A Cold Hunt (Round 2)
scent of the day: Nose Rest
A Cold Hunt
Dawn pink feeble in the ashen sky, my father— head to toe in hunter wool of rusty red—carved a wobbly path for me over black-algae stones poking just above the tinkle of the icy stream. He turned around. “Just watch your step there.” Confident I needed no babying, I slipped right where his finger still pointed. “Fuckin Spikey!”
Yet I was quick to show—shotgun submerged— I had saved the coffee. On my back I held it high. “It didn’t spill,” I insisted. Shivering at our tree (the gun drying upside down, my father blowing steam from the mouth of the Styrofoam cup), I was too ashamed to let my teeth chatter reveal I needed out. He chuckled. “Fuckin Spikey, huh?”
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
