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.

The Cape Lookout beach. No sun. No source of light. Grey above and below. Dark and light shades of grey. I can't see the ocean. Under my feet, packed, flat sand. Ridges of pebbles and rocks. I hear the ocean over an incline. There is nothing but shadowy air, dark coarse sand, ribbons of small and large stones, the sound of the ocean. No seaweed, no plants, no garbage, no objects.

Was that where the sandy cliff and grasses were when I camped here for my birthday last summer? The winter storms hadn't yet washed the land barrier away. There was a cliff face then. I stood on it and looked down at the beach full of people. I walked down the steep walkway to the warm sand.

In this absence of light, I see a group of four or five people walking. One woman has a bandanna on her head, like in an old photograph of my mother on a windy beach in the early sixties. She's part of a group walking towards the water. Far ahead and far behind them are other groups.

I get closer, to the top of the low incline. The ocean is on the other side. It is wearing down everything. It has worn down everything. The land barrier was once here. Dark sand, dark pebbles, black rocks. The ocean churns. I walk north, in the direction we walked on our real world visit in the winter. The campground has all been worn away. The ocean has poured down night tides. The ocean has flowed over this small ridge. The ocean has flooded what was the campground.

I don't think I've seen it like this in sunlight and now it's all dark. I don't think it is night. It is neither night nor day. All is darkening. All is shading into black. Shiny black rocks rolling in the surf, smaller black rocks above that, coarse sand above that.

I walk along the surf. What I can see becomes thick, until the greyness everywhere is almost opaque. There is almost no difference between what would be the sky, if sky existed, and what would be ocean and land.



I wake up within the dream. there is a part of me that is very strong, very cold, very decisive, who says this is not a good idea. This is too strong, this is too cold. This is too dark. I am deciding to end this. It is not right. The iron will grey stone strength inside me is worried about my safety, but I don't worry because I am strong, I extend everywhere, I am relentless. An identity is surfacing from me. This will happen. It is this strong part of me. The stone grey part of me. That says: no.



I open one eye in the dream and see my bedroom in black and white. It is different, my visual perspective is not from where I am sleeping on the bed. A shade is open and some light comes through a curtain. My dream self sees my room in black and white from outside my body.



I woke up enough to know I had an alarm set to go off in twenty minutes. I went back to sleep. And I think then was when I had this following dream.




I am someone who might be someone like me or someone like la artista, walking along a small ledge along a stone wall or incline and above a river. I walk along what starts out as a pathway three times. Each time the path grows more and more narrow and then disappears into the stone wall. The third time, I look up and see that the real path is at the top of the wall on my right. I get it that I chose the low road, the easy path, not wanting to go up the hill, but that to continue along the river I have to go back once again and take the high road.



~~~~~~~~~

Death, loss, depression, and the strength that comes from having experienced sadness and grief. The ability to explore the underworld. The strength to look into the dark, to inhabit the dark. A gift to bring back to the world of light.