A Ragged Shape

Posted on June 30, 2011 in Bipolar Disorder Neighborhood

One of those things that worry me flitted into consciousness the other night. Lynn had just turned off of Saddleback Ranch Road onto Ridgeline when I spied it off to the left: a dark gray-brown form, ragged at the edges and possessing four legs. It looked to me that Lynn was about to hit it so I cried out. She stopped about ten feet past the beast. I looked back. No creature, no bloody tracks where the car had dragged a dead body. Just the parked cars on our right.

Had I seen something or was it one of my hallucinations?

“Did you see it? Did you see it?” I repeated to Lynn.

“No,” she said. “But just because I didn’t doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.”

I held my silence as she made the left toward our home. What was it? I thought “cat” at the glance. “Raccoon” or “skunk” could also have fit the outline. What worried me most was the possibility that my anti-psychotic had stopped working. I didn’t need to suffer a relapse into the strange world of the seen but nonexistent.

I hope that somewhere out there, there is a cat or a raccoon or a skunk that has been scared into a lesson.