She did her day like any day before it, squeezed the juice out of the whole orange. She was a benevolent juicer. And a clear and present danger to rinds, husks, sheaths, shells, and exoskeletons. Snakes slithered away from her grasping hands, in the tall grasses of her her unmowed back summer yard. Turtles sped away. Turtles!
She had done her day. She had chased the sun over the horizon. It started like any day before it. A dark room. Predawn. A box fan sucking cool air, and spitting it, into her face. A goosedown blanket, tossing feathers into the breeze. Like some retentive golfer, worried any ever slight change in the direction of the wind might add a hook to his drive, and a stroke to his score. One of those night lights you can buy for five bucks at Rite Aid, splashing a spotlight image of fish in water, on the ceiling.
Featuring prominently: the awful sound of her prana, facedown in her pillow, half-suffocated by the weight of her own head. And by virtue of relentless dreams in which she was being chased by a clock with great arms and long legs. As the arms windmilled around the face of this clock chasing her, the time seemed to age her, in this recurring nightmare, and before she woke, breathless from her mouth in the pillow, she was an old woman losing ground to the malevolent clock behind her.
So she cried out, startled, then, upon realizing she was in a soft bed with a soft light of fish splashed above her, and a boxfan of fresh air blowing into her face; she snarled and grunted, and turned to her side. So to Live! my friends So to Live! She was and is and will always be a survivor, like that. Saves herself, from herself, every predawn morning. Wow.
Near dawn, she hunted down the tv and chose a special treat from among a sparse channel universe. There would be extra-special commercials with former NFL legends touting catheters for men. Former talk show hosts touting blenders. The Fonze, touting reverse mortgages. Alex Trebeck, hawking life insurance. Wow.
In between the deafening roar of former TV-icons gone dollar signs, she got drool relief from the wonderful world of cold cases, put in the DNA microwave and come out piping hot. She was only one of denizens of global tv junkies and insomniacs who had fallen completely head over heels for the soothing voice of Mr. Bill Kurtis from Chicago.
Aside: She was no ordinary listener. She had once directed courier traffic to Mr. Kurtis' very office on the near north, arts-intensified, hollywood central of Chicago, Illinois. True! Thus was her tenuous, personal connection to that lullaby soft voice, which helped invigorate, relegated files from the eighties. She neither knew nor cared to know anything about his legend, how he exposed Agent Orange, among other things. In her mind, TV has bombed the hell out of Vietnam, and she was sick of it. She wasn't even born in the sixties, yet she had watched so many war stories, she felt like she had fought in Vietnam. She even considered naming her three cats, Ho, Chi, and Minh.
Nudging the darkness back into some light. That's what made the difference in her days which were all almost the same. Being just like Bill Kurtis. Staring at death, with a benevolent kinda gaze. The kind she would have between her and her newborn, if she ever gave birth, again. The kids she had already created, were trying to destroy her happiness, she thought. She preferred to think on other things. Nudging the darkness into light. Having survived herself at dawn, facedown on the pillow, she could relate to the victims of darkness...in the most tenuous of fashions.
Aside: Not to mention her other glorified attribute: she was a hot-blooded, one part Irish, one part Icelandic, lightning rod for truth! Any personal description of her, risked undermining her exceptional aura. Only her television set cast a brighter light, than herself. Oh, and her credit was good (at the food bank).
Katya Mills, 08/13
