Hunting Season

Anna drove with the window rolled down, breathing in the essence of autumn: an exhalation of a forest readying itself for sleep, a smell so redolent with nostalgia a pleasant ache warmed her bones and she was nagged with the sense of a loss she could not remember.

Common mythology would have it that the truth was easy to remember and lies tended to morph with the retelling. The opposite was true. A group of honest men, questioned about a social evening that was merely one of many like evenings, would argue endlessly about who showed up in what order, whether they ate ham or pastrami, who won the pot, Memories were not stored in a linear fashion, ordered by some cerebral Dewey decimal system. They were dumped in a vast mental junk drawer and had to be pawed through to be sorted out.

Like many abuse victims, he carried the shame of the abuser, taking their malfeasance as an indication of personal worthlessness.

Maybe that was why Anna admired people with passion. A person’s passion told a lot about who they were. Those without passions seemed to have a hollow place inside. One never knew what grew in that darkness.

Anna hung up none the wiser but feeling better for having talked with like-minded people.

Christianity, in its fundamental state, brought not only the Heavenly Host into the homes of its adherents but a counterbalancing army of The Fallen. The devil was part of a package deal.

To name a thing was to own, control and understand it.

All cats were divine till proven otherwise; all dogs were suspect until cleared.

somewhat resemble Dickens’s garbage sifter, who lived in a shack surrounded by mountains of refuse.

Anna’d been born female, she’d grown into a small woman and, in the past ten years, had slid into middle age. If ever there was a cloak of invisibility, time and circumstances were trying to weave her one.

Rape was about violence, hate and dominance. Sex had little to do with it.

Man was the animal who created. Like the God in whose image he was supposedly made, he created his own heaven and his own hell.

What’s the use of being given a load of manure if you don’t spread it around?

A cipher, Anna thought, one of those people who by choice or genetics is incapable of stirring up much emotion.

it was harder than others to remember that evil was still front page news. Goodness and order were so much the norm they needn’t be reported.

of anger against the other gender for reasons Anna could never fathom.

Men and women in the United States carried a terrific burden

Mismatched images of violence and guns and God made the South a strange land and Anna a stranger in it.

The place was a mausoleum. Anna was reminded of Great Expectations, of the old woman in her decaying wedding dress presiding over a feast long go eaten by mice and worms.

buildings ravaged by the violence of those who lived there, reflecting it back on the residents. Homes of people too mentally ill to care for themselves or their property.

The misery embedded in the house wasn’t static. It lived and grew. Anna could feel it like a fungus on her skin. The touch of the sun burned it away.

There are no policemen in an anarchy, only soldiers.

A person’s passion told a lot about who they were. Those without passions seemed to have a hollow place inside. One never knew what grew in that darkness.

Though she knew she was not personally responsible for the collective sins of the world, she couldn’t shake a creeping shame for enslaving Africans, decimating the American Indian tribes, annihilating the passenger pigeon, building strip malls on California’s beaches and leaving behind unsightly junk on the face of the moon. Clintus