Cracked Cat meets the Pope

It was a rough night in bed. Ducky Duck couldn't sleep a wink: his friend Cracked Cat 

was going to see the new Pope tomorrow. Cracked Cat was timorous about getting a benediction so early on in the Pope's Papacy but Ducky Duck was irrefutable: "Do it" he said.

(Ducky Duck reflecting on what Cracked Cat should wear to meet the Pope) 11:06 am

Cracked Cat slept well. He had faith in Ducky Duck, after all she was her best friend. True she was "special". One didn't run into transexual ducks everyday. But Cracked Cat loved her. They were in it together and the proof was ice fishing. Ducky Duck hated ice but loved fish. Cracked Cat was cracked: she loved it all. But recently she was on a poor spate: last month she only caught 2 fish in one week. Two fish! Night after night she came home chilled to the bone; her nails could hardly retract.

Two fish in one week wasn't enough to eat and usually she would catch 10 times that much!

Off she went  in Ducky Duck's limousine  to see Francis the 1st.

The timing was tight. Francis was just getting off his coronation. He got word from Ducky Duck about Cracked Cat coming and since he "owed a few" to Ducky, he couldn't refuse. He would have to take the cat in his private Logia and give her an express benediction. All this without a word to the press, the pontificate insisted to his entourage.

Cracked Cat showed up just before midnight. "I don't want just any benediction your Hooliness" she said, "I need a special blessing for ice fishing. Don't just Ave Maria me" she hissed, her head proudly held up, revealing a few of her sharp teeth.

The Pope got on his knees and murmured some things in latin. He then crossed Cracked Cat and said: "Ora tu puoi pescare tanti pesci." (Cracked Cat didn't speak Italian but she knew the word pesci was fish.) She thanked Francis and swiftly took leave under the look of angels and a lot of golden suffering on the walls. 

The next day she was out ice fishing and she caught more fish than she could haul home. What a surprise for Ducky Duck!

The day Mom died

For years she suffered

And I prepared -or tried- for that fateful day.

I smeared on so much empathy

If mom were a toast

Even she would have gone soft.

I tried to reconnect sinews that had been torn

enmeshed neuralgic structures

tangled after years of family riffraff.

Trying to paste it all together was naive,

even in the name of the Family.

Trying to be "there" was idealistic,

when for so many years we were pushing apart.

It was a week when the rains heaved in

My worries of "nature drying" were dispelled when the

phone rang announcing mother lay dying

She had a week left at best, so I began to prepare my bags

and then

a point

in

my

chest

Burning pain, I knoweth not where from

A small but deep point, like a bite that drilled into my flesh

had me check into the emergency

I had to check

I a nurse, a health professional, and then be off! to my grave business.

Upon examination the doctor said,

"We have to operate tonight, no later, no later."

"But my mother is dying, I have to go"

"If we let you go, you will join your mother, but not on this living world"

My soul was jolted

had I trucked with evil spirits?

had I not gone to church enough?

had I not been honest? were some of the myriad of questions that jangled me.

That night the surgeon removed the foreign agent that had invaded my body

That night my mother died.

My friend accused a parallel psychosomatic disorder,

a stress inflection on the corpus callosum just above the temporal lobe that I had suffered from.

Regardless, heavy doses of antibiotics were prescribed

that ultimately buried my stomach in a WWI trench.

Still, with stoic resolve, I went to the funeral

Wanting to hold still, to listen still,

to the words and the music that my mother loved

Only if still

My intestines didn't rumble like a tank moving over the trenches where my stomach lie

awaiting to explode.

Only if the internal aftershock wasn't there

But it was.

Forced to leave under the watchful family eyes

I tried to change thought

Didn't my cat go for a walk

Didn't you spend three days,

Three nights looking and worrying about it just before my infection?

And that fly that got under my bed cover?

My mind was slipping. Was it the antibiotics or my infection coming back to get me?

The cold bathroom at the funeral home piped insipid organ music

I held on to a heating pipe in the stall

And wished I were

In my bath, thinking about mother.