excerpt from DON'T FEAR THE NIGHT DUENDE

March 2010

I’m stuck all over with this dirty winter. Mona Cost startled awake in her nest in the woods by the beach. She pealed dried grass from the side of her cheek. Panic – she sat up too fast, felt herself for bugs and bruises. Her cat. Mourning and panic – there was a blank spot, but she remembered the cat was gone.  This was a morning that part of Mona would wake in forever.  A morning that ran though her mind like an old song. Someone’s saliva dried on her face, her neck, her mouth tasting like the stranger and drunk sickness.

It wasn’t the first golden hour of the night she’d blacked out on. 

Loathing and breathing in the thin woods on the side of the hill between Edgewater beach and the grassy park above. Lake Erie was her Mother – grey and breathing beyond the trees. Her trunk, her bag, her crate of gear. It was all there. But for the cat. She looked at her phone. She’d missed a call from her mother. She hadn’t heard her mother’s voice since Christmas.

It was a year with a sickly warm winter. A warm breeze should carry lilacs, not stale winter exhaust.

Always in Cleveland, the people were brutalized with honest weather.

She sat up and knocked some dirt off her forearm, dug out her gallon jug of water. Her stomach rolled.

She brushed her teeth with water from her gallon jug. She saw the lake through the trees. The gulls sounded good. She sat for while with her chin on her knee. There were places in Cleveland she wanted to go now that she was free, old haunts, old loves. She wanted to see what gigs were happening. Maybe she’d get a spot in her old neighborhood on Lorain – but then she’d have to do something for money. She’d been shoplifting mixed nuts from the CVS, and using their toilet, too. She lifted fruit from Giant Eagle.

 

             Her mouth was wet – she was hungry. She grabbed her change of clothes – a gold sarong and black underwear, her towel and bar of biodegradable rose soap and made her way down the path to the beach. Her joints were creaking from the moist hard ground. It was early – no one was around. She scrubbed her underwear and then slipped into the water and washed from the waist down, shaving a little bit from the knees down perfunctory, with an old pink razor. Then she dried her bottom half and slipped on her other pair of underwear, wrapped the clean sarong around her waist. Keeping her blue sarong as a guard against cops who might be up in the trees watching for nudity, she washed under her arms and around her breasts. Then she dried off and pulled the gold sarong up over her chest and proceeded to scrub the blue sarong in the water.

            The sun was still lower toward the south in the sky, rising over downtown Cleveland to the east. But the equinox was coming.