Notes from my purple prose tinted glasses

[jack_babalon]

Autumn already here in Terminus, with it's crisp dusks and lazy dawns framing the dwindling days. September the pale reflection of August cast across the shimmering waves of the last swim of Summer, October it's shadow flickering restless from Jack O'Lantern grins and November the crackling fire places lit to warm us in it's absence. On my block the cats have begun to come out again in mass - where Summer may belong to the dogs here, Autumn is thier undisputed domain - gathering in their silent covens deep in the dying lawns, beneath unsuspecting front porches and sleeping cars or tucked in the corners of narrow driveways carpeted with fallen leaves. For the most part they seem content with playfully hunting each other across the gardens by day, followed by the screeching out of what sounds to be jagged Tom Waits covers by night. There is a new stray to the packs this year (and yes, I've come to recognize almost all my feline neighbors these past three years). Too old for kitten, too young for cat - a nervous little cloud white stray - who watches me crouched from the bushes behind the dumpster. I don't have the heart to tell him(her?) that it's snow light hide doesn't make for effective camaflouge. S/he has developed the oddest habit of running in front of my bike when I take it out for a quick spin, darting from out of nowhere to streak past me in a blur only to vanish once across the street.

Though I don't know what laws govern the province of superstition, I like to think that if a black cat's pass is bad luck, then a white cat's must be good.

It is only lately that I have come to realize that I have become somewhat of a brother to them, an honorary rank at best admittedly... but one that counts me in good company. I come to see in myself the predatory indolence of those that live unmeasured, pouncing naked upon my muse when she walks through the door and the long bouts of dream rich sleep curled around her that follow.

Nine months of Sundays now without a job. Nine life's spent with the generosity of a drunk on payday. Nine months carrying the child of my words, ready to burst into birth with a scream. The nine years I spent toiling in an office a discarded chain left rusting in the backyard of memory.

But I can no longer deny that I will have to go back to work soon.

There's no way the book will be ready before I run out of money (much less published, if at all). In the meantime my novel waits on feedback from it's first few readers - I imagine my poor manuscript blushing with bad grammar, frozen in the mirror trying to decide which dress of text looks best for a first date that's already a half hour late.

Still even if I have to go return to the Cube Farm's I had so desperately escaped, there will remain what these last nine months have given me - beyond the novel, the brief fling with economic independence, even the blessing that is my Vee - the tranquility of satisfaction that has changed my own sense of self worth from a glass cobra to a napping lion.

It might not last.

I know this. But I also know it doesn't have to.

So long as a wish is proved possible, even if but once, there will remain the undying hope of its return.

I'll be ready either way.