The Rooster of Prague*

It used to mean something to be a rooster in this town.

Don’t look so surprised, mister ugly American in your flowered shirt with the sweaty armpits. You didn’t know what two hundred and eighty-nine steps felt like until a moment ago. And only now have you caught your breath, looked around for the first time, and decided that I am out of place.

Go ahead and laugh then. You want to know what I’m doing up here? Well, time was, you wouldn’t think about praying without me. I mean, come on now! Who wants to talk face to face with the ferocious, four-headed, Svantovít, the mighty pagan god who’ll, like as not, swell the banks of the Vlatava, flooding your house, destroying your crop, drowning your livestock? Wouldn’t you rather have a fine black rooster intercede on your behalf? A god’s gotta have a sacrifice, and better me than your virgin daughter, if you know what I mean.

Those were the days.

Back then, we roosters really had something to crow about. A yard full of hens, chief timekeepers of the village, and that whole intermediary to the great god gig. Life was sweet. You’d get fattened up, treated like a prince. OK, so maybe there was a moment of panic, running about, as they say, like a chicken with a head, but that ended soon enough and there you were, rubbing shoulders with the big guy, who just wouldn’t be appeased with anything less than a nice black rooster.

But then came the Christians, who didn’t need us as intermediaries anymore. They had all these other crazy ideas about talking to their god, not a guy with four heads, but one guy with three faces. Something like that. I'm a bird, not a theologian. All I know is, these Christians thought you could just appeal to your own religious leader, or a dead religious leader you never met, or—this is the craziest of all—some of them thought you could just belly up to the trough and talk to god yourself. Can you believe such a thing? No room for a big black rooster in the pecking order there. And what did they think of the great and terrible Svantovít? They built a massive cathedral on top of his altar. Saint Vitus. That's right. This cathedral.

That Vitus really ruffles my feathers. First of all, he wasn’t even Czech. Never even set foot in the golden city of Prague. Besides that, the guy wouldn’t sacrifice a rooster if his life depended on it. And you know what? It did. Those Christians had these newfangled ideas, which got Vitus accused of sorcery. He was supposed to make an animal sacrifice to prove his innocence, and could have just slaughtered a bird and gotten on with his life, but he wouldn’t, and they killed him. Boiled in oil, and of course, they tossed a black rooster in the pot, sent him along for the ride, probably to tell Svantovít just how rude the kid had been. And here’s the lowest bit: Vitus’s followers start depicting us at his side, like instead of being the ones to squawk directly in god’s ear for man, now we needed this guy to connect us!

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised then, how I got here. Me! A rooster! You know where I came from, who I used to be. And now who am I? A copper weathervane, stuck up on top of this cathedral. Doesn’t that just beat all? Sure, I’ve got a fabulous view of Prague, the river, the bridge, the rest of the castle. But that’s hardly compensation, do you think? It really sticks in my craw. What good’s a weathervane in divine communication? You don’t need a weathervane to know which way the wind blows. You can quote me on that.

All I can do is hope that angry, four-headed god opens his eyes and looks around. You’d think he’d notice the lack of black roosters. He did swell the Vlatava last year, but no one thought of a blood sacrifice, did they? No, they just cleaned up and started again. And here I sit, a helpless copper rooster, blowing this way and that. Honestly, I don’t know what this world’s coming to.



*Written in 2003

Bears Think They Know Everything

Bears think they know everything, and this bear was a prime example, glowering down his muzzle like a disapproving spinster with a lorgnette at the end of her nose, an eight hundred pound spinster with matted brown fur and teeth the size of my fingers.

Usually, petitioners before the king in his ice palace stood with heads bowed, eyes averted, often wringing their caps in their hands, but bears have no conception of social niceties. “You must move your people,” the bear said, looking my father in the eye. “You might have three days, or only one.”

“The ice people appreciate the concern of the bear people and thank them for it. Inform your people that we will appease the volcano gods.” My father dismissed the bear with a wave. Beneath my flowered wreaths, I smiled.

The bear did not understand. It tossed its thick head. “We bears do not know your volcano god. We only know that the mountain will rain fire and poison. Your palace will melt. Your people will die in agony. We humbly ask you to avert this tragedy.”

The king had already turned away, but I was in a unique position to teach a higher understanding. “Friend bear,” I addressed it, “the ice people can read the signs as well as the bear people, but as a creature of the forest, you do not grasp our spiritual learning. Faith marks our path.”

“Princess, it’s true that we do not understand faith. We animals have only science to guide us.”

I could see the mud caked about his ankles, the parasites crawling over his fur. My father did not believe such creatures teachable, but a queen speaks to even the simplest subject with love and compassion, out of pity for its condition. “Then let me tell you of the gods. The lord of the volcano trembles from loneliness. At dusk, we are to be wed. He shall be lonely no more.”

The creature shuddered, perhaps awed by the power of our religion. “At dusk,” he growled, “you shall suffer burning death. Your skin shall blister from your bones as you asphyxiate on choking fumes and drown in liquid fire.”

I recoiled on my dais, upsetting some of the bridal wreaths, which my maids were fast to recover. Truly, the bear people were ungodly and simple. While its words shocked me, they enraged the king. My father signaled and six soldiers advanced, axes raised. Poor, dumb creature. I had provided an extraordinary opportunity. It chose its fate.

Raising itself up on two legs, it roared, sending a flurry of ice flakes down upon my shoulders like snow. It spun around, knocking the soldiers off their feet. And then it advanced, with speed unpredictable, and plucked me from my bridal bower. Flower petals billowed away as I was heaved, face-first and upside down, over its shoulder into the stinking, lousy fur. The bear’s bones jarred my body as it barreled through the line of soldiers, slid down the ice steps, and bolted through the ice garden. I heard the snapping sound of formations breaking under the bear’s careless paw.

“Stop, beast! You do not know what you do.” I yearned to sooth the volcano god, please my lord, and save the ice people, along with the foolish bear people and the other animals of the forest. I pleaded with it not to steal my future, my right as princess to become queen and wife to the god.

But the bear did not stop. It ran along, pursued, at first, by the clattering of horse hooves, and then ran farther, into the dark forest, leaving my father’s men behind. The stench of the animal invaded my nostrils, and its coarse fur rubbed my flesh. Perhaps I lost consciousness. When I woke, bears surrounded me, a mass of bears all moving together, like a dark storm cloud blown by a strong wind, like an angry, churning river.

“Would the ice people hear reason?” a bear asked.

“What do you think?” answered another.

“I saved one of them, at any rate. One less victim for their barbaric ritual.”

“Stupid animals!” I shouted, in a voice most unbecoming a princess. “You have doomed us all.”

The bears paid me no attention, only grumbled among themselves, and walked on.

Kitty Therapy

You created the confluence yourself, without intention: one new house, two new clients. The house was a fix-er-up. The clients, one might assert, were, too. “I’m a copywriter,” you want to yell. “You don’t hire a copywriter before you have a site design! A spreadsheet of keywords and URLs does not a homepage make.”

But you don’t say that sort of thing when you’re a freelancer, and just starting out, and amazed at your good fortune in signing clients who will pay you what you think you’re worth, enough money that you’re not even worried about paying for the house.

But you do scream it at your monitor, and your husband, and the mountainous stack of unopened boxes dominating your office, which will never, never get unpacked or organized, because you have tripled your business workload without cutting your ten weekly volunteer hours, and you don’t have time to make a home for yourself.

And your husband, who, to be completely honest, will be doing the bulk of the home remodeling, will understand, and draw you close to him, even though he’s in the middle of configuring your Internet phone, updating his desktop computer, and changing all the light bulbs to compact CFLs. He will take you into the kids’ room, the one space in the whole house that actually looks like a room instead of a shipping warehouse, and cuddle you up on the futon, and listen to you cry.

“I don’t know what this client wants and I really, really need to nail this account so Sarah and I can incorporate this year and all my instant messages come out sounding wrong and I think people are mad at me because you can’t hear frustration or jokes in text.”

No, he soothes you, you’re a great writer. You’re doing fine. They’re gonna love it.

“And this house is crazy and I can hardly work in that office because if I turn my head all I can see are a million unpacked boxes and I’m never going to get the kitchen in order and there’s so much work to do!”

No, he says, rubbing your head. I’m going to get it all taken care of. I’m going to build shelves and fix the kitchen. We’ll take it as it comes and get the whole house taken care of.

“And my kitty probably hates it here. He went out through the pet door and he probably went right over the wall and decided to go back to the old place and there’s four busy streets to cross and he’s going to get hit by a car and I’ll never see him again.”

Hello, kitty, he says, rubbing his finger together, and you look, and there’s your kitty, looking up at you, maybe just a little dirty from outside, and he hops on the futon and presses his head into your palm, purring, and you sigh.

“Oh,” you sniff. “I guess it will be all right, then.”

The Edge of Town

Eleventh Street makes a T where it hits KL Avenue, and foamy green retention ponds bask on all three sides. They’re real vigorous, verdant, vital little wetlands, throbbing with life. Colonies of cattails grow erect near the shore. The water beckons with banks of water lilies, their petals spread open wide to the sky.

A blue heron might stand sentry at the far end of the biggest pond, where a cast of ten thousand frogs performs dinner theater every night. At dusk, knobby brown groundhogs sprout like peanuts from the grass. Turtles crawl up from the pond too. They all have yellow racing stripes up their head and neck, and they come in all sizes: some like your fist, some like serving dishes. Some like serving dishes in more ways than one, because they try to cross the street. They’re flattened, the texture of their shells cracked like ancient leather. The little claws never look dead. They’d grab the end of a stick if you poked them.

I saw the driver of a boxy white van stop in time for one big turtle. The passenger jumped out, stood still in the first moment she looked down at the ponderous reptile in its sodden velvet mantle of algae. Then she slipped her fingers underneath and, with arms outstretched, carried the turtle to the other side of Eleventh Street, where it had urgent business: a busy day of eating, mating, and vegetating by the water’s edge as it collected the sun’s energy like an auspicious tessalating solar panel.