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“And what did you think when you saw the caterpillar?”

“I swore allegiance to the cricket.”

“I’m gonna take a year off health insurance and see what happens.”

“Do you really not know how thin you are?” a friend asked me, picking through my donation pile.
I shrugged. I lived in a house with four full length mirrors and no concept of self.
“I mean you’re a Leo and I follow you on instagram. Do you not look at the selfies before posting them or Oooh this is cute,” she picked up a pink maxi skirt.
It was a few days before this all really happened. Before it all really coalesced and picked up speed from there. The night I saw a text from my best friend about the sudden surgery she needed and the only reason she wasn’t going in next was because a flight to life had taken precedence. When she said it was ectopic, miscarriage,  I had the flash return. Not that this is how we meet again but how I paid attention again. The way I was scared her whole first pregnancy, rushed to her labor and never told her of the visions of the dead baby, the omens, the death and haunting. I wrapped the house as she rushed to the hospital. I banished the ghost to the basement and the way the fear wrapped my throat like two dark hands. I saw many things. Do I drown my child? I asked the cards. Most of what I have kept hidden is to protect.
But suddenly the word ectopic is in your search engine. Suddenly a flight to life is at the same hospital. Suddenly your mantel is full of black candles again and you’re texting her jokes.
“25% blood. May need a transfusion.”


“We want to do a biopsy to see if it’s cancer. It’s a goiter. If it’s cancerous, we will have to do surgery to remove it. It’s overgrown and obstructive.”
Doctors speak like that; with an ice cold cadence I truly crave. People murmur emotion. Give me facts and statistics and search engines and the frigid whip of a sentence. Life, the ever fucking sadist. I started by guessing. I started taking guesses at people who looked at me longer. I started taking guesses at the timing before I sent that heart. God told me to do this. I start falling fast and hard as promised. I start guessing with a 98% accuracy rate.

“crossing the bridge”

Once or twice a year, I let a man take me on a date. Something fancy that I picked and I take everything out on him. I show up petulant, murder in the eyes and crazy.
“I have to move.”
I pick at my asparagus.
“Oh yeah?”
He is of average build, intelligence and dress.
“My house is haunted.”
He kind of smirked a little and I watched him. I knew
I couldn’t chew and swallow the asparagus in a short enough amount of time that was acceptable on a date so I am suddenly unsure why I ordered it. I am unsure where to take the story but
“It’s the second haunted house I’ve ever lived in.”
I am wearing a low cut red dress and avoiding all eye contact. I am not wearing a wig.
“Why do you think it’s haunted?”
“How do I KNOW it’s haunted?”
I didn’t look at him to know that he was smiling.
“How do you know it’s haunted?”
“A little girl takes over my body at night and whispers secrets in a southern accent.”
I enjoyed recounting all the ways I had been discounted by men in front of them. There are people who pay hundreds of dollars to have mediums enter their house to release spirits. There are people who pay for tarot daily and I know because they pay me. There are people who pay for past life regression therapy in which a stranger tells you that you were once plated in gold before being slaughtered at the throne and then reblooming as a tamarisk in Egypt cut too soon. When you wanted legs, you had to start back over on a slow crawl through Earth as a dung beetle before you would learn to cross a bridge in combat boots. People pay for all of these preternatural things but you are here, ordering a ten course meal you can’t swallow just to be painted as both cross and deceptive for the evening. It is dangerous to believe everything you hear or think. I take a gulp of water. Mental note: this is my fourth glass of the evening and we are only on the fourth course.
“I have an anxiety disorder,” I tell him later.
He nods too expectantly so I throw out some others.
“I can’t have wine because I’m an alcoholic. I once drank so much I threw up on my coffee table and because I had no more liquor left in the house, I slurped it up with my tongue.”
We will not be going home together. He will not be seeing me naked.
“I once came to holding a knife over my wrist apparently about to text someone for help.”
That’s my favorite highlight in the reel. But there is more.
“I am guessing at a 95% accuracy rate.”
He has grown more tepid with time, a little more guarded but still inquisitive. We are eating sorbet now. I know that he will invite me home and I know I will suck his vape on the way towards the corner and part ways last minute. I know what he can’t verbalize.
“ I went to Busch Gardens and I guessed every single color correctly. On the sky tram, there are three different color trains in no particular sequence. Randomized. While Leana and I waited, I would guess which color we would get. I was right every single time.”
“That’s 100 percent,” my genius pointed out.
“Yes, but I am not right all the time and around other people I sometimes acquiesce away from my own favor. i do better alone or in teams in which we both believe strongly. Leana and I played games like that all the time as children and I usually guessed right but as I aged, doubt set in. Confusion,” I wave my hands towards the other patrons. “Like on St. Patricks day, my friend and I bought a lottery ticket and we had to guess the numbers…”
“Wait, you’re mad you didn’t win the lottery?” he interrupted, his mouth full of banana.
Disgusted, I still withdrew a snarl, “I’m not finished.”
Silence from both parties.
“St. Patricks day is considered a lucky day and we both felt lucky. We wanted to play the lottery. Thought it would be lucky. What is the luckiest number of all time?”
He paused, I raised an eyebrow, beckoning, showing there are no tricks.
“Seven?”
“Yep,”
“Is that what you picked?”
“Nope. Guess what I picked? The unluckiest number of all time.”
“Thirteen?”
“Thirteen. We didn’t win. Superstition got the best of me.”
“It’s just numbers,” he shrugged.
“Numbers have meaning and my intuition told me today is my lucky day if
I pick the luckiest number of all time. Thoughts have meaning.”
“So why didn’t you pick seven?”
“Thirteen means a lot to me. I was confused. But anyway, it was the person I was with. We play the lottery together. We do other things too but sometimes I think something and say something else or start walking the wrong direction CONFIDENTLY she would say. And it’s not always like that but when it is, I don’t get it. It comes out around her more.”
“Like she put that thought in her head? That you will lose?”
“No, she told me I have a strong intuition, that in am one of the most self sufficient people she knows and that I should trust myself. More her power. I submit so I can be taken care of in a way. I don’t know. Sometimes I feel pressure to perform a psychic circus. With her, many strange things have happened but she believes in randomness and I believe in other things,” I wave my hands around, catch him peeking at my cleavage. “But something else.”
The waiter drops the check and I make no move.
“The other day I was walking down the street and saw a cricket running.”
He pulls out his card.
“Running?”
“Running, not hopping, which I haven’t seen often. I thought the threat of danger must be upon it to make it move so fast in that direction under the streetlights like that. Kind of out in the open.”
He is leaning forward. The date is over. He will invite me back to his place despite me giving no obvious clues that I want that and he will offer an alternative.
He will want to walk me home.
“So I avoid it, walk over it, thinking it to be a cockroach at first, and I have a good eye. I walk only a few steps further and see a fat ass caterpillar, plump, crossing the sidewalk. That cricket was running towards a mouth, not away from one. It was hungry.”
I am starving. He didn’t blink. I cocked my head slightly, waiting for his friendly incursion which he was sure to give. He blinked and waited.
“So you were…wrong?”
“I am only guessing at a 96% accuracy rate now.”
I held my hands out like the little “duh” emoji.
“I was wrong. I thought the cricket was running from something, not towards something.”
The waiter came back to drop the check for the last time.
“Believe it or not, I used to bat a solid 99 every time. It’s how I made Summa Cum Laude.”
He followed suit, sort of standing to sign for the tip as he could see I was about to dash.
“But you don’t know the cricket went after that caterpillar.”
“There is literally no other explanation for a cricket to leave the cover of leaves on a public sidewalk under that kind of light with those kind of footsteps unless it was after something or fleeing something. Insects are instinctual only. They would never put themselves in such a vulnerable position. That caterpillar was fat and close.
I would have eaten it too I would have definitely stayed on its trail. And why would I have noticed any of these bugs? Why then did I look down to see both in action at that moment?”
Even though I didn’t want to, I flashed a flirty smile. We began to walk. He had no rebuttal. I threw in my penchant for straight As to thwart him. The truth is I didn’t stick around to see the crickets next movement. Stalking prey can take hours and as whimsical as  I can be, my knees are tired. I have let pragmatism envelop me in her warm, protective cape. He handed me his vape.
“So I live around here but no pressure, I know you said you were busy.”
“I am extremely busy and enjoy spending time alone,” I cut in.
“Well, and I know you’re self sufficient and can get…”
“I am completely capable of walking home alone.”
I took his vape again.
“There’s a park around here if you don’t want to go home yet.”
I blow a plume at his face.
“I am looking forward to my long solo walk home.”

I start batting with 97% accuracy.

“datura moon”

the way they lie to women,
cage them.

“gaslighting” or “the act of naming things”

I was convinced I was having panic attacks when a medical condition was blossoming inside of me, hindering my breathing.

Death was everywhere I went. I felt it and then as my birthday neared, I felt it press. I had a memory; a vision of me standing in the kitchen with my friend James. Me, covertly making a deal with God in my most deranged state. It was New Year’s 2016 going on 2017.

“I’ll live to 34.”

I pressed my hands to the cabinets and felt two hands press back.
James shook his head in disbelief.

“No, you’ll live longer.”
However, James also told me I needed an exorcism which didn’t help anything. I winked at the cabinet but as time went on, I sobered. It was like waking up as a giant tropical storm begins approaching. This whole time you were supposed to be planning evacuation and you just sat, entranced by the reflection and the centipede that appeared on your wall at times. The way I burned that altar three times.  I no longer enjoyed the feel of phantom legs running past me. There were two little dead girls in my house that pretended to be one. They held projectors and forecasted death like evening news reports. Sometimes I spent thirty minutes staring in the mirror trying to charm her into submission.

“You cannot leave the mirror, Catarina,” I would say. “But come closer.”
I could not get out fast enough.
“What is your name?”
We began like that.
“I could not get out fast enough.”


“the woman who walked out of walls

this next section is called

now, that I
have your attention

or

 
who to kill,
who to lay to rest,
and with whom do I finally
circle back?

I started listening to the birds that surrounded my house. I started listening  to God, myself, your radio station. I started listening to breezes even though there was a layer of mania to wade through. Lean in, Cat.  It’s not that I wanted to be dramatic. Let go, Cat. Its that I was by nature. Jump off the bridge, Cat. A bit theatrical.

I should have been an actress or a dancer. A performer. More than a mannequin, a mover. Now, I am eight weeks into a very psychotic manic episode calmly trying to stop myself from committing suicide daily. Jump off the bridge, Cat. You should know I am trying not to talk to you about it at the same time. You should know if I ever killed myself, I would always leap from something to conquer my fear of heights. You can fly, Cat.

I assumed this was purgatory.You’re in purgatory, Cat. I remember staring at the oval mirror and watching my face sort of melt and thinking, this is it. They are all in on the joke and I am the last one to know I am already dead. To jump off the bridge was to win. To show them I got it.  I got the joke. I was trying not to text you something that said

I know I am dead now. We don’t have to pretend.

Every day I walked across the bridge. Bold, I would lean over letting the cold wind hit my face or on my more infantile days, sort of scurry in and out of the bike lane as far from the railing as possible. It was cold. I took the gloves on and off and kept the straw tucked into my palm. At all times, I had to have the straw near.

“I’m gonna do it one day,” I let plumes of crystal linger in the air.
Lean over, Cat.
My hair was covered by a knit hat.
“One day I will do it.”
My fingers exposed and cracking. I brush the fingertip of a strange man.
Good girl, Cat!
“One day, I am gonna run into you again and jump off the bridge just to spite you.”
I began my way through the small center city crowd, going nowhere and freezing.

“datura moon”

The apartment kind of moved like a wave. A bruja would say “ a vibration.” You began to hear noises; check to see if it was the cat making them. You began to see slaughtered pigs at your bookshelf and the oven timer keeps going off in the middle of the night. You began to feel lethargic, take naps and wake up to apparitions in your doorway that kind of resemble Alex but also kind of resemble a human alligator. You hugged a small child at two am in your living room with no recognition of waking up or walking there. You began to chant his name. An upswing of movement takes over your legs; an endless urge to pace, to walk far. You began to wrap your body in layers and move things around; build shrines, hang postcards you had written to yourself like a map. The mother in you moves objects out of pathways for safety or tosses things over the bridge for luck: the coconut, the pearl necklace, the limpia leftovers. Your mouth keeps spilling his name and I love you and the euphoric laughter is the dead giveaway but life goes on. Fiddling, you shake. A nervousness begins.

You used to run around without a thought, numb, flask high. Once you ran to catch a plane but now you have a passport. You began the slow climb to the emperor, responsibility, flossing daily and making lists. The euphoric laughter should have been the dead giveaway. The endless spinning and baths or the way you told him I
can’t stop telling your friend I’m in love with him. You wore a red flag costume to the party but you maintained some composure during that time. Took some time off and a pay cut. Hugged yourself a lot. People really didn’t notice the muttering, the way you had to check things so often. You began to guess with 95% accuracy but hedged things to show effort. You were improving in your devolution. The night time became thick and mossy but during the day, you willed results; showed up early with coffee, felt responsible for your own volition. You showed up to the airport four hours early but ended up in Moscow anyway. These things really happened to you. Let go. These things all really happened.
Half has been burned the day your altar caught on fire for the third and last time but you still have the fortune from the cookie the flight attendant handed you:

“(Inscrutable?)”
I was awoken by Russian.
“Would you like a meal?” she repeated in English.

I had not planned to be on this Aeroflot flight on May 29th from Barcelona to JFK so I had not ordered a vegan meal. My meal had been eaten the day before by the famished traveler or curious Spanish tourist. Listless, probably actually starving, I decided to eat around the meat. I was only three hours in and trying not to count the full sixteen on my hand. I ate some spinach thing and a little cheese and a biscuit with butter, cheating. Who cares? I ate the fortune cookie last. I didn’t know Russians were so preternaturally oriented to include a chinese superstition but then again,  I was melting into the seams of my seat so maybe I was reading everyone wrong. It read
He who stands at the place, goes back.

You begin again without pettishness. You say thank you to everyone anyway, honestly, being raised that way. You begin again with a prescription and the same chant.
“These things really happened to me,” is the first thing you plan to tell him.

“datura moon