when your mouth emits that one singular sound—continuous, smooth, infallible—and you have to steady yourself on the next available structure, or the curtain.
***
a grandmother told me that she sometimes got dizzy, so much so that she could not walk, and that it got worse when her sleep was disturbed. lately her sleep had been disturbed because the upstairs neighbour’s cat woke her up in the middle of the night during the witching hour. despite knocking on the neighbour’s ceiling with a broom, the neighbour did not seem to understand that the grandmother needed to rest, that without proper rest she would get dizzy and would not be able to walk.
the grandmother had a granddaughter, and her daughter had recently given birth to a boy—a brother to the grandmother’s granddaughter. the grandmother’s daughter breastfed the baby, and was dependent on the baby’s nursing schedule, not unlike the grandmother and the neighbour’s cat. while the grandmother did not have a child safety seat in her car, she loved to bring her granddaughter to the botanical gardens, but only when she was well-rested, which she was not much at all lately. she had decided that she was going to the régie du logement that afternoon to settle this matter once and for all. she told me that the neighbour’s cat would not get in the way of her and her granddaughter’s love of the botanical gardens.