It was a warm morning in late July when I woke up alone on the wrong side of the world. The bathroom mirror greeted me with a reflection of disorientation, mussed hair, and puffy eyes. I tried to shake myself awake, for this morning I was to meet my bride and have breakfast at the downtown café we frequent for our marriage meetings. I had my notes prepared. I was going to lay it on the line. Little did I know what was to come.
I rode the curving roadways for miles. The wind struck like a moist dryer drying towels. The engine hummed like a good motor should. I thought about Detroit. I thought about Japan. I pretty much decided in my own head that I was going to go for the pancakes. With sliced banana. With sweet maple syrup. And a good cup of coffee. My spirits were slightly elevated. I thought about my love. She was waiting there in her car, pulled up to the curb, diagonally. I forgot to bring the bandage like she had asked. My memory is slipping like an old lady on wet winter ice. Damn it. I should have written it down.
We met up. Did the ritualistic kiss thing. I may have palmed her butt a little. It’s okay. I’m allowed. We went in and ordered. I laid out my plan to the clerkie. She took it all down, I guess. We found ourselves a table. A tall college kid came in and said he knew us. He joined us at the table, and we all waited for food. The clerkie brought us silverware wrapped in napkins, but I was missing a fork. I cried out something like, “How am I supposed to eat pancakes without a fork!” The whole place got silent. People were stunned I suppose. My wife and the college kid were embarrassed. Reminded me of when I was in the Kroger the other day and some guy suddenly blurted out to his kids: “Stop fucking around!” And the whole world was in silence and shock because he really did say the F word really loud, right there in the meat department. I thought to myself: What an asshole. Yeah, that really happened.
Anyways… The pancakes came and I was eating them, and they weren’t as good as they usually were, and I was bummed about that and then I found a hair — cooked into the pancake. Yep. My wife was like “Eww.” She said I should take them back, but I was too embarrassed and figured if they were going to give me a fresh plate, they would probably stuff the pancakes down their pants and jiggle around a bit before slapping them on the plate. You know, like in that movie. I just took the loss because I have serious trust issues. My wife let me buy a cinnamon roll. My woman is good about that. Caring and such. She was very sorry that happened. Now we’re going to take a nap together and that’s pretty good stuff.
Earlier we had talked about the Memphis woman who was killed in Fiji on her honeymoon, allegedly by her husband. Um… On your honeymoon? You kill your wife on your honeymoon? Damn. Talk about a bad time. I guess getting a hair cooked into my pancakes isn’t so bad after all.
It was morning and the sun was creeping through the blinds like a ghostly brushstroke of boiled lemon-yellow light. BumBuna O’Brien sat up in bed, put on his glam glasses, and looked at his collection of Easter eggs from outer space. They were arranged neatly on tiny individual egg easels inside a glass cabinet hewn from a dark wood. He appreciated their outlandish colors and designs, and for the fact their origins were completely extraterrestrial.
BumBuna O’Brien often dreamt of living somewhere else, out in space, on some different planet that wasn’t so sore and ravaged by hate and greed. He sighed and crawled out of bed. He walked down the narrow hall to the kitchen. He tugged on a string to open the blinds covering the window above the sink. Carrot shavings lay there, now drying and sticking to the stainless steel. He turned on the water and flushed them down the drain. He put on a kettle of water for some hot tea and looked out the window. Bag worms hung heavy and grotesque in some of the tree limbs, and the heat bugs were already shimmering and screeching. He watched ruby red cardinals fly through the leaves. The kettle began to whistle. He carefully poured the hot water over the tea bag in a cup and watched it steam. He carefully carried it to his table and sat down. He sipped too soon, and it burnt his bunny beard.
“Damn it all to hell!” he screamed, and then with one swift swipe of his paw, the cup of hot tea flew across the room and crashed onto the floor.
“Can’t I even allow myself one cup of tea without being all wumbly bumbly about it!?”
He slammed his head against the top of the table repeatedly until it really hurt — then the old green phone on a table began to ring. Once, twice, three times, four.
“Hello.”
“What’s wrong? You sound grumpy.”
“Caroline?”
“Yes. It’s me. Who would you think it was?”
“Where in the hell have you been? I haven’t heard from you in three days.”
“I’ve been away.”
“What’s going on with you? You sound strange, Caroline.”
She paused for a long time. “I’ve been thinking.”
“Well?”
“I’ve been thinking that maybe we should start seeing other rabbits.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means exactly what it sounds like, exactly what I said.”
“No. It means you want to start seeing other rabbits.”
“Yes. We’re getting stale.”
Sarcastically he breathed, “Are we bread?”
“Of course, we’re not bread, you dumb bunny! But I think it’s time to explore other meadows.”
BumBuna O’Brien could feel the venom boiling in his guts and it was crawling up and stinging his throat like acid.
“So, what you’re really saying is that you’ve already started seeing another rabbit.”
There was some silence and maybe even a little whimper on the other end of the line.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not!”
“Things happen. Rabbits change. You’ve changed. You’re not the same silly little bunny I used to know.”
“Who is he?”
He could hear her swallow.
“Carlos.”
“Carlos!? Carlos is a douchebag! And he’s Cuban.”
“You’re a douchebag! And a racist pig! I hate you!”
“Fuck you, Caroline! Just fuck off!… And I’m a rabbit, not a pig.”
“Don’t talk to me that way! Don’t ever talk to me that way again! Maybe if you weren’t such a bum and maybe if you knew how to satisfy me — then maybe I’d still love you.”
“I’ve satisfied you plenty of times, Caroline — don’t lie to yourself for the sake of that over the ocean Caribbean hack.”
“You’ve never satisfied me the way Carlos satisfies me. I don’t have to fake it with him. You’re not even a real rabbit.”
“I never thought I’d say this, Caroline. But I really hate you right now. I hate you to the end of the universe and then some! Don’t ever talk to me again. Enjoy your future life running to the sun in your silver rum truck!”
BumBuna O’Brien slammed the phone down on the table repeatedly until it was in pieces and then ripped its wire completely out of the wall. He screamed out a whole belly full of bunny pain. He was dripping and panting, and his heart was racing with fury. His head drooped and he began to weep softly in the sparkling sun fuzz of a new day, a day which he already hated.
BumBuna O’Brien stretched out on his bed, smoked some high-grade grass, and stared at the ceiling. He felt really goopy inside. He felt used up and spit out. He felt like that old bottle of ketchup that was almost empty, inverted in the refrigerator, the cap all sticky and crusted up. His stomach could barely take what his mind was feeding it.
“I’ll never fall in love with another rabbit ever again. Yarbles to you, Caroline. Big bolshy yarbles to you!” as Alex DeLarge would surely say.
He laid on his bed for a very long time and then he fell asleep, roughly, and he dreamed brutal dreams of betrayal.
It was a while later, perhaps a different day, when BumBuna O’Brien’s eyes flickered open as he awoke to the sound of someone furiously pounding on his front door.
“Hold on a minute! Jesus effin’ Christ! Who’s there?”
“It’s Caroline.”
“Caroline?” he wondered, and he pressed his face against the door. “What the hell do you want?”
“I’ve left some things here and I would like to pick them up.”
“Tough shit! I’m busy right now. I’ll set them outside for you later.”
“I have a right to get my things. I can call the Rabbit Patrol and then you’ll have to let me in.”
“You’re being a real pain in the ass, Caroline. A real pain in the ass!”
BumBuna O’Brien reluctantly unlocked the door and slowly pulled it open. He peered out at her. He could smell her recent sex with Carlos. It drove him mad.
“Come in but make it quick. I’d rather not look at you more than I have to.”
“I won’t be long. Just a few things in the bathroom — and my records. Where are my records?”
BumBuna O’Brien pointed to the cabinet where the stereo sat.
“Right there. Where else would they be?”
“You don’t have to be snotty.”
“Excuse me. I suppose I should just hop up and down with joyful glee. Perhaps if I were sunbathing nude on a Cuban beach and sipping carrot juice with my lover, maybe then I’d be a bit more cheerful.”
“Grow up.”
“Shut up.”
“Fuck you!”
“Fuck you, too!”
Caroline Bunny quickly gathered the rest of her things and made toward the door.
BumBuna O’Brien stopped her. “Hey wait. That one’s mine.”
“What?”
“INXS — Greatest Hits. That’s my record.”
Caroline was flustered. “Here. It’s a lousy record anyways. I always hated it when you played it.”
“I thought you liked it.”
“I lied.”
“Good grief, Caroline. You’re a real piece of work.”
“He killed himself.”
“Who did?”
“The singer of that crappy band you like.”
“Yeah. Everyone knows that.”
“Well, maybe you should do the world a favor and do the same thing.”
“You have a hunk of dirty coal for a heart. Do you know that Caroline?”
Her tearing eyes darted away.
“Goodbye forever,” she whimpered.
“Adios, trampola,” BumBuna O’Brien said, and he slammed the door so hard that the entire house rattled.
BumBuna O’Brien suddenly felt all alone in the world. He even felt bad about the way he spoke to Caroline. He took a framed photograph of them together at the Deer Park Carrot Farm and dropped it into the trash can. Then he stomped it down. The glass cracked. He poured the trash can onto the living room carpet and kicked at the pieces madly. He didn’t care. It was over. It was over forever, and his stomach suddenly pained him. He lit a scented candle and sat on the couch. He wanted to call a friend, but his phone was all smashed up and its connection to the world dismantled. He smoked some more of that high-grade grass and disappeared into another dimension.
This time it was an empty, cold beach, not a tropical one. The water was gray and smashing hard against the shore. The cloud ceiling was thick and hung low. The horn of some invisible lighthouse groaned in the distance. He thought he saw someone rowing a boat in the water. He moved closer to the water’s edge and realized it was someone rowing a boat in the water.
“Hey there!” someone called out. “Can you help me pull it ashore?”
“All right!” BumBuna O’Brien called out. “Where did you come from?”
“Hold on. That’s right. Reel me in like a big fat fish.”
The boat hit the shore, the stranger jumped off, and together the two pulled it in until it fit snugly in the growling sand.
“Thanks,” the stranger said. “Who are you?”
“My name is BumBuna O’Brien. I’m a rabbit. Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Pierre Moose. It’s very nice to know you.”
“So, where did you come from? All I see is water.”
“All in good time, my strange little friend. Why don’t we build a little fire? I’m quite cold from being out there so long. Then we can talk.”
“I don’t have any matches.”
“I do. A good seaman always has matches.”
“Why?”
“Well, for situations just like this.”
Pierre Moose was a tall, lean man with a face chiseled by the salty air. His hair was long and gray and now soaked by the sea spray. The hair matched the color of his speckled beard that was kept cropped close to the skin of his face — it surely felt like sandpaper. His eyes, stone gray and constantly scanning the horizon, looked weary and full of ghost stories. He wore a black raincoat, unbuttoned, and beneath it a heavy cable-knit sweater with a turtle-neck collar. His dark pants were puffy and dirty, and he wore rubber boots that went up to just below his knees.
“Have you been fishing?” BumBuna O’Brien wondered aloud.
“Fishing? Oh no. I’m not a fisherman. I am an adventurer.”
“What kind of adventures?”
“Ah, too many to mention. Why don’t you gather some wood before I freeze to death,” he instructed.
BumBuna O’Brien went off toward a cluster of trees and brambles that grew away from the shore. He turned to look back at the man, now kneeling in the sand, and he was rubbing his hands together in the cold and making colors float off from the tips of his fingers, like an emergency flare or maybe birthday candle sparkles for a circus clown. It was strange, really kind of eerie and hallucinatory, BumBuna O’Brien thought, and he wondered if he had stumbled upon some sort of magician or old sea warlock.
“What the hell does he need matches for if he can do that?” BumBuna O’Brien asked himself. “And I wonder if he knows anything about sailing to Cuba — I’d sure like to kill that Carlos bastard.”
BumBuna O’Brien gathered what wood he could and returned toward the spot on the beach where Pierre had decided to build the fire. He was staring off into the waters, smoking an old pipe, and thinking deeply so it seemed. BumBuna O’Brien dropped the paltry amount of wood onto the ground and the man looked at it and then up at him.
“I suppose I should have gathered the wood. I didn’t consider your small arms.”
“I can get more.”
“It’s enough for now.”
Pierre Moose arranged the sticks like an inverted cone and stuffed kindling at the bottom. He fumbled in his pockets for a box of matches and pulled one out and struck it against the side.
“They’re a little damp,” he said, continuing to strike until it lit. He cupped the flame with his bony hand and set it to the kindling. It took right away and soon the flames rose and the sticks took to it and there was fire.
BumBuna O’Brien felt the heat wash over him and it gave him some peace in the growing darkness.
The man stood up tall and he was somewhat menacing in the light of the fire.
“Stay here. I’m going to gather more wood.”
BumBuna O’Brien watched the lanky stranger stroll off in the direction of the wooded area. He seemed like some lost soul or phantom searching for good in a world with so little. He watched the fire and listened to the waves crash. He felt alone, wayward, and unsettled. He missed Caroline. Yes, she was unsavory and cruel, he thought, but the good memories soiled the bad ones. The thought of her with Carlos made his guts hurt. He saw some blinking lights in the distance. A ship was passing. Then Pierre appeared without warning and dropped a pile of sticks at his side. It startled him.
“You can start feeding the fire,” Pierre told him.
BumBuna O’Brien added the sticks, and the flames grew. Then he set on a larger log. Then another. It was roaring and warm and Pierre settled into the sand and lit up his pipe again.
“You’re welcome to stay on the beach with me tonight if you like. Then in the morning I can take you to my island.”
“An island? Is that where you live?”
“I suppose you could say that. It’s not much living really. But it’s peaceful. No one bothers me out there.”
“Do you like being alone?”
“Yes. People have it all wrong nowadays. They’re all screwed up. I don’t want to be a part of that. And you? What brings you wandering to this place?”
“I’m not really sure. I got a little high.”
“You don’t know how you got here?”
“Or isn’t this just a dream?”
“Not to me.”
“I thought I was dreaming.”
“You also seem to think you’re a rabbit.”
“But I am a rabbit.”
“No. You’re just a man who thinks he’s a rabbit.”
“Why would any man want to think he was a rabbit?”
“I haven’t figured that out about you yet.”
“But just look at me. Don’t I look like a rabbit?”
Pierre Moose studied him as if he were a fine piece of art.
“Well, it is true that you’re small and you have larger than normal ears and an unruly beard. So, yes, I suppose it is possible one could mistake you for an animal, and yes, possibly a rabbit. But I assure you, friend, you are a man.”
“How can that be?” BumBuna O’Brien wondered aloud. “How can that possibly be? How have I managed to live within such a charade?”
Pierre pointed his pipe and with straightforward honesty said, “You must be severely delusional.”
“So, then Caroline must be a real woman?”
“Caroline?”
“My girlfriend. I mean my ex-girlfriend.”
“Well, she must be a real woman. I seriously doubt any sane dame in the world would date a rabbit.”
BumBuna O’Brien dipped his head and thought about it. His mind was a gigantic jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing.
“Don’t worry about it so much,” Pierre Moose reassured him. “Tomorrow, I will take you to my island and you can be a man and even live there if you want. There’s plenty of room.”
“I’m not really sure what’s going on, Pierre. I think I need to speak to a priest.”
“A priest?”
“Yes. Do you know any?”
“Well, I think there’s an old minister who lives out on Rocky Point. A Reverend Abrams, I believe. It’s on the way. Maybe he can help you readjust your marbles. I have to stop for supplies anyway.”
“I would like to do that. Thank you.”
Pierre tapped his pipe out on the bottom of his sea boot, set more large logs on the fire, and then laid out flat on his back and folded his arms.
“I’m going to try to meditate for a while before going to sleep,” he said. “Stay close to the fire. It’s going to be cold.”
Mika Lula was like milk left out too long. She hung on me like a superhero cape outside the club as we waited for the biohazard team to finish scrubbing the stains from the dance floor. The heart was cracking like glass left too long on fire. The crowd gathered, then abandoned. She was Asian in features and figure and her teeth were as white as untouched snow when she smiled all lopsided and giddy. She was dressed up like a pink kitten.
There was a golden light birthing forward from the street and a big fancy car pulled up and a woman with a wide white hat and a faux fox fur strung around her neck came walking through the mist like she owned the world, a cigarette huffing off the end of one of those long holders. The guards shoved us out of the way as she walked into the club before us. I complained about her cutting in line and some guy told me to shut up.
“She’s the most important detective in the world,” the doorman scowled. “And where were you when all this happened?”
“At a quiet table in the corner with a round red candle.”
“Bug off before I talk to the police about you.”
I turned and started to walk off into the night.
“Wait!” Mika Lula called out, and she scuttled toward me, trying to keep her fuzzy pink cat tail under control. “You’re leaving?”
“Yes. I’m done,” I said, ferociously walking toward nothing in particular. She struggled to keep up with me.
“Slow down!”
I stopped, turned, and raised a finger at her. “Don’t do this.”
“Do what?” she wondered, black coffee eyes wide, confused.
“Wrangle me into a relationship neither one of us wants.”
“You don’t like me?”
I sighed, weakened. That’s me. Always pulling punches at the pivotal moment because I’m too nice. Why is it so hard for me to ‘just say no’, like she was drugs or something? But I had to try because she was driving me crazy.
“You’re a fine person… But I’m not. I’m no good for you.”
“Ohhhh,” she said, her head going down, eyes scanning the moist and dirty sidewalk. “It’s you, not me. Right?”
“Something like that.”
She started to cry.
“Don’t do that,” I said. “I’m not worth crying over. We’ve only known each other for…” I brought my wrist up and looked at my watch. “Not even three hours.”
She looked up at me, tears falling out of her black coffee eyes, her jaw tightening. “Fuck you!” she said. Then she turned and walked back toward the club, her fuzzy pink tail flopping around in the neon infused night steam of the city.
When I got back to my lowly apartment, I turned on a box fan and opened a window that looked down upon a street. There were people walking, people stumbling, people chatting and laughing as if I didn’t even exist. Police sirens cried out in the night. I could see the pops of blue and red scattered around the city like a spilled kaleidoscope. Everything was becoming an emergency. Everything was becoming fractured. I didn’t know how to live like this.
I sat down at my desk and powered up a road-weary computer. The light stung my eyes at first. I went to start a Word document like this:
Mika Lula was like milk left out too long. She hung on me like a superhero cape outside the club as we waited for the biohazard team to finish scrubbing the stains from the dance floor.
Then I stopped. My mind clogging up like a messy drain. I sat there staring at the small cluster of words I was able to scratch out. “Shit!” I said in frustration, and I got up from my desk and went to the kitchen in the corner and opened the avocado green refrigerator. I studied the contents inside. It looked like I didn’t even live here. I grabbed a cold can of beer and popped it open. Coors. Who drinks Coors? I thought to myself. I do. What am I doing with my life?
I left the lonely apartment and went down to the street to walk. I stopped at a bodega for a pack of Lucky Strikes and a roll of mint Mentos. I went along slowly, hands in the pockets of my brown chinos. I looked around at the womb of the town and the city, the steaming, vibrating wreck of it all with a few squirts here and there of some decent stuff, but mostly slutty strips of shops, annoying and flickering neon, glass, cement, brick, asphalt, autos, traffic lights, billboards — too much mad rushing and shoving of petty shit in the faces of all the people that live here with me.
I walked through a tempest of make-believe crinkled leaves and ice chips in the Green Head Storm neighborhood and to the bookstore there. It was one of my favorite places to just go and get lost for minutes or hours or days — like taking a long train ride to the sea, a train with no one else on it, and just the clickity clack on the rails and big views of unbroken land through big windows.
It was one of the largest bookstores in the city and it was housed in a very long and old building with creaking floors and steps and the place had the smell of old wood and old time and old paper and burnt coffee and stale perfume all mixed together in an elastic olfactory orgy that made my bones and soul feel good and sick, feel like home, feel like time standing still for once, not like all that constant rushing about to get nowhere but spinning and spilling in big, boring circles, catering to ungrateful souls of chaos.
There was something about being in the bookstore that inspired me to write. Just looking around at all the spines and the words — nerves pulsing through an endless body. All those thoughts, all those tumblers of ink spilled across virgin paper, virgin electricity. It left me wanting to go home and jump on a blank page like one jumps on a wife to initiate a slow, hot screw against a broken window. There was always that desire to shatter glass before sleeping — a need for listless and beautiful dreams instead of trying to run in fear.
I pulled a book out of its place in the fiction section. It was titled The Ambulance Witch written by someone named Gilead Frost. I looked at the cover. It was weird and intriguing — a dark forest, a winding road, an orange sky. I flipped it over to read about it even though I already knew what it would say. There was a picture of Gilead Frost up in the corner. It was hard to believe I used to look like that. The details of my bio were now all vaporized by a heartless world and my own personal derailments — the only reliable fact being where I was born, but then again, maybe that’s not true either. How could I even know? It’s all hearsay. I shoved the book back in between the other books where it would remain for an eternity, touched only by me when I came to visit.
I browsed around some more and found and bought a copy of Ask The Dust by John Fante. I had owned the book before, but I don’t know where it is now. It somehow got lost in all the moving and reshuffling of my life. The young female clerk behind the counter had no idea what it was when she stuffed it in the fancy little paper bag. I walked out alone.
I went to a 24-hour diner around the corner from the bookstore. It was one of those places where the strung out, bombed out, lovesick street kings and queens would go to when there was nowhere else to go. Every table was reserved for the broken and the lonely, and if you ask me, you could stuff that place to overflowing with people exactly like that. I see them everywhere, all over the streets. I see them in office buildings and hospital hallways, in bars and bookstores, at bodegas and bus stations. I even see them in my dreams and dramarama plays of prayer performed in an empty theater.
I had coffee and a warm biscuit with butter and honey on it. I was taking a sip, eyes cast out over the rim of the cup, when Mika Lula came strutting in still dressed like a pink kitten and she was clinging onto a new man as if she was dangling from a cliff, eons from a fatal fall. I waited to see if she would notice me… Not that I really cared. They took a booth on the opposite side and kind of got lost in the smoke and the voices and the ambience of solitude with strangers. I paid my bill and walked back to my apartment in the big, percolating city of God’s guts.
When I got back home, the box fan was still whirring. The window to the street was still open and its noises and whispers soaked the walls of where I lived. I used the bathroom. I saw an image of Napoleon Dynamite in the floor tile. He looked happy for once. I went out and reluctantly sat down at my desk. I sat there a moment before firing up the computer to try to write again. The end went something like this:
I looked up at the calendar above my desk and realized it was Mick Jagger’s birthday. He was 79. Mick Jagger is almost 80!? I couldn’t believe it. How? Because none of us escapes the unraveling of time. We all transition within the skin, outside the skin. Organs and nerves all wind down like a dying clock. We all meet the same fate. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you have done in your life. We all come in the door — we all go out the door… It revolves like the pinprick of a planet we are on, around some sun of love like it should be. And I’m always wondering why.
Gracelyn Polk was on her stomach on a small bed in a girlish bedroom of pink. Her legs were bent upward at the knees behind her, socked feet crossed, as she lazily flipped through a teen magazine. A Who record spun on a small turntable in its own red box that could close with a gold latch, and it had a handle so a person could carry it around and take it to parties if they wanted to. Baba O’Riley filled the room as Moses the cat was curled like a furry crescent roll on the bed beside her. There was a yellowed and curling Ralph Macchio poster on the wall, some cheerleading memorabilia on shelves, a makeup table with an attached mirror next to a childish white dresser. There was a closet, door propped open by shoes, and it held unfamiliar clothes within it. A rectangular window with white curtains looked out upon an endless sea of cabbage, a metal windmill stirring screams in the distance.
Then there came a gentle knocking at the door and Gracelyn reached to lower the volume on the record player. “Come in.”
The door opened with a creak and Farm Guy looked at her uncomfortably and smiled. “I just wanted to see how you were getting along in here,” he said, his head slowly moving around, scanning memories with his crystal blue silicon eyes, filing them in the proper slots. “Room okay?”
“It’s wonderful,” she said. “Thank you for… Everything.”
Farm Guy put his hands on his hips. “Absolutely. I love having you… Say, I thought I might take a walk out into the cabbage before dinner.”
Gracelyn scrunched her face in distaste. “You aren’t going to pick any, are you?”
“I’m not much for cabbage either,” he said, moving toward the window and peering out, his tall body awkward in the small bedroom. “It’s gross. That’s why I find it so strange that a whole field of it shows up in my backyard.”
“Do you think it’s a good idea… To go out in it. Because I don’t think you should.”
“I was hoping you’d come with me,” Farm Guy encouraged, walking closer to the bed, and looking down at her. “Might make us both feel better. You know — when we don’t find anything out of the ordinary.”
“But what if we do?”
He waved a hand in the air to discount her worry. “Nah. All we’re going to find is a hell of a lot of gross cabbage. That’s it. Trust me.”
She moved herself so that she was now sitting on the edge of the bed. Moses the cat got up, arched his back like Halloween, then curled back down into a snoozing ball. “Do you know anyone named Astron Puffin?” the girl asked.
A look of intense pondering came over Farm Guy’s face as he considered the question. He snapped his fingers suddenly when something came to his mind. “Cabbage farmer from over in Hillsdale.”
“That sounds like him.”
Farm Guy shook his head. “Odd sort of bird he was.”
“How so?” Gracelyn wanted to know.
“He was one of those fellas always going on about spaceships and little green men from Mars… Hell. He was a little green himself come to think of it.”
“I hardly think the little green men are from Mars,” Gracelyn interrupted. “They’re smarter than that. Mars is a dead planet and unable to support life as we know it.”
“Are you sure about that?”
She cocked her head to think about it. “I think so. Astronomy was one of my favorite subjects in science class. And besides, no intelligent life would want to be neighbors with Earth.”
“You got that right… Maybe you should do a report on Mars.” He waited for a reaction from her, but none came. She just sat there, thinking, jabbing her teeth into her bottom lip. Waiting for something. “Well, anyways, wherever they’re from, he sure was weird about it.”
“Did you know him well?” the girl asked.
“No. Barely at all. A random acquaintance who drifted in and out of the community of cabbage. Which I was not part of. I just knew a few of the guys. What does he have to do with you?”
“He had been following me around, at school mostly, watching me. He even showed up at my old farmhouse where I was staying, too.”
“He did? What on Earth for?”
“I don’t really know, except that he was always going on about being friends with me and wanting to protect me, and how he didn’t want to be alone… Like you said, he was an odd sort of a bird. I found him to be a bit pushy, too, and just not right.”
Farm Guy looked at her, his face flushed with a serious tone of knowing something that she knew as well but was left unspoken. “Well, thank God you’re here with me now. That’s downright unsettling.”
“But that’s not all, Mr. Guy. Sometimes I think I hear him out in the cabbage. At night. Yelling. Scared. Lost. But calling for me.”
Farm Guy sighed deeply, returned to the window, and looked out for a few moments. He made sure it was locked before he turned back around. “Let’s go for that walk.”
Astron Puffin sat in the endless cabbage field, knees drawn up, legs locked into position by his thick arms, his head down, his mind now mumbling. A crow flew across the sky, its aching caw causing Astron to look up. The cold sun was somewhat blinding. He looked at the cabbage around him. He studied their green, veiny heads and leafy wings and their seemingly unbreakable bond to the earth. Astron shook his head and scoffed. They were his only audience, and so he began to talk to the cabbage.
“Do you ever have one of those days where you feel like you’re a car, and you’re completely out of control and you go off the road and you crash into someone’s house… And I mean right through the living room, and all of a sudden there’s all this broken glass flying everywhere and bricks and wood and pieces of wall and everything is chaos, and everything is a mess, and, in the process, you even end up killing some lonely old man who was just sitting there in the house all by himself watching Johnny Carson on television or maybe reading his Bible in the glow of a soft lamp… And then suddenly, a car comes crashing through the wall and it’s all done for him. It’s all blood and dust and shattered bones and the entire history of one poor soul is snuffed out like a lipstick-stained cigarette in a dirty orange glass ashtray in a smoky dive bar.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” came the voice, the same voice from the spaceship but now coming out of one of the heads of cabbage that had turned to face him like a real head. The strange eyes widened, and the green lips moved again. “I see you’re startled, but think nothing of it… We have more pressing matters. The man is coming.”
Astron scrambled backward in the dirt. “The man?”
“And the girl is with him.”
“Gracelyn?”
“It’s time to stop the clock.”
The head dissolved and a rusty pitchfork with blood-stained tines suddenly materialized in the mist of gravity and quickly dropped out of the air and landed in the dirt before him with a deathly rattling thump.
“Something from your barn,” the voice from the cabbage said. “Do you remember it? Do you remember what happened back on the farm? Do it again.”
Astron went to pick it up. It felt right in his hands. It felt familiar. He began to walk toward the big, yellow house again. And this time, he was getting closer to it with every step he took.
She held his large, rough hand as they meandered down a perfectly straight row of the cabbage field. Gracelyn turned to look back at the house. “How far are we going?” she wanted to know.
“We’ll know when we get there,” Farm Guy assured her. “But don’t worry about that. Look around. Enjoy this beautiful day as it comes to an end.”
“You said that so decisively. What’s going on?”
Farm Guy suddenly stopped. He went down to his knees before her and took the girl by her arms. He looked far into her muddied golden eyes, the technology of her pupils gently sparking, the bloodshot lines merely delicate wires. “You have no idea what you are, do you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why you go on while all the others don’t. Why some wandering god on the other side of the moon left you all alone here… It’s because you’ve never been alive. And if you’ve never been alive, you can’t die.”
She reached out a finger and poked him in the face. “You don’t have real skin.”
“No. I don’t.”
“We’re the same.”
“Yes. We’re the same,” he answered.
And just as Farm Guy rose back up before her, Astron Puffin charged out from some invisible place and he was howling like a madman, the pitchfork straight out in front of him, the tines hungry for new flesh and blood and the bringing of death.
Farm Guy moved like lightning shot from the fingertip of a god in the inhuman way he was made, reached out, snatched the handle of the pitchfork, and swung it around. He cocked it back quickly, and then violently thrust it forward into Astron Puffin’s chest, two or three of the tines surely piercing his heart.
The world somehow slowed as Astron dripped to the ground like a slew of heavy mud. Farm Guy yanked the implement back out, threw it to the side. Astron fell forward, face-down. Gracelyn turned and ran away, deeper into the cabbage.
He found her sitting all alone on a big abandoned wooden crate looking off into the distance. The day was dying on the crest of the darkening hills, a moon was eager to make its entrance alongside the black stars and ruby red planets.
“I had to do it,” he said from behind her. “He would have tried to hurt you, take you apart piece by piece… And I just couldn’t have allowed that, but I’m sorry you had to see it just the same.”
“You didn’t move like a man. It scared me.”
“I didn’t mean to scare you.” He went to sit beside her on the abandoned wooden crate. “It’s getting dark. We should probably head back to the house soon.”
She ignored what he had said. “Did you know that even after a star dies, its light can be seen for a million years?”
“Is that right?”
She looked at him in the fading light, twisted her mouth. “I think so… Do you think it will be the same for us?”
He chuckled, breathed in deeply. “I don’t know. But it would be nice to see each other if there ever was a time we were very far apart. Maybe you should do a report about it.”
“Maybe I will, but not tonight.”
They hopped off the crate and walked back toward the big, yellow house, now the color of a moonlit bruise, window frames aglow, the light brought forth by the servants of memories moving around inside.
I was lying in my bed looking at the white ceiling and listening to the sounds coming from the box fans we have in our room. Neither myself nor my wife can sleep without the sound of the fans. It’s been like that for a very, very long time. Dead silence is the devil. I looked over at her asleep on her side. Her hair falling so perfectly across her back. I couldn’t believe she was my wife, in my life, but there she was. Still there beside me becoming more precious to my existence every single day…
Anyways, I had just come out of a crazy dream, and like I said, I was staring at the ceiling and thinking about a documentary I watched the night before on the television. It was a documentary about the last five years of David Bowie’s life, released in 2017. The name of it being David Bowie: The Last Five Years. Well, there you go.
Now, I’ve never been an overly huge David Bowie fan or even cared for some of his music so I’m not even sure why I queued the show up in my line of saves on HBO Max. I guess I was intrigued because it was about the last years of his life which may not be something everyone always considers when an artist such as himself has such a long and storied career. People tend to look back at the energetic youthful years, the bubbling to the top years — not the settling down into yourself years. Maybe I wanted to get a glimpse of what aging had been like for him and his artistic process. Maybe I wanted to watch it in an attempt to prepare me and teach me how to still be cool when you’re in your mid-60s. (Not there yet, by the way). And despite a cancer battle, Bowie was still actively creative to the end. I hope I can be actively creative to the end. I don’t want to wastefully linger.
One of the things that kind of stood out for me in the documentary was a song from 2013 called Valentine’s Day — a dark message about mass murder and the need for gun control. I found it to be emotional and moving and sadly appropriate nearly ten years later… Considering what happened at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas in May, and continues to happen in a country that values its guns more than its children, its very own future. It can be a harsh world and Bowie knew it, felt it, and often conveyed it through his music. You can watch the video HERE.
I have a Bowie greatest hits CD (a round, shiny disc about the size of a sandwich that contains digital pieces of music that you slide into a slot or plop onto a tray to initiate playback) somewhere, but after watching the documentary last night, I am really wanting to buy one of his later in life releases — The Next Day from 2013 or Blackstar, released three years later on his birthday, two days before he died on January 10th, 2016. Both albums were heavily featured in the documentary, and for me, contained some intriguing music that I’d like to delve deeper into.
Like I said, I was never a huge Bowie fan or an expert on his career, but the documentary reminded me that I had included something about him in a yet unreleased short story I had written a few years ago. I may need to dig it out, blow off the dust, and add some polish.
This is what I wrote in a story titled The Chinese Guy and the Angels of Uranus. I know, I write weird stuff, but Bowie liked weird.
Here’s the bit:
Janice Ho worked at a big commercial real estate office in the central district. I looked up at the tall building of blue glass. It seemed to go on forever. It was a giant with cold clouds for hands. I went in through the heavy doors and found the elevators. I went up — floor number 22 it was. It seemed like a long ride. There was a lady in there with me. She was all dressed up and she smelled good — like one of those uptight stores in the mall. I could tell I made her nervous. She wouldn’t look at me. She wouldn’t talk to me. I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Did you hear that David Bowie died?” I finally said.
She turned to look at me. “Who died?”
“David Bowie.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know him.”
Her stupid cell phone rang, and she turned away to talk on it. Blah, blah, blah. The doors slid open at 22 and I stepped out.
Yeah, I know. Not a grand cameo, but still, he got a mention, and I’m glad I remembered it and was able to include it. I think he’d appreciate it, with a laugh, welcome it even, maybe. He had a disdain for fame. And here’s something that I just learned — so, it appears Bowie’s eyes are two different colors, but in fact, his pupils are two different sizes — a unique trait for a unique person. He was a complex, eccentric, and intriguing guy with a head full of all kinds of peculiar, strange, and brilliant thoughts and ideas. The world is a better place because of him and his mind and art.
And even though his influence will reverberate forever, that was then, and this is now, and I’m at my desk drinking coffee and madly typing, and Bowie’s in the afterlife, floating and dreaming on a Buddha waffle somewhere near the moon, and he’s looking down, and admiring all the good, weird things that he left behind.
CEREAL AFTER SEX 