His Mother's Cats
Student Almost six feet tall and lithe, Oedipus couldn't read, couldn't study, had difficulty doing anything he was supposed to do. He was a student whose mind had deserted him. Text before him, he stared beyond the purple-stained shutters at wisteria vines bare of flowers. The words were smooth on the page, a smoothness he tested again and again with the tip of his index finger, letting the other long fingers join in. A government-issued textbook, it would be torn into small pieces as soon as he'd taken the exam in June. For hours, he sat at the desk, the length of him bent mid-spine under the burden of ennui and habit, a pencil between his fingers making random marks in the air.
Cats Swarm In his house, cats swarm. He can't move without cats dodging his feet or jumping toward them, his feet like large mice. "Their breath stinks; how can I bring someone here?" "The cats eat the flies," she says. His mother's painted purple toes stick out of purple string sandals. He wants to smoke but doesn't have any cigarettes. Walks to the kiosk, buys a new Asterix and a pack of Marlboros. At home, she makes him an omelette. He eats half of it and pushes the rest onto the floor. Cats pounce. When his father finally comes back, the house goes dark. He stays up waiting to hear their noise but it never comes.
Smoking Mother cats giving birth to babies on the bathroom floor, in the kitchen beneath the oven, or a bloody wet mess on his pillow. Kittens crawl against him all night long, not exactly waking him up, but there, breathing at his knees or stuck in an armpit through the night. When his father's gone for good, Oedipus realizes two things: a mother isn't a wife and, his is crazy. The house stinks of cat. He douses himself in aftershave from a blue bottle. "Ma, we need to get rid of them." She smirks; he lights a cigarette with a white Bic. "Smoking and cats are not the same thing." She says it slowly, wisely, the way she often speaks now that his father, her husband is gone. For a week, he smokes in his room, leisurely, with the window cracked, stroking the gray male, the only one he can stand, the cat he's known his entire life.
Summer He'd always liked summer best. It was summer when the cat ran into the narrow tree-lined street outside their purple-trimmed house and a car slammed into its sleek gray head. He didn't see it, only heard from others that it was red and shiny, a car he might have liked to own himself, some day. He imagined the owner, someone like himself, would have been sorry to know he'd hit a cat that held together a boy's world. He held the cat in both arms against his chest. One move and the cat—mangled, maimed—would be gone, off the table, across the slippery linoleum, and back out into the early morning traffic. He watched the needle go beyond his fur, felt it catch against flesh, the slight jump, and then the drug worked very quickly on the small body. The elasticity left it. Limp, small and shrunken, just a curve of warm, dampish fur. He put it down on the table and it stayed. Like a handmuff or something a woman would put against her throat for warmth. Death hadn't come; rather, life had gone and there was no urging it back. His once-lively cat was useless, a thing. He took the cat home in a beach towel, buried the furry body (heavier than before but also smaller) beneath a pomegranate tree. Hoped it would bear fruit. Promised himself that if it did, he'd eat the bitter seeds.
Running He no longer smoked—a cigarette in his hand made him miss the feel of pulse and fur. He ran with the dog and running, followed through back alleys, behind the tipping minaret to the harbor. He missed his father, would have done anything to see him coming around the corner. But he had the dog: she took him places he'd never been. Curtains Oedipus liked it when the dog ran down the alley to a building on the street parallel to theirs. When the woman was home, gauzy white curtains billowed from the window. He passed slowly, knew the dogs were together. Sometimes he could see her moving behind the curtains; he heard her talking to someone he couldn't see. He waited for the high-pitched howl that let him know the dogs were stuck. You were supposed to scare the dogs apart but he preferred to stand nearby and inspect. Maybe he would be a scientist. Or a vet. A journalist. Or a simple playboy. His father's manic flute made fragile things tremble and eventually crack. Why did she consent to share her bed with him? He arrived, flute in its case, dark hair receding rapidly—each weekend he looked different. Almost as if he weren't Oedipus' father but someone else, his mother's new boyfriend. It was sick when they sat down together at the table, set with bamboo placemats that gathered crumbs between the sticks, and ate a hearty meal. Oedipus and his father talked soccer scores while she, the mother but no longer the wife, stirred something to completion on the stove. Everyone ate with vigor.
Gypsies He followed the dog through the streets, spied on what he thought were prostitutes in pink-colored buildings by the harbor. He walked past the gypsy camp before and after school. Stole money from his mother to buy a louder alarm clock, and left the house on weekdays before she was awake. Weekends, he passed through the market where farmers sold brighter-looking fruit and vegetables at higher prices than the ones in town. There were gypsies too, seated behind high piles of women's underwear, small mountains of cotton and nylon in every color. He liked the gold teeth and shining black eyes, found their beautiful women more beautiful than others. They said gypsies stole blond babies. He wasn't a baby but his hair, even at fifteen, was still blond.
Dogs' Tails He thought about the way dogs' tails traced shapes in the air.
Wind Instruments He let himself do the thing only when the dogs stuck. That was rare; he was crazy with it every day. Some days it reached his chest, cut off his breathing, made his heart pitch a scattered beat. One day, while watching the stuck dogs, his eyes stopped functioning properly. He felt blind. His father drifted through the house without warning, drifted out again. Just a wind. He heard the scruffy romping fury of the neighborhood dogs from a mile away. His mother in her bed alone. Purple bed, purple toenails, cold purple feet. At the movies, they sat on opposites sides. He didn't want her to see him watching the movie and, for that matter, he didn't want to watch her watching it. Why was one of the dogs always like that, the perfect tube of glistening red out in the air?
Weight "Even when I eat this much," (his mother showed him with thumb and forefinger) "I gain rather than lose. I'd have to stop eating entirely just to stay the way I am." "Are you pregnant?" "If I am," she said, "the baby inside me is ten years old." He tried not to show his shock.
Smell His sense of smell became so powerful that he could hardly live in the house: everywhere, the smell of shit. Oedipus stopped eating her food. Lived on saltines and chocolate wafers for a week. He knew he should have been building up his muscles, but he liked giving up something, didn't mind being less.
Mummies Their bodies side by side? Like mummies?
Blind He wanted what they had, but knew he'd never be a dog. When they got stuck behind the building, he kept the dogs in one line of vision and the gauzy curtain in another. He'd thought of sticking it into them. The neighborhood dogs came in the afternoons. Some part of the sun's light reached him through the blindness. The dogs surrounded him and took him down. The heady draw of nicotine was a past life.
Eating After running with the dogs, he smelled it on himself. Sitting at the table, he located the food with his hands, his mouth. The odor of his canine body filled his nose. Ashamed, he ate wildly, using his fingers, then licked the plate to a smooth perfection. By then, he was mostly dog.
Blood He followed the dogs like a tail for days, until they were following him. Regular as the sea, the swish of his blood kept him in one place, the cats circling. Blood, the only sound worth listening to. But the price of sound was a diminishment of scent. He ate whatever she put on the table, locating it with his hands, bringing it to his face. His mother thought it was the gray cat, which she'd let out by mistake. Blaming herself, the way mothers do. The only thing he missed: shooting baskets with a new, pumped-up ball. The satisfaction of hand-to-eye.
How He knew why it had happened, but not how. Only knowing how would reverse the spell. He ate with his hands or a spoon. Spilling, he heard the displeasure in her breath. She walked him to school, picked him up, read his lessons to him all afternoon and into the evening. The cats circled, the TV stayed off until, exhausted by another sightless day, he found his way to bed. He heard her in the other room, TV low but not as low as it had been the week before. She was beginning to break.
Visions In the dark behind his eyes, he saw pictures. Movies flowed. People he'd never met kaleidoscoped into his mother's purple house, the neighboring church with its gold dome, the blue-and-white school across the street. He rode a bicycle in and out amongst the children, played basketball on a black-top, unmarked court. He visited the gypsies in their encampment and the women in their pink house. Things were released in him, away from the light. He talked its electricity in school—and heard the click of silence before their automatic laughter. His mother tried to coax him from the dark with piles of fried potatoes under a handful of melting cheese, mussels, a steak he picked up in his hands. Cats walked the grape trellis to the high kitchen window, jumped past the sink to land on the table. His mother's shouting brought him back to himself, seated on a chair, grease running down his face. His father's voice was arrogant, arranged: "So you think you want to be a vet?"
Hearing His Mother's Heart She roamed the house in the dead of night, moved by touch, cats brushing against her naked ankles. With no husband, she shut the house against the night, held in the darkness. One night, Oedipus tricked her, turning on the small lamp beside his bed. He heard the pause of her slipper-shod step on bare marble. Then he heard her heart move faster in hope, until she got the joke, returned to her room, her narrow bed. Even when his father was in town, he never heard anything but sleep coming from there. She touched him: hair, shoulders, hands, calves. Smoothed his eyebrows, fingered his cuticles, his nails. Steered clear of certain parts that, for the absence of touch, seemed dark. Only the dogs and the ladies in the pink house attended to those parts of him. Sated with motherly fingers, his brows, cheeks, the backs of his hands were colorful. He thought the blindness would abandon him if she'd loosen herself from the house, walk into the street and find someone. "The world is full of people," he wanted to say. "It must be so easy to match the lit-up parts. Aren't we all the same?" She'd abandoned herself. In the dark, her parts didn't shine. He had to find a girl his height, his age—a pretty girl with blond hair and breasts just right for his hands. Everything would go out of the world when he opened his eyes on the girl. The darkness would pour away.
Mother and Son They lived together in a three-room house, chaste mother and periodically blind son, cats streaming in a smelly wave until the afternoon she came home lugging four gallons of milk and the news that a man several houses up had chopped off his mother's head and boiled it in an iron pot. He gave up on the dogs, the gypsies, the red light ladies, including the fat motherly madam who insisted on testing the firmness of his penis each time he went through the misty red-tinted light he couldn't see but somehow comprehended. His eyesight improved overnight.
Anne Germanacos' work has appeared recently in Santa Monica Review, Descant, Quarterly West, Blackbird, Salamander, Florida Review, Pindeldyboz, Agni-online and many others. She lives in San Francisco and on Crete.
© 2008 prickofthespindle.com |
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