Dating : Original Short Story: Dandelion Clock

You know that there is mischief in the small parts that you leave behind: the hairs, eyelashes, flakes of skin, sweat, bacteria-laden clouds of CO2, droplets of saliva from an errant sneeze; even the fibers and lint of your clothing, the wear of your weight and motion. And none of this includes the larger matter you leave and take — sometimes that which is not yours to trouble others with or keep for your own. Nor the feelings and thoughts you inflict upon other living beings. Who can say how many insects you’ve unwittingly crushed or saved?

Living life as you do, from the tip of your nose, it must be exhausting to even imagine that the strictly defined acts which you consider changing the world are unrelated to the ways in which you are actually changing the world. Your world-changing is all about ideals, evils, good, accomplishment, damage…it is only of yourself that you think, not the world. For an ant or bacterium or a patch of soil up one eyebrow hair are apart from you, and small, so you ignore them. You’re looking at big things with your big human eyes. You think you’re more than the dust you shed, but you are the dust and curiously busy about it.

I used to teach a class where we would sit on an oval oral aural carpet in a field or forest and discuss such ideas, including the point that our discussion was indeed a discussion, but the ideas contained therein were only ideas. Real were the carpet, the birds, the faces. Fake were the pretensions that we were a sum above our parts. So we would sit and struggle rather Buddhistly by tugging first at one end of a rope that represented thoughts, and then at the other end that represented reality, holding our own selves in position by pulling our weight against our own selves. A discussion along this vein had begun to flow when the mouse landed.

A woman named Kiernie was in the process of explaining why the idea of being able to understand a lack of ideas, when we are creatures of thought, seems imposs —

THUMP.

Most screamed. We all stared. We looked up to a clear blue sky. Then back. Even for a mouse, its face was ugly in death: jaw open with yellow teeth jutting out, eyes half-closed, torn fur matted with blood, perhaps exposing a bit of intestines if one wished to lean closer. And it had landed, smack, on my teaching rug.

“There’s blood on your shirt,” said Nate, wide-eyed. I looked down. So there was.

“EW,” announced Jean. “Ew, ew, ew.” She stood and began flapping her hands like a bird whose wings are far too small for its body. This set off a chain reaction of departure. Within ten seconds, all of my students had stood and relocated someplace away from the rug.

“Get up, sensei,” said Kiernie, although I had informed her several times that this term did not really suit me, her, or the situation.

I decided to ignore them until they drifted away like seeds from a hoary dandelion. They tried to speak to me, and someone even started to shake me, so I waved them away to let them know I had not gone into some kind of shock, and at last they began to go. But this I noticed very distantly, as one notices oneself falling asleep.

Inside the gruesome mouse crawled the critters in the system that had constructed itself much like mine, in its glazed eyes lay my future, in its blood staining my shirt lay my past. I held myself in its body, let reality tremble. The wind blew a strand of hair across my face.

The fly arrived. Most corpses have their first fly. This was the mouse’s. I wondered what fool of a bird had dropped this meal and how clumsy it must have felt, how frustrated seeing us there, knowing surely in its mind that we would enjoy its lunch when in fact only black proboscises and mandibles would be enjoying this hard-won morsel. But that is the reality of a hawk (or whatever it was): to a hawk, we find mice very tasty, as well.

Not really. That is only my idea of a hawk’s thoughts. And only my construction that it was a bird’s clumsiness at all. And now my rug was ruined.

“Sensei…” I glanced up. She was still here, silently waiting, shifting from one foot to the other. “Sensei, I have to go to the bathroom.”

“For fuck’s sake, Kiernie, then go!”