Fifteen

FIFTEEN, PARAGRAPH, Boy Turd and Girl Turd, 12:21 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. CDT, Saint Louis Park, Minnesota, May 25, 2014

            They were Lucy's pyramids. Franny destroyed them with his boyturd. He was the boy. She was the girl, the cleaner and maker of the covered cat toilet. He entered and laid his turd, long for a cat's, not wide or squat like a dog's or other animal's, not comparing to any deer's. Lucy entered the open door next; she had been inside the cat litter house before: Brother Fran didn't bother to cover turds he'd laid. He spoke of the outdoors: lizards he'd separated from their heads, world of work. To her the box was Pyramids! Franny was no more girlturd than an untrained Egyptian, and the untrained were rejected by Ptolemy. Ptolemy was Lucy's mathematical consort. It would be like her to jest mathematically with someone like Him. Ptolemy gave her no quarter, had like her human parents denied her request to go to San José by Greyhound or other charter. It was Lucy's province to arrange turds in the way that gave her Inkling, the girl train. It was Fran's to lay the odorous curve, man work. She flew the pellets of Tidy Cat so far across the wide-plank, dark hardwoods in Houston, out the door of the litter cave, that Fran cared only for a bedroom, not in asking, though I gave it, our stairway with tallest white walls and bitter-blue short-pile. He had earned it, and she had policed him. It had been Lucy who had saved us from the Intruder's gun, who had bared her angelic teeth and growled toward that temporarily-closed door. I knew the killer would be there, awaiting my consent, like Camus's anti-Christ, as in Kermode's deliriously-casual I.D. I used the broom.