The mouse is dead. Neck snapped in a sudden crunch of steel and pine. Warm flurry of brown, now stilled, cold in a maroon pool of blood, dime-sized. What once brought screams late at night now brings a small twinge of guilt and sorrow, but not too much, since there are more mice where that one came from and gestation is only twenty days.
The graveyard shivers August 11, 2008
Wet world, slick with rain. A blowing of leaves ripples puddles. The graveyard shivers in the cold. Squirrels scurry for cover, but I remain seated on the wooden bench tented beneath my funereal umbrella, black and cheerless. An ethereal chorus issues forth from St. Peter’s Episcopal church that houses these marble slabs. The sky flashes and roars. Philadelphians impatiently honk their horns on the surrounding streets, while I remain silent, listening, smiling my secret smile, enjoying the gray.
Quietly creeping August 7, 2008
Melancholy sometimes creeps quietly as the mouse that haunts my kitchen. I saw her tiptoeing across the hardwood floorboards toward her backdoor hole behind the radiator. I was rocking in the tangerine easy chair, sipping on a freshly brewed cup of jasmine tea, transparent caramel sweet and fragrant. The mouse crept out; melancholy crept in. It came in waves of wind – the shaded breeze from the courtyard gently rattled the venetians and me along with them.
