Canaries
A (very) short story.
So many things happen in a city that you never understand. Little scenes, played out before your eyes, or flashes like photos from a club at night, one you have never been to.
At first the sheer number of dogs was confounding. In close proximity they barked at each other and circled restlessly. A chance word revealed that they were all on their way too, or from, the blessing of the animals.
“I hope he’s still going,” a woman said, pulling a scruffy animal into her lap, “this one needs it.” I picture the priest, blessing and blessing. Mostly dogs, who can arrive on their own four feet, some cats and rabbits, maybe a lizard or a rat. It seemed each one would receive a hand raised over its head.
I was sitting with Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories. The dog people were arguing about god and about what had happened in church last week. I read a story about canaries, but with some difficulty because of one man’s loud and penetrating voice. He seemed angry about almost everything, even as he praised a daughter’s dress for its depictions of fruit.
I already didn’t want to know as much as I knew. I wanted to be at the blessing, though the birdcage I carried would be empty.
When I first read Kawabata at seventeen, the mood of melancholic sexual tension was already familiar. The potter’s cup that seemed to be stained by a woman’s lips. Clothes bleached by being laid out into the snow. I knew very well what it was like to be looked at, and to look.
Meanwhile, I needed to make a list of a hundred nouns and the man with the loud voice had finally left. One of the women spoke of the elephant in the room. Elephant, I wrote. Room.
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