Milking the Hydra

What’s the phrase, said Ronnie to Murray, for it? It means having too many things going on that you can’t control?
Got the tiger by the tail? He suggested. Too many balls in the air? Burning the candle at both ends? Irons in the fire? Pumping the calliope with both feet?
Something about a hydra, she said, something having to do with controlling all the heads of a hydra.
What’s the relevance? Said he.
It’s how I feel all the miserable goddamn time, she went on, with chasing this and that, and filling up this cup and emptying that one, and rolling this twice and subtracting that and driving here and there all the miserable goddamn time. What do you do, Murray? What do you do? You go to work, and you come home, and you have your lizards, and you play with the children, down on the floor like a good dad. I am fucking drowning in Tide with Bleach Alternative, and my last gulping gasp is supposed to contain the 75,000 words of a medium sized novel? Are you fucking kidding me?
She is doing what they call venting which means he doesn’t have to listen. Or, if he listens, he is only allowed to respond with purring noises.
My writing, she said, is like a crate of ducks. And my life is like a crate of river ducks that’s been thrown into the river. And when the ducks go down to the bottom and drown it’s not exactly a surprise, because of the nature of ducks, who are birds, and the nature of rivers, which are made out of water, and the nature of crates which sink to the bottom.
Don’t you think, said Murray, that if all the ducks took a deep breath just as they hit the water, the air in their lungs could create enough buoyancy to keep the crate afloat?
It’s a metaphor for my writing career, ass. Are you suggesting I should have smoked a bunch of opium just before I got pregnant with Bubber, to inoculate myself against wearing coordinated pantsuits and attending church?
Maybe you should call your book, The Silence of the Ducks, he suggested.
If any one element were different, if the ducks were fish or if the crate were a boat, or if the river were dry, the ducks would live. But all these three elements in concert make for a crate of dead ducks at the bottom of the river. Not that it isn’t comforting to know that there once were ducks, or that they once swam around and chewed on weeds and quacked, or that if one really wanted to, one could scuba down and view them in their chilly tomb, skeletons picked clean by the monk fish, and say, I used to know these ducks. But they’re going to die. It’s the nature of the situation!
The truth was at this point she didn’t yet see her writing career as a crate of skeletal ducks. She saw it still at this point as a heavy box of exotic jewels. Still at the bottom of the river, but accessible, reclaimable, and beautiful.