From 6/20/10

Our enemies, the lower creodonts, were ruled by a god whose anal secretions killed clans older than ours. Our god, the cave-bear, battled this creodont, and drove the creodont and his clans into the underworld, among granite and the geodes and veins of marble, far below the pits that hold our ochred bones.

**

A house cat befriended a chipmunk who’d only begun a nut store such as his family had done. His family members had dispersed or vanished as the baby had become the adult. There were for chipmunks as for squirrels no transitional adolescent years, only material dependency, then adulthood and age.

“Let’s check out that bole above that toppled tree there—you go first” the housecat spryly said.

But the chipmunk had never witnessed the fear in the eye of the chipmunk seeking escape from the clutches of the feral cat racing after it, nor the unexpected dilation of the eye of the member of his species, nor his species’ inability to escape from the racing cat as it grabbed the terrified rodent in its jaw, severing its backbone, elastic and half-coiled like a spring beneath the chipmunk’s stripes. Innocently the chipmunk leapt upon the tree-bole. His eyes jumped from one scene to another, from shrubs to spiders who dangled from the tops of branches to caterpillars crawling on the leaves, chewing holes into them. And in the background, from that negative space of human life, came laughs and shouts and mechanical noises that sounded like the diminished noises of thunder, novel sounds, from metallic creatures of which he was barely aware, wrinkled bipedal creatures entering the belly and leaving the bellies of these other creatures that spewed small rainclouds as they made persistent muted thundering sounds, rainclouds that smelled of fires almost. His eye darted about in the febrile electrically quickened manner of his kind.

The housecat twitched its tail below the toppled tree on which the chipmunk leaped. But through its paws, ears and feelers, it sensed the movements of moles and field mice beneath, and began to scratch the ground, distracted from the creature it hadn’t made up its mind about, bored by the mush its master indifferently spooned daily upon a chipped and unwashed enameled dish.

**

“Cuff her if dinner ain’t ready, that’s what I’d do” the jailbird-co-worker lazily allowed to the other jailbird.

“Just a cuff” he repeated, swiping his hand. You couldn’t see his eyes directly under the faded denim dude-cap.

When he’d ask for a little sip from my Coke can at every break, I’d agree reluctantly because I knew he was trouble, and whether he carried a knife there was no telling. When he approached someone he shuffled slowly, never looking them in the eye, his eyes concealed beneath his dude-cap’s bill. Returning to prison for assault or for something worse seemed always possible. During the sorely needed break I began to sit at other places. But I imagined that after work he’d follow me with that same very slow but determined shuffle, right and then left, his face never showing itself beneath that beaten up 1970s denim cap. As a sign of anger and displeasure, he’d swallow his Adam’s-apple, tighten the muscles of his throat.

When the subject of conversation with his jailbird friend wasn’t beating up women according to degree and rightful occasion, it was about getting women, and which seamstress was worthy of attention. Lucy, a younger college drop-out from Long Island, was the apple of their eyes..