Time can be a cruel dominatrix, her laugh teasing as she cracks her ferocious whips against our severed spirits, relishing in the lingering pain her cord continually delivers. Our thoughts feed her mania, and as she draws her weapon, they alone have the supremacy to defy the internment our unintelligible vision sanctions her.

There is not a weapon more polluting to our thoughts than self-pity - a fault line that guarantees failure of true happiness - a silent hemorrhaging of the spirit. As far back as Stan could remember dominatrix time employed acute patterns for sabotaging his relationships and happiness. Repeatedly he let her destroy anything and everything that came near him, anyway she could. One cannot possibly imagine the loneliness the deep crater of his heart must have felt - preferring the solitude of a cold isolated addiction versus the warm companionship of loved ones and friends.

Stan was a short stout man, with hair thinning on top, parted on the side, greased down and swept over, his wise blue eyes hid behind dark tinted glasses, his face was oval and shadowed with old thick whiskers. He had an infectious laughter that chocked down the smoke from a pipe he continually puffed, and sadly numerous years ago his other addiction alcohol devoured his senses, perspicacity, and dignity. He had chosen a castrating and deplorable lifestyle of frequenting bars, many times ending up in jail: a silent cry that reached out to his daughter’s Eve love that once upon a time was shredded to tatters by his demeaning behavior.


Where does spirit mosey when the nudity of thought bears incessant nightmares and the grueling carcass of yesterday scale obtuse walls to future unknown to unintelligible vastness? I believe when thought runs dry and spirit relinquishes its power to the darkness, divinity in all of its abundance steps in and rescues us from our animal self.

In December of 1990 when Stan was 63 years old, divinity glanced into his pit of despair, yanked on its grounding, and zapped the core … relentlessly. Stan was no longer a young man, and the only telltale sign of his aging were tiny lines gracefully indented around the contour of his eyes and lips but he was dramatically losing weight, his physique dwindling from stout to bone thin, his skin turned yellow and his urine chocolate brown. He was perpetually exhausted and too weak to wear his frail disguise as he lay in bed lifeless with eyes like open wounds, at times doubled over with severe stomach pain.

Eve took Stan to the doctor where at first he was diagnosed with stomach flu, later hepatitis, and finally on December 12 1990, Stan was told they were 99.9% sure he had the death sentence of pancreatic cancer and only two weeks to live.

Does a sanctuary exist where thought can rationally drift and spirits generously roam when the chill of cancer teases the whips of dominatrix time? Divulge the secret of one sensibly handling that that punctures the … jugular?

The questions that raced through Eve’s head, the questions she needed answered now – immediately, like yesterday, "Was it curable or treatable? Could he receive

chemotherapy or radiation? Would it help if he did? Would it prolong his life a year or two? If not, what could be done to help him…to CURE him?”

Prior to anger rearing its sneaky head fear, shock, and denial slide through reality’s door of confrontation and it took all of Stan’s and Eve’s strength to love God. They cursed him. they wanted to understand his reasoning and they did not want his stupid two weeks to mend, heal, and love - all they wanted was to run to some offbeat clinic and implore a cure … now … yesterday!

They did not sleep much that night or any to follow: their thoughts tossed and turned with every breath of his body, until one day they just quit sleeping … they were empty of dreams, and their mind was beginning to signal some resemblance of normalcy.

There by the covenant of cancer, you need angels, you need conviction because the roller coaster whips through emotional tunnels obscured by the blight of those covenants: living with the hope, but knowing the reality that weaves a dark web between hearts, where hope dangles … straddled across the blistering torture of time. Cancer is a thief that robs eon of tribes without any apprehension or remorse. Fearing it is the last - hoping it is - wishing it were a nightmare- knowing that it’s not - praying for just one more moment - stealing snippets of the remaining - clinging on to each breath – watching smothering of gasp - burying the evidence, its thievery loitering age to age … quietly whipping.

Your spirit clings to the still of your thoughts … then, conviction crumbles behind the mask hope dons, while spirit rides the whips of the coaster until the brakes halt to the covenant … you cling and fight for every single minute … watching the thief.

The web of life’s trickery milked their spirits, and hide with a cruel and desperate hunger behind the fictitious masks illusion bore so casually: its bogus smile exasperating laughter, exhausting life and pilfering bliss along the riddled path its blight doest bear. Does the dagger of Dominatrix Time not pierce more than the heart of the mask and the wearer who veils?

Memories fly quickly across a vanishing face as time breathes down candle’s wick and the immaculate tube of channeling sanctions the spectrum of archaic lens.

Stan got progressively worse, his cancer grew dark and dangerous, his gait slow with a fright he would never heal, and the reality he could never get better. He started drifting in and out of consciousness, his chest heaving and rattling.

Eve spent nights with Stan enveloped in a terrifying pallor and Eve, soldiered by his bedside afraid to abort, fearing he would drift into the inevitable: they had squandered chances before so they savored the time he had left and was thankful for the crumbs falling upon their withering paths.

Stan was left in a black void unconsciously unable to pass over because of his tormented past. At 3:25 P.M. on Saturday, February 2, 1991, out of respect for his
last wish, Eve moved him from his bedroom into his favorite lounger in the living room. A pale shadow of a man lay motionless staring into empty space, but then all of a sudden his eyes dilated and lit up as a faint light appeared and hovered close to the ceiling of the living room.

Then a huge beam of illuminating pure light completely engulfed the room and bathed Stan in brilliant ease and acceptance. He had an irresistible almost magnetic attraction to the light, and as his eyes widened to draw in that which Eve saw not, and his hands reached out to touch that which her eyes were blind, he began communicating with beings that she could not hear but could FEEL. From his responses Eve could tell he was glimpsing the multiple spirits of relatives and friends as he blew kisses, acknowledging them by name and voicing how much he missed and loved them.

From his facial expressions, Eve likened an extraordinary viewing of a rapidly expanding panoramic review of his life, and it was obvious someone or something was provoking reflections and questions. The emotions and feelings associated with the images reflected in the dilation of his eyes as if he was viewing a wide-screen television and was afraid to blink in fear of missing something. His brows raised in startled alertness, his mouth opened in awe, his head bobbed as if he questioned with curiosity what death and beyond were offering.

At first he seemed anxious: his voice crying out in fright, his facial expressions turning to anger as he expressed bitterness for his transition into death. He kept proclaiming he was not ready, “Not now!” he shouted, persistently insisting he

was not going to leave Eve. Fitfully, now, at the end of his life, he was finally realizing the gift he had wasted to the glimmer of a bottle and found himself desperately clinging onto one more precious second of living, and in the last seconds of his life, Eve was sure, he saw not the past nor present but the endless possibilities of the life that might have been.

In a four - hour period, Stan aged twenty years as cancer bled the life from his very being, accelerating the aging process and he evaporated before Eve’s very eyes, becoming a mere shadow of the man he once had been: his hands dissolving bony and transparent with protruding blue veins that looked like the electronic traces of a circuit board, his skin tone bleaching into a milky iridescent illusion and the ghostly gray of hair that lay in a halo affect against the back of his lounger stripping the black, with his brows long and grizzly white flared out to blend in with the wiry hair mounting out of his ears.

After four hours of staring into the ethereal light, he appeared sanctified with intense feelings of solitude, love, and at last tranquility – just a peaceful quietness - a vanishing of all his worries: there was not any more pain or struggle in his face or actions, just a calm silence existence. His steely gaze seemed to traverse some ethereal mystery that penetrated a place neither he nor Eve had yet to travel.

When he found himself approaching the barrier between earthly life and the next in a faint and fragile softness, and with a great sigh of relief, he victoriously announced he was ready and called out Eve’s names to make sure she was there. She clutched his hand and gave it a gentle squeeze good-bye and as peace radiated
from his face, he decreed, “I love you,” took his final breath and staring into the light, Eve watched the last of life scale his eyes as he slipped into the peaceful state of eternal rest.

Sixty- three years of living, forty-five days of dying, four hours of crossing over… one life blending into holograms perceived not current lens as Dominatrix Time slashes her final whip into the heart of our bleeding tears.

There are moments in our lives when the world should shudder to a complete halt, and we should stop to breathe. The sun should cease moving, the wind blowing and nothing should continue because nothing will ever be the same. EVER. It was such a moment – obstacles journeyed beyond thoughts perceived by current lens, spectrum shifted, then the certainty of weeping spirits vibrated through time and space into the stillness of the silence, circuiting light years into the mysticism of immortality.

Eve’s encounter with her Father’s transition profoundly affected her perception and belief about infinity and its bond to being. Life after death was no longer merely a theoretical possibility, but an unambiguous actuality ascertained after perceiving Stan’s transitory. His transition bestowed the distinct insight that his presence would flower beyond the mere existence of flesh, thought and heart; however, as she walked into futurity, realistically she now felt the fear of confronting the inevitability of her own mortality, along with that of her children.

Stan’s laughter constantly echoed in Eve’s mind and she felt his whiskers constantly rubbing against her warm cheeks reducing her to tears. Days and nights blurred together while Stan’s ghosts slowly drifted into the haunting of the continual tossing and turning of her every dream. She had let conditions of life twist her into a walking zombie existing in a dull trance that was achingly reaching for that invisible to the spectrum of her current lens.

No matter how dead she felt, she knew she had to learn how to live again, so three months after the passing of her father, Eve decided to travel more than a whisper of forty-one hundred miles and tour the "City of Dreams” – Paris.

Wandering like a lost soul in a phantom tragedy with hazy ruminations, Eve surrendered to Paris’s seductive magic. The narrow, cob webbed, twisting Parisian streets with gingerbread chateaux painted with character after character of lives well lived and worn. Grand villas and luxury hotels were nestled together by vieilles pierres or ‘old stone’ with a cornucopia of food and fashion markets.

Eve could see why Paris had inspired so many writers as she got the feeling that if she listened carefully to the stones they would indeed carry stories tales of ancient cultures, and medieval architecture riddled by the beauty of the simple traditional things the Parisians respected, and cherished.

Paris contains a small circle - the Ile de la Cité and the areas flanking it on either side of the sumptuous seven-mile sweep of the Seine River, the Marais and the Latin Quarter. It is easy to envision the city during the 12Th century strolling

through the inner circle, when stonecutters and masons clamorous laid the base for the majestic Notre-Dame’s flying buttresses and monstrous gargoyles. One of the wonderful things about the ‘City of Dreams’ is that its past lives on in the present, as vibrantly as it was centuries ago with aspiring street artists selling their goods on the exact same soil walked by Roman legionnaires.

A woman in black with a white apron hugging her waist and a spray of baguettes nestled under her armpit, neatly sidestepped Eve as she glanced at one of the gingerbread chateaux, then out of the fog a vision appeared so crystalline in clarity it chilled her entire being. In the heart of the city a taxicab driver deliberately laid on his horn until he received her attention.

Capturing the glimmer of her eye, he smiles with a merry twinkle concealed under dark tinted glasses, and then waves with an infectious laughter … echoing in the street. A short stout man, hair thinning on top, parted on the side, greased down and swept over, with a face shadowed of old thick whiskers - smoking a pipe: a taxicab driver that Eve chased down the streets of Paris yelling, “Daddy!” Clear across the world from a childhood home, a deceased father’s double seems to sense a lost daughter’s reassurance that spirit is alive and well.

Sobbing she raced through the streets, reaching out as the cab disappears into the congestion of the busy Parisian traffic. Through her mist of tears, the grief carries me through the west portal of the invincible Notre- Dame cathedral, and lights the pathway to a brilliant sculpture of the Virgin Mary with child showcased in front
of a magnificent medieval rose stained glass window, encircled by figures from the Old Testament, saints, and ANGELS … everywhere ANGELS!

Eve’s head bowed, her body weakened as she falls to the humbling of her knees while feeling the committed presence and love of one so bountifully mighty that the almighty blesses her, one mystified child, with the sight of one last vision, one last smile and one last roar of laughter.

In praise, on one side of the chancel entrance, she lifted my arms to altars lit with brilliant gold torches surrounded by pillars of magnificence Gothic angels. Her palms reaching up to heaven high encircled the vibration of those so pure so almighty that my sight humbled by their mere presence, and twirling around in circle after circle, eyes closed and weeping, she gave thanks.

Lead me through the blemish of my ghostly temptations, and forgive the failings that trespass the wings of godliness who softly whisper mutes to fruitless perceptions of the generosity sanctioned before the communion of trust. Live so that the innocent or the wounded might channel the veracity of love enlightened to a vision carefully woven not by globule of tears but grateful passages of infinite possibilities. To humbly live freely and lovingly foresees a path the repercussions of our own innocent thoughts engrain examples of trail to futures awakened by a grain of hope or cored to calamities chosen by a thread misguided. For egos bow to Judas altars crumbled by dollars trail and see not wings of godliness reaching out to the simplicity of the virtue and dignity of humanism.

Angels: risen angels, living angels, loving angels, breathing wings of godliness in every crowd, every face, every heart, and spirit. Can your sincerity not see the light of their being, or are they invisible to the spectrum of your lens that shelters faith? Can your spirit not sense the wings of godliness encircling the tingling energy beyond the aura of your own vibration? Reach deep into the light of trust, knowing nudities of compassion shall sanction the enlightenment of the unseen, the unheard and the uncertain.

Silent gentle beings around us, guarding us, carrying us and protecting us. Messengers delivering thoughts as true and pure as the driven snow, entities bearing silent powers that emit evil through the awakening of good, and the performance of endless miracles cast upon eyes anew.

Impact! Angels we choose to let in, those who wander in unexpectedly, those veracities of light who soar to broaden wings of godliness and those who birth awakenings across a planet sanctioned into the communion of enlightenment for a species carefully woven as one. We all bond through the compassion of humanity for a reason beyond the scope of our realization, and in one split second leave imprints on the grains of eternal passages.

Is he not a God of mercy? Of all the people in this incalculable world, he knew that Eve was the one who needed the miracle: she was the one regardless of her state of affairs believed. She was the one who never, even on the darkest days and in the hardest times, lost hope, and she was the one who now with grateful tears was on her knees in a cathedral far away, giving thanks.

Eve realized as she put one foot in front of the other and stepped out onto the road of hope that the world seen through the lens of grief is crystalline in clarity whether it is grieving the death of a childhood or a relationship or a loved one. A wake-up call beckoning a world where everything, I mean everything, has a recognizable and momentary magnificence. The gift of those treasures you notice more and those imprints that leave an impact on the priceless seconds of our days and those miracles that make all things glow in hue of roses - roses we can smell!

Eve still missed her Father, but in a sweeter gentler way like that of a fading song. His voice, once clear and pleasing as a stream running over stones, faded in my ears, and his love vanished to memories revealed in a clearer voice - a promise of yet another tomorrow. A new beginning. A day without tears and with a far deeper thirst for the taste of life.

The 'City of Dreams' now had a new story for the winds to carry. Its message was simple, inevitable, and as powerful as daybreak. It was one of love, faith, and freedom. Laughing, Eve knew her Father in all of his glory was roaring across the Parisian skyline now golden with the fallen sun. Like a gentle storm he was quietly, simply waiting for nightfall to release its blazing stars, and with the touch of his spirit he would bring magic to a grieving daughter’s pillow and to the closing of yet another chapter of a life well lived and learned.

Eve had not known that anything as cold and clear as moonlight could be so full of promises - promises made of white glimmers dancing in the heavens above, stars wished upon on a clear Parisian night, and as she lives and breathes if she is ever

lucky enough to return to the City of Dreams where lovers walk hand in hand and she sees a certain bald taxi driver smoking a pipe, she will savor the clever ways her life has of reminding her that she is very much alive and that life does go on.

Awake day- by -day, minute- by- minute in a world where the hologram changes with the swipe of a thought and perhaps the paths they so vigilantly wander are not the illusions yearned but the lessons esteemed. Every thought blends into the following; whereas, when pages turn and chapters culminate, Dominatrix Time does, indeed, breathe the final word. Let it be that karma carries not regret or curse; let it be that the endless possibilities of life were lived and not left sleeping.

Donna LeClair
Calling All Angels
3,549 Words