Becoming Animal Sixteen Stories

Becoming Animal Sixteen Stories

Marianne Paul

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Marianne Paul

Discover other books by Marianne Paul at www.mariannepaul.com.

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Table of Contents

Becoming Animal

Turtle Dreaming

Tea

Rolling Down the River

In Search of God

Yin and Yang

Home Free

The Peeking Hole

The Taste of Grief

On the Road to Heaven

Violation

Gemina’s Wish

The Place Where I Live

Swimmers

Queen of Scream

The Imagination is a Liar

About the Author

Other Books by Marianne Paul

Becoming Animal

I’m not one who kills easily. I’m a vegetarian. By choice. It’s a deliberate decision. I live by the example of the Buddha and eat meat only as a guest served it in a meal. The greater wrong, the Buddha said, is to refuse the hospitality of your host.

So take your karma like a man (or in my case a woman). Eat what you are served in the home of another, but don’t kill with your own hands or prepare and eat an animal killed by another.

These are good rules to live by.

I’m one who believes in rules. They are the mark of a civilized world - laws that regulate interaction and behavior. Otherwise, humans would be no better than animals. Living by the law of the jungle. Kill or be killed.

I choose not to kill, because it is the humane decision. So it surprised me how quickly I slapped life from the spider that web-walked across my solarium window. I killed it instinctively, without thought or guilt in the killing moment. These came after, in the next moment.

I’m not afraid of spiders. Then I could justify my action. This wasn’t about fear. It was about killing. I killed. Swiftly and without emotion.

To say it was to me second nature is a lie.

It was first nature.

_____

The man in my life is a hunter.

We make an unlikely pair, a vegetarian pacifist Buddhist and a hunting atheist.

Joshua and I met at the end of his marriage, or rather, before the end of his marriage. He said his marriage was long over, that divorce was a formality. Sometimes I think Joshua hunted me down, that he stalked me like he does any other prey. I see the hunter in his eyes, the way he looks at me. It is as if he plays cat-and-mouse, holds my life in the squeeze of his finger on a trigger.

But that is my imagination, surely.

I hate to admit it, as a Buddhist, but it’s the hunter in Joshua that I found seductive. The yin and yang of us. Opposites attract, in the strange dance that is life, that keeps the world turning, and the wheel of karma spinning. But the good Buddhist is supposed to end the wheel of karma. To stop the spinning long enough to get off. I didn’t want off. I was enjoying my round on the wheel with Joshua.

I questioned Joshua about the morality of hunting early in our relationship - as I dismembered plants and tubers to make a salad. But I was really thinking beyond food and ethics to other conquests. I was curious about how a hunter made love. Whether it was rough, whether he dominated, how he handled a gun. How the caress of a finger on a pulse, the touch of a man who understands the value of life because he takes life, how that translated into the bedroom.

North American Buddhism, it is called, the kind I practice. Like all things American, Canadian - what’s the difference anyway - we make it into what we want. So with good conscience, I left celibacy to the Tibetans.

I made such show of my skill with a sharp blade that celery flew off the chopping block. Joshua theatrically ducked as if dodging a bullet. He had a sense of humor. I liked that. In response, I chopped a tomato in half. The flesh of a tomato was soft, gave way, unlike other vegetables, but then, it is not a vegetable at all, but a fruit. Red pulpy juice spilled onto the wood and stained my fingers.

Joshua perched himself at the edge of the stool.

We all die in the end, Caitlin, he said. The hunter eventually becomes the hunted, if he lives long enough. It’s the old and the young, the most vulnerable, that the big jungle cats target when chasing down the herd.

There was something beautifully karmic about that - not the killing of the old and the young - the hunter becoming the hunted.

I licked my fingers, chopped the tomato into quarters, and then eighths. Ate an eighth. Tossed the rest into the salad. Dug my fingers deep into the bowl.

How to make a good salad. That’s what I knew about life. A good salad needs the physical touch of the cook. The flavor of body oils.

We fed each other vegetable and fruit bits, and then drank from each other’s wine glass, and then a hunter made love to me.

That’s the best way to describe it.

You don’t make love to a hunter. A hunter makes love to you. He’s in control.

That’s the difference between the hunter and the hunted. A matter of control.

_____

I crave dawn. Joshua hates dawn. Avoids it like the enemy. Sleeps until his alarm clock goes off - one of those little fold-up travel things that he carries everywhere with him. I would have expected him to pack a gun, or at least a laptop. Instead, he packs an alarm clock.

It makes for peculiar foreplay. He stops lovemaking somewhere between the first bite of my nipple and the second bite to fiddle with the settings on the clock, and place it on the bedside table.

It’s as if the first taste prompts the neural sequence in his brain: set the alarm. Joshua is a nipple-nibbler. Sometimes he leaves teeth marks.

I don’t own an alarm clock. Don’t need one. I wake up instinctively at first light.

Opposites again. Joshua is a regular vampire, comes alive after dark. When he finally crashes, he sleeps the sleep of the dead. Emerges from his bat cave in time to get wherever he’s going, if he hits green traffic lights along the way. But then, Joshua isn’t the type to be stopped by a red light.

Take the crack of dawn this morning. Joshua had twisted himself up in the sheets. Pillow clutched tightly to his body as if I might try to reclaim it. And so I did. Sat naked and cross-legged beside him. Tugged at the corner of a pillow with the one-mindedness of a better Buddhist than me. Stopped when Joshua stirred, tugged again when he fell back dead into sleep. Kept at it, until I had my pillow. Then I climbed on top of Joshua’s hips. Straddled him. Now I was in control. Put my finger to his temple and went ka-pow. The hunter had become the hunted.

Joshua didn’t wake, just growled, so I slid off. Took the pillow into the solarium and sat zazen. Faced east, and the rising of the morning sun. Sitting meditation is my morning ritual. Ever since I survived Buddhist boot camp. A wilderness retreat for Dalai Lama wannabes at a lodge in Algonquin Park, where we went cold turkey and did all things Buddhist.

Breathe in, breathe out.

I inhale through my nostrils. Take in the suffering of the world. Focus on compassion for all living beings equally, for both the hunted and the hunter.

The compassion demand. For me, it is the most difficult part of this Buddhist thing. I do it as an intellectual exercise, part of my practice. But that is all. I don’t fool myself. How can I feel compassion for the perpetrators of violence. Those who kill children? Who mutilate women? Who fly jets into towers, and drop bombs in retaliation?

I hold my breath. Contemplate. Next comes the cleansing breath. I exhale through my nostrils. Exhale the toxins from my lungs. Exhale the suffering of the world. It is what I’m supposed to do. And then do again.

Breathe in, breathe out.

Thoughts intrude, produce second thoughts. Last night’s sex. Work. An insane deadline. The empty fridge, the itch behind my ear, the cough at the back of my throat. The feeling that someone is watching me.

Buddhism is a discipline. I force myself back to my breathing. Concentrate upon air filling my lungs, pushing on my diaphragm.

The thoughts, the physical distractions, no longer intrude. They are there, but I don’t heed them, let them be voyeurs. That is all that is watching me. My thoughts.

I almost reach the place I seek. The place of myself. It is clean, and clear, and cold - hard crystal - even though I sit in a solarium, windows collecting the heat of the rising sun.

I notice a ringing in the distance.

The sound is muffled, and I watch it rise and fall with my breathing.

Breathe in, ringing. Breathe out, ringing.

I think Joshua’s alarm is going off, but it’s not really thought in the normal sense. It exists somewhere else, outside of me, in my own distance.

Breathe in, rrringing. Breathe out, rrringing.

The ringing changes to a sharp rap. The noise is jarring, forces me to pay heed, pulls me out of my meditation. A woman is rapping on the glass. She peers into the solarium. Her eyes find me. Blank stare. Then her mind processes the image, makes contact with what her eyes see. The all of me. Naked. Butt-perched on my pillow. Cross-legged, crotch wide-open. Back straight, arms on my thighs, palms turned upward, perfect zazen position.

A girl, about three, big black bug eyes, peers through the window, too.

I am pissed off, feel very unenlightened.

Breathe in, breathe out.

I lift myself off the pillow. The child is nonplus. The woman, she looks traumatized, then recovers, assumes a look of disgust, as if I’m low-life. Probably a Jehovah Witness selling salvation too damn early in the morning. Part of the tactics, bring a child in tow, and they think you can’t be rude to them. I move slowly, just to annoy her. Reach for the cotton robe slung over a stool, pull it on, tie the belt, open the door.

It’s his weekend for Keisha, she tells me, before I get a chance to speak, the door barely opened. She gives the child a push through the door, setting down a pink overnight bag. She stares at my chest. Looks at my auburn hair. "You’re not his