Boxer

 [This story is a Storymatic exercise]

Now

Drip.  

A sound follows, approaching from the far end.  It arrives fashionably late, as if held up by rush hour traffic.  Finally, it comes.  My ears angle to follow its retreat.  In its wake, the pipe seems silent.  Gradually, ongoing noises retake center stage.  The gurgle of water streaming down the ribbed floor.  The gentle hiss of sand grains carried by the flow.  The buzz of a fly taking care of urgent business some ways up ahead.  Distant human sounds, so faint that they have little individual identity.  

Human sounds.  Humans.  I suddenly feel a deep longing.  What am I doing here?

Drip.

Right on the base of my tail.  One more drop and I'm getting up to shake.  Seriously now.  I'm already shaking.  Just one more drop.

Human sounds again.  The longing too.

Drip.

Fine, maybe next time.  I'm not ready.  How did I get here?  Ah!

Before

I first felt it in the ears.  Not ears, exactly, but someplace between them.  The pressure.  I looked up at dad.  He didn't seem to notice, so I mentioned it.  Casually.  "Mmm-hmm," he replied.  Casually.  Without looking up from his phone.  Fine.  I got up and bumped his leg.  Then I explained it to him in detail.  

"Please be advised, esteemed parent, that a significant storm system is rapidly approaching so we should get my outdoor needs taken care of at your earliest convenience."  I thought that was fairly clear, but all I got was a "Yeah, yeah, in a minute."  

According to my calculations, dad does not understand minutes.  By the time he put on my harness, the air pressure was… oppressing.  Or decompressing.  I don't have much fur, but whatever I have was starting to stand up.

"It sure got cloudy," dad observed as we passed the Insta… I mean, the big community oak.  A storm, really?  You don't say.  

"Hey dad, let's skip the park today," I suggested, trying my best to sound confident and definitely not a bit scared.  I then proceeded to use the Millers' lawn, to emphasize my point.  I didn't count on Miller senior, who must have been waiting all day for an opportunity to have some social interaction.  Then there was screaming.  I remember something along the lines of "I was going to pick it up, calm down, Keith!", and "Get that rabid dog away from me!", but most of it was unintelligible.  

To tell the truth, I was feeling a little rabid just then.  Nobody talks to dad like that, and I was about to snap.  Whether I would start with Miller's neck or my leash, I didn't very much care.  I prepared to lunge, and then it hit.  It was blinding, deafening, and, not to make excuses, it was altogether too much given the level of tension I was already experiencing.  Then sparks came out of a transformer at the end of the block.  

Then I was running.  In retrospect, this is not necessarily true.  There was running, and there was fear, and there was no I.  The running and the fear continued, and then rain and more thunder joined them.  It was dark, cold, and pipe.  Then the running was gone, and all that was left was the fear, the dark, the cold, and the pipe.  

Now

Drip.

Maybe if I just scoot over just a bit, it'll stop, and I won't have to get up.  Or shake.  Or make a sound.  Or admit to the world that I exist, here, in this pipe, feeling helpless and lost.  Then I won't have to do anything about it.  How long can I keep that up?  Come to think of it, how long has it been?  Has my legendary sense of time forsaken me?  Maybe I've always been here, and all my memories are echoes of a dream, fading now that I've awoken into reality.

That must be it.  Reality is a cylinder.  A murky, dark cylinder with a gurgling soundtrack.

Drip.

Alright, a leaky cylinder with a fly.  Also, there is hunger, which brings up an important question.  "Can I eat that fly?"  No, not that question!  "Who is feeling the hunger?"  Someone is also feeling the droplets.  Then, am I a tubular entity dreaming of being a dog, or a dog dreaming itself into paralysis?  I got goosebumps thinking about that one.  Do pipes get goosebumps, or is it just dogs?

I propose the empirical approach to resolving this dilemma.  A journey of a thousand steps begins with one.  Two, in my case.  Incidentally, is it two thousand for quadrupeds?  I shall make my first two steps now.  After I stretch.  That feels nice.  And shake.  Now step, paw, I command thee!

I smell freedom!  Wait a minute, freedom smells like mom's cooking.  Mom!  Dad!  I remember!  Wait, is that my house?

Story of a cat full of BBs

There were a few odd things about Twirly that we didn't give much thought when we first met him on our front porch.

For one thing, he was a very shy cat, even for a feral. It took him nine months of daily feedings before he got close enough to touch. "He's cautious, that's all," I thought. It was almost a year before he finally dropped his guard and we discovered that he is the most affectionate cat we've ever met. Up until then, he was simply "that black spot on the ground" that a seemingly impossible amount of food went into every day.

The first time we let him inside, he stayed for 5 days.  We didn't know if he had ever seen a litter box, so I had daily conversations with him that went like this.  "Twirly, you need to go out and go to the bathroom," I'd say, opening the door.  "Nah, I'm good.  I'm a man, see?" he'd reply, displaying the evidence, "I can hold it.  There is no tomorrow, you know, not for a cat.  There's just today, and today I'm warm and safe.  Who knows what will happen once I leave."

He also walked funny. It was almost as if his rear legs were making their own choices, different from the actions executed by his front legs. Perhaps they were simply operating at a different speed. He could walk, run and even jump with some level of coordination, but when he got excited, his rear legs would do circles around the rest of him. This is how he got his name. "Neurological damage," I thought, and left it at that. It was cute, even.

Occasionally, he would appear with animal-inflicted injuries. A bite wound on the leg, scratches here and there. I didn't think much of this also, he's an outdoor cat. A feral, "not really our" cat. We patched him up when we could. What I should have asked was "Why is my other outdoor cat fine?" Yesterday, he hobbled home with bigger bite wounds, and that's how he wound up on an operating table and under an x-ray.

The veterinarian tactfully asked me "Are you aware that your cat has over 20 BBs in his body?" Not having grown up in a gun-friendly culture, I didn't immediately understand what that meant. Then I saw the x-ray. "It's fairly common," the vet told me. This is where Twirly's symptoms all came together for me, his fear of people, his troubled coordination, his inability to avoid wildlife encounters, all tracing back to past emotional and nerve damage. I could hear the tension in the vet's voice ease up as she became more or less convinced that we didn't shoot "our" own cat full of metal balls. With a gun.

The purpose of writing this down is not to "other" the neighbor who did this, whoever it was. I say "neighbor" both because the cat probably didn't travel far, and because the shooter is almost certainly someone's neighbor, somewhere. I don't even know when it happened.

I can't judge because I operate within my own capacity, and so does he (or she). I have childhood memories I am not proud of, choices I would not make today. For me, these choices stemmed from lack of empathy, a sense of separation from other living beings. My wish is that parents help children cultivate empathy. Perhaps this illustration will help.

In my mind, Twirly is a veteran, and now that we've taken our vet to the vet, he is recovering, slowly, indoors. He may have trouble going through airport security, but at least he'll be able to walk, albeit in his cute and funny way.

How to Succeed in Shopping Without Really Trying

Or: How to Get Free Stuff Without Ruining Your Karma.
The trick is being oblivious, so you probably shouldn't read this.

You'll need:

• small ears (optional)
• headphones from a company with a generous warranty policy
• tape
• obliviousness

When I was in high school, a catty girl that I spent a lot of time with told me that I have freakishly small ears. I'd never really considered before that there was a standard size of ear, and that mine failed to live up to such expectations. Despite her best efforts, my ears never became a cause for self-consciousness for me, and I forgot all about this interaction. That is, until my tiny ears set off a chain reaction for which I have just become extremely grateful.

Over a decade after the Great Tiny Ear Revelation, I received from my parents a very thoughtful gift of on-ear headphones, which I'd wanted for some time. They were fancy beyond anything I'd ever experienced in my world of multicolored $9 Panasonic earbuds. But when I put them on my head, they just weren't comfortable.

"Ahem," said my tiny ears in unison. "Forgetting something?"

"Huh?" I asked.

"We're tiny, genius."

"Wait, who is this?"

But my tiny ears were right. These on-ear headphones were threatening to become over-ear headphones, but not quite succeeding. And so it was with great sadness that I returned this thoughtful gift to my parents and went about looking for a suitable replacement.

It wasn't long before I found them: beautiful, big, resonant, and with a shiny wood finish. My tiny ears rejoiced, and all was well.

For about 8 months.

One day, I realized that the right headphone was very quiet. By the time I finished my walk to work, the speaker had stopped working entirely. I tried switching the cables and tapping the headphone, and failing there, I was out of ideas. But then I was told about the company's 1-year warranty on all products! I e-mailed a representative and received a very prompt reply of, "We'll be happy to send you another pair. They have been mailed to you already."

"Should you maybe ask if they want the old ones sent to them?" my conscience asked.

"Uh," I said. "Hey, look, videos of puppies on YouTube."  And so the matter was settled.

A week later, I received the headphones. But instead of the luxurious, over-ear beauties to which I'd grown accustomed, they were earbuds: still quite beautiful and made of wood, but nevertheless not what I wanted. I wrote back to the company and told them of their error.

"Oh okay," their e-mail more-or-less read. "We'll be happy to send you another pair. They have been mailed to you already."

Once again, no mention of a return, even on these brand new, unopened earbuds. This time my conscience just shrugged. Even it couldn't find a way in which we were being unfair.

Another week.

Another pair of headphones.

Another few months of auditory bliss.

And then another sudden one-eared musical deafness.

This time I was outside the bounds of the warranty, so I knew that the company would not help me (and after all, had they not done far more than their fair share?). So I finally turned to that last resort: hypothesis testing. Now pay attention, dear reader, because this is where it gets complicated. I unplugged the headphones from my phone and plugged them into a different device. Where they worked perfectly. And so did the old pair. And a string of lower-priced earbuds that I had similarly discarded into the near-impenetrable abyss that we've taken to calling "the electronics drawer."

Now that's how you science!

About two minutes of Googling then told me that the issue was likely to be dust in the jack, and a couple of applications of a thinly rolled up piece of tape, sticky side out, would fix the problem.

I now have three pairs of fully functional headphones for the price of one. Not to mention a tangled heap of countless old headphones, revived from the dead in true Frankenstein style, just in time for Halloween. And all it took was being too lazy to test a hypothesis for a few months.

That and small ears.

Park Walk in the Clouds

A tree branch snaps somewhere off to the right, and I register its descent, counting the seconds, anticipating the thud as it hits the ground. The sound barely echoes in this evening stillness, yielding quickly to the silence like a child told to hush. A single stone is disturbed and is sent tumbling, a few inches at most, yet I am certain about what happened as if I were watching its short-lived journey with my own eyes. It so happens that I am not watching it, because my eyes are closed, and have been for some distance now.

As we walk, I become more and more aware of the world around me, the world I would ordinarily only perceive by pattern recognition - tree, rock, yellow tractor. Deprived of my most overused sense, I am forced into the present moment by a combination of fear and curiosity. What if I walk into a tree? What if I step into bear droppings? What if I look somewhat different from the way normal people are supposed to look, different from all those people who don't walk through the park at sunset with their eyes closed… Gradually, curiosity takes over - Let me listen to the birds and … wait… what happened to the birds? The tranquility of this evening moment is disturbed only by a handful of distant bugs, making our footsteps and our thoughts the loudest events in the park.

It may seem that we are also subject to the decree of silence seemingly accepted by all living things here, but this is not the case. Our silence is premeditated, or perhaps - currently meditated. We are here to listen to the energy of the park, and to practice guided walking. Intellectually I know that I am not in any danger, for my hand is held firmly by my lovely companion who is not only excellent at avoiding bear droppings, but is managing to create an energetic space of acceptance and ease as we walk. I move inwards, and try an ancient Tibetan practice of cloud walking. I picture myself walking confidently right up to a cliff and then stepping off, onto the blue infinity, continuing to walk on that which is nothing. Although my goal is to feel weightless, all I manage to achieve today is a certain degree of lightness and ease. This is fine as well, there is no rush, and there are no deadlines.

A feeling of gratitude arises spontaneously in my heart, and we switch roles. No matter how many times I've experienced it, I've found being trusted to feel unusual. I am now balancing a feeling of responsibility with a sense of joy. I'm responsible for her safety, true, but I'd also like to return the favor, to provide her the best experience possible. I know intellectually that this is not in my control, so I try to drop responsibility in favor of pure love. It mostly works.

The road comes to an end, and so does this practice. A pair of green eyes offers me unquestionable love and understanding and a pair of my own reflections. There are two, on two levels at once - the images I see is just the surface. I realize now that she is not thinking, and that's the very state I'm after. In her perfect stillness she is reflecting my nature as a perfect mirror, and my own stream of thoughts begins to finally put on the brakes. This is like having real-time biofeedback that actually works. I understand now the poetic desire to jump into the pools of your lover's eyes, and I do this with my consciousness, joining with her and feeling a oneness that requires no words. I know that both of us are entirely content, and there is nowhere else to go. Not this moment.

Thinking Black

Even from here I can sense the subtle and quick pulsation in the neck, partially obscured by fur, though not well enough to hide it from me. To be quite honest, I don't know what sense I'm using to detect the creature's pulse. Sometimes I think I'm hearing the friction of the blood against the arterial walls, sometimes I feel as though I might be smelling fear. Pheromones and other fancy things, most probably. I know of such things, I've heard the voices talk about them before, from the warm silver box She stares at in the mornings. I don't always pay attention, of course - on most mornings the box talks about complete nonsense, and frankly I don't really understand why She would prefer the box to me in the first place. I may not talk about Remote Viewing or Astral Projection, but that doesn't mean I can't teach her how to do it. Like this morning, when I was exploring ancient Egypt… now there's a place where you get treated right.

Besides, She often needs help, She may not know it, but I do. If only She would calm down a little and stop baby talking to me as if I were a first-rate moron, I could really help her focus and even pull some of that darkness out, the thoughts she brings home sometimes. For now, I'll just have to keep doing it at night. She thinks that I crawl into bed because I like to be warm, and that's fine with me. An agenda of stealth, that's my game.

But now is not the best time to get sidetracked by all this pensiveness.

The pace at the jugular quickens slightly, the ears perk up - he heard something, though certainly not me. I am completely still, even my tail has ceased its unending oscillation. What is the deal with this tail business, anyway? I seriously think that sometimes it has a mind of its own. Sometimes it gets so excited that I can barely hold it still to … wait, hang on, he's on the move. A few hops at a time, taking his time to look around, cautious, and rightly so. All the caution in the world won't help you, little friend. Some of us are prey, that's simply how it is. It's not that I'm so unabashedly self-assured… although I am, in this case… no, sometimes certainty is just so clear and tangible that there is no doubt. Somehow I just know what is about to happen, it seems to come from somewhere both within me and beyond me. What was that phrase this morning? "Zen duality?".... call it whatever you like, as long as it helps me bring this rabbit home. Bonus points for helping me avoid the noisy rolling beasts, blind as they may seem, there have been more of them lately. I must think about this a bit more later… I'm not sure I like the way things have been changing around here.

Hold my thoughts… he stops, inches from my face. No, my furry prize, you cannot smell me, I'm downwind from you, and I smell you just fine. These are the nights when I'm truly grateful for being born black. He's staring right at me, sensing something, yet there is nothing to focus on, nothing to pick out in the blackness of the shadow. I am part of the shadow now… and boy could I work that topic for a while, but I won't, not right now, my thoughts must yield to the instincts that drive me to play this ancient game. Why do I even have thoughts, in the first place? Am I the only feline in the world that asks questions? I've tried it, tried talking to the neighbors, and would you believe it - nothing! Not a single ounce of interest in anything but stuffing themselves silly and commiserating on their dissatisfaction with the weather, all expressed in the same one-word neanderthal language they've used for millennia. Yes of course I know what they mean, but seriously, it's the same weather as last year. And the year before. Mrrl...Year? Yes, year, you mindless furballs, they repeat you know. And maybe it isn't so bad to be constantly surprised by what happens next, keeps life interesting I suppose… but taking it to such heights of ignorance! Makes me wonder sometimes if we as a race even deserve to catch our prey, after all, what makes us better? Are we really any different than those long eared, grass munching poop factories?

Maybe it's better not to go down this path, I don't want it to turn out like last winter, depression isn't that much fun, as it turns out. She pretty much had to resurrect me with her infectious liveliness - without her I'd probably just sulk into the blackness…. but hey, at least I'd blend in, right, right, eh? See, I'm not depressed now, that's right, not a bit. And now it's time to crunch on some collarbones, that's always exciting. And there he is, right on schedule, walking right into my mouth, I won't even have to run. Not that I mind running, mind you, I'm in really good shape, 8 pounds of shiny fur and shapely muscles, and I do say so myself.

Well, that's that then, and now I have my teeth in his stinky scruff, dragging him across the road. Why can't you furballs come a little closer to the house and save the Ghost some work? Maybe when She sees you on the steps, the gift of gratitude that I owe her, maybe she'll start calling me by my real name. Not that other name, I won't even mention it, it makes my tail hairs stick up every time I hear it… why do they always do that, these humans, why do they make up names for us and just assume that we're cool with it, that they are the foremost authority? Did you ever think to ask us? To give her credit though, She sometimes just calls me "Cat". Even that's better than … no, I won't fall for that trick, you won't make me say it. That name always brings up an image of a country bumpkin out to chop firewood. Not that I have an issue with alternative fuels, but seriously, it just doesn't feel cool. And have you seen me? I'm pretty damn cool. Now up the steps, furry token of gratitude, She'll be up soon.