In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

wall, but the Madonna didn't seem to mind and looked on Penny with
her usual gentle resignation. When she came to her senses, Penny
checked the message, just a JPEG attachment from Ula. She ran the
super high-res image through Photoshop, macro on the eye until it
almost filled the screen. Saved that, ran the image through a preset for a
grainy old timey look. Now she had a haunting disk in the middle of
darkness. She uploaded that to all her desktops.
She turned off the lights and sat in the glow of his multiple
eyes, and lit up again. The highlight in the center of his pupil formed a
ring of black within the white almond of the sclerotic.
Enso. The circle of infinity in Zen calligraphy. This one, thick
and heavy, in the style of Hakuin. Breath was life. Didn't Zazen go to
the same place as the Immortal Sisters and St. Teresa? The no
nonsense, bare bones logic of it had always appealed to her. She looked
over her shoulder from her new tatami meditation platform (scavenged
from a Japanese restaurant renovation.) To the downcast serenity of the
Madonna's gaze. Okay, so she smoked dope, and that was a no-no, but
it did something to her short term memory, kept it from looping
endlessly around its deeply grooved track. Grounding she got from the
lotus position, counting her breaths and staring blankly at the pits in the
wall. She adjusted the breathing according to the Immortal Sisters,
because the men and women were as different as sky from sea.
After a sitting, all clear eyed and refreshed, she would glance at
the painting, for a visual litmus check, and didn't the Madonna nod
gently in approval? One breath at a time, one day at a time. Maybe she
could get through this, after all.
Life was a matter of simple routine: meditate, eat, walk up to
Washington Square Park to score, work on the music. Edited of nonessentials
Penny's basement became a serene monk's cavern, complete
with the religious icon on the rough wall. She slept on the meditation
tatami. The futon she kept for company, but company wasn't knocking
at her door.
Then it did, in April, the cruelest month, or so the poets called
it. He stood in the doorway with Ula, Dick and Beatrice behind him.
They all filed into Penny's space after pecking her cheek, except
for Sandro, who made a point of just bumping his new cheekbone
against her now officially adult one. The three of them stood
awkwardly in the center of the room, taking it all in, Dick and Beatrice's
eyes drawn to the flashing wall of tech, the silvery new formant
machine and the pile of blinking black ones. Hiding a pasty new
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