They shouldn't even ask me to come out on a mission. It's during my scheduled off-duty time. Legs in front of a sofa ending in high heeled pumps. This negotiation over my going on the assignment is simply protocol. They ask and I go. My protest is the merest facesaving.

At the assignment. This woman and her daughter, what possible value can they have in the world of espionage? The mother's picked out a film she wants them to go see. This listing, this theater, this time. I shake open the newspaper pages, looking for times and venues. Here are a few showtimes and theaters where it's playing. Can't find the showing she pointed out. Oh, that showing was too far away, anyway, on the other side of the Beltway. There's some arranging to do to get them to one of these. But with me doing the arranging, it will be easier than it would be for these two, who are intimidated by the details of moving in the world, lost, impotent.

The mother is briefly a shadow of la bonita, who is a shadow of my mother.

Here out walking down the sidewalk on a quiet street with Mono and his friend, a slender Asian man in his thirties. We're all wearing sneakers and comfortable, baggy pants. This is hanging out. I'm ambling slightly behind them. I don't walk by Mono's side like I used to, because we're not together anymore. The shared mood is careless and relaxed, everything's okay. His silence is now without weight.

We pause in our walk next to a curbside planting strip. Bare earth and several varieties of clover. Mono's friend points them out. He is familiar with these three strains. One has rosemary-like leaves, but still topped by the white petal ball clover flower, although there are less blooms on the plant. I'll save these to plant in the spring. You can pull them out and the roots, if you keep them dry and cool, will stay dormant through the dark months when the earth is cold.

Maybe I shouldn't have pulled this one out. I try to replant it where the earth makes a vertical incline of a few inches up to the sidewalk surface. The earth is soft and dry, I press the hard, thin roots into the earth.

I'll ask Mono if he wants to share space with me in the patch of herbs I'm planting next summer. The green angel keeps telling me he's gotten more space and he'll plow a plot just for me. I'll have all these rare kinds of clover and epazote and basil. It will take some thought, figuring out how to plant them so that they get sunshine at the perfect times of the day. So the more delicate herbs are shaded by the ferocious, sun-hungry ones. So the sun hits their leaves just so. It starts warming from the outside of each small leaf and its light spreads to the center like from the top of the mountain down into the valley.

The clock is here on the sidewalk. Touching it, breaking it, or it might have already been broken. This is the clock I was glancing at when I was lounging and reading. The one clock in the house that was set an hour late. The clock that made me late to my espionage assignment. That was a farce, scrambling to get the blonde wig on. But then I got there and pretended everything was normal, and it seemed to turn out okay, although I have no idea of the objective.

In the women's living room in my spy role, and a text message appears on my phone from someone I know. I-5 is completely stopped because of the thousands of people massing on the overpass in protest. When I see them, the freeway looks like a portion of 84. The overpass is phenomenally high. I see the crowd teeming up there.

Down here below on a large unpaved, tree-shaded area off the highway, I see them. These are the animals whose suffering that has inspired the protest. The massive animals' dark hides are flecked with blood from many small cuts. Their feet are chained to the curved boards so they are forced to stand. Their bodies are rigidly chained so they cannot change position. As I walk around the end of the platform, I see the silver metal chain around the silverback gorilla's waist. The chain pulls up, so his feet are chained down and his waist is being pulled upwards.

The crew of Hispanic men move around the beasts. The silverback is chained so rigidly that they can turn him on his side and lift him. Is there no danger from his agonized jaws. How can they torture him like this. But this is how animals are treated everywhere.

This is what we do to animals.

Oh, please tell me that the protest, the spontaneous uprising, is not in denial of the situation of all animals. No, no, let it not be that the people are massing in racist hatred of these Hispanic men. That's like blaming the slaughterhouse on the poor men of color, Blacks, Latinos, who are oppressed there as workers.

An exchange between me and the man who lifted the silverback as if it were so much dead meat. The immobilized animal is much too large for this man, or any single man, to lift. I'll not face off with him. I'll move away, because it's not about him.

This is what is done to animals. Pain in every part of their bodies.
This is what is done to animals. Pain in every part of their bodies.
This is what is done to animals. Pain in every part of their bodies.