⋔ Home ⋔ About ⋔ Hire Me ⋔ Links ⋔ License ⋔ Archives ⋔ RSS ⋔
1266 words by attila written on 2024-09-09, last edit: 2024-09-10, tags: dogs, fever, god, mystic, writing ⋔ Previous post: EMACS: The Carpal-Tunnel-bashing, Super Distraction Masheen ⋔ Next post: Goddamn Android, part I: Transfer All Thee Things
I am tearing down a trail barefooted that I've been down a thousand times, looking for my dogs. It is dark out, pre-dawn, I'm usually not in this place at this time and it all seems strange. The moon is up high, casting light but no heat, and I'm calling their names, all of them: "Xmul! Pippy! Bruce! Mamacita!"
... but also: "Gracie! Chester! George!" Dogs long dead, I'm still searching for them, I scream "GOD DAMN IT WHERE ARE YOU?" and look up at the moon.
Behind me, all of a sudden, a voice: "Why do you fools always look up when you're yelling for me?"
I turned around and saw a black woman, wearing a floral skirt, sweater, socks with Birkenstocks, and a notable purple hat, her face holding the question after her words had faded. "You're not calling TO God FROM this earth," she stamped her foot at the word, "that is somehow SEPARATE FROM God, why don't you clowns ever get that? You're INSIDE God, and I'm ... right ... here boop!" and she took three paces towards me with her last three words and touched me on the nose at "boop".
I fell back in shock. Some corner of my fevered brain was telling me this was a dream, I'm having chills and fever from what is likely coronavirus, I'm lying in my hammock surrounded by ... the dogs that were still alive.
Come to think of it the ones that were dead, too. All around me.
But, no: boop! And there was light. Not strong daylight, not a light I had seen before, some other light. I fell to my knees (still in your hammock, beard-o), my eyes fell on a strand of Damiana growing next to the trail and this same light came out of it somehow while at the same time coming out of everything else. Everything. Else.
"Yeah, gotta say, pretty cliché these days seeing me as a Black woman, given all the lip service and bullshit floating around, but then you know that, right?"
I stammered: "You... you're NOT a Black woman?"
At this she laughed: "Well OF COURSE I am sweetie! I'm just..." and at this her voice somehow broadened, became louder and softer at once and all of the spaces in her face pulled back as her form flickered like the changing of a channel "... all the other forms ...", man, woman, pink, brown, taller, shorter, for an instant she fixed on the form of a wounded child, blood pouring out of her shoulder, then impossibly tall, thick and hairy, to incredibly small, fine, wizened and grey. Birds, octopuses. Other stuff. All the forms.
Still the hat. The purple hat. Different each time but the same. Interstellar dust clouds can wear purple hats, it turns out.
She continued with a beautific smile: "I'm ALL the forms, dearest... unless, of course, you were intent on knowing my TRUE form...?" and at this she drew back and narrowed her eyes.
I saw fire in her eyes. Real fire. Not a metaphor.
She laughed so hard she was smacking her hands on her knees, back to the first form: "Oh man... I gotta... your face... so funny... pee" and she went into the taller of the bushes and squatted down.
My shocked look evoked another round of laughter: "What, God can't pee in the bushes if she wants to? Maybe I'm peeing in the bushes every time you go running through here with your dogs, how would you know? Lessee here ... find something," she found some bit of refuse to wipe herself with and stood back up.
"Sweetie I'm ALL the forms. If I had ONE TRUE form well, then, that would be one thing, right? If God has one true form then a lot of yall's bullshit might be true, no? God's chosen, lighter higher, darker lower, gender roles, all the shitty things, my love. ALL THE SHITTY THINGS," she lectured me as she strolled around looking at wilderness.
"But I'm ALL the forms. To say you're INSIDE me is perhaps..." she gazed at a blossom from a naranjita tree "... an over-simplification, but then SPIRITUAL TOPOLOGY was never really yall's strong suite."
"And here you are, down this friggin trail, was it even made by a person? No, silly, I know who made it: DOGS. Maybe a rabbit or two. Foxes are too skittish, very superstitious, avoid trails. MY POINT IS: you're on a DOG TRAIL searching for ... YOUR DOGS and ... the light ain't coming on?" she asked quizzically staring into my face.
In this vision, fever dream, corona having its way with my neurons, whatever you want to call it, I fell despondent, like I always did back in the day, when I would listen and listen and understand all the words and miss the point. Just like I was 23 again, an idiot disciple.
That's what I was when I was 23. A disciple. Of a Black woman. Who said she was a guru. Remember, beard-o? The cult? The thing? Lying in your hammock, a thousand miles and a million lifetimes from that person, from both of those people...
"OK. You're kinda dim right now, and, no, I'm NOT JUDGING: the 'rona is a fierce little beastie, as yall are finding out, so let me connect it for you." At this she gestured broadly with her hands: "We're doing this little TED talk in ENGLISH right? I mean, I'll meet you wherever you are, hon, there's no discrimination here: you want it in a sombrero," and all of a sudden she was the image of Emiliano Zapata, dressed like a Charro to the nines (purple trim on the hat), "pués... te podemos acomodár" (well, we can sort you out). Then back to the first way I saw her: "But you'd RATHER do this in English and it just so happens it works out DELICIOUSLY, because D-O-G ..."
I finished her sentence: "... is God backwards oh wow how did I not see that?" I asked the bushes.
"HELLO! I'm up here, precious! No need to mumble to the weeds, although you kinda..." she waved her hand in my general direction, "gotta whole ... thing going on with that. Also don't interrupt people when they're making a point, especially one YOU MADE them make oh so painfully boop!" Yes, she booped me on the nose again. All dark.
"Your dogs, and God, are where you left them, dearest."
There was... a flash? Too weak a word. All of the electromagnetic energy in my "vicinity" appeared to simultaneously "go off" in my head: a COSMIC flash. Gamma ray entering my brain, lying in my hammock? Something? I felt the ground on my knees as I pawed the air (haw) like a blind person. I felt her breath next to my ear, she pressed her thumb into my forehead and intoned, in every voice: "REMEMBER"
I woke in my hammock, two of four pups splayed across me like mink stoles, blanket soaked from sweat. It wasn't more than 3am and every one of the twenty some odd dogs that sleep every night around me was sitting in a circle around my hammock, their noses pointed at me, their faces full of concern.
Bindi launched her small frame from under the table and landed on my knees, below the pups. "Uff," I said.