TONYA JUDY is the publisher and editor of Flush Fiction Magazine. She gets overwhelmed easily and blends her experiences like a synesthetic. Tonya
grew up in Oregon and has travelled around looking for stuff. Empathics
backlashing move her. Tonya can bend spoons.

                                                                familiar


Breathing slow and low. Stroking the cat that would leave tomorrow or the next day. Dissipating into the thin air and slipping out through the windows onto the balcony. Slithering around the cactus out there, ultimately healing myself on the aloe.

I could brush off and up into the high night air with the clicking beetles and escape the water running in the aquarium inside the house. The fish love the fresh water rushing into their tank through charcoal bits, but I start feeling my insomnia the louder the sound of rushing water becomes.

It's supposed to be soothing. All I want to do is become the air. Rush in and out of the little frogs and crickets out there as music. Maybe get trapped in an asthmatic old frog's lung and get carried down to the creek. Escape just long enough as a bubble to get swallowed whole by a water-colored minnow. In time to get the fish confused and get snapped across my width by a large, tan crayfish.

I could just flop around there and succumb to this until my bubble bursts and sets me off into the wild blue night again.

"Sleep finally comes and that is what I dream about? What the hell is the matter with me?"

I down some Maxxima Intima and a Pamprin. A feminine stimulant and a muscle relaxant ought to be enough to sufficiently enter me into normalcy and supply the adequate post-coital sleep that completes the illusion.

I slug it all down with huge gulps of Budweiser straight from the can. I love the way the can responds to my pressure as I pull the tab back. Even a can responds better. Everything has a purpose and a place in my life. Each thing seems to work like it should except for me.

"Goddamn it!" I complain. "why don't I work right?"

It's 8:20 p.m. and the last load of laundry should be ready to sort. The basement is so dark that the drugs almost make me tumble down the last of them.

I gather the wet wash and sort it into two piles. The dryer pile requires the four quarters that I stacked on the folding table. I file them neatly away into their slots and think about running away again.

I’m sleepy and the time of boyfriend-du-jour's approach comes into that sleepiness like a semi-truck downhill bound. I slap the wet load into the dryer and gather up the rest heading upstairs.

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I hang up the remaining laundry.

Climbing into bed with the cat, Mojave, and stroking his body length with my long, tired fingers; I contemplate the meaning of his barbed penis as he grooms and cleans his privates after my stimulating rubdown.

"Easy," I half-tease the cat.

It's 9:30 p.m. and I get a sleepy feeling watching the cat wink out at me from behind his curled up tail.

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Copyright © 2002 Tonya Judy ð