thoughts, words, deeds

beware, beware, his flashing eyes, his floating hair

Creation Saturday! Redefine the Ides of March to your liking and/or personal benefit.

Okay, first off, I’m not sure I can redefine the Ides of March. I mean, honestly, it means the middle of March. Specifically the fifteenth, although I suppose the sixteenth is more mid when there are thirty-one days. It has specific connotation. The ides of March was when Caesar was killed by his friends in the middle of the Roman senate. Any redefinition that I do is going to cut into that connotative value, and it’s too rich for me to want to play with. By evoking the Ides of March, I get the added benefit of Shakespeare and a soothsayer’s words unheeded. So, if I’m going to write around it, I don’t want to lose any of the definition. But that doesn’t mean I can’t write around it. And so:

I didn’t notice the first sign, as such. I mean, when cats start yowling in the middle of the night, you don’t automatically assume that it’s a message for you. You think your neighbor’s cat will have kittens in about two months. The next morning the milk was sour, but the date was about a week past so that didn’t get my attention either. I never drink milk in time, even when I buy the really little bottles.

I did notice the crows. A murder of them, following me with their little crow eyes all the way to the car. I noticed them even more when I got out of the car to walk into work. Sitting on the wires, watching me as though they thought I was about to die and leave my eyeballs and assorted soft parts for them in my will. But even that could have been natural. What happened when I booted up my computer—that really freaked me out. “Beware the Ides of March.” In big letters. Running across my screen like a banner.

But even that didn’t really scare me. You see, at work, there’s ANNIE. She’s an AI (long story, not important) we’ve been working on for about a year my group. We’ve been treating her like a baby, teaching things gradually—a crawl before you walk kind of thing. Well, my responsibility is language acquisition, and so I’ve been reading to her every day. We started small, but she learns fast, and so we’re up to Shakespeare. Just like we’d train a high school student, and look how well they turn out. But it means that every morning, ANNIE asks me questions about the things we read the day before. We were going to read Julius Caesar today (she has access to the internet) so I guess I just figured that she was getting a head start.

“What about it?” I type back. Big silence.

She was quiet all day, which wasn’t like her. I read the play, on schedule, and asked my coworkers if they’d noticed anything strange. Nothing.

That night, I woke up at three am to cats. Again. The milk was sour, again. And the crows had brought their cousins. At work, the banner was even bigger, and she didn’t talk. At all, to me.

As the week wore on, I felt more and more strange. I started noticing the portents around me. The dark clouds that hovered over my apartment building. The moon was bleeding—a darker red than I used to see because of the pollution in the city. Weird horsemen paraded down my street, making it harder to get to work. I stepped in a pile on the way to my car and so my shoe smelled of manure all day long.

Tomorrow is the Ides of March. I hear the cats yowling.

I really don’t want to go to work.