Magic afoot.
We were told to take a walk through the city, and to hunt for these two things:
a mole
&
a rose
I wrote the words on my feet. “Mole” was repeated on the right. “Rose” was repeated on the left. A spell, an attractor. An irrational idea, that I knew somehow would work. The feet shall know with a certainty all occult secrets which the mind shall merely intuit. So I listened to the guidance of the toe, and was not deceived.
We discovered the mole’s burrow on North Avenue. It was cold, crystalline. Dripping water had created intense stalactites, some perhaps seven or eight feet tall. We walked deeper in, and deeper. Concrete archways grew at the center of the tunnel, wise and menacing. My friend was overtaken with a sense of the grave, with the idea of a graveyard underground. The empty spaces created by the arches were like gravestones, they said, and these invisible gravestones had a corresponding material gravestone elsewhere, too. Perhaps in Decatur Cemetery, where the werewolves rein. We thought of our own deaths too, here in the underground. Looking above at the stalactites, one thought of little else. What kind of unwholesome, sick beauty might our bodies display, impaled through by these translucent spears of ice? Cars rushed by, wrapping us in a soft cocoon of sound. Ahead, a strange and slow figure creeped. Hunched over, with head and body covered in thick brown winter clothes. A fairly short human, even by our standards. We watched as they made their way to the burrow’s open mouth. We tried to hang back and avoid them, but eventually we had to pass. The brown figure cried gibberish at our backs, half in song. Gibberish, or lost mole language? Meaning felt nearby, at the tip of our conscious minds. But not quite there, not quite. We never looked back. And as we left behind this burrow, we became convinced that the strange figure was the mole. A mole spirit, in human clothes.
A few hours passed.
To be honest? At this point in our walk, we’d forgotten the search for the rose. Too many aches and pains, too much hunger. We came across a small park, and, quite relieved, searched for the nearest bench. The first was broken, so we walked on to the second. And there she waited–the tiny rose. We couldn’t believe our eyes. Not a solitary rose, either. No, she waited for us on the top of a strange little offering, an assemblage. Beautiful in its irrationality. Something had sat here and slowly built this pyre. Had collected bits of twigs, bits of grass, bits of tree. And combined them in this very special way. For who? For us? For what reason? We tried to imagine the kind of entity which would do such a thing. A spirit perhaps, or a bower bird, or a child. We tried to imagine the state of mind that would cause this mound to come into being, and to make this state our own. For a long time we sat mutely in the stillness. Listening to the distant birdsong, letting the wind nuzzle kindly at our eardrums…
City trash men walked past us, breaking the spell. Asked us both “how y’all doing?”
Pretty well, sir. Pretty well.
