the Prey of a Laughing Moon

The old man is building sandcastles again, bent over in the orange-grey sunlight slow-dance, digging, patting, sculpting. He’ll stand for a minute to energetically shovel sand into a snaking pile, kneel to pat, pat, pat, sit to sculpt with tear-envoking delicacy.

Mitch the Cat watches him from the distance of another sandbar, moves along, traverses to the old man’s sandbar farther down the coast, walks back, moves past, circles back, ever closer like a timid scavenger, until he’s five yards away, just shyly watching. For the sandcastle is a Thing of Beauty: a sprawling Dragon: arrested in writhing flight: massive, short wings outstretched, encircling his fat body, not bat-like but Angelic, each feather long, elegant, precise; the feet are scaled, clawed, as wide as my chest; the torso and tail lethargically rotund, bearing down this beast of the skies to the soft fatality of the Sand Planets; the head a roaring, stone-toothed masterpiece; eyes: sagging, furious; nostrils flared with spent fire; vertebral spikes made of broken clam shells. The old man moves with methodical chaos, perfecting a claw, drifting instinctively to the other side of the tail, where a hillside has collapsed like a complacent avalanche (all Sand Planet people smothered unwittingly by the indiscretion of God). He is one with his work.

If the old man notices Mitch the Cat, he doesn’t show it. He just keeps on digging, patting, sculpting away. The tide is only a sandbar away and soon Mitch goes to watch it creep up the dune: with rapid diligence it scurries the gullies, breasting the tiny ridges one by one.

[No wonder the ancient Taoists were obsessed with water] Mitch the Cat thinks. [How magnificent it is! How calm, how ferocious, how unstoppable!]

He moonwalks in retreat from the armies of the moon, until he senses, knows, that the Dragon is just behind him. With the slow-motion grace often identified with endangered pygmy three-toed sloths of some Panamanian island (and with a similar stoned, goofy expression to that distant cousin of ours’), he turns.

The old man is gone. Flown from his creature creation chained, he is climbing steps to the porch of the nearest cabin, a dilapidated blue structure that could once have been a quaint abode of a succession of small-town police chiefs out of some dreadful Midwestern life or perhaps the former roost and subsequent grave of some 70’s groovy porn guru.

He enters the sanctuary, returns with a beer, sits, stares directly out at Mitch and his precious Dragon.

The water stings Mitch the Cat’s sand-encrusted feet and he shivers and jumps and creeps away from the odd dream, skulking along the tide under a warrior moon laughing in the parallel retreat of the sun over the hills. Behind him, the armies of the moon eat the fearsome, beaten Dragon as its god watches on, sipping cold beer, the destruction his perverse entertainment.