Turning to the screen before Noah flicks it off, I speculate that Norma Shearer must be unable to move in her square-tipped shoes, shrinking under the carapace of her gown, seamed with celluloid diamonds up to the cleavage, fossilized by powder.
Now, sex and pregnancy are no longer separate. Before Baby, you sought out the former with a Mike Tyson vengeance and when in the middle of the former you did your best to avoid the latter.
If there was any man in Wildcat Falls who was an American success story, it was Chester Morehouse.
As he comes into the large green park downtown he notices for the first time the milky red lozenge hanging low over the city. The stacks of an ancient factory complex on the far side of the Financial District poke up into it, and it seems as if it is their long-snuffed output which marbles the surface of the moon.
I’ve stopped using the local market. They sicken me. The waddlers, that’s what I call them. Clogged arteries, massive thighs, fat pudgy fingers gripping giant kebabs, swigging coke from litre sized plastic bottles, slapping their kids in public.
No one knew how to fix anything anymore. The scraps of metal hoarded by grandfathers during the Depression went unrecognized in barns and garages as potential hinges, latches, and doorknobs. Screen-less doors flapped in the wind, porches sagged, and things that broke stayed broken.
I slam the window and roll back into bed. The yellow walls make the bedroom even brighter, and I know I’m not sleeping in today.
“It’s not a tangent, Nick. It’s love. I wrote a song about her.”
The gaze of a scavenger is the deepest in all of nature. We find a use for the dead and abandoned. We look into a person’s heart and see the scraps worth saving.
I blinked as the winter sun poked through blackish clouds and illuminated the cityscape. It was already making good on the forecast’s promise of a seasonal reprieve: Sunny and a high of fifty-six.
