The CD player is very apparent and Amy Mann’s vol­ume increases in my mind. I start to feel like she is actu­ally sit­ting in the next room per­form­ing. This doesn’t seem out of the ques­tion, it doesn’t seem odd at all. I slide off the chair onto the floor and crawl into the liv­ing room towards the CD player.

When I turn the cor­ner the black cat jumps at me, his paw lashes at my face. I dodge him but fall back­wards, my head hits the cor­ner of the cof­fee table, I look up and stare at the ceil­ing fan. The fins of the fan are huge and they begin to sprout white angel feath­ers. One of the feath­ers falls down to me but before it can hit my face the white cat climbs on top of me and rubs her belly upon my visage.

I sneeze the cat off and sit up. My head is throb­bing and Amy Mann’s voice starts to become ugly. She is singing about me, she is warn­ing me of some­thing. She is point­ing out all of the ter­ri­ble mis­takes I made in my life. She becomes silence as I rip the CD player’s plug from its socket.

I turn to the cats and smile.

“How’s that for fem­i­nism,” I say and lick my lips.

I turn to a small cabinet-bookshelf. I look over the col­lec­tion of books and decide I want to read none of them. I open the cab­i­net and find a “Learn To Play Har­mon­ica” kit. I rip it open and begin to blow ran­dom notes into the chro­matic lit­tle instru­ment. I open the instruc­tion book­let and begin to prac­tice suck­ing in and blow­ing out air from the lit­tle holes.

An hour later I sit the cats on the couch and I play a small con­certo for them. I begin with Twinkle-Twinkle Lit­tle Star, then fol­low it up with Three Blind Mice. The finale is Here We Go Round the Mul­berry Bush and I pull that off perfectly.

The cats seem entranced by the har­mon­ica music and I decide to do an encore, play­ing a song of my own mak­ing. It is only fif­teen notes long and when I fin­ish I tell them the song was titled “Fascism”.