VISITATION

Often, she speaks of the one-eyed cat, natty-haired, gangly and gigantic. It visits her and corners her there, between the tomato patches and the rickety fence. It springs from the dirt and into the lemon trees’ boughs. It stares with its one milky eye. It yowls like no creature she has ever known.

 

As its wailing body finally disappears with the wind, news arrives of a loved one’s departing soul. An elder succumbing to illness, an accident in the fields, flesh sliced and broken by so many rusted blades, invading armies’ guns and gasoline.

 

The harvest became an offering to the war gods. Young women, roped and gagged. Many times, it happens like this. From fruit trees’ branches or curled about her ankles, the cat stares through her with its milky eye. Its other eye, half scab, half absence, stares at her too. Then the tragedy.

 

“Your death will come with fire,” she weeps to her robust grandfather, and without speaking, he places around her neck his silver amulet—Saint Michael sashed in silk with glinting sword. The following day, uniformed men come out of the jungle, the trees behind them in flames.

 

Tugging at his shirt and forcing words between sobs and frantic breaths, she knows her father will not hear. Unfaithed by city whores, and nursing cheap gin, he still suspects his own father’s spirit will make visitation upon him. A wisp of old man floating at the foot of the bed, blessing the blisters of his feet with touch.