Dogs Find Pancakes Acceptable as Food for to be Eating

  

Hello! Maybe you remember me and my teeth that stick out of my face and my head when I'm happy and when I'm superbusy smelling food because anytime there is food cooking my nose wakes up like there's a little doggy inside it and now it's morning morning morning!

Like when I can smell pancakes cooking!

Exhibit A: Evidence that there are in fact pancakes cooking. I will not disclose to you, dear reader, my identity, but perhaps you can guess who this is. Do you see these pancakes delicate and miniature? They are, friend, an aberration called Dogs' Pancakes. A thing which apparently exists in this unjust prison referred to as a house.

Sometimes the morning dawns syrup rich and sweet; I smell pancakes cooking and imagine them against my tongue. The softness of the flour. If I had hands, I could make some pancakes for all of us, but I don't - I have these paws which condemn me to the garden-of-no-self-made-pancakes-or-any-other-food-unless-you-count-lizards.

I could weep. I really could. And while the thought skitters into my brain that maybe MR's poisoning us or these cakes were dropped off by the mailman/maulman, I know in my heart they are made with flour, sugar, baking powder, vanilla, salt, and that when I press them to the roof of my mouth, I will know a fundamental and final kind of joy.

Exhibit B: Evidence that the prison guard and her boyfriend prepped and served, made ready and delicious these cakes for the dogs only and on purpose. My rage is an unquiet heat rising through my blood; it sings jealous songs in ear splitting frequency, much like the prison guard's voice when she's "singing" a song at the out-of-tune piano and all I want, reader, is sleep, and maybe pancakes.

Reprieve. Freedom. I crave these like the dogs must pancakes. I taste them like the saliva pooling in my throat.

One thing in the world I want is to be eating all every pancakes with my own mouth not someone else's mouth not someone else tasting it for me all on my own taste buds getting smooshed in between my teeth my chomping down on them for some long amounts of time hopefully many times in a row and with syrup on top of them I love sugar and some people say dogs can't eat wheat but they never met me and my super stomach which can eat anything I want it to all I have to do is be polite and just say hey tummy tum eat this because I want to eat it and then I do!

Exhibit C: The most damning of the four. Note the prison guard's boyfriend, absolutely complicit. These are criminals most cruel, most odious in nature. I cannot fathom how I came to be here, trapped within this poured concrete, drooling onto student papers, cowering in shame from the intensity of my own covetous nature. Give me, please friend, some of these cakes! What must a cat do to be deemed pancake-worthy? Let me die now, dear God, that I might no longer suffer the contempt all in the prison seem to hold me in.

Exhibit D: More evidence. The dogs, slobbering. Pancakes, eaten. And Luco?

Alone, of course. Hungry.

But me, Lucy, I'm also hungry for more. One pancake is the same as none once it is eaten.

Mingus Dreamed he had a Sister

 

I remember dim forms shifting, pressing their weight into me, bad morning breath hotter than the blankets we'd rolled ourselves into, her kicks in the night and the bite marks on my ears upon waking; did I dream her?

My sister, calico, mewling, with pointed chin and white spot beside her nose, eyes bright promise.

I've been reading the novel Beloved, by Toni Morrison; the book breathes to life my ghost-sister, half-remembered, maybe-only-dreampt sister.

This year I'm eight years old. Old for a cat, young for a living thing. Eight years tumbling into sinks and back out, lapping the water from its sides. Dreaming sisters.

Imagine sinkfuls. Their cat-weight heavying me. Whiskers prickling my face.

A whirling, somersaulting all-of-us, many-limbed crouching, jumping, sleeping, rocking against each other, our hearts pitched to wild music; blood rising, humming us frenzied the joy, oh the joy, of us many loved.

Maybe I made her up. Made them up. Maybe I read too many ghost stories. In Beloved, the dead daughter maybe comes back, is maybe resurrected as flesh-and-blood daughter. Depends how you read it.

I read it that way. Sethe's catharsis (Sethe is the mother) is so much more powerful, I think, with the reality of the supernatural. And why not? Why hand wring and look for holes in the ghost, holes in the story?

Why doubt my memory of her, litter-mate, and of how she was taken, human hand reaching for us, scooping her up, away, and traitor-sister not knowing, maybe, what she did, purring, purring into that hand. Adjusting her kitten's body to be close, closer to that-which-she-did-not-understand.

A dream, a memory, both? Why do I torment myself with imagined loss? Isn't there enough loss already?

Loss of health (this abominable t-shirt won't allow me to forget my trespasses, septic wound, that too-quick raccoon/possum/feral cat/sharp branch that cut that stung that caught that turned that hurt me), self, loss of hope, of ambition, of of of of.

And so turning to dreamsofher. I know I dream colors; I see her calico, her pointed chin, white spot by her nose, the orange of her belly matching mine exactly. Sister-salve that burns ever more bitter for its ambiguity. No mother here to ask. No records to look up, hospital to call; me, feline, eight of years and growing older each slow taste of water, tongue like to be lolling, eyes sinister or full of sleep or devoid of both; me dreaming sister dreaming me dreaming family - sardines salted and frying on the stove, the hissing of oil as it heats.

I use the bones to pick my teeth   run my eyes down the   well   of whatever it was I woke   wanting   this  wet place  my own pound   of flesh  heart a beaten thing  grasps  regardless of how I chew and I chew and I chew         once in the middle       of the night     she lept from     sleep into my      arms and I     held   her weight   with a l l    I was

down to the bone        flesh sliced       smell of that-which-I-can't-name     the horror of the sound of that purring     the horror of the sound of that purring      maybe     it was me     who lept     from      sleep     who    lept

into    stranger's human    hands     to be     pulled     and      pulled from       bodies    nestled      purring    who lept    m e     who     snuggled     kitten-innocent             into alien

unfamiliar      and who     lept    and     if     I  have    no             sister     andifihavenosister      and if i   no   sister   ever    had

maybe it was me