Everyone is nervous, the dog included. Whining and clawing at the door, pacing. I started biting my nails again, probably years since I last did that. But on a cloudy morning how the cherry blossoms brightened and the bushes and trees popped as if they’d just been painted. Birds, frogs, an owl even. The loop of daily patterns: the kind of repetition that can feel soothing at first but soon drives you mad. Bolero, the sound of Ravel’s mind unraveling. The same build-up here, offering no resolution.

Boy even the smallest wound looks gnarly when the blood blackens and dries like that. The butcher’s knife slipped off the edge of an onion and into my fingertip and somehow just the idea of my blood on the cutting board seemed to freak everyone out, for fear I was infected. No one ever moved so fast for me, for anything. Get a band-aid, here: wash it out.

Darkly compelled to howl, the dog howled. The cat began to buckle as if she’d get sick and the dog moved in like a catcher’s mitt to snatch it up. There was no trace of anything, only the sound of claws and tongues followed by another newfound silence. And us looking out the window at the sun coming through the trees.

Let me just fall asleep like this, while the sun is setting on a Monday in late April and it’s barely 8. To the sound of tenor saxophones and the birds singing, a time before all this.

Categories: microblogging, prose, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, Memoir, mindfulness, pacific northwest, prose, William Pearse writer