Cars on Fire

by Mónica Ramón Ríos

  The Animal Mosaic

  It was the eve of the national festivities. In front of the house across the street, a fifteen-year-old boy, tall and lanky, extended his arm up toward the dense trees with the solemnity of someone who wasn’t alone. He fired the first shot. The stars flashed in through the branches and scattered singed foliage. You could hear the songs of birds sleeping huddled against each other. Nests dropped down into the night. The second star lit the darkness and startled syrinxes loosed their warnings. Terrified, dozens of open wings invaded the block. The fifteen-year-old boy and I were the only humans there. My eyes found his from where I stood on the opposite sidewalk. He felt ashamed to see the third star reflected in my eyes. But his arm, lifted at a visionary angle, could only anticipate animal death. Night and silence fell once more. We both listened closely. When the boy went back into his house, nothing but me and the memory of the invasion were left outside, bearing witness to the dark and what would later come to pass on a staircase on Dean Street:

  Those were the birds. A feather on every shard of stone.

  The fifteen-year-old dreamed of rats that night. The week before, someone had shown him a video about ordinary people from all over this vast territory called the state of the union. The people fondly stroked their rats. The images made him feel the stirring of an unknown tenderness toward the dirty animals that scrabbled in the trash behind the building on the corner of Kingston Avenue and stumbled food-drunk through the streets.

  The deepest dimensions of the animal self exist not at the level of the individual but as part of the collective group mind of the entire species, and that higher level is not a duality lesson per se.

  The rats in the video weren’t rank or diseased. They scaled human legs. People bathed them and let their pets lick them with their mustached mouths. Something prompted him to close the window on his cell phone, something that pierced his retina and lodged itself in his body like a tremor. The feeling hounded him for weeks and forced him to tighten his sneakers hard around his ankles before he left the house.

  He woke from those dreams with an unease that warped his vision and his hearing. Sometimes he confused the outside sounds with his mother’s voice.

  Those were the rats. A footprint on every stone.

  A few weeks prior, Kuan had cut, sewn, drawn, printed, and stuffed some cushions bearing the images of cats culled from a sketchbook. When Kuan took them to sell outside after school, the fifteen-year-old decided they didn’t match the stoic tone of his bedroom, constrained as he was by his meager allowance and his own minimal penchant for work of any kind.

  Hundreds of these beings have manifested in full avatar mastery.

  In the middle of the night, after spending several hours engrossed in his phone, he turned his bedroom inside out in search of any cash he might have lost among his notebooks. Loose coins scattered onto the bed. He was jolted awake by his mother shrilling about the mess, demanding to know if he intended to buy more of that marijuana again. He shut the front door with a shrug, as if deciding not to give any of it another thought, and he walked along the sidewalk, kicking at a trail of gnawed chicken bones. Later that same day, Kuan surprised him by holding out a bag with the last cushion inside, the one nobody had bought. The fifteen-year-old stared at the bag for a long time, half-smiling as his friends jeered. He tucked it carefully into his backpack so it wouldn’t raise any suspicions at home.

  He got into bed, pulled out the cushion, and placed it on top of his pillow. The cat print was an effigy. She looked straight ahead with a blanket around her shoulders. Her right paw rested on her hip, her left hand dangling a rat by the tail. The rat had Xs for eyes. The boy put on his headphones and shifted his head on Kuan’s cushion.

  The leanness and the muscles under the red shirt.

  A shiver darted down his back when he turned off the light. After a few minutes, he flung the cushion to the floor.

  The mosaic will go on the western wall of the temple. Use the chisel and hammer to break up the pieces.

  His eyes were already open when his mother came in to wake him. He couldn’t shake the images of the suited men and women who’d gathered at his house the night before and tried to coax him back to the temple. They lit candles, burned incense and herbs. They filled his house with smoke and pulled off his T-shirt and slathered his torso with pungent oils. His lungs ached and his skin stung. The ritual had unleashed a fever he still felt the following morning.

  When a human forms a personality fragmentation-meld with a Felidae or Canidae, this succinct energy can uniquely evolve and often reincarnate or re-attach in vaster planes than the carnal dimension.

  He’d seen things peering in through the doorway during the night, and they mixed with the smoke that clung to the windows like in a sauna. He’d seen a hand holding a bowl of gifts and food. Some bare feet strung with gold beaded anklets. Some wide eyes with long lashes, seductive and penetrating, dark, like an elephant’s eyes. He’d seen a face in the middle of the living room, and it belonged to a body that existed only in his head. It was dressed in white, draped in flowing cloth like a tunic. The fifteen-year-old liked its leanness, its long hands, its dark skin. It blinded him. A man in a three-piece suit had instructed him to look into the person’s eyes, to recognize him. The fifteen-year-old entered into them as if into a galaxy, seeing everything and nothing. Now, in the morning, the touch of his mother’s hand seemed to materialize it all. She was happy he’d decided to return to the temple.

  The mosaic will be a prayer. It will give us a way to access the multiple dimensions of our human avatar.

  The temple yard thronged with taffeta skirts and gray suits. The teenagers were in the middle of a circle, wearing jeans and T-shirts, sporting backpacks and headphones, excited by their physical proximity. They barely heard the pastor’s sermon, although it specifically addressed them.

  It is why a dog will bark, or a household cat will move in quick reaction to energies unseen by the human eye.

  The fifteen-year-old snickered with his friends and returned the little punches the girls dealt out in an attempt to catch their attention.

  So we tell you to keep in mind that the true origin, the eternal source and power of your Divine Intelligence and consciousness has never been rooted in the physical.

  The fifteen-year-old thought he’d heard the same thing a thousand times in his mother’s amens, in his teachers’ words, and on TV, so he immediately lost interest. He added his voice to the others’ laughter, but he was interrupted by a bolt of lightning that forced him to close his eyes. As soon as he tried to open them and figure out where it came from, the bolt neutralized his vision again.

  For if the physical brain with the ego personality were unscreened, and thus fully aware of the vast and constant barrage of telepathic communications that do impinge upon it, it would have a most difficult time retaining a sense of identity in linear perception.

  He squinted around him, using his hand as a visor. Just before the next reflection hit, he saw a young man in a white shirt near the pastor. He was rotating his wrist to make the sun glance off his watch and straight into the fifteen-year-old’s eyes.

  You have in current times largely forgotten how much you learned from all of the Beings of the Animal-Kingdom.

  They didn’t look at each other. The fifteen-year-old turned and watched the glint of light glancing off the summery clothing of his friends, seeking him.

  Our design will strive to make a world as it was made when we ourselves were created. To achieve this, we need only use our imaginations.

  The fifteen-year-old got to see him up close when they assembled the registration tables for the summer workshops. The pastor had printed several sentences from his sermon in italics as part of the brochure.

  Mankind learned survival techniques, and indeed social behavior by not only watching the animals, but also by directly communicating telepathically with them.

  The fifteen-year-old felt that he hadn’t ever learned to do
anything because he didn’t have a father. With his mother’s eyes fixed on his back, he approached the information table to ask about the arts-and-crafts workshop. He picked up the pencil to write down his name, but it slipped from his fingers. The white-shirted pastor’s son was seated there to answer questions, the lightning bolt watch glinting in his eyes. The fifteen-year-old marveled at the lusciousness that rippled through his stomach when they greeted each other with a secret handshake. He wondered where it had gone—the easy soul that had always guided his body until now. The pastor’s son wanted to know if he was good with his hands, because making a mosaic required some level of skill. The fifteen-year-old’s lip twitched. He took two steps backward after signing his name and lobbed the pencil at the pastor’s son with an unfamiliar aggression.

  A mosaic will be a body, the materialization of our collective body.

  Some days, when his mother went out early, he’d stay home on his PlayStation. But that morning he just listened to music and painted the little pieces, following the model given to him by the pastor’s son, who studied art at a community institute. Looking out the window, the boy remembered the slashed pants and paint-stained red shirt, the pastor’s son murmuring in Creole through the unruly locks that covered his face.

  The feline operate vastly in the ethereal or stealth antimatter realm.

  When he felt his own hunger and the reek of weed outside, he’d rummage for tobacco in his mother’s nightstand and sit on the steps to roll a cigarette. The cool air would come. The smell of damp earth. Shoots burgeoning in the planters out front. Barking dogs. Children fighting over a bicycle, over the sizes of their bodies.

  He lit his cigarette and texted Kuan. He shared a photo of his smoke-wreathed face. A strange grazing of the leaves, the violent shudder of the leaves in the planters, made him lift his eyes from the phone. For a moment, he remembered the ethereal presences the pastor had preached about. Maybe, now that he’d returned to the temple, a supernatural being was manifesting itself to him. Such things happened to sensitive people and to prophets, it was said.

  The thick two-toned hairs of an animal body appeared among the lush branches of the Chinese evergreen and the ferns. The white and brownish colors were barely distinguishable from the mosses darkening the damp ground. It had found a soft cushion to curl up on. He could see its bulgy head, a smattering of bare patches that showed a tender flesh the same color of certain human skins, like Kuan’s. Two dark eyes fixed the boy like pistols. Its ears pricked at the slightest movement. For a few seconds, the animal’s and the boy’s bodies were perfectly still. The impact of this presence froze his fingers around the cigarette. Then the possum turned its head and rested it on its front paws again. Showing its back, it fell asleep, as if there weren’t another creature a hundred times its size a mere foot away. The blood started to flow back into the boy’s gangly limbs. He grasped his phone. Before easing it into his pocket and gently rising to his feet, he lifted his arm in a tremulous trance and pressed the shutter button on the screen. His legs could scarcely hold him up. He slipped behind the door. Protected now, he peered out at the animal through the dirty glass.

  Back upstairs, he couldn’t bring himself to keep drawing. His brush turned the palette to grays and browns. There would be rats in the mosaic, he decided. He’d hang them from their tails, he thought, pacing around the living room like a cage. He was invaded by possible images of a savage rodent. He thought about how to scare it away. Perched on the windowsill, he could still see its body, coiled and lethargic, sleeping in the planter. The sixth or seventh time, he noticed the cigarette butt he’d abandoned on the stairs. When his mother came home, he’d give himself away. Not looking, he sent the photo to Kuan, who responded with a vomiting emoji. The boy steadied the tremble in his hand against the broomstick and went downstairs.

  There will be stains. Up here, we will draw a circle that will contain a cicada and other creatures. In each panel, we will observe a detail of an insect painted with a single-bristle brush.

  He couldn’t take his eyes off the full lips of the pastor’s son. He was able to tell Kuan about it once they’d kissed.

  These physical formats of the Feline family on the EarthPlane are here to support you, and in their physical matrix are but a portion of the consciousness of their Sirian nature.

  The Sirian nature of the pastor’s son.

  His words triggered something strange between them. A rupture, or maybe a silent understanding. The fifteen-year-old couldn’t quite figure it out.

  On Saturday night, he told him, the group of mosaic-makers had come together in an act of artistic sleeplessness to start the mural on the western side of the temple. By candlelight, after they’d eaten, the pastor’s son gripped a candombe drum between his legs and recited something in a language that the fifteen-year-old could only decipher snatches of. It was about an encounter between a wanderer and an animal on a flowering plain.

  The psychic abilities and aspects of cats have long been recognised. They have been desired as partners, allies and protectors by mystics, healers and shamans.

  The song began like this: the wandering man hears a growl among the dry leaves and he glimpses what some people call an ilion through the foliage. It’s a kind of feline, with a large jaw and bloodied feet. Its teeth study the wandering man. If the encounter between a human and an animal comes to pass, then a third field emerges, a collective one. Thou needest understand, the pastor’s son recited to the beat, that this third combination appears by mutual agreement. This third consistency feeds on the encounter, on the fear of the wandering man.

  Or something like that, retorted the fifteen-year-old. A lioness’s tooth on every chip of tile, he imagined, recalling the voice of the pastor’s son. Kuan listened intently to the fifteen-year-old retell it:

  The wandering man stumbled along, tripping on his own fear, utterly overwhelmed in the underbrush. His blind, hurried steps led him on steep and arduous paths, over hills and along cliffs. He lost his way in the landscape. Any sound behind made him duck his head and hide. The nocturnal horizon abruptly filled with insects. There were thousands of them, and they scuttled toward the wandering man, who was alone and who was going who knows where or why. Fleeing his captors, perhaps, or his employers, or his family, or something else he didn’t want to see. Hordes of animals advanced in his direction, as well as small beings that snarled and raveled at his feet. Rodents and snakes. His footsteps left wet stamps as if he’d walked on water. He fell. Soft flesh beneath his boots. Then came the cattle, whose charge he withstood by pressing himself against a rock, and then the jaws of hungry coyotes. The wandering man watched them with the moon at his back. In the hills. He dug a pit and covered himself with earth so they wouldn’t catch his scent. He buried himself as if he were already dead. He woke with the sun and rose because something was hurting his back. The crushed rabbit was damp and warm, all white from nose to tail, entirely caked in mud. Not even its blood was still red.

  That’s when the drum stopped, said the fifteen-year-old, finishing his story. Silently, he remembered that the voice of the pastor’s son had stopped then, too. The candles had melted down. The only clearly visible thing was the white shirt in the middle of the semi-circle of young people sitting close together in the temple yard. Beneath it, he could also make out the muscled body of the pastor’s son, agitated by the trance and his own breathing. He told them what they had to do: along with the story of Maîtresse Jill, their ascended teacher, which would be channeled as a sacred message, they would evoke an animal avalanche in the mosaic.

  On the right piece, a cat in a white shirt with a drum.

  The fifteen-year-old and Kuan kissed one last time and promised each other, fingers entwined, to listen to the same album as they walked back to their homes.

  A sheep’s long cheekbones.

  The streets were calm, the bedroom lights switched off in almost every house he passed. Only a scattering of men shifted among cars and buses.

  The
cat will often lay on the area and purr.

  Tensed bodies flashed beneath the cars. The cats stared out with their crystalline eyes and treaded with silent, unerring steps. They climbed the trees, vaulted roofs and fences, scratched at doors. They slipped along edges and through orifices. The males were clearly distinguishable from the females. The latter slinked through the boy’s legs, waiting for his hands to touch them. If he could have, the fifteen-year-old would have taken them home to pet them all night long.

  Without his earbuds in, he heard an unsettling silence outside his house. He opened the gate and caught sight of it all at once. It was probably male, judging by the prominence of its jaw. His fur had lost its sheen. His whiteness must have shone in the moonlight once. The cat was bigger than average and any passer-by might have assumed he was asleep. But not the boy. He could tell from where he stood. The cat wasn’t curled up, as cats tend to do. His body was deserted of itself. His open eyes looked like empty hollows. Not a trace of light or soul lit up their globes. Maybe someone was working witchcraft so his mom would finally sell the house. The face of the pastor’s son returned to him. Animals aren’t witchcraft, he would have said.