To Christine Rost 2/4/2000 Geoff Ashbrook
Joseph Ozone and Maiayn Kalbrickly were inspecting an old man's mailbox one morning when a trash truck pulled up to the front of the house. They were sure nothing was wrong, it appeared to be a respectable operation from every angle. Joseph put down his clipboard and tugged at his one ear, as one does when they are cold. It was not cold however. It was a day of invisible weather, and their stately dress bore then no burden. A person from the passenger seat of the truck got out and walked up to Joe and Mai [Mah-E], and beckoned with his finger for them to follow him. He had on a clean brown uniform, with a matching brown plaid mackintosh to boot. He walked around to the back of the truck, the two followed eagerly, and then he pulled a lever opening the huge jaws of hydraulic smoosh. There was no trash to be seen, but when the opening was sufficiently wide a light came on inside the truck, illuminating for them an elegant late eighteenth century office of study, complete with a cat and a dog laying respectfully and respectively on a chair and a small throw rug. There was a full bookshelf with nothing but goldfish bowls containing many an enthusiastic specimen. There was an ergonomic oak draftsman's desk from ninetieth century France --Maiayn recognized the craftswork. "How much?" she asked. The man held up three fingers and made his mouth into the shape of a wide 'O.' She looked over at Joe. He was frowning in a distant contemplation, gripping his chin as if pulling on a goatee he might grow some day. She turned and looked down the street, and there were trash trucks everywhere now. With people running in and out of their houses, buying and selling. She saw Samual Groveman, and Old Normal Bongtoker, leaving their doors at the same time from adjacent houses, each carrying a plaid bowling ball case, and they met eachother at the curb and walked off together trying to hit birds and squirrels with a suction-cup blow gun and a jelly bean slingshot. The hotdog lady had turned the corner and was making her way up the street, striking her nearly inaudible ceramic gong, her cart pulled by Gary the giraffe who wore a bowler upon his head. He'd let them grab him about the neck and he'd lift them up and they'd shout and say "look at me, look." He had the ambition of launching them into orbit with a quick swing but he knew that wouldn't do. Some days he felt he was even beginning to like the little buggers, even when they tried to draw pictures on his stomach with chalk. And Mai could see the children running out their front doors and into the street with anything imaginable to pay with except money, and the Hotdog lady had a policy of only taking cash, but the boys and girls would plead and barter with her, explaining why this piece of string was rare, and that it could transform into a climbable rope, that it came from some far off world. Or why this small stick broken piece of wood looking thing was surely worth a veggi-dog with the works. There was this one girl who always brought her dog's slobber saturated tennis balls and wanted cheese fries in exchange. The lady didn't even have cheese fries. But the girl would only be satisfied if she got fries and when the lady pretended to put cheese on. Mai saw young Mr. Pelk, who was recently married and had a doxund and two cats. He was a teacher of Physiometrix and Horseback Riding at the local elementary school. But today he was standing and looking defeated, holding a pair of hedge clippers in his hand. You see, in his front yard he had a great old Japanese maple, but all the new growth insisted on growing downward and outward. So the tree was a veritable grail, or like a wine glass, with nothing whatsoever in the middle. And all he wanted was a normal tree. A good American Japanese Maple Tree. His wife was known for cooking fish. It's said she has a hole in the back yard where she ice fishes for anything that can fit through the hole -any time of the year. They also say she's pregnant. Then Mai turned the other way and saw this one house she'd "inspected" not a month before, where everything was covered with bay leafs, even the cat and dog. Even Mrs. Pelchwader and the Mr. . They say there's an old saying in Angola about Bay Leafs and a Land of all Children. Joe was still thinking over the contents of the truck, occasionally asking questions to which the driver would mime or 'charade' his reply. Mai wasn't impressed enough to give up on waiting.
She looked across the street and Sandy Dipslots had just ridden up driving her stagecoach drawn by six copper horses. The cart stopped and the horses whinnied and clicked their hooves on the slate street and then transformed into large knight pieces as from a chess game. Sandy jumped down with a few bags in her hands and hanging off her shoulders, and walking by she fed a shiny brillo pad to a spunky horse head and patted it. She waved to Maiayn and then turned and walked over to the side path that led to the back of the house. She dropped her bags off on a small patio in front of the side door, and she kept on going back and through the yard until she got to a long fence. Standing a few feet from it she put her hands on her hips and looked over the fence, from side to side. Each rail of the fence bore the numbers for a ten-year span of time, and it ran along weaving between houses off in either direction from her place. In fact, a number of her neighbors, she could see, were out standing by the fence. A few waved to her and she waved back. She walked up to 1135-1145, and leaned over until she was looking down at the top of the rail. From the top of it extended two optical cords with eye pieces affixed endwise, and the rail had a series of dials and sliding things for longitude and latitude and zoom functions, and other things like that, near the top. She looked in, fitted her fingers expertly over the dials, and moved over Southern Africa so that it filled her field of vision. Was she from one of those countries? Or nations? Tribes? The lines had yet to be drawn, and the floral topography of the land looked as though it would have resisted the politics of nomenclature with a shifty spunk. Then she went on to surf East Asian cooking, and to spy on the spice routs -keeping tabs on the merchants, making sure everything appeared respectable in operation.
Behind the fence there went a little stream that bubbled along around rocks and fallen branches and as it went through all different kinds of clay and soil and volcanic sands and even a few digital regions. The water flowed from her left to her right, as the numbers on the fence increased. Her kids were at school, actually school was over, but they were working with friends and teachers down at the furthest end of the fence and water line -where it was all always under construction. They would decide amongst themselves how the stones went in, and what kind of soil to make the ground out of, to make it swing this way or that, where to put hills and where valleys, and then they could watch the water make its own adjustments after that. The kids put in the fence stakes and learned about the wiring and how all that was done. Infact Deskramp, her youngest daughter, who normally went by Deski, had just finished another rail. She wiped her nose and looked in with the Longe and Lat set to herself. She fixed the shirt tag that was sticking out up her neck, and then pulled the zoom back to see the branching water-ways and diverging rail-ways, and the building construction that scrambled sycophant after the fronts of the streams over the new turf (like the flesh of the palm of the hand has filled in along the bones of the fingers- but not all the way up). And then, as she liked to do, she'd sweep over the edge where the new ends of the lines were all developing, so she could see what they were doing. She wanted whatever she did to look good in context; to avoid unsightly repetition and all that. Sometimes in the air she'd meet other people who were zooming around the Front Posts. They looked strange in the air like that. The bodies were slightly reflective, but they reflected according to the aesthetic perspective of the person; like an inside-out eye. Meanwhile, her brother was making waterfalls in the stream where there was only another foot of anything in front, and her father was just getting home.
Kevin Dipslots was putting down his film-boards and measuring sticks, leaning them up against the table leg, along with a hefty old-style manual typewriter which he set carefully on a chair up against the far wall next to the gramophone. Sandy called out from they kitchen. "Yes, it's me. Sorry I'm early, there wasn't any traffic on the way home," he called back.
"I thought maybe it was Almfus and Daski," she said.
"Oh, yea," Kevin said, stirring a cup of water with his small finger, "I wanted to tell you. I heard they finished the planet post today at work. Ron said it won't be made public until all the bugs are out, but they put in the first planetary fence post, isn't that great? It's like when the Russian's put that basketball in space. Now something about the new rails Almundfest and Deskramp are putting is going to have to change, and you might be able to look at more than just the middle ages out back," he said with a nod. She smiled, and he picked his nose. "Oh, and they tried zooming out, and there's a few billion other planet posts. That surprised a lot of people, Mr. Jar was really floored, like he'd lost money over it or something. Of course translation and stuff will take a while. But Ron let me peek at some slides of the first planet they zoomed into. They had very strange radishes."