A Rodent

Brushing slow strokes on a canvas beside the crackle of the fireplace, a rodent scurries onto my work. Poking out a window and seeking refuge from the forces, he sits on the border between the hunt and the feast. I let him in and there he sits on the windowsill, he can’t turn his back to the pleasant coolness of the wind. His knuckles are cooled and the fire in his veins are calmed by the soothing nature of the hearth. So he turns his whiskers and points them outside to gaze at the navy forms dotting the landscape. He sits there, stoic as can be, feeling the warmth spread down his back. He embraces a domesticity he never knew out in the wild, loses the tenseness of muscle and his ears drop. Perhaps his sternness is a veil built by pride, a false asceticism which hides an indulgent core. I return my brush to the canvas but fail to make a stroke again, my hand reflexively twitching. The first glimpse of an arthritic future, or a sign of exhaustion? I glimpse over at the mouse, forever a stoic watcher of the windowsill. That familiar ache of a long day spent working itches up my back and I resign. My body falls back onto the bed, exhaustion creeps over me and my body paralyzes. I feel the breeze on my cheeks and the ache in my hands and the dirt in my hair. I hear the moon conspiring and the flora listening as the cows stretch out on the field. It is late summer. A dream of the spring, a dream of her mother and her mother before her drags me away into sedation. I am born once again as a smudge against the concrete as I slip into the evening.

Tales of Old

Aged women on the deck told tales of the mother that is the sea — like how nature is regarded as a “mother”, so is the sea. Some say the sea is older than the dirt itself; the mother has grown aged and wizened enough to possess a hint of obscenity we accustomed ourselves to. Our men strayed from their gentility. The deck became not a center of decorum and good behavior, but a center for camaraderie and vulgarity the same. The plaque between my gums kept building up, my body was growing furry with hair, and my fingernails curled as they lengthened. It didn’t take long for the crew to realize that the mother was never ours. She would never claim us as her kin, and trying to tame her only brought cruelty. Even the days when she sent us calm waters — we would still dry up in the sun.