this is only the beginning

part 9

It is funny how a world formed by fire and floods can be so still, for so long. There are places, of course, that heave and buckle under the pressure of chaos, but in this place, in the time of Pasta-louis and Mary Louisa, and Terry-today, and yesterday's-Moe, most of life is static and plodding and boring as hell. Men and women meet, and they talk on their phones. Sometimes they kiss and talk on their phones. People will drink and smoke, they'll watch sporting events and think the world is ending when their team comes up short. Occasionally someone will choke on a chicken bone and either die, or live because someone else knows the Heimlich maneuver. Then come the important things, like sculptures and kitchen utensils and innovative hairdos. Great minds invent great things: Bird nest wigs, fishbowl shoes, a coconut for your linen drawer! But none of that entered the mind of Mary Louisa as she struggled for command of her mind and of her very motions. She won one battle, perhaps the smallest, most insignificant, and more important skirmish of her life.

Mary Louisa opened the door.

She didn't know who to expect, she didn't think beyond the thought that music knocked upon her door. Voices filled her ears, wafting through the bricks and wood trim and plaster and caulk like they didn't exist. Only hours before she expounded on updrafts and eagles wings and whiplash flights of fancy, but now she knew real harmony: how it could hold back the flood, how it could push back and retake fertile ground.

It wasn't quite what she expected. “Oy, hello Mary. Mind if we come in?” They came in, the group of carolers only they weren't that at all. Mary Louisa couldn't know exactly what she was seeing because the visitors wore helmets and suits and most importantly, they all had disfigurement devices on their belts, and switched on. She had seen, or more accurately, had not seen them before, on the local news. Visitors, aliens maybe? From another world, or the future, or the past? Nobody knew and they weren't saying either. “S'cuse me,” said one fellow, and he pushed by her carrying something large by its handle. Hesheit barreled through the rooms and kitchen, smashing into corners as it went, and disappeared into the offensive yellow room. The others followed; Mary Louisa could not get a solid count, or even how many limbs they might have possessed. Was it her eyes that deceived? She was seeing very clearly, but her brain was muddled.

She followed. In the room, where the walls emitted their yellow screams and the Shmear bloated freakishly, dancing and spitting filth, Pasta-louis had torn his shirt off and was feebly swinging on a rope. The lead pipe had bent profoundly and his knees touched the floor where the wood had been demolished. Pasta-louis sputtered and blinked at the visitors, but beyond that he behaved normally.

“There it is,” gurgled one of them.

“We were going to rule the world,” she said from beneath the archway. “Everything was ours, it was all in reach.” Mary Louisa stared at Pasta-louis, and she looked at the gunk cavorting in the middle of the yellow wall. Suddenly she noticed the sledgehammer leaning against the doorway, and without pausing she hefted it up, and rushed at the wall, straight at the visitors, to attack the Shmear, to rid it from the world.

They formed a line and stopped her, a tall visitor gently took hold of her arm, and Mary Louisa gave him the hammer. He held her for a moment, and said, “Look.”

The visitor carrying the case strode to the wall, and set it down. He opened a small door, then reached out to the wall and pulled at the gunk there, and it released with a loud sucking smack. “Be a good Globby,” it said, and shut the dribbly shmear in the case. “Globby does get out sometimes, bad Globby.” The visitor took the case and left, with the others in tow. The last fellow halted at the doorway and looked back at her.

“I like what you've done to your house. Can I get the name of your decorator?” They left, whatever they were. She never saw them again, or their Globby, and that made Mary Louisa very happy.

After a bit, she went into the room and removed the noose from his neck. Pasta-louis looked at her sheepishly, but remained on his knees. He wiped the spittle from his lips. “I'm not much,” he said. “And even less now. This floor is ruined.”

“And the walls,” she agreed. “We'll fix it. There's all the time in the world.”

The end.

For the Tenth Daughter of Memory.

the voice of angels

part 8

The day and the night slipped like a fish through fingers, or maybe a flying disk that skipped....

The day and night turned into a consummate painting, a masterpiece, and it zoomed along on rails of silver in a tunnel of light. They kissed like astronauts running out of air.

Pasta-louis reclined on the couch alone, smoking his second cigarette of the day. He inhaled slowly, expectantly, and exhaled with a caution, amused and saddened by the curls of smoke that lay tendrils across his cheek and tickled his nose hairs. In this room there was solace, everywhere else was frivolity or tedium. Or, in the wall room, in the Shmear, there was reverence, and duty. And the grandeur he so desired. Out the window the pinks began to blend with the blues, and darkness gathered in the low branches. There was much to do yet, and night was only the beginning. Pasta-louis dragged heavily on the spent stick and crushed the last glowing embers out in the sooty ash tray.

He left Mary Louisa in their bed, with the tiny notebook open on the sheets. She had read to him her poetry until they both nodded off. But Pasta-louis rested briefly, and rose again with purpose. That he had meditated with tobacco, seeing in the distance red, green, blue, white, did not diminish his concern. He knew not the outcome, but Pasta-louis felt his road was well paved and straight, and the guardrail was solid. It would not break should his cynics place an obstacle. He pulled on socks and shoes and stood, then moved through the rooms with the languid locomotion of a jellyfish in calm waters. In the altered room he wavered amid the creaking floor boards. Only dim light from the kitchen filtered into the room, but the great black and bloodied Shmear pulsed like a wound out of the sickly, decaying canvas, and Pasta-louis was pulled from within closer to the beacon. He stopped only when his palms met the wall and his outstretched arms ached. His elbows quivered from the battle, but finally the Shmear relented and Pasta-louis stood panting before his god. He looked into the Shmear and saw nothing but all he was meant to see, and the mantra echoed in his skull, playing and skipping like a broken record. I am your tool... I amI am. Your tool. I am your tool.

 

Up the stairs and down the hall, Mary Louisa sat abruptly, clutching the sheets up to her chin and spilling macaroni onto the carpeted floor. She could feel the power pulsing up the walls and rattling the springs beneath the bed like the clammy fingers of a cadaver. She swung her legs from the mattress and quickly pulled on her jeans and blouse. The power drew her from the bed, and without knowing how she was on the steps and then the landing. The yellowness crept out from the room. Pasta-louis was nowhere to be seen.

Although the night had conquered, and outside there was no sun, the light had not gone out. Up the lane and to the door came a group of gaily dressed strangers. They held sheets of white paper and brought joy and love and a message, and they knocked upon the door, and they sang even before invited. Mary Louisa hesitated, but the pull of the Shmear was strong. She stumbled by the front door. For a moment the voices faltered. Each of the carolers chocked and coughed, but they laughed aloud and cleared their throats. From inside she heard them again, and their voices leapt joyfully out from shining faces, louder than before. Mary Louisa stamped her foot, and she thrust her hand to the door, and turned the knob before the room could devour her soul.

underground, understood

part 7

The initiation began with stripping down to the bare essentials, then covering the offending bits with postcards from picturesque places. Mary Louisa giggled and thought it was foreplay. Pasta-louis was yet to show her 'the wall', and they hadn't progressed beyond the front room, which was a twelve by fourteen shag carpeted rectangle containing a threadbare couch and a stack of encyclopedias for use as an ash tray holder. Pasta-louis only smoked two cigarettes a day, and now that his follower had the Eiffel Tower and Stonehenge scotch-taped to her twin cups, he lit the first one up.

He suddenly stood, having had a thought, and shambled through the high shag to the kitchen, retrieved a souvenir letter opener from a junk drawer and returned, thrusting the scimitar-looking nick-knack into Mary Louisa's hand. The Grand Canyon had fallen from his Bvds, and Mary Louisa giggled again from her position against a turquoise wall.  

“Hold that up,” he said. “Repeat after me, I swear to the divine Shmear that I will uphold the law of its subject, the master Pasta-louis, and do unto others as the Shmear doth command. Say that.”

“I swear to, uh, the smear,” the scimitar dipped.

“Hold it up... to the Shmear that I will uphold...”

“I swear to the Shmear to uphold...”

“the laws of me, Pasta-louis...”

“the laws of you, Pasta-louis...”

“and to do as he says, or you'll rue the day!”

“uh, and do as you say, because or else,” she finished up, then swung the letter open around for effect. “Now can we?” Mary Louisa began peeling postcards from her bra.

Pasta-louis was pleased, very, and he took a drag from the cigarette and smooshed it out in the glass ashtray, over volume eight of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He took her hand before she could reach down below to the catacombs and pulled her through the kitchen then spun her around by the shoulders. Pasta-louis gently backed her up to the dividing archway, until Mary Louisa's bare feet straddled the line between linoleum and wood planks. He looked at her seriously, then beseechingly, before slowly turning her to look beyond the room to witness the yellow wall, and great glaring Shmear.

“See the Shmear, and believe!” Pasta-louis proclaimed, thunderously. He threw his hands up and hawed.

She dropped the opener and put her hands to her mouth, and she breathed in deeply. “I must see this,” she said, but she said it to herself. Mary Louisa stepped into the room, zigzagging through the obstacle course that was a broken floor and swinging nooses, until she stood before the glob of offensive gunk. “It's everything you said it is, all it could be.” She touched the sticky splat, and appreciated the mounds and folds of its landscape. She pulled her finger out, and a string of tenuity followed behind until it broke and fluttered back to the wall like the gossamer thread of a spiderweb. “A great booger from beyond, and we are here.”

From beyond the room, Pasta-louis watched, and he grew in stature until Mary Louisa came back to him and folded him into her arms. She led him back to the couch. “We are going to rule the fucking world,” she said.

she wants him bad

part 6

At the Choke & Puke Bar and Grill he found her, Mary Louisa, on the open mic stage standing like Gary Cooper, hands on hips and gazing over the nonplussed heads of seated patrons. She'd just delivered her epic poem “Out of the Lips of Eagles” and was triumphant in the roar of hushed silence. Mary Louisa curtsied and stumbled off the platform to a wave of more increased wanting aplomb and vanished into the crowd, where she took a seat and sipped from a straw. Pasta-louis clapped in the doorway, then sidled up to the bar to order a frou-frou aperitif, something with a cherry or an umbrella floating in it.

The walls here were brick, but painted black, and from floor to ceiling they screamed graffiti epithets and obtuse colloquialisms that only whiskey softened sots believed. Pasta-louis watched her from the glossy bar, and in the shattered light her legs seemed to separate under the curve of the booth and protrude like stuffed dummy limbs from beneath the cushions. Unaware of her silly appearance, Mary Louisa continued staring vacuously into the void while sipping what looked to be a dark soda. Pasta-louis ordered her a refill and when the waitress set it on her table, gesturing to the bar, he lifted his colorful drink in the air and dipped his head appreciatively. She blushed, and unsurely motioned to the opposite bench. He swiveled about and crossed the darkened floor to join her.

Up close her legs were more than normal, and not at all contorted. Pasta-louis shrugged happily at this wonderful turn of events, and wiggled into the seat. He found booths uncomfortable and restricting, but this wasn't the time for callous rebukes. Here was an obviously talented and intelligent young lady. She was the perfect start for a home grown legion. He introduced himself.

“Your verse is uplifting. It's poignant too, so ironic... for eagles are lipless!” Pasta-louis bent an elbow and smacked his lips. 

“Oh, yes. They are!” she blurted. “My name is Mary Louisa,” she said and reddened again.

Pasta-louis peered at the woman suspiciously under heavy brows. Pleasantries accomplished.

“I have some very important business here, and at my home some very inspiring art, it is an homage to a great overlord who is going to come here, to the Earth, and rule us all. I am to be its mouthpiece, and a great leader here, on the Earth. The art is more than art, and at its center is a wonderful relic. It will be sticky, so don't be alarmed at the sticky appearance. I want to take you there, to see it, and of course be assimilated into its purpose, here on the Earth,” he said. Pasta-louis had thought about what he would say, and it came out pretty well, almost word for word. “Are you up for it?”

On stage a gross, sweaty couple had begun plucking their ukuleles and singing Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. Out of tune.  Mary Louisa didn't notice; she grinned happily and shrugged a little, and blushed. “Oh yes,” she squeaked, and grabbed her big purse from the booth. “I'd love to see your house!”

Pasta-louis reached across the table to take her trembling fingertips, and together they left the bar. He looked around to scan the other patrons, but they were too engrossed in themselves and their sweaty drinks to notice greatness, so Pasta-louis left, with his first disciple in tow.

a careening rush

part five

There was a theme running through his dreams. In the moments before Terry-yesterday awoke, visions of vegetation, a return to nature, and haste entwined in an attempt to rock his body to action. Pasta-louis-this morning thrashed on the floor, the cold, hard wooden boards, and sat up straight covered in the dust and debris of last evening's endeavors. He rose today a different man. Not the timid Moe of last week, or the bothered Terry-today of yesterday, but as Pasta-louis who dreamt plants grew and flowered from his face with the nectar of the gods. His body was bronzed and driveling sycophants shaded him with leaves the size of small automobiles. This monstrous, self absorbed Pasta-louis could unabashedly surround himself with the hoi-polloi he required... he deserved!

Though disheveled, Pasta-louis felt dapper. Up, up he proclaimed, and so he stood and gazed upon the creation he wrought upon the once-was-wall. Bits of plaster and slivers from the busted wood planks shed from his rumpled, majestic garb. Crusty globs of cheese sauce flaked from his face and bare forearms, and he picked off a morsel and placed it on his tongue, savoring the breakfast like it was manna from the heavens. Today Pasta-louis was reborn, and he was overflowing with genius; godliness given by the great globular shmearing eye that glared from across the room.

There was no time to lose, not now, and Pasta-louis pulled his fingers through his hair and patted down his rumpled attire. The shmear, the Shmear!, demanded attention, and acolytes, and a throng besides. Pasta-Louis was Its ambassador now, he was the Shmear's prophet and Pasta-louis bowed in deference to the assignment. With this duty, he gained sizeable power on this Earth, and would command an army of followers, and be the greatest of the great!

The Shmear pulsed, and vibrated, and it howled as the power passed over the expanse and bloomed in Pasta-louis' chest. He nearly exploded as the sensation grew, but the current held steady then diminished as it found a place in every living cell of his body.

He turned and fled the room, and the house in an exalted spate, a haste to absolve the populace of the humanistic crutch that tied it down so close to the dirt of this world.

painted, printed, framed, and hanged

part 4

 

On his doorstep with a neckerchief of gunk, Terry-today composed a smug vision of brightly lit spires and marble columns; a symbolic gesture, his middle finger to the classes surrounding him. Terry was a force unto himself, and so in a class of his own. He stood apart, downcast but with angel's wings and now with purpose in hand, that was exactly his prerequisite cross to bear, he deemed himself complete in greatness – ready to be adored.

He began in the sitting room, which consisted of a sofa and coffee table piled high with debris and papers of various importance. Below all was a creaky old farmhouse wooden floor, upon which lay a rolled out carpet that had seen better days, then all that followed – none too good. Out of the back door and two steps the whole lot went, right down to the worn floor boards which stayed, and pleasantly creaked underfoot. Terry stretched his arms wide to exalted emptiness. He had here a room, devoid of all character. Bare walls, commonplace floors, and a pale ceiling just beyond reach. Looking about Terry saw no need to capitulate, so he attacked.

From his kerchief, Terry plucked the gunk, his prime acquisition, and surveyed the back wall. A tape measure, he thought, might be prudent, but inaccuracy was ever the template of admiration, so he judged the center by eye and rushed the plaster, striking definitively with a heavy purpose. And so the shmear did stick. It stuck and stayed so, and Terry sat Indian style upon the worn boards, tread worn, grooved deeply by the years and the dragged furniture it saw come and go. But the gunk and ghastly composure of its ingredients was now the talk of the room. It hung there on the blank wall like a threatening storm cloud in an otherwise impotent sky. Terry wanted the sky to speak as well.

From the kitchen counter Terry retrieved a grocery sack filled with jars and plastic containers of a yellowish substance, and he took it to the entrance of the empty room (but for the splotch of shmear) and set it on the floor, just inside the arch. In his wandering among the retail shelves of the supermarket the containers spoke to him. He walked every aisle and section of the store and picked one of each of the hue. Some were all one uniform color, a sickly xanthous shade of being. Other jars were filled with the yellow stuff speckled with flakes of red or green, or red and green, or like a silver maple leaf in autumn, fallen on the dying grass: yellowing with black specks and curling at the edges. Terry opened one glass jar and dipped in it a finger and sucked off the cheese. He made a pleasant face then reared back and heaved the cheese, jar and all, at the wall. The jar burst far left of the shmeared gunk and splattered out in a starburst pattern. Again Terry sat, his legs folded neatly, until he rose and repeated the process until each container met the wall. The contents were dispersed, they stuck, they dripped, they cascaded to lower elevations, they fell upon the floor in ragged, oblique heaps of sticky shards of glass and plastic secretions.

To preserve neatness, Terry removed the empty sack to the kitchen, then exited the house. Toward the alley was a decrepit lean-to filled from dirt floor to dusty rafters with rusting tin cans and nails and all the stuff associated with dark dank corners and mildew and yesterday. Terry picked out several long pieces of wood molding from the days of yore and took from a bowing shelf a coffee can of aged and crooked nails. Returning to the house he picked from beside the stoop a fist sized rock and took the armful into the gunk room, and flung it all the floor. Back to the shed he hunted out and retrieved a heavy section of pipe which he manhandled into the house. Terry also found some wooden blocks that he hammered (with the rock) into the studs high upon the walls on non-adjacent walls. With the moldings he created a frame of sorts around the entire yellowish aggregate; it took up completely the entire wall. With one last trip into the lean-to he found several lengths of rope, a pocket knife stuck to an open position, and a sledge hammer.

Inside the room, Terry hoisted the lead pipe, end by end, up to the wooden blocks creating a sort of joist that lay just below the ceiling. He cut lengths from the rope and threw them over the pipe, knotted up three nooses and spaced them evenly in the room. Then beneath each swinging rope Terry smashed ragged holes into the floor boards, sending chunks and slivers of wood flying to every corner of the room.

Terry stepped from the room, dragging the hammer and leaving in the dust and shards a snaking trail. From out of the yellow wall, the glittering glass specked drabness with its lumps and drools of gack, a great round shmear of gunk stared across the divide, and struck Terry smack dab in the middle of his perverse amygdala, and he swooned.

the wrong side of the road

part 3

Yesterday he was Moe, and although many events of that day and the actions of yesterday-called-Moe held consequences for today-named-Terry, Terry, today, remembered none of it. In the café Terry sat alone in a booth facing the corner, while many other patrons sat at open tables alone or in groups. Some were wearing sweaters of green or red, or adorned with snowflakes, even though it wasn't cold here. As if the anatomy of the room required symmetry, at the opposite corner of the café sat a petrified Doberman pincher who also faced away. The requisite for perfection is often skewed, but Terry had no opinion on the matter, thinking other thoughts while he sipped a third cup of coffee and munched a slice of raisin bread.

Someone had put on the Doberman a scratched pair of granny glasses and they'd slid down its time hardened snout. How the dog had become fossilized like a chunk of ginkgo from northern Arizona was anyone's guess, but time games played by the resident very-mysterious-visitors were suspected. The dog was happily stationary with a clean place-mat menu and bowl of fresh water, but Terry in the opposite corner stared down at an old, bleak menu that was ossifying, and black was spreading from the House Special out like a cancerous growth. The corner was relegated to the Terry's and the Moe's of the world, but the coffee cup was still bottomless. Terry dipped his pinky into his cup and pecked at the toast crumbs on his plate. He lubricated his esophagus with the last drops, then dropped some crumpled ones onto the bill and carefully escaped the café, unnoticed by more than just the Doberman pincher.

The reverse of the gauntlet was to be expected, so Terry avoided the picture takers who had moved back the way he came. He crossed the street, careful of the uneven ground, and decided to walk around the block thus avoiding the sightseers. This small town had become the latest venue for the very-mysterious-visitors and because they had brought along some of their space groundhogs, the streets had to be dug up. It was very inconvenient to anyone with an automobile or in a rain storm, but otherwise notsomuch. The groundhogs were happy and some old dinosaur bones had been uncovered along with the Doberman pincher. Terry preferred being off Main Street. Here, around the corner and in the back alleys, there were no picture windows or gaudily dressed mannequins ogling him when he walked by. Terry didn't like the attention of inanimates any more than the living. That they were soulless made him hold his breath, as if those with no souls would covet his exhalations. Terry found the idea plausible, even kept a pair of nose-plugs hanging from his neck for obvious reasons.

He came upon it then, stuck onto a brick wall, a shmear of gunk, like an alien life form wriggling out of context, or the expectoration from a behemoth. Terry viewed the sight as an event to be applauded. He stumbled back two paces to take in the sickly pink hue of glop. He discerned its structure and the various separation of splats. Terry found it impossible to guess its origin or composition, but the form was one of beauty. The sum of its parts as powerful as the girth of its majesty. Terry prodded the mass with one finger and found its texture to be as disgusting and cohesive as its appearance. From a pocket, Terry pulled a hand kerchief and scooped a handful of the stuff from the wall. 

He skulked quickly from the bowels of the city back to the even streets of pedestrian life, where his vision could begin to take shape. As he stepped around the neighbors lawn, the moon came round to see him home.

a cop of cafe

part 2

He now surveyed the vast canvas, the landscape of his imagination would come to fruition here on these four walls. Beyond this encased environment, in the great outdoors, a segmented bird pecked on a creased window pane. When the bird moved, flitting on the bricks, its visage cracked like a sinister grin, and Terry pulled a face then put it in his pocket. He would keep it on a string, ready to pull out when the need arose.

Now Terry stood in a t-shirt blowing a bubble and pondered his next move. In the world of a hunter gatherer, life was like a game of chess. A person, an artist and hunter like himself, needed to think beyond the next move. Terry was flowing past that and his sight permeated the lies that flooded his immediate encircling present. He swirled one hand into the vortex and witnessed a wise old man, dressed in red and white like a buffoon, and faces risen to the smoky curved glass of inebriation. Soon this gave way to an English cottage and the naked embrace of lovers, but they were crying, and Terry shunned them, or any group of partying well wishers or wishers throwing copper down a well, or blazing raven haired beauties in brothels or boardrooms. Now Terry longed for solace, but his groping sight told him to put on clean socks and seek caffeine, which was the spice of endeavor. Terry followed the moves like a roadmap, like science, as in the letter of the law. He dressed and broke the seal of his abode to witness the world beyond the threshold.

Off then, and the sidewalk beckoned. He faced a gauntlet now, and he cravenly progressed, a seeming malcontent in wonderland. Pebbles formed from the concrete, but posies crept from the debris in a series of conundrums that kept Terry guessing step to step. He wandered and pondered the puzzles that went beneath around and over his head. Soon he drifted among an influx of souls, all unknown, but now a passage in the story of Terry-today's voyage through space and time. A dark haired woman with long eyebrows considered him from her porch, children toted water but not from a creek but the supermarket, he saw a group of women and their German ancestry glowed like brilliant lava flows under their hardened faces and forearms.

Finally he neared town, recognizable from the brick walls that began to line the street like narrowing canyons and a heavy traffic light that dangled fruity and yellow like a mechanized bunch of bananas. The bunch glowered with a big red cyclops' eye. Half dressed plastic people strutted behind glass partitions. Terry almost felt he could reach through the veil but for the streaks of silty runoff and specks of pigeon shit that littered his view. Another glass barrier flaunted a frilly laced troglodyte in a party dress. Streamers, pine trees with ornaments, and gold stars festooned every window. Terry wasn't amused and he turned right heading for the town's only bridge, a stone block construction that crossed a moss banked stream bed. Beyond lay the bowels of his town and the wafting fragrance of bread and coffee.

Terry stopped then. A group of photographers were gathering sepia through their lenses, and blocked his progress. He searched his memory for recollection of his next move, when a young sunglassed protector of the peace broke through the conflagration of impediment, scattering the clucking shutter-cocks like sparrows from seed. The cop hugged his thermos and it clinked on his foil badge, holding the cafe's glass door open for a moment, and Terry slipped through to another dimension, a space beyond insight and requirement – a respite for the weary and a welcoming hearth for any despite their predilection for socks, clean or not.

clutch and choke

part 1

Terry sputtered hot coffee, but judging from the feeling of wet upon his sock, and a burning sensation on the toes of the man today-named-Terry, there was really no coffee in his cup. Terry-today, yesterday-called-Moe, peered with an eyeball framed in larceny into the void and spat imaginary libations interlaced with vulgarities upon the kitchen counter. His cup was empty, full of holes, the vicious pen stroke of multiple jabs to its Styrofoam carapace. Once the liquid flowed, colored in drab, like a torrent over jagged landscapes. But now his gaze fell on the dripping laminate, the wood grain of the lower cabinet glistening with muddy droplets, and his wooly foot dampening and the damp spreading to his thread worn cuffs.

Terry's thoughts turned over twice like a ripening pancake and stuck on his small collection of two-headed babies, then flipped upon seeing his reflection in the semi opaque glass cabinet he stood in front of. All was dark except his reflection in the form of pixilated lights, and when he moved Terry felt he was an animatronic character in an amusement park train ride. He moved and he moved again. His movements were deliberate and unscripted.

Finding no purpose in a puddle, Terry scampered into the den and collapsed onto a lumpy sofa, pushing his right leg and wet sock into the air, hoping for brazen air currents, and his mass of brain material coalesced vaguely to a patchwork of brightly colored trapezoids – the same fading fabrics he had hoarded in a shoebox underneath his creaking bed springs. Was life nothing but the never ending struggle of a hunter gatherer, and what constituted a successful hunter? Terry thought back to his kitchen counter, it was a short trip, and the grocery sacks. The crumpled ones, heavily laden with jars of cheese sauce, and then he dreamed of fresh Japanese gardens, a wire mesh, and white, luxurious skin.

Terry with one leg in the air and his arm joining in altitude, crushed the forlorn coffee cup in a joyous rage, and he rose above the cushions, flinging his arms wide and signed an invitation to the world, his improvised State of the Terry.

A shadow grew from his shape on the wall, but that was only the beginning.