With classmates in what appears to be a crowded warehouse, waiting out a storm and watching TV. A bizarre movie is playing where giant bugs terrorize the cast which includes Anthony Hopkins. In one scene, a praying mantis (colored and patterned like a moth1) climbs onto a flying contraption that looks like a large broom stick and zips away over the woods, chasing someone. I look down and see a pair of spiders embedded in the crook of my right forefinger. I casually pluck one out but one is larger and very detailed – black and yellow with orange eyes. Its head and upper body stick out with the legs inside and I tug at it but it doesn’t budge. This has occurred in more than one dream and I have no idea what it means, but now my hands are driving me crazy.
Staying with Momma and [Liz] in a hotel room. We get in late and find two teenage girls have crashed the place. One’s caught rummaging through a bag and tries to play it off while the other is napping under the covers. All our lights have been shut off, and Momma rushes us to throw whatever we can into the car. We start out with luggage and once that’s full we start stuffing things into white trash bags. Books, stuffed animals (I remember Pooh Bear, Chip, a Sonic doll, possibly my Cabbage Patch doll), and a lot of broken plastic toys. We assumed once we’d done that we’d throw away all the trash. A man is arguing with someone outside the window of our room and [Liz] and I crouch low to the floor as we work. Momma suddenly bursts in and grabs hold of [Liz], dragging her out and shouting for us to go. I hurriedly ask my sister if everything else has been stowed in the car and she says yes. I grab the bag nearest me and [Liz] holds on to the one she has as we race outside. I fall into the passenger seat but [Liz] can’t open her door and begins screaming as I fumble with it over the seat as a car pulls in beside us and tries to cut us off. Panicked, Momma tells us to scream to get his attention to lure him around to our side of the car so she can gun it, and we do as she says. The man – skinny with glasses and a goatee and a resemblance to Jeffrey Dahmer, may have been wearing a plaid shirt – stumbles to our right and starts throwing rocks at the windshield. One cracks it, but by now Momma’s backing down the driveway (we’re now fleeing a house on a dark street). She murmurs she can’t see out the back for all the bags and the car feels like it’s moving slower and slower. The man hesitates then heads around the front of his car.
I wake up in a cold sweat. As dry as my eyes are, my right eye won’t stop weeping. I hear the Shawshank Redemption credits kick in as I step into the hall …
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
• Little libraries! If only I were a carpenter (and lived somewhere else, where something like this would take off).
• Michael Chabon discusses the bias against science-fiction. Love him!
• If you’re of the geek or nerd persuasion and haven’t subscribed to the Nerdist channel on YouTube, you should. Is it weird that the show I’m most looking forward to is Rob Zombie’s?
• Wil Wheaton’s list of things every person should have.
• And I know you’ve seen it by now, but … an excerpt from Wesley Crusher, Teenage Fuck Machine.
• Francesca Lia Block is in a battle with Bank of America over her home. You can stay updated at Save Francesca’s Faerie Cottage. I really hope things work out; we’re facing the same situation and it’s enough to drive anyone mad.
• Steampunk Thing! How cool would it be to have one of these attached (and working, of course)?
• Here’s why Cinderella III: A Twist in Time is the best Disney sequel. I’m still cackling.
• Mark your calendars: The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King (4/24), another tale in the Dark Tower saga, and Railsea by China Miéville (5/15), a salvagepunk retelling of Moby Dick.
My earliest memory is of wee me, about 6 months old, tumbling over the collapsible rail of my crib and landing on my head. This would happen again many times, enough to warrant a pile of stuffed animals being strategically placed at my bedside to cushion my fall. I learned that if I held onto the railing and swayed (I’m sure I was mimicking the animated monkeys I had seen swinging from branch to branch on early morning cartoons), the side would drop and out I’d spill. But the first time I wasn’t prepared, so I knocked myself silly and shrieked as if I’d fallen onto a bed of nails rather than the floor. My mom rushed in wearing the satin blue nightgown she always wore in those days, scooped me up and carried me into the living room, still a blubbering mess. What followed is most likely a series of events that over time my mind has molded into one, but for the sake of a good story we’ll say this is how it happened.
The TV was on. I want to say we were watching a Saturday Night Live skit but for the life of me I haven’t been able to find a clip online. A young couple, the jock boyfriend and the pretty blonde with her hair pulled into a ponytail, stood looking up at the Lincoln Memorial. They turned to leave when the statue lifted one hand then the other before rising from his seat, glowering down at them like an angry god. Naturally, they screamed and ran away. But they weren’t quite fast enough. I don’t remember what happened to the guy, only that he died first. The girl must not have been very bright because she just stood there aghast. Abe reached down and made a fist and then he was holding her up to his face. She screamed one last time before her head disappeared in his enormous maw. He spit it out – close-up shot of her head rolling across the ground – and the audience went wild with laughter as he shuffled away to wreak havoc on the Washington Monument.
Now, this did nothing to soothe my cries. I’m fairly certain I puked.
Sometime before dawn, I heard a woman’s scream followed by a crash. I opened my eyes and stared at the window on the other side of the room. I didn’t move. If I had been capable, I would’ve pulled the blanket over my head and cried myself back to sleep. Instead I was forced to watch through the dingy glass as a pair of legs, stone white and as big around as tree trunks, strode past and out of sight. Something downstairs shattered. A chair or other wooden object was dragged or pushed across the floor, punctuated by audible wibbling. I knew then Lincoln had forced his way into the building.
Let’s be real, you’d have shit your pants.
It turns out that a drunk had broken into the apartment below us. Besides smashing a window and frightening the female half of the couple who lived there by exposing himself (it’s my understanding that this was the same drunk who spent nights singing in the street, sometimes clothed but most often not, sometimes with a guitar and other times with a harmonica), no real harm was done. So what the hell had I seen moving past my window at the height of the ruckus?
Maybe my mom had spiked my formula to lull me to sleep. Maybe it was the first of many hypnagogic hallucinations to come. But I saw something, something that looked an awful lot like a large marble statue’s large, stiff marble legs.
It is with a sad and heavy heart that I must tell you what is going on here at Cedarhill. On Sunday night, February 5, someone broke into the sanctuary. They turned the felv cats in with our 150 uninfected cats. They were found that way the next morning. Rags were stuffed down the toilet to plug it up. A pair of Michelle’s boots were stolen. All fingers pointed toward a former employee. She worked for us a couple of weeks then asked to be admitted to Willowbrook Psychiatric Center. She turned out not to be very stable.
I’ve had to order a whole new set of 90-keyed alike master locks. The cheapest I could find was $18.00 apiece. I am sure that this person had gotten herself a master lock key to the current set of locks. We are currently on high vigil. We have locked the felv/fiv house, the senior house and the big cat house. We are locking the front gate with a chain and pad lock. In our twenty-five years, I have never felt so threatened.
Now, for the tragic news. We were not sure what happened to Oscar. He started to throw up last Sunday night on February 5 and refused to eat. The vet came out Monday and drew blood which was sent to MSU. We gave him fluids, B-12 and a huge dose of vitamins. The next day we got his blood work back and he had tested positive for salmonella and he died that night. We have been feeding the same beef and chicken and knew that was not the cause. Lady, who lived with Oscar, cries and moans all of the time. It just breaks your heat. Oscar, the plumber, is gone forever. Rest in peace, Oscar.
The following week Sonya, another tiger, started showing severe neurological regression. She could hardly walk. We carried her to MSU and we had every imaginable test run on her. From x-rays, spinal tap, spinal milligram and the result they came back with was 96% cancer in her blood work, and she tested positive for Canine Distemper probably carried by raccoons in this area. She was euthanized by MSU on February 16. The staff and I are still in shock.
If that was not enough, Phoebe our 15-year old blind tiger, on February 23, started having severe seizures and passed away a few hours later. Her little body is at MSU for a necropsy. I’m so used to having Phoebe in my back yard that the emptiness is unbearable. She was quite the talker. She was 5 months old when we rescured her and was 15 years old when she died.
For the animals,
C. Kay McElroy & Michelle Cranford
I’m angry. I’m hurt. In the 15+ years I’ve known about Cedarhill, nothing like this has happened. I don’t presume to know what happened to poor Sonya and Phoebe – the timing just sucks. But I don’t think it’s far-fetched to assume Oscar was poisoned. I looked forward to picking up their newsletter each month to read about his shenanigans. It made me smile. Now he’s gone.
I donated $50. It won’t bring any of them back, but it may help with medical costs or locks and keys. It’s not much but it’s something. It’s all I could think to do. You can read more about the sanctuary and all that they do at http://www.cedarhillanimalsanctuary.org. They were featured on Animal Planet’s Must Love Cats in February of last year, which you can view below.
I hope they find whoever is responsible. I hope the guilt consumes her and devours her from the inside out.
Two dreams, one featuring a collie dog, black, brown and white, with apparent cigarette burns on the white spots on her muzzle. The other involved me walking through a building off Main Street (I recall going in and out the front door several times, and there may have been a bookshop). I wind up in a small dining room where someone is sprawled on the floor and a couple are eating at a table. The woman remarks, “Is that a homosexual leg?” She repeats herself and I snap, “It’s a human leg.” This rattles her, and she asks if I’d like some wine before hurtling a full wine glass at my head. I knock it back at her with my left arm, breaking the glass and dousing her as well as my shirt. She stands and I grab a fork, knocking her multiple times on the head with it. She just screams and keeps walking towards me. I slap it over her left eye but it doesn’t do any damage. I grab her left arm and mock stabbing her when I see her husband stand up. I hit her again, push her down, and run through several doors where all the locks (all chains) have either been removed or have had the knob at the end of the chain broken off. She catches up to me and I slam her fingers in the door before taking off again. I end up climbing out of what I think was a bathroom window onto the street in an alleyway.
![Fork Goodness Sake [ royal bitch ]](http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3251/2419180638_e8e2cd0f11_z.jpg)