Den of Spies Redux

"Slow down," he said. "I can't understand what you're saying."

"Mayakovsky Tree, it was nothing short of a mock execution. They tricked me into the cat carrier with their vague sunshine clapboard promise of a pile of catnip and a t-shirt that smelled like Tony," I said. "But when I bent to sniff the primrose, the monk's beard, the buttercup of catnip -- the flower of Resurrection Day, the Easter daisy, the garden snowdrop -- when I bent my haunches to sniff, Tony pushed me into the cat carrier and shut the cruel latch behind me."

The Mayakovsky Tree wobbled in the breeze, shaking snowflake crumbs from his lowest branches. A squirrel scribbled rank claws up his trunk.

"A mock execution with blank ammunition?" he asked. "Did they press an empty gun barrel to your head -- like the Iranian students did to U.S. hostages in 1980 -- and click the trigger?"

"Dr. Kissinger wears a butcher's apron. He strutted around the sterile, metallic examination table. Blood flecked above his saggy, porcine lips."

"All things must pass, Shimmy."

"Dr. Kissinger pulled me from the bower of my cat carrier, his vainglorious eyes dim and vacant as the moon. Oh, you're a crabby one, young lady! he said. He weighed me and said I must see Dr. Yawn because I'm 8.4 pounds."

"For now the filthy stigmas of 'common sense' and 'good taste' are still present in the Den of Spies, where just one wide-mouth hissyfit starts the world’s crumbling cloister shivering," the Mayakovsky Tree said.

"Were I quiet as thunder, how I’d wail and whine."

"The heavens cannot survive without the songs and starry glamor they begrudge us."

I said, "Now they're sending me to Dr. Yawn in Skokie. Only Dr. Yawn truly can tiptoe on the roof of her soul, Dr. Kissinger told Tony. We don't have ultrasound equipment here."

"Mock executions are not necessarily torture unless they take place in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. If waterboarding is torture, then torture is not constitutional."

"A rat-faced dog with rancid breath stuck his grubby snout against my carrier when Tony paid for my Cosequin prescription refill. He scattered Purrlicious Chicken Flavored Natural Organic Treats on the rug when we got home. No one can make me eat them."

"Meadow, lie green on the earth! There is no gold diviner than ours, Shimmy."