Once Upon a Time

The moon loitered at the windows of the house where you stared out of mirrors, draped in a splendidly cut shroud and worrying over your blond coiffure. In the second floor children’s room, a cat told each doomed mouse a wonderful story before eating it. The children were away in their pajamas, frolicking at the haunted playground recently vanished from the empty lot down the street. There, under moon-whitened rose bushes, a pack of sleeping dogs yipped and twitched. They smelled a hooded figure running in the shadows between houses, a burglar with an over-stuffed pack on his back. I’m not rich, said the cat, gazing out a window while absently biting off the head of a squealing mouse, I’m not rich but I’ll bet every mouse in this house that he’ll go far if he continues. Vanity, all is vanity, you answered from a framed wall-mirror, the teeth of a comb tugging at your curls. And your sister? asked the cat. My sister owns exquisite dresses and bejeweled spiders in her night castle, you said, where servants bear her majestically to bed in the morning to dream Kurt Vonnegut stories, each like a movie running backward and in one of which balls of fire erupting over a village implode into unlit bombs that glide upward into the belly of a military bomber flying backward and chasing its contrail all the way home, wee wee wee!  Then the moon yawned and lay drowsily down on the village, which made night fall black.  The burglar, suddenly unable to see in the darkness, tripped over the sleeping dogs, and they promptly attacked him, clamping their jaws around his throat out of fear not duty, his last choked breath a feeble squelch. The dogs trotted from the empty lot, where the faint laughter of children could be heard. The end.