Half-Moose with a Twist

Thursday, February 11, 2016

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.

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

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.