By Bryana Fern

The difference between loneliness and aloneness is a satellite searching for a view between the stars. A waterdrop dangling from the spigot. An animal studying one visitor and another behind the glass.

It is        sitting                           next      to     a stranger.

I need your soul, not your well-meanings. I need to snatch your shirt and pull you to my face and scream, and I need you to tell me you heard 
nothing.

***

Graduate school is not school. It is a job. A space for ambivalence and Foucault and narratology and hegemony and Kristeva. For a blonde, white student from Gulfport to email a photo of a deceased baby squirrel that she was rushing to the vet...so sorry to miss class. 

For realizing you know nothing and must let no one suspect. For 2 AM walks around your apartment lot, pass the dumpster twice and you can go in, while the meet-up in the hotel  lot behind the fence at your window rages                                 on. 

***

I don’t know what it’s like to be in love.  I know what it is to lust. I know what it is to imagine. But love cannot be realized. It is a photograph out of focus under a microscope and I turn the knob to blurry more, b l u r r y    m  o  r  e.

Tell me your loss and
I will tell you I don’t care,
I carry no good.

***

The feral cat is a creature of art and a thousand years’ instinct. Current estimates point to between 60 and 100 million that call US streets home. 40 million is too large a gap in my own estimate. I account for two. 
1)	an orange tabby, 
2)	the other black and white, they wait in the holly bush beside my concrete apartment steps. 

The orange one follows me up the stairs like a stalker—freezing mid-step if I look back, waits outside the door. It seeks what it wants. 

When I feed him the only cheap food I can afford, observe the harsh crunch between teeth that should only pierce wet flesh, do I buy their company? Purchase a pal?

Their kibble is probably made of horse meat and cornmeal.

I call the orange one Simba so I can use a James Earl Jones voice. I point toward the highway beyond the hotel. That’s beyond our borders. You must never go there. And I’ll be damned because he actually looks.

I speak with them more than with any other human, but I am not unsettled. They say more simply by meeting my eyes.

They always return.


***

Jane Eyre says she is no bird and no net ensnares her, but does she not mean a cage? Birds are housed in cages. But this is the before—the catching. She won’t even make it to the cage stage. Snatch a feather and curse.

But what if some birds want to be caught? Then it’s someone else’s job to look after them. Make decisions. A great burden is released. Then we can say that no cage ensnares us, because we prefer the whole room. 

I have so many paintings and posters framed on my walls that it’s difficult to see the beige paint surrounding. It’s decorated how I like—with things to look at. I can change it any time I like. 

8 X 11.5 or stuffed in 8 X 10 for Monet and Klimt prints
11 X 17 sweet standard for Frida
12 X 16 and 18 X 24 great for collages, shaped and arranged identities
Graduate to 24 X 36 	

Before I could afford the frames, I used blue Ticky Tack that gradually lost all cohesion. Oil soaked through the glossy paper at the corners like a coffee stain spreading beneath a shirt. When I took down and re-rolled the posters, they’d left behind cerulean spots as if the room hosted a paint ball tournament with miniature guns, the target a whirling dervish. Dots of code.

***

When I move and cannot bring Simba with me, I see him in the rearview sitting straight and tall on the sidewalk, watching me leave. The black and white cat links their tails in a curl.

***

                                                        I hope they find the 
                                                  sack of horse meat kibble I 
                                                      left behind the bricks.

***

Graduation—from anything, anywhere—is an acknowledgement via certificate that you still know nothing. It is a congratulatory time. I gave you years of my 20s because I did not want them but knew I had to use them. 

***

I walk on what is collectively known as The Trace, a paved railway track beginning in Hattiesburg, ending 44 miles later in Prentiss. Side trails curve off the pavement, heavy motorways for mountain bikes and dirt bikes. Riders spring up between the pines, a flash of neon Under Armour in the periphery, and an ungodly pound back to the packed red soil, gears and chains clanking. Stay-at-home moms run in leggings and oversized t-shirts behind strollers, a YETI in the cupholder.

My bike, once teal now nearly gray, is so ancient that the brakes mimic a banshee every single time. A group of frat boys far ahead look back and laugh, doubling over and stumbling on. 

I consider abandoning it to the ferns and dogwoods ditch. A gift for someone else who would no doubt take it and dispense of it the same way. 

And then another person, and yet another, and on it would live, a teal-gray ghost of The Trace, visible on humid nights, always against a different pine.

***

In class, students ask what I did over the weekend, and I amuse myself inventing new lies. Lies of dangerous things.

I ate lunch in New Orleans with a colleague.
I drove to the casino on the coast.

I talked to the two tiger brothers at the zoo.

~~~
Dr. Bryana Fern earned her PhD in Creative Writing from the Center for Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has been published in Sequestrum, Sou’wester, Harpur Palate, Red Mud Review, Entropy, Redactions, Whispering Prairie Press, Rappahannock Review, Rock & Sling, and Washington Independent Review of Books. She has presented at national conferences on creative writing pedagogy, Tolkien Studies, and narrative theory. She has also published critical articles on Star Trek and feminism, including a chapter in McFarland’s Space, the Feminist Frontier.