Tag: skatia

that valentine thing is just asking for trouble

Doomsday Clock moved closer to midnight.

The lovely _griffy_ tagged me for the Five Things People Would Be Unlikely To Know About You meme going around. I’m wretched at these, but she is a dear, so I’m going to acquiesce.

1. I take his hand to mine, press the palms together. “Our hands are almost the same size. I hate that I forget these things,” I frown, “but I do.” Our fingers lace and a concrete feeling of being helpless in the face of wind flows through me. He feel delicate, as if I could collect him effortlessly in the curve of my arms, curled like a black and ivory flower. He glowed at my birthday present and flashed it to everyone, smile like a searchlight, showing me off, my cleverness, my care. I am drowning for affection, but I can tell I’ve been torn down too much. My best efforts to memorize him, the way he danced in his seat, beating a musical tattoo against the table at the restaurant, won’t be enough. I will forget, these moments will fade, lost in the wreckage. Stricken with this thought, it is all I can do to put my eyes elsewhere. My role is that of the cherished escape, the lovely creature that will stay witty and safe and warm. To be otherwise would be to admit defeat. I look down at the table with relief when someone launches into a story about working with the Smothers Brothers and try to genuinely smile at the Bill Cosby anecdotes.

2. Before my accident, I was quietly training to be an aerialist. I loved the feel of the cloth, the clever twists that let me safely drop from the ceiling to hang by one ankle, gently spinning, four feet from the painful ground, the ability it grant me to fly. My fall from grace, I have never forgiven.

My Valentinr - foxtongue

3. “I really do love you, you know, with what is left of my heart,” I whispered. Innocent of indecency, those were the words pushing at me through the dark, insisting in spite of the forsaken ache in my chest and the possibility that our intelligent friend in the next bed was only feigning sleep. He said nothing in reply, but held me tighter.

4. I didn’t wear skirts until I was 17. I still don’t wear skirts that hem above my knees unless I’m going dancing.

5. Filling in for my ferret is a small silver pin fashioned to look like one that I wear on my coat lapel. I bought it during the holidays, though I couldn’t strictly afford it, because I’ve been beginning to find myself standing in my dark kitchen at four in the morning, cuddling his tiny frozen body, and something in me is aware that sort of behavior is so generally frowned upon that a substitute must be made. Thirty dollars is worth a more conventional flavour of sanity.

monday and life continues


he looks happy
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Thank you to everyone who sent their condolences, thank you very much. The hardest part was wrapping him up in the plastic bag and putting him in the freezer. Irrational, but I felt I was smothering him. He’s there now, though I feel as if he’s still sleep somewhere in my room, as if he might scramble over to me at any time and tramp all over my keyboard. It’s tricky, knowing and not knowing, all at once. I’m worried that when it comes time to cut into him, I won’t be able to separate his body from his now absent mind.

I hope that when I die, there will be someone who cares for me enough to preserve me as art. Take me into pieces like the BodyWorld exhibits or do simply what I am doing, sewing wings onto the corpse. Tyler said I was creepy for saying so, but I think it’s an expression of dedication, of the continuance of being in memory preserved into flesh. Tricky things, emotions and motivations difficult to express.

Thank you, too, to those who donated through PayPal to help me with the intense veterinarian bill. Your kindness has been overwhelming. The bill has been covered, I’m not going to have to painfully swallow it whole like I expected. (I’m finishing the verification of my account right now.)

And to those who’ve been asking, the lovely James Everett has renewed my Flickr account.

he’ll be all “oh noes, my face on the internet” and I’ll be like “take that”

I came home from work yesterday to discover thick smeary pools of black blood in the kitchen and down the hall. Graham had e-mailed me at work, said Skatia was sick. I hadn’t expected it to look as if he’d been torn up. There was more blood than I would have initially thought a ferret could provide. I found him shivering in a pile of my clothes, blood crusted to his fur. He was exhausted, cold, and limp, obviously too ill to move.

I said to Mike, who was with me, “My ferret is dying.“

I put him in hot water and Graham called the Emergency Animal Hospital in Kitsilano. I called Stephen, arranged for a ride over, and cleaned up the kitchen. Our theories were either Skatia had swallowed something that had lodged in his intestines or he had a bacterial infection. The vet said otherwise, her $200 guess is cancer.

In retrospect, taking him to the doctor was a very expensive mistake. (One I’m not sure I can actually afford, so if anyone feels like taking me out to dinner for two weeks…)** Not only did she only tell me what I already knew, “he’s lost a lot of blood, he’s going to die,” the vet also became upset with me that I wouldn’t have him immediately put down, in spite of the fact that he wasn’t in any pain, as there would be “no way he would survive the night” and made it a hassle to get him back. He’s curled up in my lap right now, still breathing, over twenty four hours later, being kept warm in a blanket with a hot water bottle and a space heater. She only made things difficult.

It’s true, though, that I don’t know how much longer he will last. Sam and I stayed awake until dawn watching over him. It was expected his organs would shut down one by one as the blood that was left in his system worked to keep his brain alive. Slowly he would go to sleep and cease breathing. Now I’m not so sure. I got him to drink an entire tea-cup full of milk last night and at least half of it stayed in. He’s not exactly animated, but he’s no longer in shock and the bleeding has diminished. If he survives tonight as well, I think he’ll be okay for a few days more. He’s a tenacious little thing, even still dragging himself across the room to get to me, so I expect him to remain resilient.


**


if I were related to James Burke, it would be illegal for me to seduce him, which would shameful


the brothers ire
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

I just gave my copy of Pattern Recognition to a stranger on the bus. I struck up conversation with him because he’d been hassled by the police while we were waiting. Trafficking, I figured. He looked the type. White sports clothes, white glass stud in his left ear, had that attractive young latino look going for him. Perfect black goatee and perfect black hair, though hidden mostly under a bandanna. He asked what I was reading and I told him, inscribed my name and phone number in the front and handed it to him right before he had to get off.

Today’s been busy. I got up a little early but got out a little late from playing phone tag with one of Cale’s friends. She’s been kicked out of her house and I offered my apartment for a few days or at least as a little storage space while she gets her feet under her again. It’s tough to come home and find the locks changed. I understand. My mother’s boyfriend stole my keys once and would hang up when I phoned. Slight differences in essentially the same situation.

Late, for once, was alright though. Raphealla had already been scheduled to open the store for me today so I could hit up the Office Of Vital Statistics for my Change of Name application. So after my back and forth with a crying Chloe, I plucked my ferret out of bed and went down to the Bureau and picked up my form. There was an unexpected line-up, but nothing deadly, just enough to instill me with nervousness about the whole thing.

I brought my ferret because a student of Alastair‘s needed one to map for wire-framing. That all went without a hitch. Skatia was picked up from Hypatia at around 4 o’clock and returned sometime around five:thirty. The students, an Italian couple, were very nice about it and loved him dearly, in spite of the fact that he slept more than he ran around to give them footage. After work, the barflies at the Waldorf, including James, the bartender, adored him too. Spoiled him rotten even, as apparently he has a taste for beer and pecan pie. I’m going to bring him back for visits on quiet nights. It’s a surprisingly comfortable place to spend time. I would never have guessed.

However, I knew full well that the strip club that Mike picked in New West for his Going Away To England Birthday Party tonight is notoriously terrible. Mugs & Jugs it’s called, and the name, I think, explains almost everything. It’s full of tacky lights, atrocious rock music and inhabitants whose parents drank when pregnant. We had an alright time, some of the girls displayed such amazing feats of anti-gravity on the pole that we actually watched them for more than five minutes at a time, though we didn’t get Mike as drunk as everyone had apparently promised him. Nick tried, it’s true, but he was barely slurring when Rick and I, the last ones standing, brought him to the Skytrain. I waved goodbye from the opposite platform then had to go back to get my William Gibson book, Pattern Recognition, that I’d forgotten at the club, dodging vacous drunk skater kids to do so.