The day after she ran into the biggest dogman Lela found a book under the smallest tree in the forest. In childlike handwriting, scrawled and messy, was written, 'A Mazurka for Three Men and a Blind Woman'. She opened the book slowly, the pages brattled with time, and read, ‘That day, the day after Ships Day, three men and a blind woman set out to find the end of the world’. She counted each syllable in each word, each word in each sentence and each sentence on every page until she’d finished reading the book, then placed the book back under the tree, the smallest tree in the forest, and walked in the opposite direction she had come from. She remembered an old man from Chippenham Wiltshire who claimed he could change a cat into a dog and a dog into a cat by whispering in the animals’ ear. And a man from Mannheim Baden-Wurttemberg who had two cats and two dogs, never knowing for certain which was which. Both men, the old man from Chippenham Wiltshire and the man from Mannheim Baden-Wurttemberg, knew a woman from Wola Katowice who knew how to change a cat back into a cat and a dog back into a dog.
Lela hid beneath the Waymart awning and wept. She wanted a dog that wasn’t a cat and a cat that wasn’t a dog; she wanted things that wouldn’t change no matter how much they tried. She wanted new shoes and socks without holes, she wanted a warmer sweater and a better hat. She wanted things that stayed the same, and if they wouldn’t, changed into a warmer sweater or a sunnier day. She sat beneath the Waymart awning and dreamt she was somewhere else, somewhere far, far away, somewhere other then where she was.
That night the biggest dogman bought a picture frame and put a picture of his mother in it. He forced the edges against the rim of the frame, tamping the picture in place with the sides of his hands, then hung the picture around his neck on a piece of string, cinching it taut with his teeth, and walked back to the woods beside the aqueduct. The night sky hissed rain, the street lights refracting the darkness into images of stillborn children and lost dogs.
Lela hid beneath the Waymart awning and wept. She wanted a dog that wasn’t a cat and a cat that wasn’t a dog; she wanted things that wouldn’t change no matter how much they tried. She wanted new shoes and socks without holes, she wanted a warmer sweater and a better hat. She wanted things that stayed the same, and if they wouldn’t, changed into a warmer sweater or a sunnier day. She sat beneath the Waymart awning and dreamt she was somewhere else, somewhere far, far away, somewhere other then where she was.
That night the biggest dogman bought a picture frame and put a picture of his mother in it. He forced the edges against the rim of the frame, tamping the picture in place with the sides of his hands, then hung the picture around his neck on a piece of string, cinching it taut with his teeth, and walked back to the woods beside the aqueduct. The night sky hissed rain, the street lights refracting the darkness into images of stillborn children and lost dogs.
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