No Sloe Gin Tonight
The dryer was tumbling end over end. All the clothes inside, in a great whirl of fabric and color. Unseen to the eye. But heard.
And the skyscrapers, outside the windows, stood tall and still. Very still, with their lighted attire. Their signs, and their designs, and all that they did to make sure that you looked at them. Making you forget that, with their proud lights, they had buried the stars. Their envious eyes turned, now, to the shifting moon.
And she was at the kitchen sink, washing a dish. With no soap. Just water. And turning off the water, and reaching for a tan-colored towel (which was already half-wet). Drying it (the dish), and putting it back, finally, into the half-full cupboard. Leaving nothing else to be done.
Except to grab for the graham crackers.
They were the honey kind. Not the cinnamon. She would've preferred the cinnamon. But they were standard graham crackers, all the same: the kind that you gently broke into eight little rectangles. The kind that got crumbs everywhere. The kind you couldn't eat without having a drink. Of milk, or water. Anything. Graham crackers were so dry.
So, she opened the refrigerator, filling the small apartment space with incandescent light. For, otherwise, it was dark in here. It was 1:17 in the morning. A Wednesday night. No. No, scratch that. Morning wasn't night, even when it was dark. You should know that, Aria. Thursday morning, then. And she reached for the filtered water (in a big, clear pitcher), took it out, and shut the refrigerator door. Which shut off the light. Not only shutting it off, but shutting it in.
How many ways were there to hide a light?
She supposed she should know the answer to that. She witnessed light-killings every day. It was one of those socially-acceptable kinds of murder. To murder light, murder hope. Murder faith, and murder the heart. With words and glances and cold shoulders.
But such things, inevitably, were always resurrected. For such things were the Lord's. They were beyond compare.
And that was a comfort.
The snow rabbit sighed, pouring herself a little mug of cool water. Forgoing, this time, the ice. Just water in a mug. And a mug wouldn't be enough. Not with her fluid needs. But she would start with this.
Just start with this.
Just sip.
Both paws daintily on the mug, she drank. A gulp. A sip. And a breath. Slowly in, and slowly out.
Ross was sick. Some kind of flooring fever.
One of those stomach things. One of those throat things. One of those things where they couldn't sleep together, for his tossing and turning and coughing. For his temperature. For trying to make sure she didn't catch it, too. And maybe she wouldn't. Her immune system was different than his. Was stronger.
Nevertheless, for precaution, she'd been on the couch for two days. And guessed she'd be there for at least another two. Before the thing ran its course. Before it finished having its 'fun' with her husband.
And she sagged a bit, her posture not at her normal 'proper.' And she set her mug down, and stretched a bit. Rather lamely. Ultimately, just settling, at a lean, against the sink and counter. Bare, really, save for her pure-blue Colts jersey, with the double-white stripes on the shoulders. And the white mesh of the number eighteen. The jersey trailed past her waist, obscuring (lightly) her hips, and the rest of her delicateness. Her snow-white bobtail, though, sticking up, collecting the material, and keeping her rump from being fully, loosely covered.
The train sounded.
That was a trademark of an Indianapolis night. Train whistles. Trains barreling down the tracks, into the city. By the White River. The trains. From whence did they come? And where were they going to? What where they carrying? WHO were they carrying?
No one really stopped to think.
The trains just came and went, sounding every time. Their presence taken for granted. Suppose, one day, the trains never came?
What would happen then?
I'd get more sleep at night, the snow rabbit reasoned. And paused for a moment. And conceded that, no, that wouldn't be true. You still had the cars. Still had the furs outside at obscene hours (doing, one reasoned, obscene things).
Trains weren't so romantic when they were in the city.
When they were in rural lands, though ... rural trains. THAT was romance.
No doubt, though, some would joke as to why the trains would WISH to stop here. 'India-no-place,' they would tease (before they cut-and-ran). How they would shove around the still-modest city. Built around a war monument. Built on a circle. A big city that didn't seem it. It was surely some kind of 'Hoosier,' and yet this city, this place, was so far removed from what the rest of the state was. From the rest of the rural, outward areas that weren't in this privileged, cultural center.
The real Indiana was in the struggling small towns. Was in the fields.
But was not this city real, as well?
Was it not merely a massive built-up accumulation of bits and pieces, made into a composite to represent the sum of the whole?
How could this, the twelfth-biggest city in the nation, be so unnoticed by anyone outside its limits?
Living here, the snow rabbit had adjusted to the urban hustle-and-bustle. To that ignorance that city-furs had. They went about their day. School, work, home. Like in they were all living in cages.
A small chewing. A small blinking. Eating her cracker.
She ran one paw along the fabric of the jersey. It was Ross's. She often wore at it night. She tugged at it, and then let it go.
No team from this city had ever won a professional sports title.
Boston could shove it. Three Super Bowls, a World Series ... and that was just in this decade.
Were but Hoosiers that deprived.
Maybe this year. That was, as always, the refrain. The refrain of hope in the hearts of the masses. Sports, a great unifier, a sense of pride.
For an Indiana team to beat all the other teams?
The sense of pride ... that they all longed for. But had yet to receive. Instead, years of one-outs, and 'almost,' and ...
... wasn't it a bit silly? Maybe. Maybe it was. But when things seemed broken down, when no one gave you the time of day, games took on a meaning of life or death. Your happiness rose and fell on the win or loss.
Sports became the proving ground.
There was that train again ... calling out of an identity crisis. What was this land, now, before the field of chilly, sparkling vision?
Was it agriculture? Was it industry? Was it medicinal?
What about the past of this place? Did it matter to anyone anymore?
How did a singular place form an identity in a 'global' community?
When everything was judged on size and sight, how did you manage to matter? How did you make others to see your inherent beauty? And how did you deal with the worming threats that, beneath the facade, aimed to turn that beauty into rubble?
And a FedEx jet could be heard lowering, lowering ... making for the hub at the airport.
Planes, trains, and automobiles. They were all in league.
She could never get used to all this noise. Nor could Ross, but ... school was here. Opportunity was here. And they had to stay here. For now. For however long. In a city that they loved, yes, and defended dearly, but ... they were not souls of the city, all the same. Respectfully, they wished for a rural harbor. No offense to you, Chase Tower (and all you other buildings branded with the names of banks). No offense, Canal Walk.
A yawn (which she fought). And she looked to their open bedroom. The door with the Indiana flag draped over it. The navy-blue and gold. The torch and the stars.
She'd checked on him five minutes ago.
His dishy, pink ears were clammy, and his was nose was quieter than it should've been. Was hardly moving. And his fur was slightly matted from sweat, and ... from being in bed all day. Bed-fur. Sick-fur.
No sloe gin back-porch nights for them.
They didn't even have a porch. Didn't have gin, either.
What was it they'd told her once: "Don't leave your mouse alone ... " They'd all warned her about mice. How they were fragile. How they took a lot of care. "They're too much work," she'd been told. "He'll die on you ... "
Not if she could help it. And as if love were work?
Love was a duty.
Was an honor.
A pleasure.
Was.
Is.
The snow rabbit put her paws on her cheeks, rubbing her muzzle a bit. Blowing out air, and licking her lips. And she stepped away from the sink, padding from the linoleum onto the carpet, and sinking to the couch. To a sit on the couch in her mostly-bare state. Digging the toes of her naked foot-paws into the carpet.
She could hear him breathing. Soft (but ragged, all the same) breathing.
She'd never had to take care of anyone before. Like this. Someone who was sick ... she'd had her own brushes with near-sickness. Blood tests, the final canon-shots of past relationships. She'd dodged all those blasts ... and had been a fool for putting herself in that line of fire in the first place. A young fool.
That was the thing about fools, though, wasn't it. Everyone was a young fool at some time or another. That was just the learning curve. And you had to hope, later on, that those foolish things you'd done ... didn't come back to haunt you and turn you into a chafed husk of burnt potential. But the choice, to most, came after that ... the wake-up calls ... did you heed them? Whether or not you grew into an old fool was your own doing.
Live to learn.
Learn to live.
Meeting him, Ross, her mate ... had matured her. As she had, by entering his life, matured him, too. Symbiosis. But ... anyway ...
And she'd had the flu before, of course. Tundra flu. A nasty thing. An extreme illness born of an extreme environment.
But no cancers. No heart attacks. Nothing 'big,' but ... and at least this was nothing big, yes. At least ... he only had a fever. That was all.
That was all ...
Only a fever.
And yet she couldn't sleep. And yet she couldn't focus.
A fever might as well have been a raging forest fire. Some primal thing that you couldn't really fight on your own. To watch someone you loved so dearly, so much, struck down, incapacitated, their mind numbed ... was to be the ultimate kind of helpless.
And humbling.
The young never liked to fully realize that they would get old. And, somehow, being young and suddenly sick ... was a humbling reminder that, no, young fur, you're not above the natural law. You're not stronger than you think.
You do have limits ...
She'd given him pills. But ...
Her ice-blue eyes, in the dim, dim light of their apartment, so tired, and eyelids closing slightly ... she looked at nothing in particular, simply cursing (silently) the physicality that they were all burdened with. That plagued them all.
Sensual desire, and sickness. The need to eat. The need to sleep.
Horrible things.
How much trouble had sex caused? In her life. In countless lives. And yet the drive for it, the need to breed ... captivated each and every individual.
Such pleasure. Such pain. Was sex a two-edged sword?
No. No ...
... it was merely a sword. Simple as that. And swords, like all things forged, needed to be wielded by a steady paw. A steady mind.
It was a blessing. To be intimate with someone. One flesh, one fur. Joined, and vulnerable, and ... trying to get into the very gaps of each other. Warm, mind-wrapped, soul-craving union.
A need.
And she wasn't yet to the point of ascribing needs as 'weaknesses.' Needing something was not a sign of weakness. It was simply a side-effect of living.
But her mind, in its rest-deprived, worried haze, found it hard, at the moment, to think in totally positive ways. And she could only think of the indignity. That she, a snow rabbit, a master of emotional cool, a creature of grace and logic and ...
... her mind was so much greater than her body. In theory. In spirit.
And yet her body held her mind prisoner. Forced it into this symbiosis.
There was that word again.
She had half a mind to write whoever it was that published dictionaries nowadays (or had dictionaries gone extinct) ... and ask that they banish the word. It was too complicated for her mind, right now, to truly wrap around.
Symbiosis was giving her a headache.
But, then, a sleep deprived snow rabbit ... was a cynical snow rabbit. Perhaps she was slightly frayed. And perhaps she was overreacting.
Wasn't one allowed an off-night? Wasn't one allowed a bad day? For all the struggle and striving, could one be forgiven if one stumbled, just a bit, into a lapse of self-pity? She wouldn't stay here, in this. She wouldn't wallow. But, for just a moment, she had to vent it out. She had to purge it like a contaminant.
Purge it. Think it away. Lament it ...
... and let go.
Take a breath. Please, please, take a breath.
Ross.
Her thoughts turned to him. The vole. The meadow mouse. The artist. The writer, and the photographer. The rural soul. Her mate.
His fire burned her like a favorite song. He moved like smoke in her eyes. If this, her life, and his, and everything that had come to be ... if this, Aria, is heartbreak ... then, oh, what a beautiful piece of heartbreak!
Love. Oh, love. What stuff was this drug made of?
It was a word, wasn't it, that had been knocked-up. Overused.
'Love,' as a word, in today's commitment-less society, in today's casual 'my happiness comes first' society ... 'love,' as a word, had come to lose all meaning. It was used so often. And very rarely, anymore, backed up with the proper sacrifices.
Maybe it, too, should be erased from the dictionary. 'Love' and 'symbiosis.' Two less words to worry about.
But, with Ross ...
... when HE said 'love' ... but when he said 'LOVE' ...
Most everything she ever wanted maybe didn't even have a name. Feelings, flashes of desire, and things too hard to pinpoint. But Ross was as close as she'd come.
When he said 'love,' the word took a whole new life.
The word meant something.
The word was.
She nodded in response to her internal dialogue. She nodded weakly, and sank further into the couch cushions, swallowing. She shut her eyes for a moment. For they were too raw to keep open. And her ears? Antennae, sentinels ... tuned to the bedroom. The open door letting any sounds the meadow mouse might make ... out, and to her. So, she could respond.
But, for now, she blanked. She zoned.
Thinking random things.
Like, when God had walked the Earth as Christ. When He'd been one of us. What impression must he have left on rooms? In crowds? What imprint?
They must've all thought to themselves, "I feel loved when He's around. I feel right when He's around."
The snow rabbit bit her lip. And exhaled.
Many of the furs in her classes (her peers, and her teachers), they didn't have any sort or faith. They believed in the mechanical. The things that could be put together, piece by piece, in plain sight. In plain memory.
Everything plainly there.
She had accused them, one day, of being just that. Of being 'plain.'
They'd been insulted. Them and their towering 'intellects.' And of course, they'd reached for the rusty sword of the unbeliever: the demanding of proof.
And her response of, "I had my heart broken. And I had it fixed."
They'd all blinked, waiting for more, and not quite sure how to respond to that. For what place did esoteric book-reading have in matters of the intangible?
To be made up of flesh or fur or blood. Tissues, organs. Cells, molecules.
Atoms.
Quarks.
It was too much. Too real. Too vast.
The snow rabbit believed that only a fool would attribute such furious existence to mere chance. Such sprawling cohesion. Such infinite intricacy. Did not all art need an artist? And, surely, love, passion, and joy, those things were artworks. Surely, the shivers up the spine, and the countless tears of sorrow. Surely, life and death, these things weren't in a vacuum of 'nothing before' and 'nothing after.'
Surely, life was not just a pipedream on graphing paper.
Life was five percent text, and ninety-five percent sub-text. Was it not?
And whereas light always perished, Light (the capital L kind of light, the holy, living Light) was never-ending.
She pitied those who obsessively needed 'proof' to believe in anything. Never able to rest until they were certain that they, themselves, had all the answers. It was their compulsive, twisted desire to completely, consciously control every aspect of a life and a universe that, too often, was beyond controlling. Curiosity became more than a simple quest for knowledge. It became their vice. That was always their undoing: they tried to fight eternity with brainpower and equations, and they lost. That they tried to deal with their pain by saying it didn't matter, because it came from nothing, and would fade into nothing.
Where was the redemption in that?
The growth in that?
The hope?
But she hadn't lost. She wouldn't. Christ had done the fighting for her, and extended her the pardon. The olive branch. And she'd taken it, with full, bowed-down repentance. With a grateful heart.
Oh, that I be given new life! That I be made to see!
That I be purchased from the dead.
And, therefore, she lived.
And listened.
To Ross's little, sleepy whimper-sounds. Airy squeaks. He was asleep. Tossing, turning, and she could do nothing for him. She could go in there, of course, and put her paw back on his forehead, and kneel at the side of the bed, and watch him for hours. But it would do no good.
She prayed. She'd prayed.
She'd made him soup. (He'd sipped very little of it.)
She'd made sure he got plenty of fluids. (She didn't wish for him to get dehydrated.)
He'd mumbled. Throughout the day, he'd mumbled. He was half-delirious, but she'd conversed with him, anyway, as if nothing were different. As if he were well ...
"I was, uh, I had ... mm ... Aria ... "
"Yes?" she'd asked, sitting in a chair. Trying to do her work. Her homework, and other nonsense. And bills. "Yes?" she asked again, head tilting in his direction. Her waggle ears standing tall. Her whiskers doing a singular twitch.
No answer.
She sighed. "Ross?"
"W-what," he'd whispered, eyes closed. His own whiskers, his own nose, all of it uncharacteristically still.
"You were saying something. Is there something wrong?"
A weak, cry-like sound. "I ... I d-don't feel good." And, now, actually crying. Though weakly. Without histrionics. Weak paw-clutches at cool sheets. Cool sheets that did nothing to soothe the aching burning that flared through all his nerves. That kept him immobile.
Letting out a breath, she left her chair, and sat on the bed, and put her paw out. To his cheek. His hot, hot cheek. "You are sick," she stated. It pained her, honestly, to look at his eyes when he was like this. Normally, so energetic, twitching all over, so bright and so innocent (belying no hint of past traumas). And, now, weakened.
His weakness was hers. And hers was his.
When you married, you took on each other's burdens. Was that not a true partnership?
A sniffle.
"I've given you your medicine. You need bed-rest. And water. There is no instant cure-all for a fever, I'm afraid."
"I ... I'm missing all my classes," he managed. "I'll get c-counted off, and ... and ... "
"I would not be concerned."
"But ... "
"I do not care about the classes, about the grades, Ross. I would rather they suffer," she told him, "than YOU suffer." A small pause. "You must stay in bed."
"Wh-what's my temperature ... "
"Ross ... "
"I just ... "
" ... do not worry. I am taking care of you," she assured. And she sounded, to herself, odd. Saying such a thing. 'I am taking care of you.' Had she ever said that to anyone before? But to say it, and to MEAN it ...
"I'm sorry," was his whispered apology. And it wasn't the first time he'd apologized today.
"You have nothing," she assured quietly, the blinds in the room shut, to leave it mostly dim. With just enough light for her to do her studying. "You have nothing to feel sorry for."
"I'm ... w-weak. I'm just a ... waif. I'm ... " He trailed.
"Ross ... "
"I'm ... " Little, coughing sobs, and eyes full of water. And he exhaled through his nose. He hadn't the energy to continue the sentence.
If her own eyes had been prone to watering, they probably would've done so by now. But the snow rabbit's emotional freeze kept her on the right side of control. Kept her strong (for him, and for herself). "You will get better," she assured. "In a few days."
A weak, weak nod.
"And I will take care of you," she repeated. A vow. A promise. Spoken with ice-made steel. "I love you."
A weak, watery sniffle, and a mouthed, silent, "I ... love you, too."
And she'd gently stroked his fur, trying to soothe him, and ...
... that had been earlier.
He was asleep now. Oblivious, all this time, to the trains, and to the now-ceased tumbling of the dryer.
As she should be. For she was tired, and she had classes tomorrow, and she had to take care of him, and she should be resting.
But she couldn't sleep.
School, work, finances, the city, young love, the past, mistakes, the future, the wish to start a family, to move back to the countryside, and relatives, and ... faith. Most of all, faith. And surviving in a world that loved the darkness more than the Light.
It wasn't easy.
And as she slumped on the couch, tired, worn, frayed, she knew that, still young, she had quite a ways to go. They both did. She and her mate.
Yesterday was already far away. So far. Like it had been another country.
And, hours hence, the morning.
A new day.
Enough to go on. Just that simple knowledge. As her paws came together, and as she prayed that they may be 'alright,' and that their paths may be straight and true, and that strength be granted, and glory, also, be given (to Him to whom it was due).
That moving from day to day not be like moving from country to country.
But, rather, a journey of holy endurance. Of joy, love, and peace.
Pressing toward the goal for the prize of the upward call.
And, finally, eyes closed, the snow rabbit breathed her 'amen.'
And succumbed to rejuvenating rest.