Like a sword with its hilt exposed and blade in the earth, I found a rusty machete. Inspired by the flower-scented day I decided I should try horticulture. I marched around my garden cutting everything unattractive. To tidy up some ragged browning tips I chopped at a plant taller than myself with impossibly long leaves like gigantic rabbit ears. Horribly, the stumps proceeded to leak sticky beads of milk with a garish stink like molten rubber. I had hurt the thing. I felt awful and I began to apologize, but I did not know how to convey my sentiments. Should I hug it?

I continued hacking away at some seemingly loose palm tree bits but they were more robust than they appeared and the blade ricocheted on each slice and I pictured losing an eye, or fingers. When the machete came close to cutting off one entire arm I lanced it back at the leaf strewn ground.

To remove myself from danger I pitched into the hammock.

I have seen cats cutting through the back yard. Singly they stride, favoring particular routes. A calico male insists on spraying a low shrub, which does indeed sport a lustrous patina I had previously put down to good health. To be neighborly I nightly placed a heaped plate. Every morning the dish was spotless. This continued until I discovered the plate rimmed with small brown snails, their slimy bodies like squishy tongues suctioning away. I’m told gargantuan toads are often found face down in the cat food.

One night I saw a black cat sitting stiffly in a patch of shade. Unseen, through a window, I stared. I made out the strip of white chest and one white paw. Gradually I realized the cat had no face. Where its face should be instead there was nothing, only shadows. Squinting, I stared harder and all outlines dispersed. I blinked and the cat vanished, dissolved into varying depths of darkness, fuzzy blackness filling the space between giant green leaves with serrated edges. The white chest turned into the edge of a flagstone, the white paw a leaf.

Another night a pair of raccoons trotted across the top of the back fence. These tropical raccoons are smaller than their northern brethren. One sprung to the ground in a graceful leap and attacked my yoga mat. With his jaws he ripped free a mouthful. And then the little furry beast shook his wrinkling snout, and spat out the unappetizing fragments before scrabbling up a tree trunk and racing away to rejoin his comrade. A corner of the mat is forever gone, tiny teeth marks outline the crime scene and I no longer leave the mat out at night.

Easing off the hammock I went indoors for a glass of water, and on my way I checked up on the slasher-victim fern. The globules of oleaginous cream were caking; hopefully I have not murdered flora, or poisoned fauna, nor perturbed the ghost cats.