this is based on my interpretation of a mundane yet real of events. this non-fiction is a kind of a metaphorical observation I've made of life.
Fall would soon be knocking at our front door, but its pet winds had already come around the house to find my father and I sitting in the back yard. They had already made a game of running over our bare extremities and past our dry lips where they were met with expelled breaths that wanted to cool off and play. These gusts were amiable and did not bark and growl like the Summer’s hurricane hounds or whine like the Spring rain’s new litter. Charcoal, the family mutt trots over to meet us. An elderly dog, 84 in his own years, he struggles just to sit. My father, man of about 60 with grey hairs on his black head, looks at the ground with the red dead leaves in the lean green grass.
With the last of my persistence I scan the final words of a copy of The auto-biography of Malcolm X lying in my lap before slouching back in my seat. Malcolm had returned his Hajj to Mecca with an outlook on the world that contradicted his entire life leading up to that point and as history would have it, his old devotion would end him.
As the blank pages at the end were blown closed by the wind, I turned the book over to its back to read the summary and reviews.
My father looked at the old dog lying on the ground and asked, ”you tired?” to that the dog glanced at him and yawned. “Me too,” He replied. I looked over to them with an entire life story rolling in my head and said “Me three.” With all members in agreement we nodded off to sleep.
While we slept, Dusk and Midnight silently traded post regardless of our concerns.
When I was awoken in the middle of that night I was jolted to my feet by a severe chill that had crept up on me and struck. It was phone call from Winter, a strong sensation of snappish cold bearing the news of inevitable mortality that comes in much the same manner as warmth and longevity sent from Spring; dusk had gone without even a wave goodbye and I was stiff in the chills clutches. I realized I had slept through the sunset's elopement with its own sundry glow. I was about to run back to the house which my mother had left well lit and warmed to receive Fall, but then remembered that my father still slept. He was sitting there very still and quiet not two feet from the old mutt who was just the same. I saw that his situation was shrouded in darkness and cold and it disturbed me to witness his quiet contentment.
I roused him from his stillness and directed him back to the house. As we were going in through the door Charcoal brought me the autobiography which had fallen from my lap in my awakening. Having fetched something as he had once done in the games of his youth, the old boy was now in a good humor. No sooner had my father and I closed the door behind us that a chipper new chill blew in to greet my old dog. The wintry whelps enthusiastically lapped at his maw, and he received them with a gentle breath that related to them how there had been days when he too was a pup.
That night, the dog slept with the blanket that was woven from his flesh. Him being an animal, it was not made for him to be oblivious of or impervious to the annual void, but for him to withstand it. Meanwhile, I slept in warmth; I was wrapped in it, rolling in it. I laid there cocooned in a blanket made with human hands and ambition. It kept me comfortable, separate, and ignorant of that thing that is coldness, distance, depth, and time; that is unless I’d listened to the shivering window like it was the receiver on a phone and hear the long, drawn and heavy exhale of humanity’s stalker on the other end descending from the farthest fringe, bringing the outer atmosphere and his howling jackal hail to make the earth more like the cold cosmos.
So, I laid still and warm where neither the wildest writhing dream nor the wickedest whinnying night-mare could drag or ensnare me to a thought of the future or death like those phone calls from Winter.
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