Year of the Snake

Ennui

47 Ennui Sometimes I feel I’m on an island in the lake of lost connections, where insects buzz and hum their electric song, and the metronomical blink of the cursor’s eye is a beacon to the shore beyond. I keep starting and restarting letters to people I once knew, but I feel brittle and strange, and can’t find the right words, or at least the ones I need. Autumn tightens its crisp band of air like a tourniquet, and the man-size sunflower across the alleyway from my back door dries on its stalk and becomes a ghost. The cats sleep closer now that it is cool, their bodies heavy and round, the oddity of their cat thoughts self-contained. In the morning on the bus I see the same woman every day outside the Shell station, wheeling her grocery cart that holds only a green street sign reading “Emily Way”; and the man who clasps a plumcolored Igloo lunch cooler with such formality, chest level, using both hands palms up, as if offering up his own heart. I wear 48 my anonymity like a scar and consider it an excuse for voyeurism. On the way home, behind the coffee shop, I pass the skeleton of a sparrow, licked clean over the course of a week by clusters of black ants, whose nervous, rippling activity reminded me of television static. Now the bare, delicate architecture of the bird is almost fetal—tiny skull compact as a cowry shell, the empty curl of the ribcage, the vertebrae of the spine linked together with the intricate precision of an expensive bracelet. All evening long I keep checking on the praying mantis who came to perch on the lid of the trash can. I am lost between one thing and another, and can’t remember which. Absinthe green, with its backwards-pointing knees rising in stiff peaks, it swivels around its triangular wedge of a head to gaze at me with black pinpoints of eyes each time I step out my back door onto the stoop, and it seems as if she is saying to me, Have you ever eaten a pomegranate? I buy one from the Big Bear grocery on the corner, and the seeds are brilliant, clear as rubies nested 49 in the fleshy concave hollows of pulp. And as I pluck them out one by one to eat, each one leaves behind an emptiness, each one making me more a thief. ...