Iris Avenue by Pamela Grandstaff

said as she looked up.
    “You okay?” Hannah asked.
    “I’m fine,” Caroline said. “It’s nothing a few days of warm weather wouldn’t cure.”
    “It won’t be warm up here until June,” Hannah said. “You may need to take a vacation before that.”
    “I can’t go anywhere while the monks are here,” Caroline said. “There’s too much to do and I have to take care of them.”
    “How long are they staying?”
    “Who knows?” Caroline said with a sigh.
    “That’s a pity,” Hannah said.
    “Oh, no,” Caroline said. “It’s a privilege to have them here; any inconvenience to me is far outweighed by the greater good. I’m not suffering at all; suffering is just an illusion.”
    “Are the raccoons you called about real?” Hannah asked, “Because I can’t justify the mileage on imaginary ones.”
    “They’re real and extremely noisy,” Caroline said. “I don’t want them harmed in any way, just relocated, if possible. They’re keeping Petula and Sven awake at night and heaven knows we all need our sleep; we get so little of it as it is. Not that I’m complaining. Some yogis go for months without sleep or food. I’m not quite that evolved yet. It helps that I’m vegan even though I’m considering becoming a fruitarian. It’s just that there is so little organic fruit available and you have to be sure it fell off the trees naturally and wasn’t removed forcibly; fruitarians consider that murder. You can’t be sure of the cruelty free purity of the fruit when it’s shipped in…”
    “That’s all really interesting,” Hannah interrupted. “But I need to get started, if you don’t mind. I have a humane trap I can set up and once they’re caught I’ll relocate them somewhere else. We need to figure out how they got in, though, and seal it up.”
    “Sven will do that,” Caroline said. “He’s handy. Have you met Petula and Sven? They’re from Stockholm. I met them at a conference in Seattle. They’re both Reiki masters and have completed all but the most secret levels of a Sacred Energy Medicine course I was involved in for awhile. They’re working for me to earn the money to pay for the last module. Once they complete the training they’ll be able to manipulate the electromagnetic field that surrounds us, that connects us all. It’s powerful magic and not just anyone can do it; you have to be born with the gift. Not many people understand the importance of the electromagnetic field. Did you know cell phones interrupt the radar that bees use to navigate? That’s why they’re disappearing at such a fast rate. It affects humans and animals as well but most people aren’t sensitive enough to detect the changes in the atmosphere…”
    Hannah wondered if maybe Caroline was starved for someone to talk to. The simplest question seemed to trigger a chronic bout of verbal diarrhea. Hannah’s attention wandered to the decorations tacked to the walls of the kitchen. One in particular caught her eye.
    “Um, Caroline,” Hannah said, as soon as Caroline stopped long enough to take a breath. “Who’s the monster guy?”
    She pointed to a large poster on the wall featuring what looked like a fierce, blue man-beast with long, pointy teeth holding a large wheel with his long, pointy claws. Each section of the wheel between the spokes had a little scene of Asian characters in different situations, some of which looked pretty dire.
    “That’s Yama, holding the wheel of time,” Caroline said. “He’s a Tibetan Buddhist deity who protects Buddhists. He was a monk who planned to meditate in a cave for fifty years in order to achieve enlightenment. In the last month of the forty-ninth year, robbers brought a stolen bull into his cave and cut off its head. When they realized Yama had seen them do it, they cut off his head as well.”
    “No wonder he looks so mad.”
    “Yama put on the severed bull’s head and terrorized all of Tibet. Finally Manjushri, Bodhisattva of Wisdom, manifested