Author: auspiciaoblativa

Therapy

Louise had had herself a very long week. It was the week before her life would begin to dig its way sunward, the week she would begin to see a brand new kind of therapist for a whole new kind of therapy. But she didn’t yet know this, couldn’t possibly fathom it, actually; so, her mood was rather tense and her body followed suit.

Monday had woken her up in the middle of the night with such muscle spasms she feared she would incite her husband to call 911 on the spot. Poor Nick, she had thought, even as her habitual premature reaction was sending recognizable hatred and resentment through her nervous system. The way that he cared, she found it impossible to receive. She despised being seen in her pain, and despised even moreso watching another person try to suck some of it from her, as if they could possibly make it better that way. No, it cannot be sucked: then you simply have two people in pain instead of one. She knew that Nick didn’t have the proper support structures in place to make a transaction like that the least bit intelligent, helpful, or sustainable. It’s the sort of thing Shamans in the Amazon could do, she thought, but that man speaks only English, and Business English at that. How in the world does he think he can carry this for me? What conceit. What total ratshit. And, that night in bed trying to subdue her spasms with silent anger, she had met the guilt of this tortured chamber of Doom and Repression exactly the moment she was hit with a fresh bout of unbelievable pain, and she staggered into the bathroom to throw up.

Tuesday had not gone well at all. After spending the pre-dawn in tepid, salty bathwater, she had worked up a sense of self to match, which she felt did her no good in the go-get-‘em world of real estate. Louise’s coworkers seemed to be having a particularly successful time going and getting ‘em, which only made her feel more like the faded photograph of a grandmother’s scowl. She closed her office door, trying hard to stay busy and keep still by organizing her computer files. By early afternoon, the pain meds had again worn off and someone had come to knock on her door. She felt like hiding under the desk.

“WHAT.” She was surprised at the crack of her own whip. Pain cranks up the volume on everything.

A timid head poked in. It was Stephani, the youngest partner in the business. A real nice lady. A fucking go-getter. She probably had good news.

“I have some good news, Louise,” she apologized gently. “We’ve closed the deal on the 10th Street Market. Big bunch of going-green opportunists looking to put in some pricey organic shops and a wellness center, maybe even give Whole Foods a run for its money.”

“Oh,” sighed Louise, having held her breath without realizing it. “That’s good, Steph. Good job.”

Although it wasn’t a great stream of accolades, it also wasn’t a coffee mug in the face. Stephani closed the door with the look of a whiskey-n-coke: one part pissy and blue, having been let down by the one she loved, one part relieved and sweet, having come out on top anyway.

Wednesday wasn’t much different for Louise: lotta hiding, fair deal of organizing, bit of weary participation in office communications. Thursday, however, brought with it the particularly paralyzing sting that comes with too many days spent in uncontrollable, sporadic, unpredictable waves of numbness and pain. She had snapped off the heads of four people before her first cup of coffee. By lunchtime she had made several reckless deals, five of which were total longshots, two of which were joylessly finalized as she pulled long red strands of hair from her head. Louise, who had always been a rather handsome woman, was looking like a wax statue of her future undead self and acting about the same. From where she stood, the old neurotic habit of pulling hair had many benefits to offer: one, she got direct, physical evidence of being alive while she spoke on the phone with people who had no idea what was truly going on in her living body; two, she had a source of pain of which she was in control; and three, she watched herself declare, strand by strand, that her beauty was less important to her than the unquestionable reality of her pain. After knocking one of the long shots into an unexpectedly feasible range, she had a hairball the size of a newborn kitten next to her computer. By the time she closed on the second seemingly-impossible deal, the kitten had grown up into a toy poodle.

By afternoon coffee break [1], Louise was surrounded by a roomful of people who both thoroughly hated and ambitiously admired her. This must be what it’s like to be president of the United States, she thought, as a tiny intervenous gunman went on a killing spree along her sciatic nerve. The hairs that grew back where she had plucked them were gonna be white as the swan in her condo’s fake pond.

“Louise!!” shouted a gleefully uncorked Amy as she toasted her adversarial ally. “You won’t have to work for at least the next month!”

Ha ha ha, haha, ha. That’s right, Amy, it’s best when Louise doesn’t come in.

“Louise. Oh my goodness. Just when you think someone’s gone off the deep end, they show you what they’re made of.”

Nice backhand. Little did Bruce know. She was made of the deep end.

“I know. Really, Louise, it’s like you’re Mozart or something.”

Comment critique, uncut: Angela had seen Amadeus once, so in this regard she felt confident alluding to him as a tortured artist. She had not seen Frida or Basquiat, both of which would have worked in context, both of whose main characters were artists with whose work she was equally unfamiliar. The “or something” clause was thrown in because Angela didn’t seem to think that closing on two major real estate transactions in one morning while battling a particularly disruptive gang of MS symptoms was necessarily of equal value to the symphonies she had never personally taken the time to hear in their entirety. [2]

“Louise. What on earth have you been doing in that office—we thought you were playing online poker or writing your memoir. And all this time, you’ve been actually working. Way to show us up. Bravo!”

Bow-tie wearing Ben had gone for the razor-sharp compliment, as was his style. But it was the last straw in a game of short straws.

“SHUT UP,” shouted Louise. “All of you. Fucking wretched pretentious passive aggression fiends! Constipated competition hacks! I don’t have time for this bloodbath. Get back to work, and please, for the love of god, leave me the fuck alone!”

But they all kept schmoozing there just the same, completely unphased. Continuing their spiked praise and poison punch. Louise white-knuckled her coffee mug, realizing with a sickening flush of stomach acid, I must not have said it out loud. Shit.

“Louise!” “Louise.” “Oh, Louise!” continued on for another ten minutes, until she was finally able to zombie-walk back into her office, where she sat and ate pudding. The cold, soft sweetness was the only thing she could think of that would not offend her in that moment. She ate a four-pack of individual snack-sized lunch-box filler before she felt calm enough to cry.

Friday morning, after her husband left for work, she called herself in sick. Despite the disgusting response (“Oh honey, you deserve it!”) and the inner voice shouting defeat (You’re proving them right, you’re proving them right!), she felt like it was the only thing worth doing. She lay comatose on the couch all morning, until her wounded pride out-throbbed her nerve endings. At noon, she gathered the last of her sanity and rode the metro to a coffee shop across town where no one would know her nor expect her to smile. Then she ordered the most expensive drink on the menu just so she could taste it.

Plopping down in a giant leather armchair, Louise set about organizing her mind files. Getting it together. Being useful. She was ten minutes into the process before registering she was working pro-bono, doing for free the same shit she did at work, keeping busy and staying still. It stank of futility.

She sighed, sank back, and took a moment to look around. Dim lights cast their fake-fire glow across the faces of important business meetings, studious kids, and hand-holding lovers alike; the coffee shop is to gentrified art districts what the disco-lit karaoke bar was to the 80’s or the generic “bar & grill” is to the suburbs. People huddled together over unspoken underlying agreements, increasing their sense of self and generally trying to keep dry in the storm of cultural warfare.

One thing, and one thing only in this dreary commercial break, caught Louise’s attention.

Across the posh squat table sat a long-limbed olive-skinned beauty with mahogany eyes directed so far out the window it seemed that the time of the air around her was at least one hundred years ahead. Or behind. Something like a lush forest dripped imperceptibly in her atmosphere, almost visible the moment before blinking. Or after. Her breathing was noticeably deep and still, if she were covered in birds, snakes, a jungle cat or two. Perfectly, unshakably calm. Louise double-blinked to be sure: yes, there was indeed an actual bee buzzing back and forth on the woman’s orange pen, which itself buzzed in harmonious syncopation, back and forth on the thick pages of a hardcover book. She occasionally pressed her eyes and blood-red lips together into the closed focus of sensory deprivation, only to come open again more breathtaking, more ferociously alive with color and silent song.

Louise watched her for a gracefully long moment, mouth open like a child. Then, shaking it off, bringing her coffee mug sheepishly to her waiting lips, she glanced down into the liquid black pearl, hoping to see a reflection of some aspect of the beauty she saw in the other. Quite on the contrary, what she saw was a pair of tired eyes folded deeply into wary layered sockets of chronic fatigue. She put the mug down. When her vision adjusted from the shadow shapes of the black mirror, it flickered swiftly to register the pair of lit brown fire agates blazing back at her. Looking far too directly at Louise, the woman blinked the slow shine of a lighthouse weathering a storm, then, in no hurry, let her mouth bear the shelter of a small smile.

Delirious enough with her Circus of Fucking Exhuastion [3] work week, and mesmerized enough to have been caught completely in the headlights, Louise actually heard herself ask in the voice of a starry child, “Are you an angel?”

“No,” said the smile of Vanni Rigamonte. “I’m a therapist.”

 

**

1. …which is a funny, old-fashioned tradition in a place that breathes & pisses coffee all day long.
2. It’s important to be accurate.
3. CFE: Certified Fraud Examiner.

Opti-Mystic

This is what’s up: generation(s) to be reminded of what they know deep down, what fears are real and what are being invented & manipulated for short-term small-game profit/control. Useful to check your habit-tracks and let them lead you back to yourself. (Small times, many times.) And there, in the Heart of even the smallest flicker of recognition, the warm pulse of Instinct is alive, and what is speaking is what is rising up to save itself: Earth. Sentient Being in all of us. All of us.

Those who see that as “optimism” are perhaps naming the fierce edge of courage required to stay with what has been spoken, to stand honestly for what is described over & over in intricate, exquisite, excruciating detail: the Earth wants to Live. It will find a Way. And we are invited to participate, to support this, with every breath sent round.

Shaking off the chains of conditioned depression, of trauma-enforced forgetting, of daily desensitization to the actual potent choicepoints in the story unfolding. The unbinding of deceit & complacency. Intention giving access to the keys that re-route the nervous system toward inner listening, intuitive guidance, Earth-centered awareness. Letting it move through us.

Optimism is what it looks like, only if the immensity of Being is temporarily forgotten.

Honesty is what it sounds like when the Whole is seen for What It Is.

Peace, in Process.

-**

Dawn

“Every part of you has a secret language. Your hands and your feet say what you’ve done.

And every need brings in what’s needed. Pain bears its cure like a child.”

– Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi –

What was it that Beau did the morning after this revelatory night-musing? The same thing he did every morning, just the same. He awoke just before dawn, splashed cold water on his face from the bucket under the window, ran three times up and down the creaking stairs of the empty building, careful to skip the four missing boards; then he lit a candle, opened his Rumi collection to whichever page revealed itself, and hung upside-down from the open beam of his bedroom doorway long enough to read the entire thing out loud. Without fail, whether his recitation was a single stanza or many pages, by the time the poem completed, Beau was thoroughly at one with his primordial essence. He relished in feeling it pulse heart to tail-tip as he swung himself down and let his feet find ground.

It was the same morning routine that had shaped his sun-greeting the entire summer, prior to moving back to the city for college, though now adapted for the relativity of civilization. Out there, it had been a cold, clear mountain stream instead of a gutter-fed window bucket, and it had been a cascade of mossy boulders rather than creaky stairs, and it had been a firm, abiding branch of a generous fir in place of the door frame reminiscent of someone’s abandoned demolition project. All the same, though: it did the job. Awake, alive, present.

Just as he had the morning before his acceptance into the military, as well as the day after, as well as this day, Beau followed said ritual awakening with a meditation, staring at the sun[1]. Sometimes he sat in silence, other times he rang a bell with a hammer and bellowed guttural chants in no recognizable language, and sometimes he jumped rope while singing rhymey kid songs. This part of the daily routine changed frequently, as Beau found that it helped him to acknowledge where they were all the same.

If anyone ever overheard this eccentric cacophony, they didn’t let on. But this is New York, so they would have. No one heard. Beau’s domicile was an abandoned building in the midst of larger, more accessible abandoned buildings, and not even the craftiest of the hobos who made their way through the pry-bar-friendly window-boards of the other buildings even came within glancing distance of Beau’s place. There were a number of perfectly logical reasons for this, but they, combined with all of the cracks in their logic, all contributed to an intricate Venn diagram that had Beau at the center. Flower-of-Life style.

Having come of age on the edge of the city, a quiet black kid obsessed with Kung Fu, Lao-Tze, Sufism, and Rumi, self-aware as a trans man since before those words were given to him, Beau had a long-developed mastery of shape-shifting, disappearing and reappearing, moving undetectably without flinch, and deflecting incoming tidals of neighboring systems as needed. At this point, he was so practiced with the skills of this multi-tool, he could use it day or night, on-site or off, steady backgrounded or snapped into focus. He didn’t snooze on the tool-sharpening either. Hence the daily cold-water splash. Enlivening. Embodying. Purposeful.

To Beau, it seemed ludicrous, properly absurd, that anyone immersed in an environment that reified the legitimacy of the nation-state on a minute-by-minute basis would have need of any morning routine less stark or strange. Surrounded by visceral theatre that produced a constant glut of consumer propaganda for the embodied ecosystem to process, most of which boiled down to bells and whistles of distraction politics and survival tactics, clanging in the name of the right to drown out the simple truth of what the ground under their feet knew, held, spoke, and sang incessantly, the human body required a devoted custodian and a trusted anchor. Beau could hardly remember a time when he did not choose to meet the dawn of a new day on his own, listening into that quiet before anyone else got a say in who, what, how, or why he should be. Even as a child, solemn and watchful, with a piercing kindness that most adults found necessary to downplay or shake off, Beau was drawn to that dark hour before dawn, mesmerized by its specific tone of penetrating voidness. And in the city, it was the only relative quiet that the day held. So Beau felt inclined to hold it in equal measure. And there he was always held, without fail.

By the time the orange light of dawn spread its fingers through its lover’s hair, Beau was fed and dressed, strapped in to his regular undercover monksuit, ready to hop on his bike for the hour-long zig-zag path to school that was easily worth the price of a stable squat, moot gym membership fees, and avoiding the frenetic hustle of the subway. The frenetic hustle of street traffic, however, Beau considered a treasured video game, whooping a wingbeat of Shaolin’s finest [2] as he soared between lanes and dipped down cobblestone alleys.

 

-**

 

1. To be clear, this pulse here. No shade on U2.
2. Faster than the eye can find.

BYOS

{Excerpt #5, journal of a sacred whore.}

 

They ask me how to be sure it’s safe in here. I say: first find safety in there. I vow to do the same, and when we bring our own safety we can trust the agreements we create together.

They ask me how to have sex when they’ve known it before as a weapon. I hear. They ask me how to make room for forgiveness in a world where such things persist. I hear. They ask me why the fuck not just turn it off and move along. So.

I always say the same thing: find your center and walk. Walk forward. Further down your own path. Come along. We’re going somewhere together. Remember where you’re going. (Or make it up. Or choose anew. Or be still. But always: continue.) That’s part of why I am here: to encourage your continued vigor. To unlock the places where you have carried distrust in your own vessel. To promise to be present with you through the swailing, to hold vigil in the charred memorial, to hear you when you find yourself alive and aware. I will be there for that. When you show up here, for this, wherever you are when you’re ready.

I don’t have the answers to your questions. We’re going to find out those answers together, because you’re going to be finding them out. I’m not here to save you, to be sure. You can do that yourself, and perhaps you’ll find that you must. But I vow to breathe in your silences, to hear rather than fill them. To nourish your fertile balances. To listen for where you’re going and to be there when you arrive. For all your smouldering Edens I have good coffee grounds & compost & beetles, seeds & larks & honeybees. Clover & moss & velvet.

It’s my pleasure to watch you grow. It’s your pleasure I propose to grow. Pleasure is a well-honed evolutionary tool in my belt, and it can be incredibly efficient when wielded wisely. You have my word that my work is dedicated to wisdom in wielding. It’s not your job to figure that out. It’s your job to be honest, to tend your agreements, and to lean into your own growth. There are many shapes this can take, depending on the elements to be rendered. I assure you, my tools work in all manner of alchemical equations. The exchange is always equitable: we will discuss this until we create an arrangement suitable for both of us.

My own mission is fairly simple. The memories of rape culture live in the collective unconscious. We heal in the present, where traumatic memories can be given re-routes if we have the tools & supports to successfully pattern-interrupt. It is my job (my actual profession) to assist in healing the splits, rewiring the electrical configurations, stitching the tissues together. Showing up, paying attention. Supporting you in danger with a steady hand. Instrument tuned, streaming. Hips nearly swimming. Awash. Heartrinse. Spin cycle. Come up for air. Let the current float you. Come. Alive. Here.

In our work: your honest will, your heart’s consent only, your authentic self-actualization: it is the singular appetizing spark to this tongue. Respect for your choices will fill the above and below, polishing up the mirrorball that is my only visible toy. Your every move will be encompassed, your journey sovereign, so good news: there’s nowhere to hide.

I’ve compassion for the vulnerable and the hidden, but I have not the time nor the pity for hiding. Do not waste your mirth on mockery. You’ll need to be willing to come out, or at least to begin with recognizing there’s somewhere out of which to come. There’s a difference between hiding something and tending a secret. Hiding is dodging; tending a secret is incubating an evolution. Hiding gives off an unmistakable scent. It smells like self-pity, most often. Secrets, however, are not of this scent. Secrets can be right and proper, given appropriate temples & tenders. I do respect secrets fully, as I respect their telling. And you, as I, get to choose when secrets wait and when openings come.

Understand this, in Bringing Your Own Safety: safety is an aspect of relationship. It is built of Trust, which provides stable molecular structures for the verb known as Consent. As I have learned throughout countless seasons of dedicated study: Trust thrives where Respect is clear. Respect for one’s own nature, the nature of another, and all of nature.

You can trust these things here. Confidentiality, I respect. Timing, I respect. Honesty, I require. Compassion, I have in spades up every sleeve. What I fuel with my attention and care is the Creation of Consent. This is where my temple lives, so this is where we meet, where we can hone our edgework, and where we get to find out what safety feels like together.

~VGR~

 

**

Science!

The week after the public schools of Everett released the emergency slept-over children, there was an inservice day for teachers [1], and Marma was allowed to come over for a whole day (a whole day!) of no-school shenanigans. There were cookies in the works, because Mrs. Hanson had specifically two cookie sheets’ worth of time before her soaps started.

“Thank you, Marma!” Mrs. Hanson glowed as the somber child handed her a pair of oven mitts.

“You’re welcome,” murmured Marma while casting a wide eye in Glory’s direction. Glory, never one to mind the “don’t eat the ingredients” cooking rule, was squeezing the tube of blue icing she dangled over her mouth.

“Want some?” Glory mumbled through emulsifiers and food coloring.

Marma shook her head fast as the adult cried, “Ooh! Dennis! You’ve got to see what this child just did!” Dennis, now past forty and ashamed of his gummy-bears-with-chocolate-syrup days, sought a hard line on this arbitrary rule, if only to remind himself that he could now afford to supply the vehicle for those toppings so he need not pretend they were sufficient. [2]

Lucky for Glory, the only response was a muffled “Can’t look now!” coming from inside a closet, a sweater, or a combination thereof. Statistically-speaking, it was safe for Dennis to assume the invitation to “look at something Glory did” was a summons to witness some kind of metaphysical artwork or a new scientific discovery rather than something that was irrevocably despoiled, and this assumption ruled the day, at least by a wide enough margin to pass a hypothetical congress [3]. One pant leg at a time, Dennis prepared his nervous system for another day sustaining his position in an economy that upheld hastily-approximated long-since-appropriated pseudo-Mexican cuisine.

Back in the kitchen, Morning Glory had been successfully encouraged to use her grip on the icing tube to adorn a plate of cookies as she saw fit. At her request, the cookies had been made planet-shaped, that is, generally round and lumpy. She made them all blue planets, affirming the capacity for each delicious microcosmic orb to sustain life, even if that life would be eaten in full by a creature many times its size. She gave Marma the task of selecting appropriate tube nozzles for the other colors, such that realistic geographical compositions could be rendered.

Mrs. Hanson smiled indulgently at the pair, sipping coffee and devouring her one apportioned frostingless celestial body. (“But it won’t be able to host multi-cellular complex organisms!” had been the protest. “I am just fine with eating the dud planet, thank you very much,” was the reply.) Her long nails drilled distractedly on the countertop as she watched, waiting for her entertainment to change from youthful interpretations of geographical evolution via baked goods to heavily-backlit, amateurly-acted, dramatically-scored manipulation and intrigue via corporate-sponsored programming.

A timer went off. Glory and Marma looked up from their masterpieces, wondering passingly if a secret batch of additional planets was coming their way. Nope. Mrs. Hanson was already halfway out the room, calling “Okay, gotta go! Enjoy yourselves! We’ll clean up later!” as she beelined for her TV spot.

“Excellent.” Morning Glory grinned over the inert solar system. “We’ll only eat some of the planets.”

“Right.” Marma was fashioning impressive cumulo-nimbus skyscapes on one particularly active cookie atmosphere. “Some means most.”

“No, for real,” insisted Glory, amid careful erection of metamorphic chocolate mountains. “Gotta save a few for my dad.”

“Save me at least half.” Dennis said as he grabbed his coat, giving a quick squeeze to the geologist baker and an honorific nod to the dulcified meteorologist. Eyeing the gooey mess, he assured himself his request was merely parental, and that he would in no way indulge in the consumption of a saccharin mound of astronomical overkill when he returned from work tired and spent and easily swayed by the sight of food that in no way resembled tacos. “A third.”

“Bye, Dad!” Glory wheeled back to her mountains with renewed vigor, while Marma paused to check the milk provisions.

“We only have enough milk for a glass each.” Marma shook her head. “We’ll have to ration carefully.”

Ration they did. An hour later, the house was down 100% of its milk and 75% of its sanity [4]. The kids retreated to the bedroom, howling like loons, eyes shining like a disco-lit psychonaut’s dreamreel. The galactic dessert course had hurled the collective blood sugar past event horizon. The day was as good as glitterbombed.

“Make sure you wash those hands!” was the only call from adulthood as they’d scrambled up the stairs.

Hands washed, yet stained in blue blotches nonetheless, the two squealers spun around Glory’s room, taking turns seeing if they could fall into the bed without looking. This progressed into tracking the spin-fall success ratio from different points in the room, adding interfering or supporting variables, scrawling charts in Glory’s journal. (Being pelted with socks, for example, seemed to deter the spinner from the bed, whereas singing Santigold at the top of lungs from a stationary position in the room seemed to improve results dramatically.)

“Okay, so echolocation is a thing.” Glory scribbled wildly across the page while Marma carefully placed gold stars on her face to benumber achievements. “Now let’s try silent telepathy.”

Marma agreed, closing her eyes and whirling in place three times to start the round. Morning Glory sat still in the middle of the bed in the middle of the room, concentrating on calling Marma towards her with all her might. The sham-Sufi spun madly into a dizzied shriek, then leapt. Both had closed their eyes for the experiment, so their scientific findings were heralded with a loud, decisive bonking of heads as Marma flew directly into the centerpoint of Glory’s rumination.

“Ow!”

“Oaahhhhhh. Marma!” Glory rolled into a little ball while Marma found pillows in which to bury her head. “Well. That worked.” Moans turned to giggles and kicking feet. From inside the pillow asylum:

“I thought you’d keep your eyes open.”

“What would that have helped?” Glory held her forehead, squirming up next to Marma’s sanctuary. “Just woulda meant I’d watch the impending doom and probably freak out and move, then we’d have skewed results and have to do it again.”

“We have to do it again anyway, for science.” Muffled reason from beneath the pillowy refuge.

“Okay, true. But let’s let this one settle first, hey?” Morning Glory sent one hand round the bed in search of her journal. “I think we got some pretty clear first results.”

“That was the best one yet for sure!” Marma’s nose came animalling its way out of the cushioned cave, aware of safety and sustenance. “I felt like I was in a rocket launcher.”

“Ooh, yeah! Tell me your subjective awareness.” Glory began a new page and wrote “rocket launcher” along the top.

Marma came out from the pillows in full, roused by the hope that her pain served a greater purpose. “Well it felt less like I was in control, or like I even had to figure out my aim.”

“K…”

“Actually it felt like I couldn’t aim, not like before. Or like I wasn’t doing it myself.”

“Well yeah, because you weren’t.” Glory kept scribbling. “Could you feel my wiggles?”

“Uh… whaddya mean?”

“Wait, wait, that’s not good science. I’ll tell you later. Ahem. What did you feel from me?”

“Uhhh…” Marma settled back for a moment and closed her eyes. “I felt like you were spinning in me and I was sitting on the bed.”

“Really?” Morning Glory dropped her pen and grabbed Marma’s feet in excitement. An unprecedented move, since Marma preferred never to be touched without express permission. “Oh, sorry. Just, yeah, me too!”

“It’s okay.” Marma acceded. “I actually was gonna ask you to touch my feet.”

“Wait, really?”

“Yeah, they felt kinda faraway and I wanted to feel if they were still there.”

“Huh. Okay.” Glory took hold of Marma’s feet once more, with thoughtful curiosity. “You feel em?”

“Yes. Thanks.”

“Marms.” Glory’s tone was solemn, wallowing in the sweet mud of significance and maturity. “I think we turned something on. I think we’re still psychic.”

“You think so?” Marma sat up, gingerly patting her forehad. “That’s gonna take a lot more science to confirm.”

“True.” Glory shifted so she could sit cross-legged in front of her friend. “So let’s start. How bout you grab my feet too. And we’ll see what that does.”

“Okay.”

The two sat still for several moments, producing the first quiet the house had held since dawn. Mrs. Hanson snoozed on the couch downstairs. Birds tweeting on the crabtree outside were the loudest thing in the air. At last Glory spoke:

“I can feel our blood pumping.”

“Yeah me too.”

“Any psychicness?”

“No. Well, I don’t know.” Marma drew her eyebrows together.

“Were you thinking about cats?”

“Naw.” Marma let out a breath. “I was thinking about electromagnetic resonance.”

“Okay, okay, wait!” Glory wriggled. “For a minute there, I was thinking about Schrödenger’s cat! For real. That’s close, right? I just said ‘cats’ because then it was lots of cats. And rainbows.”

Marma pondered for a moment while Morning Glory took notes. “I think we need way, way, way more evidence.”

“Yeah, me too.” Glory put the book down and resumed her station at Marma’s feet. “Okay, this time let’s put our heads together.”

“Literally?” Marma winced. “Like right where they collided?”

“Exactly!” Morning Glory was resolute. “Look, no accidents, right? There’s probably psychosomatic information that is alive exactly where those tissues made contact.”

Not convinced, Marma made the ‘not convinced’ face at Glory.

“Also… there are ancient healing practices that use touch and attention to bring blood flow to injuries?”

Marma crooked an eyebrow. “We don’t want bloodflow. We want diminishment of goose-eggedness.”

“That’s the medical term, right?” Glory giggled.

“Yes.”

“Okay, so let’s gently put our heads together and direct the blood down to each other’s feet.”

“Like my blood to your feet and yours to mine?”

“No, goofy! I’ll send yours to yours and you send mine to mine.” Glory shook her head, shimmying the idea out. “The other way would be weird. And unsanitary. Probably gross.”

“Right, that’s why I asked.” Marma rolled her eyes. “Like you don’t know who I am. Sanitary. For real.”

“I think it does matter that we do it for one another, though. Otherwise it’s like spinning onto the bed alone. Less accurate. More flaily.”

“Ah. Yes, I see. Agreed.” Marma bent her forehead forward carefully, looking up through crossed eyes to see if the bumps were aligned.

“Just feel it.” Morning Glory closed her eyes. “Not like it’s hard to feel a giant bump pounding on the forehead. Feel my bump with your bump.”

This sent a wave of giggles rolling through the room, and the two were only calm enough to hold still again after throwing and recollecting the pillows several times.

“Okay. We’re going to see if the bumps have anything to tell us.”

“You know, they’re kind of like unicorn horns, where they’re at.”

“Probably not an accident. We’ve been called into our unicornity.”

“Let us learn.”

“Science.”

By the time Dennis returned that evening, he found a strangely quiet house, an empty carton of milk, a nearly-demolished tray of frostinged globes, and two children sitting together in rapt meditation.

Whatever the world was coming to, it included this nonsensical equation.

He sat down next to the sleeping babysitter, turned off the muted television, and licked the swirling atmosphere off one blue planet. Not bad, thought he. Not bad at all.

 

-**

1. One would hope, after all the mayhem, the “inservice” consisted of full-service massage, naps, and take-out, rather than the usual paperwork, hard chairs, and hotdishes. Just sayin.

2. For the record, in Dennis’ well-trod cookbook: Bread, vehicle for butter. Potato, vehicle for butter. Muffin, vehicle for butter. Corn, vehicle for butter. I think we see the pattern here. Food for thought.

3. The internal statistics monitor did not, however, adhere to the bogus-as-fuck standards of the American electoral college. Black folks having been specifically underserved by that invention, Dennis had avoided the implant of said highly-skewed twistings of presumed rational logic. White folks: please continue deconditioning work, Vol. 3, Chapters 7-15.

4. 95, if you include the input from the television.