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I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the
open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I’d
half awaken. He’d stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of
urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest, powerfully,
arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for
milk. And some mornings I’d wake in daylight to find my body covered with
paw prints in blood; I looked as though I’d been painted with roses.
It was hot, so hot the mirror felt warm. I washed before
the mirror in a daze; my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea
kelp. What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of
union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of
some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The sign on my body could have been
an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. I never
knew. I never knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally
disappeared, whether I’d purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the
Passover. We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death,
beauty, violence…. “Seem like we’re just set down here,” a woman said to
me recently, “and don’t nobody know why.”
(pp 1-2, from Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
New York: HarperPerennial, 1988.)
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