a habit of mine even though the chimneys seemed to all be lined with stainless pipe which does not accumulate creosote. Glancing over, I saw the neatly piled cut and split firewood stacked high in a wrought iron bin next to an iron ash shovel, billows and a tong that had been used in the previous century to keep the fires of the Machenuber homestead going. Those of Cord and his younger sister.

We had, in total, discovered three well-kept fireplaces in the house. All of them clean and ready to be used with nice, dry firewood stacked next to them. They all had a form fitted stainless funnels and stainless pipe up the chimneys. One was in the kitchen (a wood stove), one in the large bedroom and one in the living room. There were cleverly constructed aluminum heating ducts in the other rooms. I found a small enameled metal box filled with wooden matches and lit a fire in the bedroom as well. Soon the entire house was filled with warmth, chasing away the coolness of the evening.

Obadiah had started cooking dinner while I was lighting the fires, and the kitchen was brightly lit with kerosene lamps. The stove had several pots boiling with home-canned potatoes and a fine vegetable stew, with Obadiah's special dumplings which also contained some ingredients from the pantry. Nobody had knocked or come over to the house to investigate who had lit the fires or the lamps. We had not passed any other houses when we had come up to this place. The nearest house was, maybe, one-half mile from here. Perhaps that was where the guy who took care of the goats lived.

Obadiah decided to make a cake after using part of a jar of yeast for the dumplings, wanting to use up the leftover wild ingredients that he had gathered on our way across the fields and plains. I helped him by lighting the cook stove oven and brought in more logs that were stacked on the front porch. There was no electricity in the house, although there was some plumbing. No flush toilet, either, just an outhouse down back. Fine by me.

We had gathered wild chestnuts, walnuts and hazel nuts. Add to that what Obadiah had dried from the weeks before: raspberries, blueberries and a few bunches of rather tasty roots to grind up in the hand grinder to add to flour. And, of course, some twenty-year old wheat and rye flour. Still pretty good, I must say.

He made a three layer, dark, berry-nut cake with some old apple sauce, ground cinnamon for topping, plus some buckwheat honey and sorghum we found in the pantry. Oba took a moment to go out back and brought in about a half-gallon of fresh goat's milk.

There was still a little overgrown herb plot behind the house and clay pottery inside the enclosed back porch filled with dried herbs. Funny, the clay and bell jars preserved their contents really well. As long as they popped when opened and they were not rusted on their metal tops, they were pretty much okay despite their age. There were old curls of cinnamon bark inside of mason jars and a small cinnamon knife used for carving bits of soft trunk from the cinnamon trees to the side of the apple orchard. Lots of useful things to discover around here.

We sat down after this fine dinner to drink some wonderfully hot sassafras tea. I do love sassafras trees. And there were at least two of them outside in front of the house, as well.

There were quite a few goats around in the back area which gave us a small opportunity to speculate slightly about staying. I looked at Obadiah across the kitchen table and started laughing a little bit over the flickering candlelight. "What do you say we try and find the town...the Town Hall...tomorrow? Maybe try and look up the deeds to see what happened to this place? If the owners are no longer here, we can see what folks have to say about us staying for a longer period of time. We have enough money from working as dock hands in the east to pay a modest price. It's a nice place, Oba. It doesn't need much work--a little paint, maybe. We have a fine lot of horses. Plenty of everything we might need right here...Maybe we can even get some handy work locally. You are a carpenter and I can do a little of everything."

"I suspect the place is in county guardianship, myself, Willy Lee. Or maybe being offered for sale by a bank. Too far away from anywhere for any city folk to be too interested," Obadiah replied, pushing his wooden caned chair back on the hardwood floor. He tried not to scrape it against the woodworking on the wall, propping it on its back legs anyway. He chewed on an oat straw.

"Somebody takes care of those goats," I commented.

"Yup. Think they'd have been here by now if they were concerned about the smoke or anything. Guess they're not."

"Well," I said, as I stretched, getting up from my chair. "I guess we could go on speculating 'bout all of this. Right now, I think I'll go 'round to look at the front of the house before I get ready to try one of those nice, soft beds upstairs." By the time I got back inside, Obadiah had disappeared. I looked out the kitchen window, across the back porch. The horses we had taken with us were grazing in the field behind the house, around by some of the goats. I could see more of the wild herd in the distance grazing on a rise, maybe in some other abandoned fields. We knew that this was not the only farm in the area. Maybe not the only abandoned one, either. Abandoned farms were common everywhere, actually. I saw more dappled gray horses and roan mares. There were a few small, sleek brown horses with beige marks on their ankles--and others, including a few colts and older foals. It was a rather large herd. They didn't seem so inclined to leave, either. A black stallion stood back from the herd, keeping watch.

Harriet bounded into the room, through the porch and down the back stairs, loping across the fields towards the dappled gray, the roan and the foals. I stood, mesmerized by the sunset and the dusk settling darkly upon such a vast and lonely countryside. The sun shone red and huge as it set. Our elevation must be pronounced.

The sun set further to the left of a stand of knotty pine and gnarled pear trees, still loaded with ripening fruit, beyond which the swishing tails of the wild herd feathered the horizon line. We could do some canning with the extra bell jars in the pantry. The roan mare raised her head looking in my direction. She shook her head and moved closer to where I stood. I heard the rhythmic sound of an ax beating off to the side of the rise that the wild herd was feeding on, closer to the house. I turned around and noticed that Oba stood splitting an enormous stack of cut firewood.

I washed the dishes with the hand pump in the kitchen, since Obadiah had become diverted to chopping wood. Putting some more tea on, I cut a small piece of cake, munching on it as I dried my hands on a cross-stitched linen hand towel. The goats smacked their hooves on the bottom porch stair and a kid jumped agilely across the broken timber of the post that used to hold up a side fence. They didn't seem to need an enclosure. They just stayed right around the yard. There was hay there. So, I knew for sure that someone was taking care of them. It was good we milked a couple of nannys since the extra milk usually bothered them. There would be enough milk for their kids in the morning. It seemed as if the larger goats called into the house through the open back door with the short laughing voices of old men as they fed on a hay bale near the back stairs. They were very pretty with immobile, wide hazel and blue eyes. Some of them had long wavy black hair, some were short-haired, auburn and tan.

Their tails seemed as if they were waggling brushes on an alpine hat as I looked over at them tripping up and down the back stairs but stopping at the door jamb. I walked outside with a bucket, shut the door, and passed through their congregation on my way to pump some water from the spring house to take a bath in.

There was not much plumbing to speak of, as I said, just a hand pump in the kitchen sink that I could see. The sink was not deep enough to fit a large bucket in it. I would have to fix that before winter. By the time I got back and began to climb the stairs up to the house, a pregnant she-goat trotted around the side yard with a deeply resounding metal bell hung around her neck. The bell was clipped to a wide, studded canvas collar.

I could hear Obadiah's voice from around the front of the house as another dancing little kid ran after another nanny, kicking her tiny hind legs into the air and wearing her own tiny bell. She gave one springy jump into the meadow and did a few jack-rabbit hops over some clumps of flowers and weeds.

I laughed, catching sight of Obadiah as he walked around to the back stairs. "Where'd you find those collars? Was that you who did that, or was it someone else?" I yelled.

"There's a barn around down at the bottom of the field, to the left of the house, " Oba called back, as he sat down on the stairs, puffing. He grabbed a very small female kid, trying to hold her as she bolted slightly in the embrace of his large, muscular, brown arms. His flannel shirt was opened across his stomach, so the kid was miniaturized even further by his large chest. "The barn has painted, metal roofing and old, large-tiled vinyl siding. Besides being ugly siding, it has worked really well, and the barn is in good condition with no visible leaks. The Machenubers were clever people. There is plenty of horse tack there in need of oiling but still in reasonable condition, a few saddles and harnesses. There is also plenty of farm equipment, mostly manual tillers and such. A tractor (who knows if the thing still works), and other useful manual equipment. I found the ax in there."

The night fell completely, making the darkness blind us. Oba put the kid down and she scampered off to find her mother.

The next day we oiled and used the tack in the barn, riding the obliging roan and dappled mare in search of the Town Hall. We left the foals shut in the barn. The dappled mare trusted us by then, so it was not a problem. We followed a dirt road and saw town signs, so we knew we were going in the right direction. In about twenty minutes we were in the center of the town. The people in the Town Hall assured us when we found the tax map of the Machenuber property, that the local bank that held the deed would not charge much. The Machenuber place was now in default of their mortgage. We posted signs in the bank and Post Office for handy work, inviting inquiring folks to come up to the Machenuber place for laborers. We promised to come to the bank the next day with enough cash to pay for the place. They were happy enough to sell it. We would have enough money left over to buy supplies for the rest of the month until we were working again.

We were also told who was caring for the goats and did a few other maintenance things around the property. Everyone was happy to see someone interested in the place and assured us that handy men were welcome in the town. No one was put off by Obadiah's color or the fact that we were obviously ex-cons. Folks talk of amazing grace, this was just an amazing place. Everyone was kind. Some of the women asked if we would like housewarming gifts such as casseroles and roasts. We heartily agreed to this.

The welcome wagon came over all that week and we ate like kings. Oba got a carpentry job right away at a decent wage and was working by that weekend. I took time off to mend my foot, which was blistered from my old cracked shoe and soaked it in the cold waters of a local creek as I skipped stones and talked to Harriet who was like to foller me there.

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# The Wishing Well

Copyright (C) 1993, Cathy Smith

***

There was a deep, old stone circle surrounding an open artesian well, with hundreds upon hundreds of huge, green bullfrogs hopping in and out of it, some of them sedate in the inky, cloudless night, immobile on the grass surrounding the circle, but making a lot of noise. It was late at night. I was a very young girl at the time (about nine years old). My friend (who was a skinny, dark-hair boy) was about three years younger. They had let us go out this late at night because we were out in the country and on vacation. The two of us had not wandered very far from where we were staying and were fascinated by the large quantity of frogs in the open well.

There was hardly any light at all, except for fireflies, making us cross-eyed trying to estimate their nearness. Their fluorescence was the only light in the dark forest behind us. We hoped that the fireflies could create a lantern, a flashlight from fly-bodies, a thunderstorm with fly-body lightning, even a few little fly-lights revealing our disembodied toes and fingers. They did none of those things.

Where were my hands? I could not see them anymore. Something ate them, bit them off in this gulping, grasping hour of the night. They were lost. I put them in front of me. They were eaten by soft, dark, marshmallow-monsters with black rubber teeth. They disappeared into the darkness. I could not feel them. I could not see them. I knew that they were gone.

On a hot day, throaty, short croaks exposed the frogs through sound. All of them inside the clear, clean waters of the well, and hopping around the forest floor made a symphony of different noises. The water of the well was always cool, no matter how hot the weather got. The hotter the baked, dried pan of the corn-yellow sun scalded the earth, the colder the icy well-water got, until our mouths smarted and tasted like rusty iron, and our teeth cracked and ached in relief from the heat--our throats tightening on the cold water.

The color of the spotted, rubbery frogs matched the bright green of the huge maple leaves nearby. You could hold the littlest frogs in the palm of your hand or on top of the large plate of a flat, chartreuse maple leaf making them jump into the imaginary shapes of frog and swim fins, choking snorkel noises and springing like the jump of stretched and released Olympian rubber bands. They had grasshopper legs and balloon laughter in their throats. Firefly lanterns were strung around froggy parties. The fireflies were surrounded by startled frogs hopping away, their leg muscles as springy as peeled twigs, like young lime-colored, maple stems.

I would sit there for hours with my chin on the rough, gray stones of the well and stare at them. Going over there right after sundown was the best time--right after dinner--I would play with the frogs and watch the patterns in the big, eight-cornered leaves floating in the water at the top of the well like flat, hull-less boats, sail-less, skimming up and down, molding from yellow to brown to beige, letting part of their bare, lace veins turn into green bending skeletons. A huge, dead moth was unearthed by the toe of my shoe.

There were all kinds of leaves mulching along the sides of the well walls. There was rich, crumbly, moist soil. Big, fat nightcrawlers with blue, poufy, worm aortas wrapped themselves around my short fingers possessively. The frogs were in the thousands of thousands--maybe millions, or billions, or trillions, or billions of trillions. There were little, snake-colored, horned toads, too. Dry-looking.

I was doubtful as to whether one could get warts from toads, although I had been warned that it was distinctly possible. I was pretty sure, though, after playing with the toads, day after day that one could not get warts from them. I was warned not to play in the waters of the nearby lake, either (besides the dangers of contracting wars from toads), because there were eels in there that shocked you when they bit you and were really delicious when they were cooked.

I only tasted them a little bit. I contented myself with watching purple-winged dragonflies and extremely large, long-legged, green grasshoppers (with racing knees bent for a good start). I chased after frogs, which hopped a short way into the forest. I played around the cool, wet, sweating walls of the stony well.

Me and my small friend stared at the frogs almost every day. We had a few pennies, some of them coppery and bright, some of them dull and lead-like. We tossed the bright ones into the water first. They disappeared. We could see our reflection in the round ripples which moved rolls of fat water away from our pennies. The fat water rolls thudded against the mossy slick stones of the well walls.

I made a wish and closed my eyes, holding my little friend's hand. We looked at each other but didn't reveal a thing. We never spoke of these kinds of wishes at the well. There were other things that we could tease each other about, but not this. This was a real secret. In a real secret place. Our parents would probably not like us around this open well every day, without them. I would never know what he wished for. Then again, how could he know what I, myself, so much older than he was, wanted more than anything, more than anything in the whole, wide world. What kind of vision could I have in such a dream-like place, in such a perfect place?

He looked into the well, his nose barely reaching over the side when he lay down, hiding himself from the frogs so they would not try and hop away. His shirt and shorts would get all wet and muddy. He would get all wet and muddy all the way down to his sneakers when he did this. "I don't like it," he would complain and run back to the vacation cabin where his family was staying.

I would throw some more pennies in the well and watch their bright color sink slowly as if they were drifting deep into some subterranean water tunnel, some natural aqueduct, gushing water from a clean, natural lime filter into some underground water-filled rock. Perhaps my pennies landed miles away, settling in the sandy bottom of a pool underneath some mysterious waterfall. Maybe my penny would reach there, funneled through the aqueduct currents, sliding through sandstone crevices. Perhaps it would scratch the underground bottoms of muffled, unseen, underground, undiscovered rivers, hundreds of feet beneath me. Perhaps it would rumble to a far-away place and pop up there in the little rapids of some distant part of the world. How distant?

I cautiously ventured a few yards into the woods. Sure enough, there was a waterfall maybe a quarter of a mile away. I kept walking and peered through the thick trees, looking into the spray of the waterfall from time to time. It made me blink as it dashed into my face. I could see natural, hot springs surrounded with ferns like the fans of older women pushing the humid air. I could see white, plaster walls crumbling around bent tins that must have been meant to carry milk long ago. The place with the plaster walls must have been a stable or barn of some sort.

Crawling underneath a crack in the crumbling plaster wall, I pushed my hands through the ferns again until my face felt the spongy ground near the waterfall. I was rather far from where I had started. The well was quite a ways away. I did not k now exactly where I was, but I was pretty sure that I could find my way back. My hand felt the ground as I groped. I looked up until I could see the indistinct, falling avalanches of cascading spray trailing away into a downstream valley. Maybe, I could feel the source of the waterfall, deep into the middle veins of the pumping soil, protected by granite girdles that spread out on either side of the rushing tide. The water was piping its arteries into cliffs, crashing down into a splattering, rock-crushing rapid foam, and me hidden behind the ferns. I pressed the water-soaked ground and my hand filled with liquid as if it was a cup.

I stared at my hand pressed into the ground, filled like a mossy swamp, a drinking gourd floating with strings of algae, dragging miniature vines. The lucky lines on my palm looked like wrinkled, worried creeks. The turtles around here had shells like bowls that were red and yellow in places. They stood totally still when they saw me, their heads up, not moving. There were there, too, hidden. Murky, mud turtles with painted eyes on their shells--salamanders too, black lizards with yellow dots. I saw clay that was chameleon and ochre and porous. I saw imaginary volcanic rock as I examined the ground near the waterfall (which was smashing thunder into the ground). The waterfall...tons of pounding fists getting no response on top of the deep earth. I listened with my ear to the surface of the clay.

A turtle flattened, its legs disappearing. Salamanders ran until they were a blur. I walked beyond the forest, running, running, overturning the eyelets of the upside-down bowl of a painted box turtle--running, splattering ochre clay with my feet. I removed myself from a garden of honeysuckle smells, looking out over a field of flat-headed mushroom hats.

I did not know where I was, exactly. The gray, mushroom hats looked like they should make me hungry, but I was beginning to recognize some of my surroundings. Their vented caps were rooted in soft, decayed tree stumps. A sweet, humid smell seemed to undercoat the bottom side of the edge of the forest. I thought to myself, musingly, "Bees nearby. I can smell the honey..."

Then, I heard them. They had a deep, loud, insistent drone. They sang inside a hollow log that looked like a drum, drumming from the inside--boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom. I felt like getting a stick and hitting the side of the log real hard and hearing it call back as the bees flew like yellow sparks from their hive. I shook. I could come back here later with a better plan and get some of that wild honey. I had seen it done before and thought I could do it too. I did not hit the log with my stick.

Hexagon wax, bees wax, melted, solid cakes of wax, embroidered turtle shells, lollapalooza star quilts on snake skin backs.

I ran in a large circle and came upon the other side of the woods and the top of the waterfall. There were surprisingly enough, no snakes at all near the pond above the falls. Water crashed below me flying in small beads of spray and falling on water-resistant grass and rocks. There were cattle drinking near here. Their calves stuck round, wet noses through a fence. The calves' noses were as big and round as the round, cupped palm of my hand. Gooey, liquid cow pies lay near them. The cow pies were made from a grassy liquid fermented carefully inside of fourteen, warm stomachs snug within the big ribs above the cow's udders. Imagining that, somehow, I could count those busy stomachs, I watched a farmer milk them. The cows were fat-sided and spotted with black. He patted their hides in a friendly way and called each one by name to come to him for milking.

Squish-squish, zing-zing, squish-squish, zing-zing, schloop-schloop, milk hit the stainless steel containers, flowing like a white, swirling river sucked into stainless steel silos. The round-nosed calves pulled my attention to the bison grazing in the next pasture. They were behind two safety fences due to the Brucellosis they carried which made them dangerous to dairy and all other cattle. Being only nine years old, I was sure they must have been wild at one time. Not just the kind of bison that are raised in a pasture. Their horns were in a bow, reaching upstretched. In my mind, woolly-haired bison thundered upon the earth once again, turning the grassy plains red with their sharp hooves. (The corn in the farmer's field grew in the naturally red, terra cotta soil). The bison were not very large. Not quite as large as the enormous, young Hereford bull that stood alone in an adjacent field.

The Hereford stood still, alone, in his risky-looking pasture. I really wanted to slide past him and go to see a rather fascinating place that suited my mood every once in a while. I held my breath and thought to myself, just to shore up my foolhardy self-confidence, "Pretend that he doesn't see you and you don't see him. Hop the fence and run. Do not look back. It won't seem as far to the other side of his mushy pen if you run real fast. Ugh!..."

I walked home from there. That evening I took a bath in the bathtub and was given my starched, pink and white, frilly dress with the petticoat to wear to dinner. I had to wear black patent-leather shoes with straps and buttons and anklet socks that folded over with lace on them.

An older friend of the family leaned over in his slender-fitting suit and asked, "How were the frogs?"

"Just fine," I answered, seriously and frankly. I went on at length, describing (even more seriously) the color and quantity of the frogs in the well. My little friend was there also, quietly sitting beside me, leaning on my arm. He was at least a head shorter than I was. After a short silence we both asked when we could go swimming the next day. It was dark now. The adults decided that we could go first thing in the morning--at nine o'clock.

The daylight rolled around in big, cottony tumblers. We made the older folks put our bathing suits on us. Both of us received a thick towel around our necks covering our stomachs and reaching down, tickling our knees. I began to chat while they helped me put on my small swim suit. Perhaps, just to make small talk to let the adults know that I appreciated their efforts. My bathing suit at that time had a little ruffle around the fanny. My friend wore only a small pair of striped swim trunks and a pair of decorated sunglasses, painted with little beach umbrellas in the corners of the glasses.

He got a blue, plastic bucket with a yellow, plastic shovel--and I got a yellow plastic bucket with a blue plastic shovel. We picked our way down the gravel road in our bare feet, complaining and excited. The beach at the lake was very warm. My friend sat down in the sand (with his sunglasses still on) and played. I walked away a little distance.

I could see clear across the lake. Sitting still on the bottom of a row boat that I had climbed into alone. I looked at the fish with my head hanging over the side. I could look down and see ten pound bass. They had scales (clear and blue), pumping sides and chopping teeth. Two adult neighbors began to row the boat.

The fish seemed to hang on nylon strings near the bottom of the lake, saying, "Nobody will ever see me again. I am a phantom fish destined to weigh tons. I will live forever. I will be a monster in this water. No one will ever see me again, but they might feel that I am here. Breathing. Waiting for them. Like someone might stand behind a door, waiting to go, 'Boo!' and scare somebody. I will be there.

"I'll be sending up bubbles behind the rock that seems like it is telling you to drink some of this deep, deep lake water. Don't look until ten years have passed. I will still be here. There are many others like me. Take a look. They are here now."

I moved the oar and the metal, horseshoe lock squealed. My index finger got pinched. I screamed and started crying. Looking at my finger, I saw it had gotten a blood blister and a long splinter in it. My high-pitched scream echoed across the lake and back into my ears. My face was flushed with crying and pain. My cry had disturbed the painted turtles along a rocky shore enough to make them disappear into their painted and shellacked bowls. Looking like waxed fruit, their wet shells and shingled stomachs hid a fleshy, snap-trap mouth, chestnut-crunchers, a snap-trap scary enough to cut my cry short and stare at them.

I looked down into the water which seemed like a glass window right to the green bottom of the lake, twenty-five or so feet below us. We were still in the boat, floating with invisible buoyancy, flying above underwater mountains, underwater meadows and valleys, above the immobile fish. We hit the shore and ran up on the sand with the hull.

I hid my small hands in my jacket pockets as they put the wooden-spoon oars inside the boat (making sounds like threatening wooden teeth with iron clamp gums). There was a loud clack from the sides, and the boat rocked back and forth, tilting the wooden plank seats, the oars secure in the wooden frame of the boat, satisfied at having bitten me only a little. I looked at my finger. There was still a little, red blister on it. I sucked on the oar-bite and kicked the oar with my foot, making it rattle against the lips of the boat. Wooden lips and ribs and iron-ore teeth.

The plump, cumbersome, over-inflated, orange life-jacket I had on made me look like a melon with feet. They lifted me out of the boat and put my bleached, little, sneakered feet, with the rubber, torn-up insoles and the gritty, sand-lined seams on the beach. My white sneakers were water-stained, and I put my toes near where the lake water, darkening with the twilight, smoothed the sand like a trowel. I let the water soak into my shoes, so that I could feel the waves recede in and out of my sneakers against my toes, draining out of the sand and cloth inside my shoes as the tide came in and out slowly in waves. Thick strands of lakeweed washed up to the drier, looser part of the shore.

"How's your finger?" asked one of the tall, slim members of our boat crew sympathetically. I looked way up to his far away face set against the darkening lake in a faded fishing hat. I shouted up at the face, so that it could hear me, my legs tired from too much sun, exercise and boat-riding. I swayed underneath the effort to connect his face with his invisible body, hidden against the late day glare of the sun on the lake.

"Just fine!" I shouted at the face. "I only got a little blister..." I held my finger up at his peering nose so that he could see it. I felt his huge, rough hand over my little one.

"Mmmm..." he said, letting go of my hand after examining it.

I ran up towards our cabin as the adults walked more slowly behind me. The face disappeared, and the wind put gritty sand in my hair, rubbing it on my face and scratching my body underneath my bathing suit--making me shiver and feel the last few minutes of the cold, lake water. My shivering disappeared into the sound of the crunching, big feet walking behind me in the sandy soil, feet big enough to make you wonder what went into shoes that large.

I was told that the big, high faces had names. They had laughter. The only person that I really talked to was the little boy who was younger than I was, who was not very enthused about throwing pennies in the wishing well every day, making them suck down granite pipes to the waterfall that I had imagined was connected with the well. I had told him about the flight of my copper penny hitting rock bottom and whooshing through the natural, connecting reservoirs. I don't think he believed me. I made that up, I have to admit.

The frogs were there again in the night, half a billion strong, flying around like grasshoppers. I imagined them to be little, green people with muscular legs and webbed hand and feet. They populated the earth. Everywhere was covered with little, green frogs. There was almost nowhere I could walk. I had to stand there motionless, my own sad, unwebbed feet covered with frogs, careful just to stand there and watch them take over the earth.

It was a froggy world takeover. They hopped on the buses. They were in the back seat of the car and under the cushions in the living room. They tickled my bare feet on the wooden floor boards, jumped into the bathtub, the sink and the kitchen cabinets. Every sound sounded as if it was the croaking of a frog. Everyone began to look like a Martian with a permanent frog smile spread from ear to ear all the time. The rivers swarmed with frogs. The mountains and valleys were panting with frog exertion.

That night I slept on the banks of the lake, wedged between two huge rocks way on the other side, where there were no sandy beaches. The painted turtle eyes were warm against my breathing side, frogs curled up like folded hands by the trees. The yellow color on the turtles became a fire crackling like snapping twigs underfoot. Rustling trees bent over me as I shivered. I fell asleep.

Two big, tall pairs of trousered legs appeared. I saw the dim, warm spots from their flashlights. I could hear the crunch of their feet on the sandy soil and the soles of their shoes squishing on the sides of the rocks. I was hiding inside of a turtle egg, almost sound asleep, my hand poking against the embryonic sides.

Their lights could not find me. They scorched the outside of my shell. The purple of the painted turtles frightened them. They called my name tentatively and looked perilously close to where I was hiding. I breathed quietly. The hot light from their oily torches felt hopeful, desperate, probing. It stopped and went away. My nest was safe. I breathed cold breath like a bear in the winter. I breathed into the forest as I opened the egg, painted with the maroon face of fear and ran, running faster. I had heard the bewildered voices of concern, speaking slightly distant from where I had been sleeping. The voices faded like dawn streaks light over the river nearby with blue, red and yellow. The warmth of the sun made me awaken fully.

As I grew older, my limbs seemed huge. My eyes grew soft and opened wide like those of a doe. I was patient and would stand close to where the other people lived in their wooden houses. I would run away deep into the forest, further and further. My hair was shiny and long. I grew much taller, reaching the windows of the houses. I stared into their planted fields. I followed a hawk circling up the mountain ridge and ate their leftover prey raw. The yellow color of a huge, painted turtle landscaped the sky. The veins of the insides of my eyes, rounded and pliable looked like the hidden chamber of a turtle egg. I hid there, behind my eyes to learn the ways of others like me.

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# The Sixth Day

Copyright (C) 1993, Cathy Smith

***

And on the sixth day God said:

"Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the fowl of the air and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." Genesis 1:26

***

"WHAT A PIECE OF WORK is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and shape how express and admirable. In action how like an angel." Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 2 Scene 2.

Note: [Some of the scientific and technical aspects of this story are true.]

***

PREFACE:

The laboratory glistened like a stainless steel cell. It was so sterile, so clean, so remote from most human eyes, that the windows in it seemed to be visionless. The trees outside seemed to be invisible. Visionless is not a good way to exist. You need to have a Vision. A purpose related, as it were, to Goodness--with a capital "G". It was as if the sun that came in from those apertures in the laboratory was from some remote planet, unrelated to the ones we were familiar with.

***

LUCY: To be placed in the present is a gift of a very few people. Most folks rush around day after day just going about their business as if dinner and their job was the only thing that meant anything to them. As if a nice fat stomach needs to be filled again and again, beyond the bounds of reason. As if time needs to be caught like a wild animal in a trap, not like it is already present. But Bill is different, he always has the time, has always had the time. Time seems to be his main possession. No matter what he has been through, since I've known him at least, that has always been true.

You know, I've tried to stop some people on the street and ask for directions or something and I sometimes see the blank mask of someone who does not seem to comprehend what I mean. Of course, they are not at fault. Perhaps, they are just not focused for an answer at the time. Answers come when you give people the time to formulate their thoughts. Without time, without the time to formulate a Vision, then some things don't really have value or relate to an answer to an important question.

So, I never really told anybody what I knew. I knew things and saw things that would make most people consider me daft.

Today, I was itching to talk. My hands were sweating. I had peeked into the laboratory first thing, but I hadn't seen anything unusual. Sometimes I went out for a cup of tea with one of the resident micro-biologists that worked here. I worked in one of the offices as a secretary.

I didn't really expect to see the guy I usually ate lunch with anyway. I didn't have the security clearance to go looking for him in the lab. I was lucky they trusted me enough to crack the door open to peek in. There are probably a lot of security camera shots that have me in them - looking through that door. They all know me, you know, they wouldn't bother with that minor violation. Not even for a simple reprimand. I'm sure I'm listed in a few security logs, even all the way to the top, just for doing that.

The lack of caring I usually saw on most folks faces around the lab just seemed to encourage my deepening desire to communicate with Bill. It was not a normal lack of caring. It was a smooth, cool, lack of caring. A happy-go-lucky lack of caring. Lack of caring for a Vision that provided a wider option to answers. Answers to deep questions. Some answers come later, some come sooner. You don't get a full spectrum of answers if you don't care to take some time, either.

Bill had a rather poetic personality for a genetics lab like this one. His full name was William James Taylor, Jr. He was scheduled to be exited from his job within a couple of weeks, so I was anxious to check in with his usually newsy, gossipy self. Bill was a complainer. That, in itself, was a liability and an isolationist habit around this place. Except for the fact that he had to be one of the top-ranked biophysicists in the entire world, he would have been fired years ago. They might have fired him at fifteen or even twelve years old. He was a prodigy and had been at this laboratory that long.

Bill was wealthy, to say the least. He had been, literally, raised within most of the top-level security agencies in the country and had technical degrees that included subjects that most people have never even heard of, let alone studied. Just being an employee here was not the only reason Billy hung out in the lab until it drove him crazy. He sort of had to. He was a biochemist, that was true, but he had to have elaborate testing done on himself, occasionally, as well. No one really knew exactly what Bill did as a job or why he needed testing. Bill knew, though, to a certain extent. He knew enough about it to have it start bothering him.

Billy was about twenty-three now, very youthful and really good-looking. He was identical to his twin brother who, he knew, did not even know he existed. He did not like having a twin. You know he had a funny (peculiar) story.

That's why I felt like talking, even to a stranger. He had told me something about himself the other day. His story had made me jumpy and I needed to talk to someone - anyone. I could not tell them much, because I promised Bill, I would keep his secrets (which he wasn't supposed to talk to me about anyway).

I was really, myself, a nobody. I had a lower than adequate income. I was usually moving from one small occupation to the other. You know how it is when you're kind of young. So, Billy was just a friend of mine.

I couldn't meet him today. Finally, I sat down at a bus stop and began to chat with the other people that were waiting for the bus. It was just an excuse because I couldn't find him. I just felt like talking, but not about him.

***

BILLY: Beginning with my dreams, I reach out my arms and find nothing but absence. I feel nothing in front of me. I reach around and there is a void that I seem to be walking through, as if I have no body - like a spirit. I begin to shake. I am not afraid. I am not like anyone else. Trying to find this dream within a dream leads me to an empty thought - something that I made that is already present in my soul. It makes me think I need a soul birth. A spiritual flight to freedom. In an ordinary way, I want to remain alone - maybe with others only occasionally, like in a dream. To make a distance between me and them. No, I don't want this. I don't want what I was given. I need to see what dreaming could do for me.

Why are my thoughts so dissembling? Why do I cry and feel things that seem to come from nowhere? Why am I in such human despair? Why am I so ordinary? Why does this thing (distance from others, for example) make me cry inside? Similar to this feeling, I need a dream. Another dream. Maybe another kind of life.

***

BILLY - Another Entry: I tore up my condominium today in a fit of hysteria. I started in the bedroom and worked my way to the living room. My gourmet kitchen was in a shambles, I tore vents from the ceiling, broke all the windows and smashed the lamps and furniture. I sat down and cried, looking at my bloody hands. I began to shake. Patting my own sides, I wrenched with the agony of self-doubt. None of this was real to me. Reality was beautiful. This was not beautiful. The spirit had gone out of my home.

All of this, my life, had become ugly to me. What was of use to somebody else, was of no use to me. Washing my lacerated hands and taking a shower, I changed into some old, clean blue jeans and a warm flannel shirt.

***

BILLY - Third Entry: Yesterday was the end of my old life. I gave notice at my job that I was not coming back regardless of their rules about quitting. Leaving the door to my wrecked condominium wide open, I walked out with only the clothes on my back. I sat on a street corner in the sun, crying and smiling. I am free!

***

LUCY: My name, by the way, is Lucy. After I sat waiting for Billy at the bus stop, talking to the folks there, I called in to the laboratory. They said that he hadn't been there for a couple of days. I was worried, so I began to comb the streets for him. Walking to his condo building, I went past the doorman to the elevator. Like I said, Bill was not a poor man. He was downright wealthy. He owned a yacht, an RV, and even a summer house in Majorca. A big one.

The door to his place was open. I stood in horror, gaping through the aperture into his living room. Someone had obviously ransacked his apartment. Even the ceiling and walls had large chunks of plaster knocked out of them. The floor to ceiling drapes had been torn down and the wind whipped through the huge broken plate-glass windows. There was blood in the middle of the living room rug. He wasn't there.

***

BILLY: Walking the streets felt good to me. I shivered when the sun went down, finding an old torn blanket, I wrapped it around me. Some guy told me to come with him, because he could show me a place to stay. I did and ate some dinner at a soup kitchen. I spent the night at a shelter and slept soundly, totally exhausted. I had no dreams but woke up with a smile on my face. The person that I had met last night went one way in the morning and I went another. He usually went out to collect cans and bottles and panhandle, or so he said.

I, personally, didn't want to do that. I still had my bank accounts and credit cards. I was also still too tired to think clearly. What an anomaly! My whole life had been structured to aid my ascent to "Clear Thinking." I had what most people would call a college degree by the time I was about twelve years old. My whole life had been catered to and tailored to both my interests and the interests of my teachers. I loved them, too. I had an entire pseudo-family filled with exotic academic and scientific creatures. I was, as a child, fascinated by this world. I did not question it.

The cuts on my hands began to ache. I waved at the other men from the shelter as they took their shopping carts down the street and walked away. They were good guys. I needed some friends. Some of the men were engineers like me, some ex-construction workers, some of them college graduates, some high school dropouts, some alcoholics, some just ordinary unemployed folks. Nothing surprised me. I had been an outcast all of my life in a way.

All I cared about was that I wasn't involved with my old life right now. I looked for one of my newer friends, Lucy--a nice, friendly young girl I had met on the street on the way to the laboratory where I had been employed most of my life, tested for defects, and improved--so to speak. I have a twin, an identical twin who holds some of the combinations to my future.

Sighting Lucy about two blocks away, near a public library, I ran--holding my pounding hands close to my body to prevent the air from burning into my wounds. Crying, I screamed at her to stop. With tears sliding sideways off my cheeks, trailing down my neck into my collar, I ran faster and fell off a curb as I tried to beat a traffic light.

***

LUCY: I saw Billy yesterday, finally. I heard a shout and turned around as I was walking down Santa Monica Boulevard. He was running down the street in a blanket and torn flannel shirt, his hands bandaged and otherwise lacerated. Crying uncontrollably, he had tried to tell me what he had done. He had let the mortgage on his condominium be sold back to the bank that held it. Saying that he could no longer stand his former life at the laboratory, he told me that he had felt engineered into extinction. He had defied his birth-identity. He had tried to destroy his DNA codes on the laboratory software. His security clearance was so invulnerable that he would probably be treated like no more than a bad puppy.

He wouldn't get in touch with his twin. He said that he really wanted to but was still too afraid to try it.

He felt sorrier for his twin than himself because his knowledge levels were high enough for him to try and face reality alone. He had been brought up in the lab. But his twin had family. Genetic family. Billy didn't think his twin would be able to accept things without his own kind of scientific background. He was convinced that he wouldn't be able to do that.

He wouldn't tell him. He might know anyway - the way things were. The administrators at the lab were smart. They knew people. They knew Bill well enough.

Billy was actually about twenty years younger than his twin, you'll be able to figure this out later on. I'll tell you about it--or he will. It was a kind of secret, so I was not at liberty to tell anyone else. But, perhaps, things are changing. What happened to Bill is more out in the open these days.

He still loved the laboratory though. I could tell. In fact, that was the one thing that he would have a hard time leaving. I knew he would still visit the place as if it was his home. Wandering around the silent dark halls, he would let his soft-soled shoes slide and squeak in the endless corridors, trying to see through the dark unlit doorways. Like when he was a kid there. There were some people that he would miss. I didn't think he could do this. I didn't think he could make it on his own. To make a break from the lifestyle that he knew so well.

As the former Billy Taylor, he'd told everyone that he'd make his own decisions about himself. That they would not even know who he was anymore. It was his own choice, like everything else.

When I met him on the street after he had been gone overnight, I had taken him home with me. I worked part-time as a waitress including my day job at the lab. I let him sleep on my couch and make himself at home.

***

BILLY: It has now been two months since I quit my intelligence job. If my job is quitable. That is the job I was 'bred' for. I feel really good. I spend a lot of time sleeping and hanging around Lucy's place. I have consolidated my savings and sold almost everything I owned. I use very little money besides helping Lucy with the rent, getting some food and paying my share of the utilities. I have become a vegetarian and Lucy has been vegan for about a year. It felt good, really good, to do something like that for myself.

We fast occasionally on spring water and fresh lemon for about three days at a time. I have begun experimenting with meditation. We sit together in the evenings after Lucy gets home from work - after supper.

Life is different now. It is easier. I suppose everyone feels the same way about change at some point in their lives. I didn't want to see the laboratory ever again. Both my folks were technicians, but I was quickly developing a strong dislike for my former field which included some biochemistry and medicine, mostly in research and development. People like us do have relatives. In a very funny way, we cannot avoid it.

Would my brother like the hallways as much as I did as a kid? Yeah. But I destroyed the only software entries I could find on my biological future, my DNA. My DNA is the key to my natural life span or my predicted extended life plan. My genetics belong to my brother, not to me. Technically anyway. I simply borrowed them, against my will, too.

Without those codes and the corrections that had to be entered every time I took a blood or tissue test they could not 'make' me. My identity was clouded with that of my so-called "brother". In fact, I had begun to distrust the medical profession and even my former self with a gnawing passion. I drifted towards spiritual pursuits. I had the time now. There was no reason not to change. Lucy says I've always acted as if I owned time, itself. I used to laugh at that. But now...

I had hum-drummed myself into a very lucrative field. I was not bitter, just tired. What I used to do for a living was enough to make me vomit. I still hung out on the streets, just to talk to strangers and homeless guys. I would take people that I hardly knew out for something to eat at a cafe, just to talk to them.

It felt good, even great. I had been, in the past, so terribly confined and preoccupied with the lab.

There were others like me, some who died too young due to miscalculations in cloning procedures. I didn't care anymore. They had let others leave before. They had to let the others die and continued their programs anyway. I believe in a version of reincarnation, but I'll still die after so many years. I want more control over my destiny with the time I have left to me. Why not?

Some of the books that I have read say that you can retain consciousness and conscious choice even during and after death. All of us born in the laboratory were raised to be educated to all of the risks of our parentage. We had this advantage over test tube babies fertilized in utero. The safe guards over sperm donation are ludicrous. One man is allowed to donate too many times and no public record is kept of where his progeny are. So, they could, actually, meet each other and have unwittingly incestuous children. Children of in utero fertilization done by anonymous sperm donors have no idea who their half-siblings are. They could have one hundred of them, or more. Who wants to live like that? I was gestated in utero, but not fertilized that way. My birth underwent a different process.

The other problem with anonymous sperm donors is that they lie on the applications for sperm donations. There have been cases of schizophrenic donors, heart patients, etc. donating sperm. They have bred schizoid children, autistic children, kids with heart disease. All for money. These are documented cases. The lack of follow-up and open records is not ethical.

So, off hand, I would say that highly paid, anonymous, multiple sperm donations do not work. They are dangerous and unethical, in the extreme. Also, one should have the right to sue the bejeebers out of the donor if they are proven to have lied about their medical history. The donors should be warned that they will be liable to being sued. Also, there must be some type of explanation that one can give the donor that they might actually meet the children that they have created. I mean, who wants to never meet one's father? Seriously?

There are, actually, well-educated, intelligent and healthy men who would really love to have a child, but due to career objectives do not want to care for a baby. There are enough of those types of men to solicit as donors. But they have to be targeted and medically (genetically) tested. This takes some time and money. In fact, instead of paying the sperm donor large amounts of cash, maybe they should contribute something to their testing procedures. So, there should be an open, stated, intelligent risk statement presented to the donor. Instead, insemination clinics accept men off the street who are poor and financially in need. This should not be an industry. They are creating new life, real human beings, not making dolls in a factory nine-to-five.

The problem with my birth and the birth of a few poorly "manufactured" clones is the fact that we have identical genes to those of our fathers or mothers. Even identical twins are not that identical in their gene structure. The problem has arisen that clones have some of the problems of mother-father-son-daughter incest. We are far from perfect genetically. This gets too scientific here to explain everything. Mostly farm animals have been cloned. So, if you do not know what you are eating and do not know what it will do to you, why care? Ignorance is bliss? Maybe not, says this scientist here.

I was created to be an American uber-mensch. A scary, Nazi idea. I was to be given the best of everything, especially a scientific education. I was cloned from a scientist, (who I call my twin brother, although, technically he is my biological father. Clones do not need mothers, but they are sometimes too biologically homogeneous in terms of DNA to survive). My "creators" were pretty sure I would be naturally drawn to science. You may not know this, but science believes itself. The descendant of an athlete might naturally like athletics and have the muscle structure for it too. So now you know. Most of that is true. Not totally, but mostly. Nurture is very important, too, of course, but they took care of that. So, I was the Nazi/Nietzsche ideal. I was not at all happy about my philosophical foundations. I freaked. I became tired of being an experiment.

My teachers and mentors were not at all cruel. I loved them like parents. I still do. They understand the development of personal philosophy. The development of the feeling of vulnerability. They were very intelligent, kind, sensitive social scientists at the top of their fields. But I found out that some of what Western science tests out and speculates at, Eastern science has known for millennium.

That helped to change my outlook on life.

***

LUCY: Bill has turned out to be the best friend I have ever had. We do a lot of really interesting things together. For example, we went to see a holy man speak the other day. He was Bhagawan This or Maharishi Something. A Shaivite - a worshiper of the Hindu god Shiva. Very interesting. We chanted Sanskrit mantras and sang to the accompaniment of a little hand organ. Billy got a big ceramic OM symbol for my living room and we stuck it on the wall with some wire and a nail. It's kind of fun. He comes up with the most innovative ideas. I think he has had a very comprehensive education. He doesn't talk about it that much, though.

Sometimes I worry because Bill doesn't want a job. Sure, he has money, plenty of it too. Over several million dollars, at least. So he says. I know he was a top scientist at the laboratory, so he made a large salary. But, still, you know, it seems a bit indolent to someone like me - not to be working at something. I have to scrounge for tips and enough work hours just to survive - even with two jobs. Still, I kind of like it, my job, I mean - especially now. Now it is just because I am embarrassed to accept money from Bill. To have Bill offer to support me takes me off-guard. I know he won't let me work much longer.

The administrators at the lab probably suspect Bill is living with me and I'm afraid they'll fire me from my lab job. I know I could quit my job at the lab. In fact, I think I should, actually. Just to protect Bill. I can't rely solely on my waitressing job or Billy for everything. Although, I know he'd pay my way if I let him. He's that nice and that rich.

***

BILLY: Lucy and I have moved into a camping trailer. It's cheaper than her apartment and she doesn't feel the need to work more than occasionally. She was fired for being a light-weight security risk at the lab. For sneaking around and peeking in doors, actually. She kept her waitress job and makes good tips. I enjoy visiting her there at the diner.

She doesn't have to work as much anymore. As far as I'm concerned, she doesn't have to work at all. I'm rich, but I save everything now. I even buy used clothes. Why spend anything when you don't need to? I don't need that much. We don't need that much.

In other words, Lucy doesn't work at the lab anymore. She won't accept much money from me, although I could pay for just about everything without even touching my savings. All I'd need to spend are the earnings from my dividends. I told you that they do let us go. They even granted me retirement pay.

Personally, now that Lucy is home more often, I've begun making the "hippie" lecture circuit. That is, listening and speaking to small groups and university and high school audiences. I also belong to several therapy groups for the children of sperm donors, even though that is not specifically my own situation. I am one of the very few humans created successfully from the SCNT (Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer "cloning") procedure, which is illegal in most parts of the world, but for some reason still not illegal in the United States in the present (2016). Our family situation can be similar to that of the children of sperm donors. Very similar.

You know people should know about this thing. This thing I went through. There should be no secrecy. I mean, folks should have some knowledge, awareness of bio-genetically altered animals and humans. They shouldn't be left ignorant. There is room for more of a choice. I talk about choices as much as I can. I also crash over at the homes of some of these people after the group sessions and lectures.

***

LUCY: Billy isn't here very much right now. I really enjoy that. As friends, we get along fine. But I am beginning to enjoy my own time alone, more and more, especially since I know that Bill will take care of things financially when necessary. He usually leaves me with plenty of money for day to day needs when he travels. When he is gone, I cook, meditate, clean the trailer and sleep. Ahh, this is really nice! It was his suggestion. One of his best. Not being a workaholic is kind of nice. I made some organic brown rice in the steamer today. We are eating really well, mostly fresh vegetables that we can grow ourselves. You can grow a lot in the desert if you take the time and put up a fence to keep the deer, antelope and rabbits out.

The silence we get from our meditation is really nice - addictive even.

***

BILLY: I got home after a few months on the lecture circuit. Lucy has made our place like a little heaven on earth. We cook outside a lot on a camp fire or the grill. We are presently camping at the base of a huge foothill in the Santa Ana Mountains. There is no one there but us. I bought a parcel of land there that included several acres and a nice, fresh spring. Lucy finally agreed to quit both her jobs. It was time for her to relax. I love helping her. She has always stood by me, through thick and thin. She's like my sister. In fact, sometimes I tell people that she is my sister. I tell them that I am living with my sister. I have that need.

***

LUCY: Now I know why Billy is so attached to our wild, unusual lifestyle. Sometimes he meditates almost all day long, not moving even a muscle. He really got into that stuff. I did, too. It is very calming and surprisingly fulfilling. The talks he gives about his former life are usually very informal and laid-back as well. I think that he has become a more deep-thinking individual as a result of his habit of meditating. Leaving the laboratory has been very beneficial for him.

He reminds me of a lake up here that is very deep but so clean and clear that you can see down all the way to the bottom of the water. He has become like my brother. I know he appreciates that. He appreciates so many small things that most of us take for granted.

What a beautiful person he is! He's only a friend. We've never slept together. There is nothing sexual between us. Not that we haven't thought about it. But, both of us have a life apart, too, you know.

***

BILLY: Life is weird, man, you know. You have to know that I was a successful experiment in only a small part of this natural surrounding beauty. So, therefore, I am just as intrinsic to nature as any other form of living, breathing, sentient life. I was the child of my father. Twin brother to my father. My father did not raise me. I was gestated in a host female. Twin to my father, developed in utero. But I am beautiful too. Beautiful even outside a laboratory. I am more of a twin in DNA than an identical twin, which is not perfectly identical in DNA to its brother or sister, by the way. But a clone is identical in every way.

My genetics were combined from several criteria. My existence is a literal statistic. I was given an accelerated education and a "perfect" environment. It was perfect, or I wouldn't have thought of leaving. Sounds contradictory. It is but it is not. My teachers from infancy were great people, famous people. I grew up in their homes all over the world. I still like some of the laboratory personnel as if they were my family. They are my family. My genetics will probably be recycled and used again. They will try to correct the kinds of "faults" that induced me to run away.

My progeny will be grown and gestated with or without my permission depending upon the size and amount of genetic material that is useful. Whatever miscalculation caused me to freak out is probably being analyzed right now. I know that they have copies of the software on my development that I tried to destroy.

Like I said, I do not have a 'quitable job'. There are so many freaked out clones and progeny from anonymous sperm donors that the programs they come from might be in some deserving jeopardy. They do deserve legislated change. Every physically successful clone from my government program had their genetics recycled and re-used. Sometimes the program re-adjustments are effective. We are given a very accelerated growth environment and are generally treated with a great deal of warmth. The exclusivity of our knowledge, though, can wear off.

The wealth and isolation began to break me. The money was just about neutral, I didn't mind it. But the fact that my biological father didn't care about me (and the fact that technically I didn't really need to have one to raise me) and the way our genetic structures are engineered kind of angered me. The other technicians know that. They don't mind my rejection of my origin in a way. It's my choice. They gave me a lot of freedom too, you know. They knew that I might reject my method of birth.

You know I could live much longer than the average 100 years. Look young, feel better. They've lectured me on diet control all my life, so I have some of the common food and addiction glitches overcome already. As long as I don't have to work there anymore. My program has a re-adjustment code. They can take me on as a projected experiment as long as I agree to have my quarterly "booster" exams. I might go back for that reason. It is a healthy thing to do and their technicians are the best.

I mean technically one of our children could have about ten birth parents or more. We could all contribute to the zygote's DNA structure. DNA software controls part of my own life. I use an earlier version.

But, I think, what if another kind of Y2K should happen to me? What if my computer spews bad data? What good will your money do you? But you know I'll be healthier if I go back. They'd let me go back just to de-brief on all my projects. Then I could get my DNA adjustments done. Technically I could live for a few hundred years. Maybe more. If I agreed to their help.

I remember the scares over Y2K in the year 2000. What good was it to leave the poor of the world helpless and crash all the GNPs when a few volunteer programmers could have created coalitions and corrected and recoded all the bank and utilities computers free of charge? Or the debacle of selling securities that did not exist in 1929 or re-selling bad loans in 2008. All that cheating just to wind up cheating yourself.

People could care more about each other.

Sure, it's a challenge. But without a product where will your salary come from anyway? Leaves some space. Leaves space for a Virtual Economy. Service or objects that are exclusive in terms of cost create a sort of mental slavery. That was my phrase when I was studying Economics at the age of eleven. Economic exclusivity creates the need to compete for a replicate economy. Money creates more need and a dependency on third person economics. Three processes in this paradigm: the manufacturer (and factory workers-farm workers, transport, etc.); the retail shops and the third 'person', the customer.

Third person economics creates non-productivity and the desire that Someone Else should make Something for you. I helped to make Something for you. The Someone Else that makes something for you is Anonymous. You do not make what you need anymore. You know, you might need to change communities or something. Get away. Get away for a while anyway. Get away from this anonymous thing that manufactures your life for you.

I, myself, think that inspiration is just as close as breathing. And breathing is a mystery. What is it? My work now is just breathing.

Why does it make you feel some intrinsic connection with the air, the wind, the sea, the earth? Breathing, I mean. I am a part of this. I am connected like the blur of movement of the animals as they run through the woods, like the welcoming of the rising sun. I inspire: breathe in, acceptance ... connection with all living and animate entities ... breathe out.

I don't lecture about my birth. I talk to people, to others, about science, about my scientific fields: biophysics, bio-chemistry - to name a couple. I do this because they might gain some inspiration and knowledge. So that they can learn why I was born. They can learn what they already knew the moment they were born. They can learn where scientists are going when they attempt to go backwards in the process and explain what it is that they knew as an infant. Sort of an overall encompassing vision. Science is to me a sort of deja vu.

Why do I say this? I am an accident, an experiment, a child, a son. Genetically engineered food, cloned metal, cloned people are all a new frontier. They are here. They are now. They are the linguine and vegetarian, imitation clam sauce of the uninformed. I was the clam sauce of an innocent science to be reduced to a table spread upon expiration. A victim only of nature?

Only the beauty of the natural world saved me. I was spliced from the genes of an adult male; God's first success made me his second. And from the linguine of my confused mind emerged a real human being. Change is weird, man. Change is always necessary, but it is necessary to have a choice in determining which changes are okay for you.

Arthur C. Clarke's futuristic computer "Hal" is now a cloned human head enslaved by being bodiless and wired to an electronic box where it works until it dies. Wouldn't you rather talk to a real person? I'd rather talk to a real person with two arms and two legs. But they run away, they have judgments, evaluations ... like me. They change. Maybe you'd rather just talk and not care what you are talking about - or who it is that you are talking to.

Change is a very interesting and delicate thing. It is like wondering why spring breaks through the pains and cold of the ice and snow. I know some of it, of course. But science says to me I cannot know all. Even being educated as a scientist, I still wonder why this happens. There is so much I do not know. So much so that the "why?" of everything surrounding me makes me silent ... but less an employee and more a sensitive member of the animal kingdom.

When I travel, I see the desert, the cactus, the empty skyline of the Mojave, my aimless feet parked half inside the barrel of my canvas boots. - the way I like it. I even shuffle around in the sand without putting my feet all the way down into the bottoms against the insoles. It ruins my boots.

I fall asleep on the ground at home in the mountains sometimes as if I tripped and fell there. As if I fell off the aluminum stairs to my trailer. I sleep face down, my arm dangling in a piece of brush when I am up on my camping cot. I sleep this way because I want to. The scent of live sage pervades the air mysteriously. It must have seemed like I was dead drunk. I hate alcohol - never drink it. Instead, I drink the air like an intoxicant; the pink of the sunset is like a person to me. A person that I know. Someone that visits every day right before dark.

The blue streaks in the sunset go through me as I sleep. The air is so bright that it is like I am invisible - or awake. Like I am sleeping with my eyes open. I saw my body explode into pink - and sparkle across the desert like I was running away in my dreams - free. I woke up and ran about three miles and leaped backwards, twisting and running back to the trailer. I like to run in these wide, open spaces.

I had trouble pulling the aluminum door open. Kicking at it, I split the rubber sole on my canvas boot. Carelessly, I entered the trailer, the door banging open. Lucy wasn't back from town yet. Falling asleep again, this time inside, my swinging foot over the side of my bunk was irritated against the new tear in my boot which seemed to syncopate the listless drift of my unlatched trailer door swinging back and forth in the desert wind.

The insistent knock of the door slamming back and forth, combined with me sweating and drenched in the California heat, made me jump off my bed, slamming me directly into the small trailer sink. The camper rocked back and forth dangerously. I slobbered an incoherent sigh of recognition at the endless fright of a jack rabbit, startled by the noise of my clumsy awakening.

***

LUCY: Our life here is simple and peaceful. I don't think I'd ever wish for anything else.

***

BILLY at a lecture/presentation: "Perhaps you all think all the variables on this planet have been accounted for in the Genetically Modified Organism, that scientists can be trusted with the invisible. That they can be trusted with the universe, that nothing is ever hidden to them, nothing will ever go wrong.

"Can you see your immune system? Are you aware of everything that is inside even your own body? Were you watching your gall bladder today when you ate your lunch? Do you really know what you did to it? How would it feel if you could see all of that and take it into account?

How would it feel if you had that kind of power over your own body? Can you even guess?"

***

"And I think it's gonna be all right.

Yeah, the worst is over now.

The mornin' sun is shinin' like a red rubber ball..."

("RED RUBBER BALL" WRITTEN by Paul Simon, Bruce Woodley, 1966 • Copyright (C) Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group - Recorded by The Cyrkle.)

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# The Magician

Copyright (C) 1993, Cathy Smith

I.

***

WINTER STEVEN MOON had been feeling peculiar since he had met Crystal. You know, the kind of experience one might call a series of deja vu. She could not have known him before she had gotten into town. She was almost kind of weird ... mystical maybe. Winter searched for the bus after work. He would think about all of this later. Maybe Mari would have her call back. He didn't get a chance to ask her again if she had talked to Crystal before she and Zoe had left for San Diego.

He felt a strange urge to get in touch with her. He didn't know why. Lately he felt as if he was losing understanding of himself. You know, one of those vague feelings that he needed somebody else around a little more.

Three. Three and a half. Four. He could not see the curbs as he walked down the street. He continued to count the intersections as he stumbled over each impassable crossing, lurching away from the cars. Everything looked as if it was covered with a fine lighted dust. He could barely make out whether he was looking at a tree or just the open sky. He pushed his hands in front of him and felt the rest of the way down the street, ignorant of which corner he should turn right or left at.

He was lost, for all appearances, with an indulgent fog pressing upon his face. It crept within his being, like a quiet voice that persists despite being ignored. All of this seemed to come with an unusual sense of elation. The fog made everything seem unreal, almost surreal. Guess just getting off from work can make a person feel that way.

He finally found the corner where he usually caught the bus. He saw two narrow doors glide open and stepped in. He still could see nothing. The fresh cool fog seemed to have entered the bus. He couldn't even see the passengers as he brushed past the seats. He began to get nervous as he tried to look out the window and spot the wide familiar boulevards and the sequence of stop lights before his stop.

There was no conversation on the bus. He began to panic. There had to be a bus driver! He could sense his presence. He could definitely see, or rather feel, that the bus was not just drifting, running into curbs--the steering wheel spinning and the bus engine idling quickly without guidance. The fog was so thick that he still could not see the passengers, let alone the driver.

The bus stopped. He yelled, not hearing the sound of his own voice, "This corner, please!"

Almost falling off of the bus, he stumbled onto the street. The fog made the sidewalk look like it was made of phosphorescent granite. He managed to find the door to his apartment building and slid the key into the lock, almost breaking it. He looked at the key again and the brass was bent in the middle along the shaft. Even his hallway was filled with this infernal fog.

It was very easy to breathe--in fact, the air was rather refreshing--but he could not see anything at all, including the inside of his apartment. He had left the windows open. He looked down and tried to find his legs. His whole body looked as if it had turned into a kind of sheen, perhaps from the moisture in the night air. He wrapped a blanket around his body to stave off the effects of the coldness of the fog and sat down in a chair in his living room. He began to cough from the dampness and lit a fire in the fireplace. It burnt away part of the fog. That was one of the reasons he had rented this place--the fireplace.

He only worked part-time, usually, enough to have an apartment like this and get a few things: incense, good food. He had recently bought a Mexican serape from a second-hand store to decorate the wall. His hair was long for a guy, hippie-style. Normally he only chose jobs where he didn't have to dress in a suit or wear anything fancy. Guess he really was your basic '90's hippie. Just a workin' fool, not expecting anything from life other than the dreams he might have for himself, you know.

Winter worked another job part-time, as well, (babysitting) and had just quit his job moving furniture at the thrift store.

He stared at his body, pushing the blanket away from his wrist, scratching at the strange new golden tone on his skin. It looked as if he was getting hepatitis or jaundice or something. He hoped fervently that he wasn't getting sick. Just when he got his new job too! He inadvisably pricked himself with a pin out of frustration and hopelessness and bled slightly; one of his rather silly habits acquired from patching his own clothes. He never really did anything simply from anger. As he watched, his own blood turned into a gold wet substance that dried into something that resembled squarish crusty metallic flakes. He put the dried gold into a clean handkerchief and stuck it in a small velvet pouch that he usually kept his change in. He scattered the former contents of the pouch onto the table next to him.

The next day the fog still had not lifted. He made his way to the jeweler's on a kind of ridiculous hunch. They appraised the metallic flakes that he gave them.

"Rough fog, isn't it?" Winter said to the elderly proprietor as he bent over the velvet scarf underneath his magnifying eyeglass.

"I'll give you twenty dollars for this," said the man after a short pause. He looked up, the bright light of his old-fashioned green-painted metal-hooded lamp catching the shine from the bare bald skin on the top of his head. Adjusting his visor, he looked slightly irritated. "Where did you get these? They seem to have rather odd kinds of shapes for gold flakes." He raised his eyes to Winter's until they bulged. The boy could feel his piercing gaze like laser heat, searching--almost touching the inside of his pupils.

"I ... I," Winter Moon stuttered, looking down at his feet.

"That's okay," the elderly jeweler said quickly, nervously pushing his lamp away. "Twenty dollars ... I'll give you twenty dollars for them." He bent over, switching the lamp off. "Last offer here, anyway," he spoke, straightening up and watching Winter's nervousness with doubt, shifting his glance sideways. "These have to be at least 24 carat--rather valuable. Do you have any more?" He looked at him quizzically, frowning. Winter felt limp and rather cold. The elderly jeweler offered him a seat in one of his green vinyl-upholstered chairs.

"Yeah ...," Winter said, running his fingers shakily through his hair. "I'll sell 'em." Pointing at the gold flakes on the counter, Winter looked up at him almost pleadingly. The old man handed him the twenty dollars. He stuffed it into his pocket and got up, walking to the door, wondering at the fact that his blood had turned to gold.

"Stay loose," he said and smirked at the jeweler. Winter turned around and walked away.

Starting to shake, he felt the twenty dollars in his pocket and looked at the faint pin-prick on his arm. He walked home, feeling his way through the still-present fog. He started to laugh. When he got home, he sat in front of the fire again, staring at his arms. He bled himself, on purpose this time, until he had at least one small vial of dried blood. It turned into gold almost immediately. He filed his nails and blew his nose, saving his nail clippings and the hanky rather carefully.

He managed to make a modest supper for himself. He went out and bought a large coconut cream Table-Talk pie and ate all of it. He looked rather weakly at his efforts to dry and save his own blood. Calling in to the night supervisor on his job, he spoke to his new boss who had already gotten on his nerves. Elsmer P. Cramer, himself, answered the phone with an irritated scrooge-like bark, running the edge of his voice over the line like the scraping, miserly, nasty, pecuniary buzzard he really truly was.

Winter cleared his throat and said in a rasping too-low voice, "I quit."

"What!" Elsmer shouted, echoing across the static like the call of a loon flying high above the endless pine and the crystal shining lakes in the lighted Budweiser sign hanging on the wall of Winter's favorite folk music cafe, minus the friendliness of the employees.

"I said, Mr. Cramer!" pulling his golden shoulders a little straighter and pushing out his chest a little more boldly, gulping. "I said, Mr. Cramer, I quit! I don't want your crummy, old job anymore. You can shove it. Furthermore, I think you ... you ..." Winter started to cry.

"Well?!" Cramer screamed back over the telephone, spitting out his words. "I have to tell you, that you were one of the worst, most disorganized people that I have ever had in my employ! Please, do me a favor," he hissed, frightening Winter as usual, "and don't bother to ask for any references!"

"I tried my best," Winter shrieked back at him, the phone shaking in his hand. "My absolute best. And, I think you," he gasped dramatically, "you stink! You watch, Mr. Cramer! You just watch! One day you'll be sorry you treated me so badly." The phone went dead. Winter hung up loudly, panting in fear for what he had said to his ex-boss. Cramer wasn't that bad really. He looked at his golden sweating hands and wiped them on his pants, still shaking.

He laughed to himself as he ate supper, eating extra helpings of everything. He rubbed his hands together, belched and fell asleep. He knew that if his blood and nail clippings had been alchemically transformed to 24 carat gold, there was a chance; a small chance--he could not say it. He could not repeat the words, even to himself.

Before he went to sleep, he sculpted and molded certain items from his solid extraneous body waste into squares like gold bullion. It seemed to have worked. He couldn't believe his eyes. Yes, even these rather humble offerings from his body had become solid, metallic and gold. In fact, his whole appearance had changed. Not only had his hair and skin become golden, his entire physical appearance shone in a dazzling array.

He returned to the jeweler the next week. He certified Winter's bullion and directed him with an amazed and startled look to a larger appraiser who he said could handle the huge amounts of gold that Winter laughingly said he had in stock. The elderly man was quiet as he put the gold into a velvet valise for the boy. He looked up and his bulging eyes met Winter's with the intensity of inquisitiveness. Squinting furtively, he shoved his face into his customer's. He started to laugh.

"What'd you do? Find a gold mine?!" he asked.

Winter chuckled nervously, shivering with excitement, and leaned closer to him. "Nope. I'm just a lucky small quantity gold dealer. I have a good friend who got me into this business. You know. It's not too popular these days in the more radical political circles. We have to keep a careful eye on where our investment dollars go and everything," he said rather glibly. "You know sort of examine the real causes of poverty." Looking learnedly at the ceiling, he cleared his throat pompously, making smacking noises with his lips. He pulled at the hood of his sweatshirt covering his golden hair and adjusted his sunglasses and face scarf. He had had to cover his entire body with clothing to mask his unusual appearance.

"Actually," Winter said, narrowing his eyes at his own cleverness and smirking at the elderly man, "... it's recycled 'old gold'. Rather lucrative business, isn't it?" He hissed, rubbing his gloved hands together. "Of course, I wouldn't invest in a mine! I don't trust their labor, business or employment practices." Winter's weak voice felt like the hole in the elbow of his shirt. He shrank into the thick cotton hood of his sweatshirt.

The elderly man's jaw dropped open. He handed Winter the valise containing the gold bullion, staring at him. His mouth was still hanging open as the teenager stalked out the door. Turning around to smile broadly, Winter shouted to him brightly, "Hasta la vista!" The old gold dealer kind of liked that kid.

***

II.

***

LATER THAT WEEK, WINTER rented an armored truck and walked slowly to the Jeweler's Building, located a few blocks away, looking into the shop windows on the way there. The revolving glass door rotated slowly as he entered the huge new building. He took the elevator to the floor that his new appraiser was on and walked into his plush office. He was greeted by a receptionist who peered at him over her glasses.

"Hello?!" she said, gasping quickly as Winter dumped the gold bullion out of the cases onto her desk. "I'll get Mr. Potts ... I think he might like to see these!" She ran into one of the inner offices, looking back at him, almost in fear. A short fat amiable gentleman came out to look at the gold, which was glittering on the surface of the receptionist's desk. He clapped his hands in delight.

"Mr. Potts?" Winter inquired, trying to emphasize the seriousness in his voice. "Would you take a look at these?" He shoved the bullion at the jeweler. Leaning over his rather large head, he said (a little bit too loudly), "So, how much do you think this is worth?"

The jeweler looked up, his face looking enthused and excited. "Oh!...Oh!! Well," he said, frowning and pushing at his glasses, which had started to fog up a bit, the perspiration showing on his forehead. He looked at his secretary, who smiled. "Well. Um. Let me see." He thumbed clumsily through a worn price index, fingering his rather thick mustache juicily. "I'd say approximately ..." Gulping awkwardly and coughing, he pulled out his hanky. "Excuse me. Um." He looked precipitously through a veil of sweat which was cascading from his forehead onto the paper, saying loudly, "Four-hundred thousand dollars."

"You don't say!" Winter gasped, rather ironically, laughing to himself at his own joke. He sat down suddenly in the receptionist's swivel chair, making it scoot underneath her desk, smashing his knee into the bottom part of a drawer. He bent slightly to hide the pain from the other two people in the office. He felt like a nerd.

"Cash," said Mr. Potts, leaning over him and breathing heavily. Winter choked from his harsh breath.

"Okay," Winter said, feeling squashed. "I'll take it."

"I have to ask you, though, wherever did you get such a large quantity of gold?" He looked at the boy, furrowing his brow, worriedly.

"Ah ...," Winter said. "I'm in the recycling business. I don't believe in unethical, unresearched investments--however lucrative. So, I have found a way to consume as much material as possible in order to use a rather simple procedure to produce a source of a new investment capital. Hopefully my innovative, yet ancient, procedure will direct itself towards a more equitable marketing schemata. That is, barring any kind of euphemistic or real, unforeseen; quote unquote; constipation in gold trends." The boy coughed, laughing to himself quietly, as he sat in the receptionist's chair. She stared at him incredulously.

Mr. Potts went to his back office and brought several stacks of bills, which were banded with paper and stuffed into his hands. "Here," he said, shoving them at Winter with a receipt. "Please," he said, glowingly, taking both the young man's hands into his, and looking trustingly into his face. "Please, feel free to come back any time you wish to. No amount of precious metal is ever too large for me to handle. However enormous your source may be."

Winter's eyes widened at the thought of his source and he inadvertently rubbed his rear-end anxiously. He looked Potts square in the eye and said with a ring of sincerity and honesty in his voice (marking his own words and feeling the huge stack of cash stuffed into his sweatshirt), "I really appreciate that, Mr. Potts. My source seems to be flowing rather regularly at the moment." His stomach began to growl almost in affirmation. "I think I should go feed my resources," he continued, laughing uncontrollably at his own insane pun, his hair falling across his face and sticking on the scarf he had started wearing to cover his chin.

"I'm glad you're so happy with this sale," said Potts grabbing his hands again and again, shaking them profusely. He stumbled out the door pulling his large sunglasses lower and yanking the revolving doors ahead of him as soon as he reached the first floor. He screamed in elation as he hit the incredibly, unexplainably foggy street again, running home as fast as he could. He thought that he could put his money in the bank later in the day.

As soon as he got home, he wrapped himself in a blanket and sat down, scrunching the money stuffed into his sweatshirt underneath him. He lit another fire to clear the remnants of fog from the room. He started to laugh again, looking through the paper at houses and apartments. He chose a house in a nearby, rather heavily forested area and called the broker. He bought the house outright with the cash that he had with him.

As planned, in the weeks that followed, he prepared to go back to see Mr. Potts. He had, in the meantime, moved into his new home which was not that far from where he used to live. Since that time, he had accumulated a new rather large stack of gold bullion, some of which he put into a velvet-lined valise that the other jeweler had given him. He donned his hooded sweatshirt, gloves, scarf and hat, adjusting his sunglasses over his eyebrows and called Acme Armored Transport again.

The thickness of the fog had not lifted. He could not even see his new home which was hidden behind the seemingly ever-present muted blankets of fog which hung over the trees. It swathed his face like a hand unwilling to release his vision enough to permit him to find his way out of his new front yard. He bumped headlong into several trees.

Walking from his house all the way downtown into the business district, he found the Jeweler's Building and went in through the revolving doors. Mr. Potts greeted him as he entered the office, out of breath from jogging most of the way there. Potts gasped as he opened the cases which had arrived previously by armored escort.

"I can't possibly pay you for all of this bullion right now. Can you come back a little later, say, this afternoon?" Mr. Potts said in a rather anxious voice.

"Yeah, sure!" Winter reassured him quickly. Patting Potts on the back excitedly, he continued, "I'll be back at two o'clock. How's that?"

"I think I should tell you--" Potts replied, lowering his voice. "That gold bullion will be worth close to six-hundred thousand dollars." Winter Moon gasped and sat down, his head reeling.

"One million dollars!" Winter repeated to himself slowly, counting the money he had already made in his mind. "One million dollars." He shook his head incredulously.

He went out of the building and walked to Times Square. Sitting on a bench outside the bus station, he folded his hands in his lap and smiled at the people passing by. They smiled back. He twiddled his thumbs and looked around, staring at the pigeons and humming a little tune to himself. Staring at the tall buildings around the square, he tried to estimate their tallness against the ultimate height of the sky.

He looked at the huge clock on one of the nearby buildings. He must have sat there, mulling inanities, for hours. The pigeons had dispersed into a circle around an old man sitting on a bench at the other end of the Square.

There was a huge crowd of pigeons resting on the man's shoulders. He was throwing little pieces of bread over his knees. He wore a huge over-sized coat and sprouted a gray and black beard and mustache which had been trimmed rather short around his upper lip, cutting away some of the nicotine stains. He had a bag of Wonder Bread in his left hand and was tossing little bits of it with his right hand. He looked up at Winter as he walked over to him and smiled.

"Hey, Buster! How's it goin'?" the old man drawled.

"Just fine, just fine--" Winter answered, lazily.

"What 'cha doin' up around these parts?" the man asked in a friendly way. He tossed some pieces of bread to the pigeons gathering around his toes, turning to grin at Winter through his mustache. The small edges of his teeth showed as he stuck his tongue out between them, making a funny face. Winter laughed.

"Well ...," Winter said, looking down, not saying much of anything, then looked up at him slyly. "I just made one million dollars ...." The old man stared at him sharply in askance.

"Playing the numbers?" he frowned looking at Winter.

"Nope. I'm in the gold business," Winter said, smiling at the surprise in the man's eyes. The old man stood up, brushing the bread crumbs off of his lap. Scattering the birds at his feet, he sent some of them flying quickly away and settling down by the far end of the bench.

"What," he sputtered, leaning into Winter's face, "did you make all that money with?" He put his hand up to his left ear and turned on his hearing aid.

"Gold!" Winter repeated, irritated, speaking slightly too loudly.

The man rubbed his ears. "You a miner or something?"

"Of sorts," Winter replied, giggling.

"You know," the man said, sitting down heavily as the pigeons flew up around his shoulders, landing again near his feet, "you ought to reinvest that money in something half-way decent, such as mutual funds or ... or bonds. Yeah, like stock, re-invest in the stock market. See if you can outsmart some of those highfalutin' guys that think that they know more than anybody else does." The man chuckled to himself and raised his head, looking at the sky, baring his neck underneath his beard, and revealing the edge of his cardigan. Winter looked at him keenly, sitting down next to him.

He poked Winter's side with his finger.

"What kind of stock would you suggest? You seem to know an awful lot about this kind of business," Winter blurted at him awkwardly.

"I used to work in the stock exchange--on Wall Street," he said.

Winter coughed, covering his mouth, muffling his words with his hands. "You were on Wall Street? What did you do there?" Winter asked, wondering at the fact that the man did not seem very prosperous at the present moment.

"I was a broker; a stock broker. When I was a younger man I started out as a runner on the trading floor--in commodities--and worked my way up to brokerage. It's a very rough business, very rough. I lost everything I had. My house. Everything. Had a divorce, wife left. Don't know where my kids are. My brother's dead. Now ...," he paused, poking Winter in the side of his sweatshirt again. "Now, I can only tell you this. At this present time, I'm broke. But, back then, I had everything. Yes sir. I did.

"Twenty years I worked for the exchange. God knows. All the way from a young runner in suspenders and a button-down shirt to my own brokerage and a custom-made suit. I had everything, but my shoes made by hand, here in New York. They had to take a rented van to Florida and hand pick alligators for those. Then, they would make my shoes. By gum! Even that was done by hand! Lively little buzzards they were, too. Those alligators." He cackled at his own grotesque joke. "Lively little buzzards!"

Winter blanched in apprehension. The cold pages of the Merchant's Marketplace flipped before his inner vision. His body trembled. He felt himself blush with ignorance as his eyes widened with interest at the old man's pathetic story. Here he was, practically making a complete livelihood out of feeding the pigeons in Times Square. These pigeons feasted on his attention and were otherwise generally ignored or unintentionally flustered by the chaotic rush of traffic and pedestrians, needing to seek a meek refuge upon the stone ledges of the surrounding buildings.

How could such a man--obviously reduced to this sort of urban zoological experience: feeding pigeons in the park; living in a seedy room rooming house on the West Side of Manhattan--have obtained such wisdom? Buying alligator skin in Florida just to have it made into shoes? Purses, too, obviously! For his wife. Not that Winter liked the idea of using exotic animal hides.

A tear leaked down Winter's cheek from underneath his eyelid. "Of course," Winter replied. "I should have known. I can see you know what you're talking about."

He looked at Winter speculatively, and spoke in a whisper, "I can tell you what stocks to play, which to hold. Which ones to sell."

Winter put his head down on his hands, frowned and said, "You know. That ... that's a very good suggestion. Very, very good. I hadn't thought anything about doing something like that. Like sort of like gambling with business loans. Right? Right on."

Winter looked down, shyly, and continued, "You know. The gold, silver, platinum and diamond markets are rather rough. They could get pretty scary. Even downright mean! But," he paused, "... it would be very interesting to see what would happen if those markets were closed. Or, if they were to change hands. Wouldn't it? Hmmmmnn?" The man looked at him, startled, frightening the pigeons until they flew above the pedestrians walking further down towards the center of the Square, towards the tall buildings. Winter glanced up quickly at the clock. It was exactly two o'clock.

"Jeez! I got to go! I'll keep what you said in mind! Thanks a lot, slick!" Winter smacked the old man on the back enthusiastically, pulling on the hood of his sweatshirt as he ran into the crowd back towards the Jeweler's Building.

"Good luck!" the old man shouted through his cupped hands, waving at Winter and throwing more bread at the pigeons. Winter heard him rejoin, "You'll sure need it! Those brokers are real jerks .... I ought to know!" He kept on yelling as Winter dove into the rushing streets, filled with people intent on carrying on their daily business.

***

III.

***

THE CLOCK TICKED AWAY over their heads, biting into their consciousness unbeknownst to them. It counted their minutes, eating into their preoccupation with their jobs and families and way of life like a hungry gulping customer at a frankfurter stand near the metropolitan, slopping mustard and eating two frankfurters in four chomping bites--letting the mustard dribble down his chin and onto his clothes like an omen. A tolling of the bell. A dripping yellow putrid omen--summoning a new sense of purpose.

Yes! Winter knew that he could do it! He knew that his new prosperity was meant to change the world! He did not feel proud or unjustifiably pompous, but he knew he could, single handedly, perhaps create a new heaven upon this humble earth. And his whole life ahead of him! He was only nineteen. Nineteen and hot on the stock market.

With this tumbling around in his mind, he nervously entered the Jeweler's Building and went up to the office of Mr. Potts. Potts was busy working in the back room of his suite. The receptionist grabbed Winter's elbow and pulled him over to the side of the door anxiously. Winter could feel her breath on his face as he stood close to her. She spoke in a low voice, sounding desperate, "Are you sure you want all of that money in cash? That's an awful lot to carry around with you ...." Her voice trailed off absentmindedly.

"I don't mind, really," Winter said, showing her the empty pockets in his sweatshirt. He smiled and opened his briefcase showing her that it was empty as well. Potts walked up to them, smiling from ear to ear and carrying an armful of banded cash.

"Where do you want me to put this?" he said.

Winter opened his briefcase and pointed. "In there, Mr. Potts. Right in the briefcase, okay? Say," he looked at him searchingly. "You ever invest in the stock market? Hunh, Mr. Potts? You ever do that?" Winter looked at him closely again, trying to calculate his expertise, his experience, his knowledge of Wall Street. Anything. "I was thinking," Winter said as he grabbed Potts sleeve, "... of investing my money in stocks and bonds."

"Good idea!" Mr. Potts replied, looking surprised. "What were you thinking of buying? Not gold or jewels, I hope!" he laughed nervously, looking away. This kid seemed to have an awfully large available source. Subliminally, the gold dealer felt threatened. He had seen people like Winter before but usually much older. His idealism and youth made Potts wary. He knew Winter Moon was not your run-of-the-mill conservative stock investor type.

"Uh. Yes ...," Winter said, stunned at his impromptu brilliance. Winter snapped his fingers. "That's exactly what I was planning on doing!" He slapped both of his hands on Pott's desk and watched him jump in fear. He got up quickly and swore an oath at Winter under his breath.

"You're not really going to use all of your gold to buy those commodities, are you?!" Potts hissed, spitting slightly. His usually benign face flushed with anger. "You ... you'll close down those markets! You obviously have a rather fluid source. I don't think you would have the gall to try and redirect that money." He looked at Winter, smiling and crying at the same time. "Would you?" He looked at him again pleadingly.

Winter looked at Potts as if he was seeing a space alien, an extraterrestrial, not someone that he had come to know--at least in the last few days, rather well. (Eeek! Extraterrestrials!)

"You don't approve?" he asked superfluously, laughing nervously to himself.

"No," Potts replied, "I didn't say that. I'd help you any time I could. You can always sell your gold bullion here, regardless of what you intend to do with the money. I don't care how you use it. I'm just rather concerned about your plans and how you intend to handle some of those stockholders." The jeweler looked down at his wing-tipped shoes. "You're obviously going to gain a somewhat controlling interest in whatever companies you are able to invest in to that degree."

"I'll find a way, dude. Wish me luck!" Winter chirped back at him, cheerily, hugging him affectionately as he turned towards the door. "I'll be back!" he called to Potts as he walked out. He waved at him and the receptionist.

Winter tromped down the stairs and took the elevator to the first floor, running down the street, through the business district. Thinking to himself (as his golden stomach began to gnaw in hunger), he fingered the handle of his briefcase and stopped into a juice bar on 46th street, ordering a large glass of carrot juice. He downed that and ordered three sprout, hummus and eggplant sandwiches with a double side of avocado dip and fresh ground organic yellow mustard.

Paying the bill and leaving the cafe, he walked up to Wall Street, eating and looking for the square churchlike architecture that he usually passed by noncommittally on his way home or on his way to his former job. Remembering Elsmer P. Cramer, he turned into the doorway of the New York Stock Exchange, his sweating hand slipping over the vinyl of his briefcase which he now had pushed up underneath his armpit. The perspiration dripped on his forehead. He tasted the saltiness of his wet upper lip. Taking the elevator to the trading floor, he looked in awe and amazement over the crowded polished arena filled with brokers and runners. Boards filled with lit computerized commodities filled the walls announcing the fluctuations in prices from moment to moment. Bidding was heavy as brokers in white shirts and suspenders held trading tickets over their heads, continuing the auction for shipments of goods throughout their morning exchange. They shouted their purchases and handed the sold commodities to the young runners who gave the orders to the different brokerages and ticker information gatherers.

Throngs of brokers crowded against each other like jostling passengers in the New York subway. The veins stood out on their shaved necks as they craned their heads to see the boards. Winter's mouth began to salivate as the gold traders entered the floor. He noticed that his left shoe lace was untied. Why now? The shine of his golden skin seemed to emit a calm peaceful glow as he removed his gloves and hat. He removed the scarf from around his face and pulled the hood from over his head. Opening his shirt to reveal the golden glow from his neck and shoulders, he stood as the Buddha must have stood when he first arose from his meditation underneath the Bodhi tree after attaining enlightenment.

Quiet and serene, Winter placed himself in a balanced posture as the brokers took their attention away, one by one, from the fluctuating lights of the trading boards. He smiled at them slightly, parting his lips to reveal his golden perfect teeth. He pulled a few small bricks of gold bullion from his sweatshirt. Holding some yellow carnations that he had bought on the way there, he held them aloft, parting his golden right hand into a peace sign.

Some of the brokers, from the crowd on the trading floor, stood with their mouths hanging open. Others rushed to the stairs and ran up to the balcony, laughing as if some foreboding prankster had pulled a really good joke. Perhaps they were thinking that Winter could not possibly be real. That the golden color of his skin and the solid gold bullion in his left hand next to the flowers, was a typical bullshit New Yorker-type prank. It was not. Others seemed to sense that. He intended to buy their entire market and flood it with his own gold--as fantastic as it might seem.

Winter's body began to become transparent as the brokers ran towards him in the balcony of the Stock Exchange. It slowly changed to a glassine texture. He became a living diamond. The bullion--which had been produced by many fruit-sweetened date and coconut cream tarts, a large amount of organic potatoes (his compensation for the tarts) and other edible materials not usually considered essential to the precious metal or diamond mining industry--transformed itself (in his hand) into flawless cut and uncut diamonds where the gold bullion had been. He had gone out of his way to eat and eat well.

His eyes began to flash as if the light of carbonic compression had burnt in volcanic abundance inside of him for one million years. The brokers stopped dead. They began to tremble as he put his arm in front of them. His body became translucent again. The diamonds glittered, highlighting the brokers' awed faces, making their brows seem to glow with the sheen of the precious gems resting serenely in Winter's hands.

"Your day has come!" he spoke dramatically. "Please prepare yourselves for a total wipeout! My own precious metal and stone companies are prepared to buy out your entire market. Don't worry, all that will change is the source of your commodity." Winter looked at them, narrowing his eyes in as mean a way possible while giggling slightly because of his rather unusual appearance. "Be warned!" he shouted over their heads in a booming voice as they observed his skin change to platinum and then silver. The gleam from the exposed parts of his body flashed sunlight into the eyes of the brokers, making them hold their hands up to shade them.

"There is much, much more where this came from!" His stomach growled slightly, again, as if in affirmation. "Please remain calm, don't worry. But be warned! I shall return!" He stumbled over the foot of the stockbroker standing closest to his side and waved his wool scarf over his head in victory as he walked slowly through the throng in front of him--throwing some of the carnations at them. "No more poverty. No more war."

Winter closed his briefcase now filled with cash, diamonds, emeralds and rubies and disappeared into the elevator. Flashing another peace sign at the crowd which had parted to allow him to enter the elevator, he said, "Peace!!" loudly. Showing his precious teeth, he shouted at the crowd, "I shall return! I shall return! Watch the trading boards! I'm sure they'll keep you posted. The word 'future' might damn well come to mean something more fulfilling for everyone in a very short while!"

The elevator doors closed silently. Laughing as he thought of the money in his briefcase, he pulled his hood over his head and his gloves over his hands. He walked out the front doors onto Wall Street.

The fog enveloped him as he began walking through Manhattan. It was as if he was walking within some dream, some dream in which the money he had made felt like a cushion underneath his feet. It was as if it padded his entire body with the softness of luxury. Of course, he knew it was selfish to keep this luxury to himself alone. He intended to share it.

He had always had a dream of raising bamboo. Winter was in love with the stuff. He had at least four, different sized bamboo flutes at his new house and amused himself by tooting on them in his leisure. He loved wood. He loved the sound of air inside of wood.

Bamboo was great for paper-making and light-weight beautiful furniture that saved trees and could be given away to those who needed it. In San Diego, it used to wash up on the shore in huge usable quantities. He had also tinkered with perpetual motion machines since he was a child--building and rebuilding them whenever it rained outside or when he got a new idea. He was an authority on self-propulsion. After all he had two feet and was more than accustomed to not having enough money for his bus fare. He really had read a great deal on the subject though.

Now, obviously, he had the power to do these things. To put them into production. He was wealthy, intelligent and rather pleased with his new fortune. He had heard of the man who had built the famous New York City Greenhouses--Dr. Axle Brown-Rice. The fourteen-story wonders had cleaned and moistened the air of the Hudson shoreline. He had invented a crank electrical car designed like the motion machines he had been working on.

As he turned to walk back to his home, he slammed into a signpost and screamed. He held his nose as it began to throb and bleed, and sat down dizzily on the curb, which became dusted with diamond spray. What a dork! This was the second time that he had run into something in this infernal endless inexplicable fog today and it really hurt. He had a big bump on the tip of his nose. Despite all of his money, he began to cry. He held his face in his hands and covered his injured nose with a handkerchief. Why do all great mystery stories have to be shrouded with this kind of fog?

He thought of Crystal. He needed to see her - bad.

All the rest of the way home, he shoved his arms in front of him, only stumbling slightly over the curb again as he approached his new house. He crashed out on the bed and fell asleep immediately in complete exhaustion. It had been a harrowing day. Winter felt another overwhelming urge to call Crystal. She could move into his new house and save her rent at the "Y". He had just gotten the place and hadn't seen her for over a week.

First, he had performed his surprising exhibition at the Stock Exchange in which he had changed from gold to diamond to silver, and then to platinum. By sheer will alone, he became the world's first human, walking, talking jewelry store. Now he was tired. His gift to the world had made him weary, bleary-eyed. He removed the handkerchief from his nose and began to snore loudly.

Within months, his plans were put into action. Economic conditions all over the world began to improve drastically. Everyone purchased or were given his low-cost perpetual motion machines, converting all their energy needs into self-gyrating esthetically-pleasing living room sculpture. The entire precious metal and gem markets were bought out by his own corporations. His low-cost high-profit cooperatives financed many necessities throughout the world, free of cost.

Winter Moon's enterprises were located everywhere, all over the world. His generosity and understanding created a more equitable attitude in all areas of life. Of course, the anonymity of Elsmer P. Cramer's former employee was protected.

--------

HE THOUGHT DEEPLY OF his coming namesake, the winter moon--the snow that it brought, the cold weather. The beauty of all that.

Yeah.

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# The Songs of Dolphin

(Real Life As Science Fiction)

***

Copyright (C) 1993, Cathy Smith

[Based on a combination of two True Stories]

***

The nebula of the evening sky (if a nebula could be seen with the naked eye) resembled the beating wings of an insect. Faster and faster, the clouds flew past me, leaving trails like cotton coming out of the threads on a spindle.

I sat on the bus, running through my own thoughts. It was as if they were cataloged according to date, time and relevance. And, whether or not I had accomplished whatever it was I had intended. The days ran into months which ran (almost in a calibrated rhythm) into an orderly succession of calendar years. That is, I felt that I must have had a thought that accounted retrograde for this exact time...a deja vu that I had forgotten about until now. My ideas had become very methodical lately due to certain circumstances and study habits that I had acquired on my own. I catalog, measured, labeled and practiced everything. I understood the folding of information into small, hidden squares of paper and the careful attainment of memorized knowledge, stored for a lifetime, secretly, in my brain.

A study corner, a sleep corner, careful, polite behavior all included the screening and masking of knowledge. I knew that keys were not made only of tangible materials such as metal, but they were also made of wit. It was a human hand that connected with other human hands. People that knew others that knew more than you did. That knew more than they did. They would somehow use their keys for a small group or produce them upon the request of a "superior", supplemented by some authorization. All metal locks function, or are capable of functioning, in this very mundane way. I've been to places where no one ever locks a door. You can wander around outside barefoot. If you get to the place early for a visit, the door is standing wide open. Perhaps the screen door is shut, but anyone can walk right in and sit down in a fat chair in the living room. They can go into the kitchen and make some tea, make themselves at home. Not so here, though. Not where I had just run away from.

Today had been an ordinary day. My calculations were astute enough to permit me to go and visit a cafe a few streets down from where I was staying. Normally, we were not allowed out of the building. The time then was early morning. I could see the darker clouds lifting over the lighter ones enough to reveal a sky that I knew very well, a personable sky. The sky was a familiar, like a witch's cat. Cat lips opened into a light blue mouth. The dark clouds moved silkily onto gray-cloud fur. These clouds leaped like a swift white and gray cat jumping over my head. I turned to look at a playground.

I swayed in my bus seat, noisily moving the cracked plastic in the corner. I rocked back and forth, a bad habit I have due to the fact that I am not allowed to open the windows when I want to, or to leave a room when I want to, or to leave a building when I want to. I live in an institution. Rocking back and forth gives me the ability to concentrate on the clouds and the sky without too much awareness from the other passengers. I had run from the cafe "outing" when another ubiquitous attendant had turned his back. The only sky we had back at the other place where I was staying was behind a metal grating. Going to the cafe was an institutional outing, a special privilege. And I had run away. To my surprise, no one had followed me. I was free of the police. Amazing.

We are all, I guess, passengers. Maybe, even, passengers in some form on this same bus, if the bus was a universe. Perhaps, most of the people I know are right here, sitting alongside of me in some form, maybe as invisible spirits. I smile at them, letting them know that I might know them. They smile back, and nod. I feel good today, happy. This is important because lies about how you feel and what you've done get written down, documented, sealed and, hopefully (someday) removed from the Omni-File that somebody, somewhere keeps trying to find information for--real or imagined. Just to suit themselves. In some institution. For some institution. Beware, the truth may lie elsewhere.

All of these things (these filings - as in "file") precipitate Bad Karma: heavy rain, stormy weather, infernally cold winds during the holidays. It always seems that I have to experience these things, to know the source, where they come from. I truly believe that the origins of the weather come from the filings in the captive institutions. Even the fat, singular snowflakes that just began to fall must have come from some erroneous paragraphs, literati lies, unknowing boo-boos in some institutional Omni-File.

I like snowflakes but abhor cold weather wind tunnels. Things like wasp and bee stings all resemble undocumented, unverified filings--little bites into my slow-moving flesh, my observant skin. I pinch bee stings right when I get stung and pull out the stinger carefully with my fingers. I do not get stung often. If I do get stung, it is only once...and once is too much.

Peculiar day today, though, the heavy snowflakes passed through my gray thoughts about metal-grated windows, filings, keys, groups of captives and insane procedure. If you frighten people, later on they feel better. They feel better when they aren't frightened anymore. Thus, this institutional activity of frightening people could be considered therapeutic.

These are logical keys, like trying to sweet talk the attendants. They have key rings: brass, elastic, plastic, fancy, special, neon-colored key rings.

One idea. A memory now. We actually did talk the attendants into taking us out to that cafe this morning. One inch thick, icy, pie-pan sidewalks clattered on the soles of our slick shoes. Melting ice shifted on the awnings of houses, rattling down copper drain pipes. It'll turn to slush as soon as it gets even a little warmer.

The visit to the cafe had had a few logical keys. That's how I got away and got on this bus. At first, I sat for several hours with the others, watching the snowfall shuddering down the icy neck of a long street. Watching for flashing yellow one-way signs on snowed-in roads. I thought of frozen wild apples on the roads in New Hampshire. It made me thirsty for my freedom.

The cabins up there have steamed-up windows peeking into the frosted trees. They've been snowed in for a week. The trees must look like ice-cream cake. Yum. Ahhh! I couldn't stop thinking of sitting there and eating, my feet up on an old, clean cushion. I remembered resting softly, listening to the sounds of snow falling onto the pillows of more snow. A huge, improvised, natural "snow sculpture" must be hanging over some of the branches of the green apple trees like it usually does. My garden.

I have geraniums, two avocado trees and three lemon trees that grow in my greenhouse. I have wheat grass garden boxes, a wood stove and a homemade hydroponic garden tank. All of this is at my home in New Hampshire, plus friends that should have been over by now to take care of everything. Or it all died. Or some of it died.

Dreaming of my living room, I cannot help but get a bit misty--the easy chairs, the pillows, the polished walnut tables...my ficus. My dead ficus.

I am very considerate of my ficus. It blooms beautifully with careful repotting. It has dusted leaves and gets much more water than ficus-haters give their abandoned, leafless, wretched and gnarled victims. My ficus is cool and refreshing a little ways away from the porch windows.

When I ran from the cafe this morning and jumped on a city transit bus, I avoided the glare of the driver when I didn't pay my fare. Walking to the Greyhound station from there, I kept my face hidden so that no one would recognize me, or the pajama-like clothes pulled up under my coat. It was trickier to not pay the Greyhound fare. I had to hide in the smelly bathroom all the way to my destination. The bus had pulled into the New Hampshire station about an hour ago. It doesn't take long to walk to my place, ten acres, a three room cabin and a large work shed. The ride from the captive place, including the city transit, only took a few hours. Sure, smells better outside here! Funny how such a small thing is such a big treat.

My feet and legs sink up to the knees in snow for a hot second as I breathe the searing air outside in the back. The door is unlocked. My door is never locked. The rooms are cold and musty-smelling and undisturbed. My friends have been over, though. I can tell. Jim Levy, probably, and Sarah Winston. First thing I do is light a fire and warm up. My neighbors thought enough to bring over some cut and split firewood. Bless them.

I hear ducks call outside and see mallards with vivid blue feathers flying overhead. They will be there, also, in the spring. Brown ducklings with webbed feet should be following their brown mothers by then. Close by is one of the few ponds that does not freeze up completely. Deer pause at the edge of the woods, along with the fly-by-day hawks., scooping the edges from the sky. They are flying overhead right now. The winter sparrows eat out of my hand as they usually do. All of these creatures eat out of my hand. They know me. They know that I would not hurt them.

Human animals tie-dye their files with ink. Maybe they would like to share the comfort of my home--my hospitality--but they still balk at recognizing my personal freedom. There is no need right now for an intimate, involuntary interview.

I pare my neat nails and enjoy the warmth of my fire again.

There are other things available outside the window in the other place. They have categories. A store. A newspaper. A fine dinner at a restaurant. Your own things scattered on your own floor with an arrangement that includes sweat socks. That, at least, I have here.

Ink stains spread haphazardly on my own left thumb as I write leaving notes for my friends, innocuous, incessant. They spread across my papers, moving carefully underneath my feet into a big, black, inky river as I go to the kitchen to fix some lunch. These are my own imaginary ink stains. They are much more innocent than those of my recorder who must write about me to satisfy something other than a simple request on my part. I did not request the kind of attention they gave me in the institution.

Waiting for the snowfall, I again look out my window. The snow dances across the ice on the lake. Maybe, later, I will make a cage and bring some trumpeter swans over and set them free to nest here.

The blue of my lake. I share this body of water with my neighbors who dot my view in their bathing suits in the summer, flipping off the make-shift dock. Now, the winter ice cracks open with an explosive noise. I pack a bag full of clean clothes. I do not know where I am going. But I know the authorities know about my cabin. I have to leave. As an afterthought, I add my copy of the I Ching. Might as well try and figure out what all this means.

When I sat in the cafe, my thoughts had drifted to my home life. Using my logical keys, I had wondered about going back home again. I had an old, carefully hidden (stashed), half used, round-trip bus ticket that was good for another two months. I used to work in the town near where my cabin was. That was no longer possible. They would know to look there. After the institution, one needs to readjust. I had adjusted to my life behind the metal grating to new calibrations, itineraries, how-tos. How to do this. Now things were different. Slower, more self-motivated.

Life to me behind the metal grating had become too permanent, like a parking ticket--orange-feeling. I felt stultified being cooked for and catered to and having to ask for things like using the bathroom. Just sitting around and doing too much of nothing was just not normal.

A funny light appeared in what I thought was the early evening sky. Then, I could see that it was almost day. I must have dozed off sitting in front of the fire in my front room chair. Truly, I was at home in New Hampshire. I did not feel like sitting in that other place.

I had gone home to my ultimately steamed windows and the warmth of a newly stoked fire in the wood stove.

Yesterday had been an ultimately stewed day.

The first part of my escape had succeeded. I had made it out to the country to see my place and get some essential things and the rest of my money. Now, I must be on my way, it was getting late. Purple dragonflies began to fill the air. Why, I do not know. They filled the winter sky. Remember, how I said that words can cause things like this?

Their wings were delicate, see-through paper, with little blue veins in them. Tiny rhythms traced across the oval of their bodily components. Not understanding where such an abundance of dragonflies could have come from, I stared at them, at their vivid colors. As I left for the bus again, I felt almost biblical. I felt some fear.

I looked up into the trees that filled the street, noticing that the branches were holding hundreds upon hundreds of these insects, buzzing like crickets when they moved their wings. Instead of the leaves and branches that usually gave us shade and spread over our heads in the summer, or the bare, winter trees--there now resided multitudes of dragonflies.

Banging my cold hands together, I stopped before I reached the bus station. "The obvious solution..." I said to myself, laying down in the snow (right next to the sidewalk, before I reached the main road into town--not caring that the snowflakes bit my eyelashes and accumulated droplets of water on my face, running down my chin into my collar) "...is to enjoy this while it lasts."

Laughing as I lay in the snow, I threw a snowball at the branches of a tree, making the buds of the insects' wings buzz closer to my head, as if they were viewing me with curiosity. I figured that the out-of-season insects had hatched near some warm water pipes by the lake. I was about three blocks from a small stream that fed into that body of water. They must have hatched near there. This all seemed pretty far-fetched, but it had happened before. Sometimes, a hot water source makes these summer insects incubate a little early. I had even seen early mosquitoes hatch this way.

I stood up, soaking wet from the snow, water dripping off my coat. Needless to say, I had almost missed my bus into the city. I was scared. I was not going back to the captive place. I had a plan, but I was pretty much out of money. I had not had a job for over a year. All I had was about twenty dollars for food, some clean clothes and things in a backpack from my cabin, and the rest of my bus ticket. I had decided to take a late bus so that I could arrive at the city under the cover of twilight.

I watched the insects again and tried to follow their presence which led like a trail from the bus window as the engine started and the driver began to pull out of the station. They looked like a trail of purple and red paper streamers.

We arrived in the city in the early evening. Lifting my head above the coarse wind, I let the cold grate against my face, making my gloveless hands crack with numbness. In contradiction to my estimation, the weather had gotten better. It was not snowing anymore. Following along a small timber and brick saltwater canal for part of the way, I walked a ways away from the bus station, avoiding the main thoroughfares. I gazed into the canal's unusually dark water which was swallowing snow and etching a wet swathe underneath an overpass. The overpass hung as if it was suspended from nothing, maybe suspended from its own stretched-out distance, held up and held down by concourses and the usual cement pilings that were not visible to me right now.

The canal was staked off by broken wooden pilings, useless except for scouts among the whitewater seagulls from the bay. The gulls searched dumpsters and parking lots across the city for potato chips, bread and other half-eaten garbage. Looking overhead, I saw that they had begun to circle, screaming through the dark blue evening as if they could hear or see many more miles than I could and needed to let me know, excitedly, what they had discovered so far away. They swallowed the bread I gave them whole.

The timbers along the canal served no purpose anymore. They stuck there like they were awaiting boats, awash in the heavy weather. They begged for a purpose in the low rise of the canal water, rotting like mulch. I slid down a brick incline like a skier off the slopes of the Berkshires, leaving two parallel side swipes alongside my leaning body. My frozen, wet feet were raw from tramping wantonly in the slush, salty from brine and the softer mud which was clinging to the cuffs of my pants. The drooping cloth of my pants snailed damp up the threads and inseam.

The overpass was quiet for a minute or two. The wind batted against the teetering gulls, flying into my face like a question. the gulls circled in the shape of an eye, the iris dilated. The lashes of the few overhanging, brittle tree branches blinked up and down in the harsh, cold wind underneath the brow of a worried sky.

I followed the thinning trail of gulls to the next slippery dockets in the jutting embankment of the canal.

The water bathed the shoreline stones with ice, sludge and soft mud, resembling kneaded dough or potter's clay sucking at my shoes, pulling them off my feet. The gulls formed a circle again, flying away.

The salty air of the open sea bit into my cheeks and moistened my tongue as I trudged forward. The night was beginning to emit a purplish glow across the horizon like the fading glimmer of many hearths. The wind blew harsher and colder as the sun went down. I reminisced about the warmth of my wood stove in New Hampshire as my frozen feet became numb, feeling like stubs pegging into the snow. Pitting the surface of the ground, my footsteps began to fill with water like sunken wells. More and more, my feet slipped into the unfrozen areas of mud and slime below the snow's deceptive cover.

I must hide. I must stay away from the main streets and avoid the authorities, so I didn't care how cold and uncomfortable I was right now.

The mud along the canal became like a landslide, moving beneath my feet in some sort of slow progress towards the open water located downhill, at a sharp angle below me. The sky grew apprehensive in the darkening daylight, like a sour melody played across the changes of the quickly gathering night time air. The sludge of the daytime had begun to harden and became slick against the advancing trees, standing like a mask against what I knew to be an extension of the harbor shoreline.

I looked vaguely into the dark waters of the canal again. This tributary had not been used for years. there was a cry, or something. It was almost too quiet to be heard. A rat! Oh, no. There was another cry, almost sounding as if it was a squeak. It came from the direction of the canal. I squinted hopelessly and looked down, getting a little bit worried that I might now be officially searched for after not showing up and not checking in at the institution where I was supposed to be residing. Maybe that high noise was a police scanner of some sort.

The captive place was located in this city. They could double their efforts to send someone to look for me at any time. It wasn't a pleasant someone, either. Or a pleasant thought. I had to work. I figured I could use someone else's name to check into a shelter and also their social number to work. I had done that before successfully. There were usually some alcoholics around that would not be working for a while and I was not going to use their number or name for very long anyway. I probably had a cleaner criminal/misdemeanor record than they did, so it wouldn't hurt them.

I involuntarily slid further down towards the canal waters. The forlorn remnants of buildings and old train tracks scraped at the ground, half-covered in snow. It was like a cold desert--like New Mexico. No buildings. No trees.

The cry came again. Like box cars squealing. Like a gigantic rat. Or, worse, more than one. The sound scraped against the rotting timbers, pushing itself into my ears. I looked up, my fear of rats shaking within me. Then I saw something...something in the water.

A fin?

It was a dolphin.

There was no way that you could convince me that anything would have found the shallow waters of that canal appealing. The canal was dark, dirty and abandoned.

My life, too, had been abandoned. I was now, I was sure, officially sought after by the authorities for not showing up at the place with the metal grating over the windows. The place in which the phenomenon of seeing a friendly dolphin in a salt water drainage canal near the main street overpass (cutting right into the center of the city) was a freakish fairy tale, and totally implausible. I did not celebrate being alive in that institution. They only let us out sometimes, not frequently. Like when I had taken advantage of this small lack of restraint and run away.

I gazed back at the dolphin, now swimming up to me as I stood ankle deep in the icy waters of the canal. My hand reached numbly into the brine to touch the animal. I did not care about the cold and the wetness anymore. I touched the soft skin of the fish. It rubbed against my foot and made some melodic, welcoming noise.

That night, I panhandled for a one-way ticket to California, not bothering to go back to my involuntary confinement. I sold my cabin in New Hampshire from there. No one ever found me.

I read in the newspapers from that city, the next day (way back in the second section on page 26 in a short article) that the dolphin I had seen in the canal had been returned to the open ocean when people from the local Aquarium had arrived on the scene after a call that the dolphin seemed to be stuck in the canal and could not find its way out.

Even in the sterile, antiseptic, washed-out, sub-world of this holocaust-ridden planet, there are a few things that have hidden joy well enough to coax its reappearance. Coax the reappearance of hope. Like, maybe, one small seedling, a baby animal--or something like that, a generic. The sweet smile and gentle touch of a friendly dolphin. There are no real schools in this world I am describing. No real schools that will teach you how to make this word right and safe for the existence of life.

You think it is now, it is the present. No. this is a world you are not familiar with. This is an antique world, an ancient world, it is an illegal and unseemly futuristic world at the same time. It could be further into the future than anyone has ever (sadly) believed possible. But for me, it is now because I always see it there. You might not. Whatever year or time zone I am speaking inside the belly of, it does not matter. I do not know the nation I belong to. I know that I won, though. And, because of that dirty canal I know that all captives deserve at least one friend, call that friend imagined or real. Or it could be something/someone from another species. A dolphin. A dog, a cat, someone else's child.

Our lives are filled with components that become mirage-like linkages. But, linkages to what? Not everyone connects with everyone else's sense of reality. Some of us can remove unwanted connections. But we are all forced to wear a similitude of some sort to each other. Why? Examine this.

There remain names like California, New Hampshire, but there is no utopia. Not yet. You need to re-examine your knowledge sources. Perhaps you are innocent. But, some kinds of innocence can make people vague and indecisive when it comes to true justice.

Still the free roam. I know that now I won for a while. How long I do not know. I won some time. I am still free like the dolphin. I won some freedom. Maybe you will too.

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# The Bookstore Cat

Copyright (C) 1993, Cathy Smith

***

I walked through the low-ceilinged entrance way and through the smallish door into the little basement-level used bookstore. I came here quite often to browse and buy books. The low frame of the wooden entrance only permitted me to duck as I went in. Immediately, a small bell suspended on a curled metal hook hit against the door and the cashier looked up, peering over piles of new books stacked around the cash register. There were leather-bound, embossed volumes up to my eye-level. Marbled pages from small gilded diaries with obscure handwriting hid another browser eavesdropping on an old personal letter. Someone else tried deciphering the coded labyrinths in minute corners of the shelves. Each wooden floorboard played a tune, echoed by Socrates or Plato, Baudelaire or Foucault.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning sat in an old rocking chair in a hard-bound, blue-covered book in the back of the store, underneath a high window. The owner's beige and brown striped cat had her claws out and was laying on her side, purring loudly. She lifted the cover of the book of poetry with her claws as if to read or re-read a familiar poem, perhaps to recite it later to herself in the sub-basement as she folded her arms akimbo under her soft chest, sitting in a furry ball. She had a corner in the book store with a folded blanket in it, but she preferred this rocking chair in the sun.

She flung herself over the cover of the book and pushed it off the rocking chair in order to stretch out a little more. It went down onto the floor with a slap. As she saw me approach, an interlude in some Chopin Mazurka accompanied her lazy look as she turned on her back; her velvet-like cat hair creased along the side where the edge of the book had been. Her eyes were dilated as she stared back at me sideways with her arms outstretched, her claws kneading the air. She rolled over onto her feet and arched her back, touching me with her wet nose as I bent over to pet her.

The cat purred loudly, curling her tail in ownership. Her buzzing, muffled sounds echoed around the strains of piano music and around the high, wooden bookshelves in the back part of the store. She jumped down from the rocking chair with a thud, suddenly, landing on all four feet and disappearing into the Philosophy section, seductively moving her tail around the edge of the bookcase at the end of the aisle. Her tail started down at the bottom of the shelf and sporadically went halfway up the shelf, curling into the shape of a question mark.

The cat tended to prefer Philosophy and Opera, in terms of literature, because the Opera librettos apparently were small and soft enough to lay upon. The librettos that had not been shelved yet were stored in stacks of paper-covered booklets, disarrayed from the pressure of her body tumbling and rolling around inside the cardboard boxes that contained them. Other boxes containing dusty, scented and parched paperbacks left at least enough room for her to hide and occasionally jump out in mock attack at some poor, timid reader.

As for the soft background music in the store, she seemed to prefer Mozart and Chopin to Stravinsky or Prokofiev. Personally, I always really rather relished Prokofiev and Stravinsky--especially some of the shorter, more dynamic pieces. But, Tallie (short for and named after Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks by Richard Strauss) would start meowing loudly and jumping over stacks of books until she managed to knock, with the fear of deafness in her voice, at least some of the heavier volumes onto the echoing, wood-planked floor.

She would meow and scratch at the front door until the cashier let her out accompanied by the loud defiant ringing of the loose, little metal bell over the entryway.

One could tell approximately how many times disliked composers were played around Tallie (usually by accident by an unwary, new, part-time cashier) by the deep gauges in the wood at the base of the front door of the bookstore. There were imaginary faces carved with cat claws into looks of terror at the seemingly benign melodies Stravinsky might have thought were more sublime than unexpected. There were road maps of escape routes and cross-hatches near the door lock. Even the tiny scratches on the yellow, brass, door handle told of futile efforts and knocking leaps attempting to open the door. Without any bravado at all, Tallie would begin to howl loudly and off-key as soon as the first screeching car brakes of the opening string section were clumsily found by the innocent, shocked hand of the young man or woman tending the store at the time.

We all mused, upon seeing Tallie's complete dismay at the fame and grandeur of Le Sacre du Printemps, that only a very sensitive understanding of her lack of appreciation for atonal modern music would be tolerated. Consoling her, by kissing or petting her soft, kitteny fur did not help. She generally scratched our faces, albeit only slightly (since we were forced to let her down) and slithered her way through our sympathetic hands on her skinny, long limbs and stomach, jumping down to the floor and frantically racing along the floorboards and molding. Her ears were laid back smooth to her head, surely wishing her snake-like appearance to be sent (translated into a tongue-smacking, nerve-rending whine and shriek of distaste) directly to the composer of such an offending piece.

Violins, it should be noted (as Tallie might have explained after she was calmed down by her sudden voluntary exit into the snow, rain, sun, hail or sleet) are to be used only as unrecognizable fruit bowls, sewing baskets, things to keep rubber bands or extra string in--and, on no occasion, are to be strung with any wire, let alone the guts of cats. In fact, decorating them with a pillow and sitting on them until they cracked like satisfied knuckles or walnuts would not be the worst idea.

The very millisecond that the last frenzy of strings reached an ecstasy of unconscionable, delectable heights and the calm, static whine of the end of the tape or record put wool muffs into the air of the bookstore, Tallie would cry out again. Her eyes would be magnified in the beveled glass of the upper part of the bookshop door (from a cement ledge outside) like bifocaled messages letting us know clearly that she had not, repeat had not, moved one centimeter from the side of the stairwell where she had exiled herself to...her muscles tensed a little too tightly into a furry cocoon. She usually stared intently through the front window during the entire disgraceful performance. "Now," she said with her eyes at the end of the piece when silence again predominated. "Now...she was ready to come in...right now."

The cement and brick staircase left one side as a perch for the cat to stare, wide-eyed, into the shop, until we let her back in. How she was aware of when these rather annoying pieces of music were over--exactly to the last, lingering, high-pitched belch of the timpani, we never knew. Guess she was listening despite her dislike. Perhaps the shut door helped her maintain her calm.

Now, as she walked back into the bookstore, ruffled and miffed, she presented us with a grateful look and leaped back onto the bookstore rocking chair, where the poetry book written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning had been replaced upon the cushion. She jumped from the chair rather abruptly as one of the customers shooed her away, sitting down themselves to peruse a book. As she leaped from the chair, it moved back and forth emphatically, as a sort of backward look of disdain. She had decided to eat from her filled cat food dish as soon as she saw that it was full. It was proper compensation for losing her seat.

Tallie usually sat there, in the rocking chair, basking in the sun underneath her other roost on the high window ledge above the chair where she chose to sit only when she could not get the customer in the rocking chair down below to move.

The entire book shop smelled, on occasion, like a pillow of catnip. Scents traveled easily on the old wooden floors and paneled walls. The scent delicately decorated the back of the bookstore, near the rocking chair, with much of its intensity. It was almost a sleepy smell. Tallie would ignore the little catnip pillow for a very long time until, as we were reading silently, or quietly searching through double stacks of books of ill-matched height and thickness, or tiny volumes squashed behind huge tomes of old encyclopedias, or matching sets of Greek philosophy from the 1800's--she would suddenly pounce upon it with the majesty of the opening chords of the tango section in Carmen.

Tearing around the store with the catnip pillow, flinging it like a wanton petticoat doing the Can Can from her claws to her short, little-fanged mouth and back again like the rapid-fire rhythm of rattling castanets, she was intent on flinging herself into a state of wild abandonment. At the end of her cackling, skittering dance, she became much like Marie Antoinette--triumphant at the panting handle of a too-much used guillotine. She posed at the end of her play like the innocent cat painted by Toulouse Lautrec with the dancers of the Moulin Rouge bent towards her. Hidden underneath their starched, rustling dresses, her ancestor had stepped lightly around their satin shoes in a gingery-quick Allegretto.

In all of these places, Tallie would have found a statement of fact: a quick catnip dance--an unhinged dance with her tapping, slippery feet skittering around some small patch of linoleum somewhere behind the counter. She would rattle the legs of the telephone table until she knocked the phone over and the loosened speaker began to mumble some incoherent command from an obscure, tape-recorded message into an empty, unresponsive room, until the cashier returned the phone to its hook.

She would pounce upon her catnip toy, leaping sideways and bouncing around the splintery, wooden-planked, bookstore floor. Done battering the catnip herbs, she would leave the little catnip pillow (just as suddenly--defiantly--with a sharp swish of her whip-like tail) right at the very edge of the felt and metal weather strip at the peeling bottom of the front door.

The next customers, chattering happily as they stuck the door hard, only opened one-quarter, peered around the side of the opened edge, asking Tallie (futilely) to please remove the little pillow of catnip herbs. Tallie, herself in response, would scratch furiously at the floor around the catnip and the edge of the pillow in what seemed like a laughing cat attempt to make an effort to do a real service. But, in actuality, she just simply left rather abruptly, running away. The poor cashier had to try and remove the delightful, jammed pillow of catnip which Tallie had somehow, questionably, managed to stuff further underneath the door.

The customers laughed as they walked in and Tallie glared at them in mock amusement as if to say, "That was a good joke, wasn't it?" She flipped her tail as if she was ignoring their liking of her. She showed her backside to them as she stroked the legs of a chair with her face. She came back to the new customers, of course, to be patted by them, purring and taking absolute full advantage of their affection and amusement.

There was no denying that Tallie, in general, had a lot to say--when she left the store, when she insisted on being let back in, when she ate (sedate and slightly to the side of the cardboard boxes), her tin of cat food rattling slightly on the splintery edge of a wide crack somewhere on a narrow floorboard.

Little crusts of dried fish lined the top edge of her cat food dish. Occasionally, the proprietor would leave a small, thick, white pottery saucer (painted with finger-print sized blue flowers and balanced, yellow arabesques) with a little milk in it. Tallie would rattle the saucer and sometimes the empty food dish into the middle of the next aisle. This made it quite easy to observe how many people might be able to just miss stepping on it and turning it over sideways and upside down on top of their shoes, bare toes in sandals squishing easily into the leftover cat food.

Tallie made rasping noises as she cleaned her feet, sitting again in the rocking chair, licking her sharp claws in a slightly threatening manner. She looked intently at the innocent victim who had happened to step into her cat food and was now bending over, rather obtrusively, looking at a book and blocking an aisle. Tallie would hop off the chair, leaving it to rock perilously close to the customer's rear end.

Despite Tallie's little idiosyncrasies, she was always an entertaining presence. Upstairs, in the proprietor's old, one-bedroom apartment, she would be quiet and demur. Cleaning her small, soft-padded, right mitten until her sharp, middle claws were pressed out slightly in her splayed, tiny cushioned foot--she wound (tightened) into a purring, gentle half-curl. She would sit happily on the lap of an older friend of the proprietor who usually came to visit in the evening.

The proprietor's visitor was a woman who was thinnish and wore her hair neatly cropped and rather short. Her dress was sort of stylish for an older woman, but she looked stunning simply because she was very friendly, although rather quiet. Tallie like her a great deal but would not tolerate any lack of attention from her. When the proprietor's woman-friend's attention would wander in conversation, Tallie would leap up from her lap, rattling the woman's tea cup in her saucer, jogging her arm with her arched, furry back on purpose. Then, she would (with the least amount of subtlety possible) suddenly jump to the floor, licking her own side and stretching as she walked away.

On more than one occasion, she gave the proprietor's friend a little scratch on her leg, tearing only a bit at her nylons. The lady would remonstrate Tallie, laughing, and the old proprietor would catch Tallie as she leaped smack in the middle of his lap with a start, rattling his own cup into its tea-sloshed saucer.

Sometimes, he would get up gently and put Tallie down on the floor to go into the kitchen and get some things for him and his friend to eat. Tallie would follow him around the kitchen and jump up on the counter to try and open the silverware drawer by sticking her little, padded foot underneath the silver drawer handle and rattling the drawer. She could get it open slightly, then she would continue to play with the carved ends of the knives and forks until they were displaced from their sections in the drawer. The proprietor would absentmindedly play with her foot for a while until Tallie would either bite him or jump down for interrupting her efforts to open the drawer wider. Or he would gently remove her foot and close the drawer. In this case, frustrated, she would immediately try to reopen the drawer.

Tallie would follow the old gentleman back into the sitting room just slightly getting in the way of his round-toed, polished, over-sized shoes, running between his legs, back and forth--with her tail stuck up into the air.

The old man might bend over and give her a few milk-soaked pieces from the homemade bread on his serving tray. Both he and his friend would then sit down to chat again and, later, drink more tea and read the evening paper together, sharing the different sections of the paper with each other. The proprietor would read the business and sports sections and some other parts of the paper and his friend would read the front section. Tallie would usually be sound asleep in her basket in the corner of the small room.

Generally, she did not stay upstairs all night. She was a working cat and the old gentleman had gotten her as a kitten in order to chase the mice in the basement which she usually did with much delight.

Tonight, though, she was allowed to stay upstairs since they both enjoyed her company. It was as if her fussy, demanding ways amused and lured customers and friends to come back and visit, to enjoy the warmth and coziness of the store and the proprietor's apartment, and fact that she was there.

In the bookstore, Tallie never failed to be completely stretched out over at least three stacks of books, digging her claws into a fourth stack, daring some customer with her dilated eyes and swishing tail to just try and move her to get a book from underneath her reclining body. If they insisted on getting a book from under her body, she would bite them lightly on the hand and jump down quickly, perhaps knocking a book down on the floor in the process as well.

Tonight, the old gentleman stayed up very late, so Tallie was still asleep in her basket until almost midnight. He had fallen asleep in his chair after his friend had found her way out and Tallie was the first to awaken. She jumped up on his lap and began licking his face with her rough, little tongue. She clawed slightly through his shirt as he opened his eyes and smiled. Removing her insistent claws, he trundled her under his arm and petted her until she purred. turning on the light in the old, narrow staircase leading downstairs to the bookstore and then the sub-basement. He set his heavy-soled shoes down carefully and noisily, brushing the cool, curved, plaster walls on either side of the winding passage. Switching all the lights on as he would find the switch boxes with his tentative, large fingers, hearing the click and watching the intermittent dazzle of single, bare, electric bulbs, he felt his way down to the first floor, which was actually a half-basement and his bookstore.

He let Tallie jump out of his arms three-quarters of the way down the narrow, wooden staircase. As he entered the bookstore, Tallie ran off into the store rather than run to the door of the basement, as usual. She normally tried to open that door by putting her paws underneath the bottom of the door in the space between the floorboards and its flat, thick buttress. The door was hinged and loosely clasped. She would quickly try to solve the contrived desperate puzzle of the clasped door and rearrange the position of the clacking, metallic hook lock like the numbers in a plastic, carded number game. She did this by repeatedly jumping up and knocking into the door handle. Rearranged properly by jogging the door handle as if there was a correct sequence: 1, 2, 3, 4, the door would eventually open into the dark, warm labyrinth of the basement. She was ordinarily able to unhook the lock like the combination to a safe, letting her push the door away from her. Amazing but true. She had been doing this for years. The old proprietor and she made a game of it.

Instead, this evening she ran around the base of a wooden book table and slid sideways, running down the different aisles of books until the proprietor could no longer find her at all. He whistled and clapped his hands. He tried smacking his lips as he bent over slowly to examining the undersides of the taller bookshelves. He rattled one of her toys. To his surprise, the cat did not even respond with a distant cry (as she sometimes did when she got caught in some dusty, crawl-space underneath a table or accidentally shut herself in a cabinet as she did occasionally, needing his help to re-open the door). He whistled one, last, high whistle to call her again. Looking around, his vision viewed the dim outline of the darkened book tables in bewilderment. Tallie did not reappear.

A week later, the elderly proprietor made more than his usual inquiries and had had the entire store cleaned and swept. Still, he could not find any trace of where his little Tallie had gone to. He was confused, hurt and slightly puzzled as to what could have taken Tallie so far away so thoroughly and quickly. She had run away once before but had come back in about two or so weeks. She was spayed, so the proprietor was not concerned about the prospect of a litter.

She should be back soon, he thought to himself as he read the paper upstairs one evening. He had heard no loud scratching at his doors. She had not tried to climb the tree outside in the back yard. There were no singing yowls from the back yard or sounds of spattering disagreements.

Sometimes, when Tallie came home, she would climb the tree outside his bedroom and try to crawl in the window from some leafy branch bouncing back and forth outside. She would cry like a bird as she gripped the end of a branch, swaying underneath her own weight in the wind, trying to scratch his window open.

This time, though, Tallie did not come back. Two weeks passed. Three weeks passed. Then, the end of the month came--a new month, then another and another. The old man had inquired about her among his neighbors. He had sent a few, small children to look for her, giving them dimes and comic books. (One of them wanted him to offer an old Atlas of the World as a reward if anyone found her. He agreed.) They, none of them, could find the small cat.

One evening, as he was sifting through his receipts, having put on his glinting, small reading glasses and pulled his reading lamp close to his papers, he noticed that his supervising cashier had hired a new, young woman as a part-time worker. He was very pleased. The new part-time woman seemed to be quite accurate and neat. He wrote a note to his shop manager to ask him to train her to take on a little more responsibility and see if he could give her more hours.

In the weeks to come, the old proprietor met the young woman and found her quite charming. There was something slightly familiar about her, her quickness, even the way she would move her arms. Her eyes were a lovely hazel color and rather large. He told her that he was very pleased with her work and she laughed in a deep, soft, throaty vibrato as she smiled and touched his arm lightly, running the old antique cash register flawlessly for the next customer. He could have sworn he heard her purr like a cat.

The old man finally got another, very small, kitten. She was about the size of his large, rather callused, hand (worn roughly from constantly hauling and unloading boxes of books into the bookstore and helping his workers stack them on the shelves of the store.)

At first, the new, young woman at the cash register caused the little cat to run deep into the aisles of books. She didn't seem to like the new kitten at all. In fact, one of the proprietor's friends came running to him, out of breath, as he worked outside in his garden one day, insisting that Tallie had come back. Grabbing at his jacket sleeve, the man pulled on it until the old proprietor had to ask him to let it go. The old man asked him to explain (while he went puffing behind his friend 'round the corner to the bookstore) exactly why he thought Tallie had reappeared after all this time.

His friend hastily explained that he thought that he had seen her walking around the bookstore and really, distinctly, had heard her hiss loudly at the new kitten. The noise had frightened the poor thing until the little cat had hidden--and gotten stuck--between two large rows of French literature and German literary history, almost squashed by a volume of 17th century Russian poetry.

The old man laughed and shook his head.

The two friends walked down the three or four short stairs into the bookstore, bending their heads under the low timber in the doorway. As they entered the door, the diminutive bell rang in its high-pitched, short chime. The young woman at the cash register looked up.

The old proprietor and his friend looked down all the aisles as the cashier watched them. They whistled, jogged books and peered into cardboard boxes. They called Tallie's name as they looked high upon the top bookshelves with a ladder. The old proprietor found the kitten and held her in the palm of his hand. She was like a tiny ball of Angora wool. All of her hair was like fuzz and her claws were like wire-thin needles: delicate and prickly like the spine of a small yellow carp. Her thin, hungry cry made the old man put her down near a too-large saucer of milk and her cat food bowl.

His new cashier watched him with jealous, dilated eyes. He looked down the narrow aisles of books in vain for his old Tallie and a cold shiver went down his spine. He looked up, but Tallie was nowhere to be found.

His little kitten, Maggie, (named after Margaret Thatcher because of her rather shocked-looking kitten fur) continued eating, innocently. His cashier started laughing and her eyes turned from their dark dilation to their usual large, hazel color. She looked down at her receipts, flushed, and began to write them into the ledger as she checked them against her cash register tapes.

The proprietor looked confused and continued peering underneath the dusty bookshelves behind the cardboard boxes. He saw no crouching, full-grown, beige cat. No cat looking discovered and totally without surprise, acting as if she would just as soon walk calmly out of her cob-webbed, well-hidden, cozy corner herself as if nothing at all had happened. She was still not there to haughtily tap away from him without so much as an "adieu". The old man thought about how he would be glad to have his Tallie back again to haunt him in his concerts, and in his linoleum and tin-metalware kitchen, hearing her tap her claws on the enameled kitchen table as usual, in search of food. (As she was not supposed to do.) She would, then again, spread out comfortably not letting a soul creep a spare finger near her fluffy pillows in the corner under his reading lamp in the yellow, parchment light. A faded lampshade with decorated borders and a mahogany lampstand stood above an fat, over-stuffed armchair where Tallie used to sleep on the old proprietor's lap breathing hard on every off-beat.

Just as he looked up from this rumination (to his surprise) appeared an unlikely mirage of his new cashier hissing loudly, as if she were an enormous, beige-striped cat. He could swear he saw a huge, furry tail whip right behind her skirt as the hair on her head stood straight up in the air, slightly electric, her rather small ears laid back smoothly against her head.

The old proprietor jumped as if he had seen a ghost. The illusion lasted only a second. As soon as he blinked his own enlarged, care-worn eyes, his cashier turned back into a tight-skirted, cashmere-sweatered, young woman again. Her large, expressionless, hazel eyes had changed from their widened intensity to a more demure expression as she bent over underneath the cash register to get a few plastic bags with the bookstore logo on them: "We Will Not Be Undersold!" Asa Jedsl's Used Books to give to two customers--handing them their receipts with a quick smile.

The little kitten, Maggie, skittered across the floorboards in a fiery, hissing, spitting knot of Angora and nails, taking this opportunity to arch her back at the new cashier while the old proprietor stood between them in protective conversation. The kitten hissed shrilly again and meowed a second time, hopping sideways in a shaky spate of spitting challenges--skittering around the store with a ringing toy, filled in the center with a metal bell. Maggie jumped into a stack of books, sliding across them onto the floor and her blanket, licking her tiny, needled feet, acting as if she had won some imaginary triumph over the new cashier who was deliberately ignoring her antics.

Tallie, herself, never returned to Asa Jedsl's bookstore. The old proprietor kept his store for many years to come and the new cashier eventually became the bookstore manager. Maggie grew up and the brownish-beige stripes broadened over her belly and thick-whiskered face. She was more sedate than Tallie and a little heavier. She kept the mice under her control and eventually had a fine litter of six kittens in her soft-blanketed corner of the cement-walled basement, after which Asa finally remembered to have her spayed. But he and his friends were delighted over the kittens. With the small basement window set half-open, she would occasionally jump out of the basement (when she was still nursing her new kittens), taking a break to bask in the sun of the little patch of front lawn near the gray-painted, brick walls and the cool cement stairwell.

The new cashier never got along well with Maggie or her kittens. In fact, she seemed to have almost a snappish, feline, jealous distaste for cats in general.

She played with Maggie and her offspring by off-handedly throwing the toy ball with the bell in it wildly across the bookstore, ignoring the response of the kittens with the dilation of her own eyes--averting her head again to her work. She seemed to enjoy playing with the cats with at least that much tolerance. But usually played with them so that they wound up further away from her and smack in the back of the store. She was, though, very good with the organization of the bookstore and eventually did most of the receipts and bookkeeping.

Every once in a while, Asa Jedsl would gaze out of the low doorway to his shop, running his thick fingers over the one, rough timber over his head. He would look out over the stairwell, over the gray flagstone and overgrown grass, down the block, past the tall, numbered buildings and the alleyways. He looked past the chained, aluminum garbage cans, past the stacks of string-tied newspapers and magazines ready for recycling--into some distant, winding path in the weeds and wildflowers in one of the many overgrown, vacant lots in his neighborhood. He would whistle his one, high, thin whistle, sure that Tallie might come trotting at a half-run, her beige, furry tail hooked in a curve above her as she ran in answer to his searching whistle--on her way home.

The End

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Did you love _Hidden Treasures: Short Stories_? Then you should read _Waiting for the Sunrise_ by Cathy Smith!

**_Waiting for the Sunrise_** is the collected poetry and memoir of award-winning nature poet Cathy Smith. It contains many full color illustrative photos chronicling her coast to coast journeys in the United States, Mexico and Canada. Written in free verse, the poems are easy to read and the book makes a lovely _'Book of Days'_ \- a fine way to start your day, reading one poem at a time. This is a Zen-like collection of observations about our relationship with natural phenomenon.

Read more at Cathy Smith's site.
Also by Cathy Smith

Beautiful Dreamer Short Stories

Hidden Treasures: Short Stories

Standalone

Waiting for the Sunrise

Watch for more at Cathy Smith's site.

# About the Author

Cathy Smith lives in northern Maine near the Canadian border writing cozy novels, poetry, taking photographs (for the poetry) and editing her short stories from the Nineties (of which she has many). She lives in a farming (rural) area watching the wildlife -- recently foxes, weasels and cardinals -- and the ubiquitous coyote. She has a wonderful rescued Yorkshire terrier named Sparky, supports third world and other animal rescue organizations online and has owned quite a few amazing dogs and cats. She also writes under two pseudonyms -- Zara Brooks-Watson and Sophia Watson (cozy mysteries). She has four book websites -- silverlakemysteries.weebly.com -- jitterbug-watson.weebly.com -- zarabrookswatson.weebly.com and appleciderpoetry.weebly.com -- She authors the Silver Lake Cozy Mystery Series and the Bonaventura Cozy Mysteries -- samples of these books and links to online downloads are on the above websites. She attended Boston University and Harvard.

Read more at Cathy Smith's site.
