Four o'clock morning

A four o'clock morning. But it was a straight five-hour sleep. Funny, when I don't leave food out on the patio, I tend to get these good, extended sleeps. I went to put some food out, but they were anxious to come inside for a while, and I am always happy to have them indoors. I tried to get another couple of hours of sleep but gave up at about five. I think I need to accept these irregular hours, along with the cat naps that come with them. It seems to be the way that my life is working out. And the cats have since gone back outside.

Russia and the West

Roger Cohen has a nice encapsulation of the dispute over Crimea and the revival of the Cold War, which is not going to just go away. At least the war on terror seems to be running very low. The world is a dark enough place as it is, even if you do not count the plutocratic class war. I guess Hobbes really was right and life is war.

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The Natural World

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Whitey

God, that stranger cat -Whitey we will call her - is dozing on top of the hood of Pop’s car. She looks so pathetic. I have been playing hard on the food, not leaving any outside. I am feeling bad about that, but I also do not want to risk giving rise to another cat colony. Of course, I don’t even know if this cat is a female, but I am giving some weight to my bad luck.

Should I go chase it off, in the interest of discouraging any pointless hope that she is probably harboring? Nah, I don’t feel like wasting any energy on playing the role of the mean clown. But I’m not leaving any food out. It is a hard world when you are homeless, but I myself may have to suffer that lot pretty soon. I cannot even save myself.

Nina Zero

This is our second excerpt from the interrogation and torture scene with Frick and Frack. Eversz lets his heroine truly suffer, and it actually does make her stronger. Though, he perhaps necessarily restrains the brutality from reaching sickening levels. It is a noir story, but it is still basically a happy one, and Nina is a winner in life’s rotten, dirty game. It is popular, escapist fiction. There are no burned nipples or genitalia.

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Frack pried my mouth open, stuffed the gag down my throat, tied it in place with the strip of cloth. It was like he was doing it to somebody else. I watched it all from a perch in the corner of the room. If he thought that was me hurting, that was me crying, he was wrong. That wasn’t me. He didn’t have any idea I was watching him from up there, near the ceiling. He thought I was still in my body. He knelt in front of me. A pack of wooden matches came out of his pocket, then a cigarette. The bright ripping sound of sulfur flared out. My eyes tracked the fire as it ignited the tobacco and left the tip. He touched the match to the wisps of hair hanging from my forehead. They went up in flame. I squirmed and bucked. He grabbed my hair to stop me moving, hovered the coal of his cigarette a quarter inch away from the inside of my wrist. The skin smoldered and burned. He stabbed out the coal in my flesh, tossed the butt to the floor. He lit a second cigarette and smoked for a while, watched me, crushed the second cigarette out a little higher up my arm. He smoked half a pack that way.

I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

The scars aren’t so bad. It’s not like I’m horribly disfigured or anything. Like most scars, with a little cosmetics, nobody notices. If I wear a long-sleeved shirt with a high collar, nobody even has to know the scars are there. See, nothing wrong with me. Good as new. The scars will shrink and fade, blend with the slow ruin of my skin. Maybe in twenty years or so, the traces will vanish from my flesh, until all that remains is the lingering memory of pain.

-- “Shooting Elvis” by Robert M. Eversz

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