I’ll describe the house to you first.
You’ll like that, won’t you?
Think of a place where the plants are free to grow wild. Where the climate gives them all the rain they need—these plants are plants of the woods and they do just fine in the cloudy climes of upstate New York or the Northwestern United States. The plants grow wild around this oddly shaped brick house. The mortar is dirty and crumbles.
I lived there once.
There are broken pavings leading up to the wood stairs.When you step up, the wood creaks; that is what it was meant to do. A grand old wooden front door, so old and neglected it seems fragile, with a handle and keyhole.
You can peer in through the keyhole
(peer in down my throat)
you can see the flicker of lights.
It isn’t good enough that you should want to live here. My boy fled very quickly.
Being a fixer isn’t always a workable solution. (It isn’t good enough you want to take me by the hand)
Someone was locked in the attic for a long time, hiding there. Someone was a little black cat.
Someone was the echo of someone else
This place smelled of fear and being trapped. A small space, step only on the beams and you might keep from breaking through the roof. You can see where they live in the insulation. You can. But these holes are so deep and black it is impossible to reach far enough in.
But I digress. Should I describe some action. Something that happened there?
Would you like that? Is that how it is done? Is that how I can open the door, without leaping hither and yon into disjointed spaces.
They all connect. The spaces, I mean. At least I think they do, although sometimes, when I was in the house, I’d be by the attic, cleaning up the refuse from the creatures hiding and then, without knowing I’d done it, I’d be outside by the back door, trying to fit myself under the overhang to keep from the rain.
Bonnie is a fine name. She was pretty too, if that makes you feel better. Bonnie lived in the house with two friends. They divided the rooms so each had her own. Bonnie lived on the uppermost floor, with her own bathroom and a second little room.
The blood under the wrist, a faint pulse in the paw.
It was on that floor that the door to the attic was. Bonnie loved her little black cat, Chiquita. This little black cat learned something about the attic because she fit inside.
She fit like a cat, perfectly tucked.
And then she was gone. To fit inside means you cannot be seen from any other angle.
(I’ve never fit inside)
The little black cat vanished. Holed up–whole up, so to speak.
Brick by brick, like in that old Poe story.
Although she wasn’t really, it was just my imagination. It was just the smell of old rotten cat food and the broken trap. It was the fact that my boy had run and I’d tried to make the house something that I could inhabit. Look down my throat, the ghosts parade to and fro. You’d like the house, wouldn’t you. And what about the truth?
All I asked for was a little intercession.
Is this true? The cat exists in the interstices between me and you. The cat intercedes in the interstices–she holds the dark at bay. This particular cat held it at bay because she had an attachment to the girl, to Bonnie.
(But not to me)
And here is the question: If the cat intercedes for Bonnie, and I intercede for you, who, if anyone, intercedes for the cat?
Who intercedes for me?
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