I pace my garden like a tiger in a cage around and around the potted plants. I gaze at the dark drip-droppy trees, their slippery limbs reach their fingers up up up in throws of cooling ecstasy, gently scratching their delicate branches down the back of the moon. I hate libido and I love it. It makes me ridiculous and it makes me great. I think back to when I first felt this feline way. I was on a twin star Honda motorcycle. Thirteen. My arms and legs wrapped themselves around Danny Thomas: a Marlboro man in the making. I held onto his wiry farm boy body for dear life. We booted over the fields between the two families that helped raise me in my teens, my younger cousin crammed in behind me. Three kids without helmets wheel
ing recklessly over scrubby hills, screeching along barbed wire fences, leaping off so Danny could vrrm vrrm vrrmm up the side of the cliff near the slough and we would jump on again when he decided to catch up to us. We would ride until someone bashed their head open or we ran out of gas. Oh I had such a crush on Danny. His tangle of unruly hair, his freckles, his quiet smirk, his confidence. And oh, he had absolutely no time for me. I was his sister’s friend. And worse, a late bloomer. But come eighteen, as I headed off to theatre school, his appendix burst. I came to visit him every day in the hospital and this endeared him briefly. He was a high school hero football player by now and I finally had a figure. We chatted. We necked. And then he decided to go out with a super model’s shorter sister. Just as pretty. Oh those Helfer girls. And that was that. He married her.
The cat jumps the fence. Darn it. Four days ago she was out all night and I woke at three in the morning to the yowling screech of a bristly bear racoon in my patio, having cornered her for breakfast. And we have coyotes too. “Come inside, Licorice, I really don’t want anything to eat you.”
I get the prancing cat toy. She falls for it every time. Hard to get hard to get hard to get. Gotcha! I toss her a treat and shut the screen. Sucker.
I sit out in the patio alone for a little while longer, it’s a beautiful night and I have another hour before I can drag myself off to sleep.
Men are delicious. I sigh in my garden. Delicious. Maybe it’s time for another.
I wander back inside, the moonlight tickling between my toes.
