A Cat With a Concussion

The cat with a concussion runs through the Snipers Market, formerly the Flower Market. She can no longer do the things she loved to do. She cannot toy with a dictator's laptop mouse, mischievously. This cat with pure white fur, who has been blinded and deafened by a bomb falling through the roof of a room where she had been pleasantly sunning by a window, dashes madly now into walls and the legs of running children fleeing other explosions. The bullet that enters her brain had a prayer scratched on its shell by a young man who died Tuesday. The child soldier who shoots the cat is severely reprimanded for wasting a bullet. This stern rebuke comes from another child soldier who had been one school grade above him a few months ago.

Maybe

Maybe you are strong and already know your way. But I have put these magic gloves on the street for you to find. Just in case. They are not mine. Actually, they are not "gloves." They are mittens. They are a child's mittens. I figure you will find them since you are a creature of wandering. Although this is an empty street with no houses and only trees are watching here. The symmetrical spiderweb patterns with the eyes on them is for you to appreciate the starkness of such childish beauty. Childish beauty, like what quantum mechanics is doing down under the day. All day today.  Didn't you fall in love in childish beauty, with it all your life?  I have placed them, the foundlings, as they would appear in the "natural world," i.e. left on the left, right at right. Although the universe has other symmetries. They are not to keep you warm, but they might. It is bald winter, after all. You may have to stretch them to fit your hands. As you are not a child, except in matters of total darkness. You are totally dark. So you stumble towards a woman's body. Another one then. In a closet you take her. The women's bodies are as illuminated, lit up, x-rayed. They have dark grammar. You should pick up the mittens. The gloves. Call them gloves if you must. You are on your way there. To the place where there are no children. Where the closets are no longer filled with women facing into darkness, but actual brooms and true darkness.


--after a photograph by Atsushi Ito