The frenzied barking of my dogs drew me alert. This pitch of noise always meant one of two things; one, there was another dog in the alley, or two, someone was outside who was a stranger to them. And the stranger the stranger, the louder they bark.
Looking through a window that faced the street, I saw John’s old farm truck parked on the green verge outside. Tell me, what was John doing at my house?
I know, I have been avoiding his calls for a few weeks now, but didn’t expect him to stop off here. John could be patient, sometimes. I was hoping that he would wait until I turned up on his farm after my sorry-the-person-you-are-trying-to-reach-is-unavailable issue was fixed.
He stood outside my fence, with his sitting-in-the-farmers-market face on. No wonder my dogs were tearing down the fence to get at his ankles and heels.
“Come up by the other gate in the alley, John; I will open it for you. What are you doing here? Are you okay?”
“Oh, I thought you dead. I callin’ you for weeks now and you ain’t answerin’!”
“Yeah. Long story. I gotta tell you what happened to me that night Jah Prince and I left your farm.”
“Happen, wha happen? Judah never tell me nothin’? He did you something?”
“I am not sure.”
In two flashes, my mind went back to sight of the strange, but still familiar, glowing green eyes of Mystic Man as he sat in the passenger side of the truck — all luminescent and smiling, telling me that we took a long time finding each other.
I have no recollection of wandering this planet looking for him.
“You don’t? All those years of searching high and low, from dark places and dim spaces, to morning lit valleys and evening glazed mountains? You kept alive, the search for that part of you that felt missing, like a severed limb, calling out into the void to be returned to its whole.”
The voice sounded like his, but he wasn’t around. I was hearing it in my head. What the bleep!?!?
As I opened the door to step outside, all my dogs got silent. Even Dora. Dora is the only female amongst a bunch of males and her personality is the exact replica of my dark side. I shake my head every time she does something in her dog world that I would have done in my human world. Once Dora starts barking, nothing makes her stop unless it was a sharp command from me and often, even that she ignores.
My eyes went toward the gate.
Leaning against the corner concrete pillar of the fence was John, and in a stooped position, his fingers pushed through the holes in the chain link fence, enjoying a good slobbering from Moby Dick — the skittish of all my dogs, was Mystic Man.
He looked up at me, flashed a smile and gave a knowing wink.
I looked from him, to John, to my dogs, to him, to John.
John looked back at me, the beginning of a smile cracking his lips, “he a dog whisperer too.”
© I. Trudie Palmer
One Love