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Thursday, July 16, 2026
Rewinding Fate--Take One
Rewinding Fate—Take One
Only it wasn’t Anthony
Anthony was dead.
This guy was somebody else.
Katya's calculations
were elegant.
Almost.
If Gina
never met Anthony,
there would be
no falling in love.
No impossible future.
No time machine.
No cat
with opinions
about quantum mechanics.
Simple.
Except...
Gina and Anthony
didn't meet
by accident.
They met
through friends.
Which meant
there wasn't
one moment to stop.
There were dozens.
A picnic.
A concert.
A borrowed canoe.
Somebody's birthday.
Somebody else's barbecue.
An invitation
nobody remembered sending.
History,
it turned out,
had excellent networking skills.
Katya kept crossing out
one rendezvous after another,
while Fate,
without even looking up,
wrote in another.
Tiki watched
the list getting longer.
"So..."
he said.
"We're not changing history."
Katya flattened her ears.
"We're editing."
"Looks more like
history's editing us."
The Time Machine
kept circling the Gunks,
patient as a vulture,
waiting
for somebody
to admit
that destiny
had mutual friends.
Wednesday, July 15, 2026
Cruise Control
Cruise Control
The Time Machine
was on cruise control,
circling the Gunks
through the now-infamous
Heat of July 2026.
The dashboard blinked.
The engine sighed.
Tiki was looking
for a soft place to land.
Not easy anymore.
Climate change had rearranged
the rules.
Even the lakes
had climbed uphill.
Lake Awosting
still held out—
three and a half,
maybe four miles in,
rain-fed,
crystal-clear,
balanced on the Shawangunk Ridge
like a bowl of sky
nobody had spilled.
"Show-off,"
Tiki muttered.
This time
they had Gina.
Which meant
this time
they had a chance.
Katya had a plan.
Cats don't believe in fate.
They believe in timing.
If everything worked,
Katya could go back
to being
an ordinary housecat—
sleeping on warm windowsills,
knocking pens off tables,
judging everyone equally.
Tiki could reclaim
his hard-earned title
of Fishing Master,
a profession requiring
silence,
patience,
and spectacularly good excuses
for catching nothing.
But Gina...
Gina was the hinge.
The whole ridiculous universe
swung on one ordinary afternoon.
One meeting.
One conversation.
One smile
that lasted too long.
Katya's calculations
were simple.
If Gina
never met Anthony,
the future unraveled
like cheap yarn.
No time machine.
No impossible cat.
No July
hot enough
to boil the mountaintops.
Maybe.
Time was funny that way.
It always laughed first.
Tiki had one job.
Get them back
to the spring of 1974.
Land without crashing.
Avoid paradoxes.
And whatever happened—
keep Gina
from meeting Anthony.
Which sounded easy.
Until they saw
Anthony
walking up the trail.
….
Tuesday, July 14, 2026
The A/C was O-U-T
The A/C was O-U-T
Katya narrowed her eyes.
This was not a minor inconvenience.
This was a full-scale feline emergency.
A cat, after all, was never meant to be slow-roasted at 102°F.
Something had to be done.
And F-A-S-T.
Her current kingdom—temporarily known as Rosendale—had become a convection oven with windows.
Honestly.
Why was the Creator always testing her?
Did she have some strange hobby involving lightly toasted house cats?
Was this another cosmic experiment?
"Let's see what happens when we remove the air conditioning and observe the tiny furry empress."
Rude.
People underestimated her.
They assumed cats were dramatic, aloof, incapable of communicating anything beyond the occasional judgmental blink.
A tragic misunderstanding.
Oh, she could communicate.
With precision.
With poetry.
With strategic levels of chaos.
Well...
We shall see about that, won't we?
Katya had more than one ace tucked beneath her velvet paw.
She had simply been quiet for far too long.
And every great heroine knows the moment before she saves the day is often the hottest.
Literally.
A faint hum rippled through the shimmering air.
Then came a familiar whir.
Out of nowhere, zigzagging through time itself, came Tiki at the controls of the time machine—grinning like a raccoon who'd just stolen the moon.
Right on schedule.
Exactly as Katya had planned.
Of course she'd planned it.
Heroes always have a backup plan.
Cats have at least nine.
The Creator thought she was writing the story.
Katya merely smiled.
Sometimes the author forgets...
...the heroine has already read the next chapter.
Monday, July 13, 2026
Venice--October 2012
Venice
October, 2012
By October of 2012, Gina had become a ghost wearing her own face.
The woman who once filled rooms with laughter had dissolved into silence, as though the tide had carried her voice out to sea. Words lived inside her like trapped birds, beating against her ribs. She knew exactly what she wanted to scream from every rooftop, but when she opened her mouth, language shattered into fragments.
She was no longer imprisoned by walls.
She had become the prison.
Anthony had spent years laying each brick with careful hands—one rule, one insult, one threat at a time. He measured her world until there was barely enough room left for her to breathe. Friends disappeared first, especially the ones whose eyes could read the monster beneath his polished smile.
He hated witnesses.
She hated everything about him.
His rules.
His certainty.
The smug curve of his mouth.
He stood over every moment like a puppeteer above his stage, tugging invisible strings until every ending belonged to him.
Even Paolo had never escaped.
People saw privilege.
They didn't see programming.
Raised beneath impossible expectations, failure became forbidden, and perfection became a prison all its own. Addiction slipped through the cracks like floodwater. Before long it carried him toward jail cells, treatment centers, and nights spent sleeping beside garbage bins where rats became familiar companions. The handsome boy disappeared beneath hollow cheeks, broken teeth, smoke, and despair.
Their family tree bore poisoned fruit.
Its branches twisted under the weight of fear, rage, and distrust.
Gina looked at the harvest and wondered whether love had ever lived there at all.
Then Anthony began preparing for endings.
He called it practicality.
She recognized it as cruelty.
Zeus—her faithful guardian, the only soul who loved without conditions—had sores that refused to heal. Blood stained his legs while Anthony refused the simple mercy of a veterinarian. They tried every remedy they knew, but Zeus lingered, stubborn as an old oak refusing the axe.
Perhaps he understood.
Perhaps he was staying because Gina still needed someone who stood between her and the dark.
From the outside, they looked untouchable.
A Bentley gleamed in the driveway beneath a vanity plate.
A magnificent home overlooked Hawaiian water.
A beautiful boat rocked gently in the harbor.
Every year they crossed oceans together, collecting photographs of happiness like actors changing costumes.
This year, the stage was Venice.
The city floated between water and sky, its ancient palaces mirrored in quiet canals that hid unfathomable depths. Gondolas drifted like black swans through streets of liquid glass, while stone bridges arched over currents carrying centuries of whispered secrets. Venice understood beautiful things built upon fragile foundations.
There, Anthony almost resembled the man he'd promised to be.
Travel softened his edges.
For a few borrowed days, he wore humanity like an expensive suit.
But masks are heavy.
Eventually they slip.
Only Katya knew the true architecture of Gina's life.
The nightmare lay beneath it all like thin ice over black water—appearing solid until one wrong step sent everything crashing through. From a distance it glittered beautifully. Up close, it was always threatening to break.
It felt like a thriller where everyone was marked for death long before they understood the plot.
Anthony believed he was writing the final chapter.
He believed every life around him existed to serve his ending.
He was wrong.
Because beneath Gina's silence, something ancient had survived.
Not happiness.
Not certainty.
Hope.
Hope is a stubborn seed. It pushes through concrete. It splits stone. It reaches toward mālamalama even after years underground.
Anthony had mistaken her quietness for surrender.
He had confused survival with defeat. But her spirit remained kūpaʻa, rooted deep, waiting for its season to bloom.
And survivors learn what storms never understand:
Trees that bend are often the ones still standing after the wind is gone.
This was not where Gina's story ended.
It was where she quietly began writing it herself.
Sunday, July 12, 2026
Postcards
Postcards
Arrive.
Bringing
Care.
Distance
Echoes.
From elsewhere,
Gathering light.
Held
In hand,
Journeys
Kept.
Light
Memory.
Notes
Opening
Paths.
Quietly,
Returning
Summers.
Time
Unfolds.
Voices
Whisper
Xenia grace.
Yesterday
Zealously remembered.
Saturday, July 11, 2026
Purple Umbrellas
Purple Umbrellas
Lift my spirit,
purple umbrellas.
Tiny pockets of twilight
perched above white hydrangeas,
keeping the sun from stealing
their porcelain blush.
In my sister's nascent garden,
everything is practicing:
buds learning to blossom,
bees tuning their buzzing,
breezes humming backup,
while the umbrellas sway
like flowers pretending to be birds.
They make me think of Mary Poppins,
drifting over London's rooftops,
her umbrella winking at the wind
as if every gust were in on the joke.
And surely, they're cousins
those merry umbrellas and Katya,
who is, by now, somewhere over the Gunks,
zipping through blue skies
with determination in her pockets
and laughter on her sleeve,
off once again
to rescue Gina
from yet another faux paw—
the kind that leaves everyone smiling,
tails wagging,
and the whole world blooming
just a little brighter.
Because gardens know the secret:
it takes only a splash of purple,
a pinch of whimsy,
and one well-timed umbrella
to turn an ordinary day
into a song.
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