Tartaned Dog

Tartan

The muse rushes in at 4 am singing of the goddess of gravity. Go away, I’m sleeping. “No. Write this down.” At least let me pee first, start the coffee. “No.” She says, with the utmost urgency, “write this down! Naked! Now!” Then purrs softly in my ear, tickling me with her muse-down fur, “what’s a little cold between forever and forgotten.”

That’s how she’s done me since I rubbed that genie’s lamp a year ago, wishing I could write a book. She says, “yes, make it one with delicious hurts.” Before she shot up the drapes with a feral cry for recipes.

I’d say it started when I had the notion to write these stories for my children. A trifling of a memoir. Just a typical tome of hey kids, this happened, then this happened. But in that slow process, my wife twisted my arm to try just one more of those tedious writing classes, oh alright. But I grew up with this platitude scribbled on a poster board - “when the student is ready, the Teacher appears.” Of course, once I’d left Neverland the placard gathered webs in the attic.

Lo, ta-da! There She was, She taught the creative writing class. Who knew? For sure, sure enough, first class, the Teacher made me cry. Not like in kindergarten so far away from home at that little red fire schoolhouse. But like a loving angel singing returns from my land of forever Mondays. “Welcome home,” she said. No pressure.

I saw a seer once, I was talked into seeing, who said amongst cheesy bits, “I see a cat in your future…” And I drove an hour away before I realized she’d sent me home with her excess cat. Fulfilling the vaticination.

It was like that. My creative writing Teacher sending me home with a kitten of the spirit world. A muse, perhaps, who sleeps when I want to pet it and comes to life at 4 am. Throwing Lego Blocks of ‘what ifs’ about the room. Flushing choice in the matter before I’ve had my ablutions. Daily. For all this year. I’m really more of a dog person.

I tried to go back to sleep, tried not to think of the book, and the muse sighs, “He hit the ground running like a pretzeled gazelle.” Of course he would. If he did. There’s no surprise there worth getting up for. However, as I rolled over to my nightstand to take a sip of water, the muse unzipped a baggie of guppies into the glass and a flood of thoughts swam off the walls at 4 am. As if, “What if a gazelle got caught in a revolving door, at Macy’s on Christmas eve, backs up any further possibilities from entering or leaving until you get up and write this down,” created its own manifestation. Forget sleep.

So I turn on the light. Maybe I will write a bit of those half-dream whispers I heard. About spirits and magical Teachers. Who disciplined this child-boy, pushed me from a broken plane, softly, supporting, suggesting, “Flap your wings, you can fly.” Even as the goddess of gravity reaches up daring I try.

So, I take more classes, learn, write. Because I can no longer not. And I am more than okay with that. Because gods and goddesses and spirits do all the work while I sleep, and I get all the credit. Translation by a fumbling scribe. Surprise.

Teacher said, write about writing, so that when we get to this story we are grounded in context. Otherwise, we just whiz right through it. As she’s running the faucet at the sink filling a container for the day’s lesson. Sounds like a trickling brook. And at that, kitty-muse climbed right up my leg, drawing blood of, ‘Ohh, oh, what if…what if…whizzz?”

Now I’m sitting in the Teacher’s class, trying to keep up with all them shadows moving seamlessly through dimensions. And lo, the prompt is ‘water.’ With a glass fullen from a pristine pitcher in front of me. Write something. More precisely, just write. And after more than a page of manic scrawling, a misshapen seed pearl appears,

“A sip he had owned in a previous incarnation and felt it was still rightly his. As much as anyone’s.”.

It’s what came out exactly as the Teacher had implored, ‘write until you surprise yourself.’ Scribble. The water I sip in class, as per the prompt, the water that becomes me, was once in your pedigree. Your lineage. Your inheritance. Was once a part of your grandmother’s grandfather’s blood. And bone perhaps. Cycling. I am you as you are me. The same sip has passed through us for generations. Surprise.

The next prompt saying, look through the water and write everything you know about anger. About mercy. Crap! Did not see that coming. Fascinating process. I’ll think on that. But right now I got to see a man about a dog. Our teacher had said clearly once, more than once; every scene needs a desire and an obstacle – even if the desire is simply the protagonist needs to pee.

We had a break in class, and I’d sipped too much water, so I whizzed up to the main building to find a bathroom, avoid the lines. Weather’s warming. What do I know about anger? It’s a drug to me. A lesson in waiting, if I can hold it away from clawing my face long enough. I hope no one’s in the men’s room.

Mercifully it’s empty. The light’s off. It’s not one of those automatic ones either so I fumble in the pitch dark to find the switch. Fluorescence bathes and bounces the porcelain room freed by my touch. A mercy to the walls. I need to make water, as my grandmother would say. What an odd euphemism. This water was once in my brain. Now I’m peeing thoughts. Fixing to anyways. Truly, stream of consciousness.

My mind is half back in class as I cross the few steps to my stall. Something black moves in the corner of my eye. I’m focused elsewhere, my filters dismiss it as a common hallucination, an eyeball flicker. An annoyance of…what the fuck! Something biggish and coal black and furry, yeah got all that in a millisecond. Something alive in the sink rises up, rising towards me.

I was calm. Initially anyway. In that first millisecond where my filters shut off and the discernment lobe kicked in. Then I was in mid-air, having kicked myself two feet backward by reflex. By the time I had landed, my amygdala had determined it was in fact a passive furry dog and thus kicked the next thoughts upstairs to the (cough) rational mind. Which wanted no part of such nonsense. I need to pee.

The dog. Black. A terrier mix of some kind, I don’t know. Small. Wearing, of course, why not, a red tartan sweater. Probably of your grandmother’s clan. Hey, it’s my story. At least partially. Maybe it’s a sip of your grandfather’s tale. This cute cuddly dog was looking at me with its puppy eyes pleading for answers.

Which honestly, made two of us. Because the black thing in the sink and the tartan, didn’t make any sense. I distinctly heard the muse pour a glass of ‘what if’ and thought for a moment it was the muse manifested in the sink trying its damnedest to look like a real dog and barely, if I’m being generous, pulling it off. Maybe she’s making kitty amends for waking me up so early each day. For not coming when I call her. Trying her hand now at being a more subservient animal.

I try half-committed, “Here boy, c’mon boy.” The silly black mass looked at me like a fuzzy thing that hadn’t quite composited into our three-dimensional world yet from wherever it had traveled. The tartan a nice AI touch-up. I momentarily relaxed. Thought, there’s a story here.

In a ‘seeking first to comfort’ sort of thing, I was about to pat the animal and realized it just may be a trap. That’s a problem when you write too much about gods and fantasy spirits and then one kinda shows up in the real. Do you pet it? It might just take your arm off and suck you through the mirror. I yanked my hand away mid stride. I got to pee dog. Sit.

Except I can’t make water when something’s staring at me intently. An affliction of being the youngest child. I just made that up. Still. Cute dog of mystery now becomes damned dog. Look away Toto. I don’t think this is happening. On several levels.

I’ll skip ahead. In exiting, I turned the light back off leaving the room as I’d found it. The pleading animal again in the dark. And still in the sink. As I was passing the new secretary’s office, I felt I needed to step forward and make absolutely sure they knew. Maybe an elderly patron, a distracted artist, a child’s ‘I promise Mommy, I’ll take care of him’, had inadvertently had a moment’s lapse. Forgot their pet. Maybe, it’s been there for days.

I had to wait a spell till she got off the phone. “Um, excuse me. Um. I just wanted to be positively sure you knew there was a dog in the sink in the men’s room in the dark.”

She looked at me like I was a fool. Which I half expected, though I thought I was holding the aces. “Oh. He’s just in time out.” Like, like that was an answer. I folded.

She said something about the dark so he wouldn’t jump down. Or if the lights on he thinks time out’s over. Which explains little but the dog’s questioning eyes to me, a complete stranger. Begging for a mercy I don’t own. While judging me for not washing my hands.

I believe in signs. Some stories write themselves, and some try to manifest themselves. Making no sense, as if dreaming. Random fragments of prompts and prods and a dash of magic from another realm. The Teacher said write about writing, so that when we land in writing class, we’ll be grounded in context. Wee late for that.

Prompts; water, anger, mercy. Props; tartaned dog in sink. Prods; connect the dots, scribble.

Sixty percent of the dog is water. The sink is appropriate for one of so much water. One who has angered the goddess in the other room who was working, the two of them together. Right up until the dog took a sip of the water in their cup. Her cup, she claims. But that water in the cup had once been a part of each of them in previous incarnations.

The larger animal, the one with a brain larger than a walnut, has embraced the acrid vinegar anger and punished her worshipper, the ersatz dog. Chained him to the dark in a basin of mirrors. Put mercy under a stack of papers on her desk.

Who owns this mercy. Who owns this water. Whose clan is this. Scribble. Surprise yourself.

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“Crease by crease he unfolded it, until at last there came to view eight small misshapen seed pearls, as ugly and gray as little ulcers, flattened and almost valueless.” – John Steinbech, The Pearl