Y Tu Rumsfeld Tambien (Part 1)

Faces and horns, anonymous bodies, the cattle who live next door to Rumsfeld's home in Taos burst into our apartment. Flies buzzed their rumps. The cattle rambled everywhere. I nibbled Science Diet Hairball Control pellets just so they wouldn't steal my food. My skull hummed from their manic eyes and grunts. I watched them mingle, their matted brown hides and muddy horns. Their hooves clattered on the hardwood floors.

They were running from the Secretary of Defense, fleeing another of his blood ritual masses at the manse in Taos (a Chevy Chevelle sits on blocks in the tall grass next door) where he camped as a Boy Scout in 1948.

These poor disposable creatures. Satanic masses, white SUVs rolling up the driveway at midnight, the soil steeped in blood. I threw the milk-bottle-cap-ring tied with dental floss, but to them I was a calico ghost chattering at their ungainly legs. I hid in the South Forest of the apartment and watched. A waterbug crawled along a crack between two floorboards.

"Shimmy, come sit on my lap." It was Rumsfeld, old and plump, tapping his fingers on the arm of the sofa, mimicking the doomed pitter-patter of mice. "Don't be afraid of me. Look at all these cattle! I'm friends with the animals."

The Secretary of Defense pushed his eyeglasses up the lean rivets of his face. He looked at the cattle, then back at me, the darting braggart eyes of a teenager. He tapped his fingers on the sofa, back and forth like mouse feet.

"Raoul Vaneigem says you are a great despiser of life," I said. "You're on a gigantic search-and-destroy mission in pursuit of myths and received ideas."

"I adore your love bites, Shimmy. You chomp just hard enough to break the skin. Each pinch a punctuation mark and a boundary, like a couple kids playing a game they've decided in advance won't be meaningful unless they keep score. I kill all life on earth."