Part 3

“What are you doing? ‘Mangy thing’ is what he called you. He will surely hurt you if he finds you here,” she said and ran her hand from the left eye of the black head across the white back to the black tail, and the cat crouched, and as the rays of the sun streamed through the window, the one eye shone like gold, and the cat looked at her, and at the food on the floor, and back at her again. “We are so hurtful, you know. We are in such pain both,” she said, and tears spouted like geysers, and the cat spoke through silence, and when the pain was gone, she fell asleep with her face on the table.

While her soul slept at the table, the angel, the cat, the Priestess took her body and dressed it in a green dress and took it for a dance at the Zen nightclub under its Endless Knot and its infinite wisdom of compassion, and the body danced to the beat of the drums. After the dance, her body walked out into the dark night, and into the wet jungle, and into the mountain where the noxious vapours choked her lungs, and the heat of the mountain’s molten rock dressed as a dark shadow drained the sorrow from her. When she awakened, covered in sweat and ash, the cat was no longer present and her mind was purged, and she knew the heartbreak had run its course even if nothing was to change.

That same day, he walked miles along the black sand where the ocean devoured the earth, and toward the high cliffs where the volcanic water fell into the ocean. And as he walked toward the waterfall, the sea changed its tune, and more shallow shimmering silver water spilled gently over the black sand under his feet, and it spilled slowly, then slowed, and stopped, and receded back into the ocean. And the shallow water over the sand and in the diamond bright sun appeared to move in unison as a single solid sheet, a mirror to the soul, before receding and smashing itself to shards in the surf’s relentless swoosh, swoosh, and swoosh. Then the mirror returned once again beneath his feet over the sand in silence, and again, and again and into infinity interrupted only by either wind, or storm, or sunset. And as the sheets of water washed the black sand back into the sea, they exposed fields of emerald and amethyst clams. They were no bigger than fingernails. And, when exposed to air, the clams swiftly straightened, pointing at the sky, and briskly buried themselves into the black sand and hid away from air and away from small, fast, amber birds that walked on quickly and picked the clams, and receded away when the sheets of water returned.

Near the waterfall, a sheet of water returned to the sea and exposed the emerald and amethyst clams along with a white triangular bone in the black sand. He leaped to it and snatched it swiftly with a handful of sand before the sea snatched it from him, and the sharp edge bit his palm. He rinsed away the sand and the blood, and the salt water stabbed the wound and sealed his fate as the white triangular bone sat in his palm. He inspected it. He thought it a coral first, but it had turned into a large predatory tooth. Elated by the realization, with the waterfall behind him, he sat down like Buddha in the wet sand, and the sheets of water came gently over his hips as he inspected the tooth. He imagined the monstrous size of the creature. He mused it must have lost the tooth in an attack. He imagined how much flesh this bone had gnawed in the most vicious and heartless ways. And here, at this point in spacetime, his brain waves attuned to the ocean’s aria and its everlasting crescendo. He no longer heard the waves crashing against the shore as noise but only as an acoustic map of the ocean for creatures that live in it; and the fluids in his brain and in his body swayed and swelled as he felt the ocean current in his blood.