Mona Lee's Knees

         Mona kneels, positions two folded yoga blankets behind her on the bolster, lowers her backside onto them, sighs, and grabs her copy of The Procrastinator’s Guide to Being a Writer. How many of these books can she read? How many times must she hear the plans, the tricks, the determination, and the deep love of reading and writing from childhood that writers on writing have—before it rubs off on her? When pigs fly.
         The day outside her French windows shines, alive with sun glancing off of deep green, fluffy, dripping wet trees. Rain in the wrong month of the year, but still as sweet. Global weather change, Los Angeles becoming Seattle. Lifting her spine up, raising her arms, she acknowledges the love of being one story above the world in such a pretty place. Her mind-travel to the past or Paris isn’t working today, though, because NOW is too much with her. Radio, television and internet are beginning to demand that everyone wear a mask against the Corona Virus, her tied scarf is not going to cut it anymore. Employees from the pet store across the way trudge out with large trashcans to be emptied at the bins, and all are wearing masks and gloves. The feeling is that everything is getting worse, not better, and she and Gus are the squirrels who did not gather nuts for the winter. If they do not receive the stimulus checks, they will not be able to pay the rent and some bills in the gap before Gus’s pension. And will he receive his pension, or will it be taken from him? Sorry, the bankers took your money. She acknowledges their good fortune that they might even have the pension when others like them have nothing to look forward to. Except to die because they are over sixty and seventy from a virus of bats in China that somehow knows, like a pack of hungry wolves, how to seek out the weakest in the herd. 
         Last night, coming to bed after falling asleep on the couch, she found Grayboy curled up on Gus’s abdomen, Gus’s head had fallen in sleep to the side, his right hand resting easy under one of the cat’s paws. It was a thrilling sight to her, an eternal moment, and reason enough for now to stay alive. She relaxes into the bolster, closes her eyes and prepares to go on a flight.