Just before dawn, an owl flew right up to the towering pane of stained glass and scraped the soldering with its talons. It crashed into the pane again and again, whilst the glow from behind the opaque window set fire to the bird’s eyes. As its shrill echoed off of great stone walls, the patron saints below watched the tired owl perch on the ledge and wondered,
Why does a creature of the night
slam up against the light?
And as the saints crossed the threshold, past the doors of mahogany and iron, the owl descended. She tore the gold tassels from a banner, and tied them around her neck in a delicate knot. She cracked her beak into the wooden barriers, as if to knock them down.
When the doors opened, she looked up at the man in the white robe and gold tassels with those burning eyes. The saint paused for a moment, then reached into his satchel. He leaned down, biscuit in hand, gently offered the bird reprieve for her strange arrival, and returned to the nave with the doors closed firmly behind him.
The owl hurled herself into the air, those metallic strands loosening as she traced the perimeter of the cathedral. She scanned the structure from all sides, observing it like liturgy she could either bury herself in or burn. The tassels released themselves from her plumage and were tossed away in the cool air as first light broke, and her molten watch met the wrought iron cage of the aviary.
A falcon, adorned with a leather harness and a capsule for a scroll, perched inside the dome with icy eyes fixed on the owl as she circled. The owl landed at the foot of the door to the aviary and knocked her beak into the gateway once again.
A bird handler opened the door and watched silently as the owl walked herself past her feet, through the vestibule, beneath the falcon’s perch,
and found herself an inkwell.
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Today, I was about to submit my application to the University of Missouri as a first-time, first-generation student. I wrote a free choice mini essay fully confident that option was my ticket, just to reach the ‘submit’ button with an error essentially telling me, “You still don’t fit into any of our boxes.“
You’ll have to try another way.
Without rattling off the growing list of systemic barriers I have encountered trying to reach higher education, under survival conditions and finally not, I am unaccepting of being disallowed access to opportunity that the outside world insists on repeat I belong in.
For the first time, I’ll agree with you openly.
And for that reason, I have to play the game this time, but once I’m in through the side door, I’m going to highlight every crack I fell through that people with less of a vengeance might just submit to, and challenge them.
Of course I don’t jive with boxes- I’ve been sharpened.
And so, since my little admissions essay has been rendered obsolete, yet remains relevant to future posts I still have living in my drafts, here is a piece of The Microcosm.
_____
“Please see me as who I am, and not who you think I am.”
I mixed another three parts paint, one part mineral spirits in my cup and continued painting the bands of malachite over my old van. I ignored the drips of ultramarine on my running boards as I covered the grey that was singed with rising rust. My hands did not stop buzzing for minutes after grinding the rot away from behind my taillight lenses, and the 1985 small block Chevy looked ready for the scrap yard with the grill removed in preparation to be sprayed black.
Over the 68 hours inside of two weeks it took me to paint a classic, I remembered my nights parking on the streets of Louisville years before. Neighbors would call the police periodically, and I’d answer that dreaded knock on my side doors with a contained “Good evening, officer.” And I recall that each time, there was a micro pause before they spoke, and a softening in their posture as they looked at me and my warmly decorated interior. The dark air would move from enforcement to, “What’s the story here?”
I taped a handwritten sign to my windshield when I was out in public during the transformation process that read,
“Sorry for my mess. I’m going to be a mural.”
To an audience of one.
When I was finally finished, with likely one of the most unmistakable vehicles on this side of the New Madrid faultline, my own presence changed. Where I once kept my head down walking into the grocery store, I now turned back occasionally to admire my labor and sometimes noticed another taking a look from across the parking lot.
And sometimes still, they take two and they say,
“Hold on. I have to meet this person.”
I will the machine. 