Caged Spirit

Creative nonfiction
by Tay Berryhill

I was damaged and the panther haunted me. She moved as a shadow within shadow, a presence eclipsing a wounded moon.

I knew her somehow, a phantom prowling the edges of a memory I couldn’t fully conjure. She paced. And paced. In a cage too small for a jungle spirit, she paced. Her eyes did not seek mine. I sensed they were as dark and dull as her fur. She means something.

I kept her hidden from my doctor, who no longer expressed interest in my dreams. Whenever Dr. Turner turned a hawklike gaze on me, I knew she wanted to journey to a realm deeper than my sleeping life. After a year, our sessions were now only monthly, and I wanted to know where I would end. When would this fog lift? The dark voices had been quieted, but how much brain damage remained? Would remain?

Dr. Turner shrugged. A head injury resolves in two years, and what stands then will be as good as it gets. She stalked a different answer for the question of Me: Why had I stopped creating?

You came into the world as an artist, she said. Why did you surrender that gift?

Why did it matter? We always went in circles on this. Me giving reasons (the expense, the unpaid hours, the uselessness of it all); her replying, No, that’s not it.

She asked me to paint. So that we’d discover what I’m afraid of.

Afraid? Who’s afraid of art?

Once home, I picked through abandoned canvases, bones without flesh. I craved the scent of turpentine, the feel of buttery paint, the satisfaction of completion. Yet, when readying a brush, my body stirred with restlessness, hungry to tear from my own skin.

I felt it: someone else in the room. Then I saw her, leaving the night to enter my waking hours. She paced around me. I had been pacing, too. Our eyes met. I knew her, remembered from long ago.

A circus, my first. My only. Painted elephants and jeweled horses led the parade of cages. As the crowd roared with shrieks and laughter, the panther paced silent in her pain, and I wept for her loss. What I remembered was this: A panther is only a panther when living as God intended, true to her birthright and spirit.

I knew something of caged animals, that if their barred doors are opened, so blind are they to freedom, they often will not see. Placing a canvas on my easel, I wondered: Am I brave enough to step outside my cage?

Copyright © 2007 by Tay Berryhill