Abestia

 6:30 am.

Nana asks me to see whether my grandfather would like some banana pancakes. Sure.  I follow the narrow staircase down to the basement. The pale yellow light is as eerie as ever, reminding me of each time I’d reluctantly go down to play “scary in the dark,” our family’s twisted version of hide-and-go-seek.  I used to sit under mom’s empty horse saddle next to the bookshelves, desperately wishing for my cousins to come find me already so that I wouldn’t have to share the shadows with whatever monsters were hidden there.  Different game today.  Feels the same though. Wishing for some light, for someone to come find us here.   

I return upstairs to tell her that I didn’t see him. 

“Oh,” Nana says.  “He must have already left. I guess the dead don’t eat anyways, huh.”

 I shrugged. What do I know?  Probably not.  

 “Well, he didn’t eat the dinner you made him last night.  You should at least eat yours though,” I reply.  She’s become a breathing skeleton herself, just skin and bones.  But she doesn’t have any energy to digest food, as she chases her racing thoughts. “Zombies come to feast on your mind…” plays in my head as I listen to her ponder the needs of the dead.  Do the dead need money when they go out?  Do they need sleep?  How do the dead open doors, do they need keys, or do they just walk through walls?  She barricades herself in her bedroom, furniture pressed against each door. (As I’m writing these words, I suddenly realize that I’m actually staring at her name, written in huge block letters above a bookstore: BARBARA.  I wonder, should I be home now?  Protecting her from ghosts?  Keeping her company as she meets her ghosts?) 

But I leave her, locked in her room, alone in the sense of responsibility for all that has happened.  I’ve gotta go milk the goats… 

7:21 am.

The sun rises behind downtown, showering the city in yellow light through rain clouds, as I drive across the Golden Gate. I pull over before I reach the tunnel into Sausalito and call you.  Luckily, it goes straight to voicemail, so I avoid the failure of trying to share this image over the phone. I hang up and lean against the little telescopes for tourists that cost 50 cents to use.  I don’t need them, as the fog rolls the sunrise right on by in front of my face, turning the entire San Francisco bay pink.    

8:15 am.

I find Stella in her usual position.  Her head jammed into the corner of the barn, horns touching the walls.  At my voice, her ears perk up and she tilts her head to look at me with crazy goat eyes, divided in half by those strange horizontal pupils. Sometimes I find myself blankly staring into space and remind myself of her.  It is disturbing to remind yourself of a goat.  She turns toward me and pushes her front half into my lap, causing me to fall into the hay.  Okay, I’ll hang out for a while.   

Stella has caprine arthritis encephalitis, a common goat disease that affects the nervous system.  Sometimes it manifests in arthritic joints.  Sometimes in dementia.  Supposedly it is not transferable to humans.  But I’ve been drinking her milk for five months now and find myself asking ghosts if they want pancakes for breakfast and sitting in a feed trough with a goat in my armpit before 9 am in the morning.  Wonder where my crazy comes from.  

12:45 pm. 

I eat lunch on the ridge again.  It’s calming to see the ocean, so large in front of me.  So large that it’s capable of holding all its life beneath the surface, while my own body is too small to be housing both this beating heart as well as my tears … tears so lonely in the purity of their blue that they fall in hopes to meet the gold in your eyes.  Then I see the ocean anew through the stained glass windows of a monarch’s wings.  Time leaves again and you aren’t here as I had hoped. But, there are seven black cows on the hillside, four fuschia thistle flowers, two hawks flying in circles – one in the direction of the sun, the other its mirror image – a sun shining over eucalyptus, willow and blackberries, and me sitting on a tree stump.  A still moment that will leave just as quickly as it came, but right now it stretches out in every direction.  Time leaves and where am I?  I was just with you and now I’m not. She was just alive and now she’s not. He was dead and now he’s back.  Behind these eyes is the only place I know and the only place I stay, as life outside rushes by.  And I’m always the only one there.  

3:11 pm.

Run in circles during a freak downpour in the middle October, trying to gain traction in the mud to turn the apple press.  The squash is floating in the fields.   

4:55 pm.

Feed pigs the apple scraps. I love pigs.  There are no better noses then their flat wet snouts.  So weird.  

8:41 pm. 

Stem starts swearing from his corner of the “Farm Homies Bunkhouse.”  I ask what’s the matter. “Oh, just the world ending in three years,” he responds, dramatically.  Well shit, I think from my own corner in the kitchen.   

 “Well … I guess that is something to worry about.” I say finally.  “What would you like to do, how would you act, if you knew that the world was ending in three years?” I ask him.  

“Be crazier,” he replies.  I wonder what that means.  Be crazier.  Then he asks, “What would you do?” I pause.  I can hear the ocean rolling us deeper into the night, see a silver haze hovering above the ridge, betraying the hiding moon.  Sucia’s on gchat.   

“Make dragonflies,” I respond, and continue twisting twine and wire around a cinnamon stick to try to make a wing.