2/14/1999 G.g.Ashbrook
Randolf opened the door and backed his way in slowly, the huge paper bag in his arms with a rip beginning down the side, a little further down with each jostle a tare, and a dozen eggs in carton topless balanced on acme. Generations underlying tender loins, the hard white Styrofoam of the meat department. He remembered the days of brown paper parcels tied with twine. Little sticker blurbs as if the meat were a magazine, "Lowered Fat," "Interview With Peggy Jaskar on page 27, giving away all the secrets on life success," "Free Range," "Organic Feed," "Now leaner." He grabbed the small package and threw it through the air like a Frisbee, where it sailed over the table, over the sink, and out the window.
He put a few boxes away in the cupboards, some oats, salt loop cereal, granola bars, and then he walked over to the sink and leaned and looked out the window down onto the lawn at the smiling plastic shrink-wrapped over ground red in the sun. Then he looked up at all the houses across the street, all built like his, and he saw that all his neighbors were all looking out their kitchen window just like him. And he looked out on their lawns, and sure enough there was something, a package of meat, a rainbow trout, a box of cigars, a handle of bourbon, a bunch of bananas, a crossword puzzle book, a radio, a TV, a bag of syringes, a photo album, a wig, a giant ball of tin-foil, bars of scented soap, that they had tossed out their windows.
At the outer extremes of his window view, he could see the truck coming slowly down the street then, far off and from the left, while from the right Mr. and Mrs. Grodfong were on opposite sidewalks walking their fourteen foot crocodiles. The truck had long metal arms with which it was picking up the items the people had tossed out on their lawns. One lady who decided she wanted her pair of shoes back was picked up as well, and placed in the tank on top of the truck cab with everything else. The crocodiles walked along slowly across the front lawns, devouring the toss-outs they came upon.
Randolf slowly removed his eyes and placed them on the edge of the sink. The small white lacquered mental spheres unfolded in a kind of blossom of jointed hinges and telescoping rods and spirals. In the middle of one lay a long necked bird cozy on a tiny plush sofa, and it shook its head as it rose. In the other a frog in a bathrobe snored with a book opened against its chest in a hammock with three easels at the foot end. The bird flew up and over to the frog. There she hovered, and reaching down with a steady talon’ed foot, she pulled a singe hair from the still neatly combed head before she flew off again to one of Randolf’s hands; where she landed and stood before his thumb nail, pushing buttons and seeing on the domed screen a visual display of the town and out. The frog sat up with a start, and coughed a dignified cough into one hand. Then he took from his left elbow a small light bulb which then floated in the air above him as he went, to help him see the way. He went over to Randolf’s other hand and walked up the pinkie finger onto the flat past the knuckles. There he knelt down, and feeling for the handle he spun the wheel opening a hatch. Inside were a weimaraner, a peacock, a wad of cotton, and a butterfly with a feather duster, all eating lunch and drinking tea and playing a board game to the layout of the town; and all waved and smiled and said "Hello, Mitch." As the frog climbed down a ladder and sat himself next to Elroy, the cotton wad, the hand further unfolded revealing a lavish study, lounge and kitchen. Bishop, the weimaraner, was playing The Truck, and wagging her tail excitedly. Folltaph, the cotton wad, was playing Mr. and Mrs. Grodfong, and smoking a bundle of #2 pencils wrapped with a rubber band, and ashing in a decanter of orange juice.
Rinager, the butterfly, stood up and walked off to the kitchen, where there was a torn bag of groceries on the counter. He took the open-topped carton of eggs from atop and carried it to the fridge and put each egg in that shelf in the door which is always indented for just so. He called over his shoulder, "Mitch, you can take my place if want, I was playing the sidewalk." To which Mitch called out a ‘thank you’ quite cordial. Rinager put out his hands and leaned against the counter, and looked out across the way at the long necked bird. He always wondered why she had to be so far away when making the clouds, keeping the wind circling corner leafs and currents pushing old trade ships to new continents. Designing the wildlife of the forest. Forging foliage and pushing landscapes into canyons, waterfalls, foothills, riverbeds, bays, coastlines, rivers branching out into the sea, the rainbows with doors to everother, the plotted spots of gem and mineral stops, the dotted drops of mushroom umbrellas, a little lightsofrock, for picnics on the edge of underany, high power telescopes sprouting from grassy hillsides under early morning rain, pants and dresses unraveling from the first branches of the first trees like they were draped over a clothesline, mint, cinnamon, ginger, chamomile, a fish for flowers in a sixty four page prologue, over turned, pour yourself a glass, volcanoes go, an ash for grass past fertile blow, a cup with ice, a lemon, a Nalgine jug for backhills sipping, bottoms up, for gravity and other minty-dinner afterthoughts, away, hiding iris lightbulbs, Velcro of the soul, a spinning wheel of aftermath, and all the more to tell.