Heather Banks, Member at Large, Rockingham, VA I never owned a real black cat, though felines of three other shades owned me for more than 20 years sequentially. Even longer has this ebony cat crouched on a table that might be rectangular or round, and might be covered or just painted brown but definitely is very flat like the depth of all ambiguous spaces painted on two-dimensional surfaces. The pot of flowers, painted white, somehow admits a trace of the room’s vertical orange plane. The azure sky does not intrude entirely on primed, bare canvas between cattails and sunny flowers that sing of daffodils or gladiolas that cannot open fully. Light varies the striped décor’s lush tint, and the sheer, patterned curtain rests, twisted between breaths from the open window. A painting—or perhaps mirror’s dark reflection— almost slides off the wall into the path of the screen door’s yellow frame. Through decades now, I see, the young artist’s energy coiled in the waiting black cat’s smudge. Each time I delve into this image, ...
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