"It got a black bird."
"Not the owl?" She was anxious that it not be the owl that had nested itself in a wooden flower pot that hung beneath her window.
"No, your owl is okay I guess."
"Good." She turned to Rick. "Are you staying for lunch?" asked Gabriele.
"We will if your cooking doesn't make anybody sick," said Nathaniel.
"I'm sorry. What did you say?"
For a few seconds he hesitated fearfully but he pushed himself and let his temerity ooze out. "I don't want anybody to get sick eating it!" Her eyes became hard and haughty. She smiled a hateful smile for that son of hers "had balls." Gabriele shut the window on the opinions and personality formulating within this son of hers. With the window fully closed, she could still hear that whining of the cat wanting the payment of praise for having made its capture. "God," she thought. "Why does it have to play with its prey? If society is barbaric, the nature of an individual is worse." She wondered where she could move under the sun without projecting a shadow. She wondered if by finding a mission in life for the benefit of herself and others in the hope of making the world a less obscene place she would become more indecent than what she was. She wondered if she could even learn anything from a world where the nature of things wasn't exactly evil but was definitely cold, crude, self-centered, and merciless. She supposed that this question was the predominant experiment of her life, and it incorporated Nathaniel into it. The redundancy of the cat's disharmonious songish cries grated her gray matter. She filled up a bucket with water and threw it onto the steps to cause Mouse to abscond to happier fields.
As if both were very young boys, she wanted to make playdough for her son and this other little entity that he had dragged back with him. She yearned to foster in a small way those who could still mingle within the solitary wanderings of the mind. From this malleable substance of flour children could be encouraged to continue as solitary units of the present moment where just the peculiar aspect of being alive would be enough to totally enthrall them. And yet she realized that she would be fostering that which was tepid in all of them for boys grew older and more sociable by the day and she, a maimed and hurting soul, was sour to the world. This sour quality ricocheted its dour force on her inner harmony forcing cynical ruminations and recondite perspectives. The railing, in her own head, about "the prostitution of work" was merely an excuse for not being more contemplative and productive. The reality was that she could not reside comfortably in the inner world even if she had all the time in the world. All that she could do would be to conjure oil paints and malleable pottery clay if not playdough in the hope of retaining an inner depth in a child capable of perceiving the entity in a unique way. Maybe the wish to make him once again interested in playdough was from the yearning to retain the earliest aspects of him. Through him she could have a childhood vicariously. After all, with Mother and Father riding off into the sunset in a tank, the beheading, and the disparaging comments by the Peggyites in the bootcamp of Peggy's Kansas home, she still needed innocence vicariously. She rejected the idea of making playdough. "I don't want to confuse the playdough with the meal," she told herself but really she didn't want to feel that malaise of one foolish enough to have a 7 and 8 year old do activities that they had outgrown. Her grandmother still thought that Peggy's thirty year old children collected coins and she still sent commemorative coins from every new state that she visited. After so many years Gabriele still felt blessed to be out of that fray because nothing was worse than trying to feel close to a bunch of hostile strangers whose only closeness was proximity and blood.
Glancing from the window at these boys competing with each other in a game of soccer, she was reminded even more of the way things were. Her son was a social animal now and all meaning would be in others. She tossed a salad. Unfortunately, as she was reaching for the burning toast she set the bowl on the bar with a bit too much thrust of the wrist, tossing it everywhere. She cleaned up her mess, raised the window, and tried to avoid being controlled by the roaring negative irascibility that strummed discordantly within her. Restraining herself, she said mildly, "Okay fellows, better put the game aside and eat this stuff or I'll feed it to the Mouse." Nathaniel picked up his ball and raced his friend to the door. The meal might have made him procrastinate were it not for hungers and thoughts of a chocolatey allure.
"Do you have mice inside there?" asked Rick as the two boys entered the kitchen.