Scrivner

He said the reason was because the asphalt was porous, the concrete was not.  Since their driveway was made of the former, not the latter, the rubbery weeds that evolved into biting trees pushed up the seemingly solid rock like gopher mounds in a meadow.

“It wasn’t like this last year, any other year,” she said.

“Must be their time,” he responded, looking at not only one eruption but four pimple-like blemishes on the face of their small road.

She thought about the creative nature of the mass idea and wondered if her time would be as ugly at once.

The law passed in the autumn of 2174 made each book a standard size which measured one hand by one hand.  The hand in question was the illiterate Princess of the Americas whose wrist to tip of her middle digit was exactly 6.25 inches.  A standard cover was issued for every book – the Princess’s eye colour with a small flag of the Americas in the lower right-hand corner. (Her eyes were a most bland shade of rainy grey, and the flag grey with white stars.  The effect was underwhelming.).   While booksellers were ecstatic, the vocabulary-challenged general population was bored.

They come to the pool as spokes on a wheel, as rays from the sun.  A mass of smiling faces to the center bobbing and screeching their amazement while on the extreme of the radius small and large beings stand, faces turned toward the source of all.  A harsh buzzer sounds and there are screams of horror, of delight, rush toward the hub to be, to have been.  Waves crash upon them with increasing determination and their response: to give and push forward once more.  If it were God (it may have been the sun), would they come screaming still?

How he was perceived by others was in no relation to the manner in which he viewed himself.  His voice was deep and raspy but taped recordings told him otherwise.  His arms, defined, slightly muscular, lightly tanned were a block of buttery flesh to those who happened to catch him in a picture.  All of his eloquent thoughts and philosophical phrases managed to allude him in public situations and the results amounted to no more than any other average ramblings.

Having given up, he made for the village of Skihim where they believe a photograph can steal your very soul.

I write into the hole, throwing paper after the liver, the onion, the Shitake mushrooms on

marbled rye, wanting to become wise without the burden of discontent.  No…without the

luggage of suspicion, I mean.  Or could it be the load-bearing age of skepticism?

Like Fox Mulder, I desperately want to believe.  Problem:  I do it too frequently, ergo

seeing aliens of want emerging from my closet every evening.  Anal probing can happen

at any time, without warning.

I hunger but there are clubs where girls aren’t allowed.  Face-down, I enter backwards

and hope for the best.  I hope.

The eyelets on the bottom of her white cotton dress were filled with mud.  Old mud, yesterday’s mud, forgotten mud.  There were lines where it cracked, pointing thin fingers upward in a gesture of conspiracy.  Pay no attention, move along, it seemed to say.

Her tanned face had these same thin lines, although pointing down, down toward the muddy dress.  Her skin seemed as though she had worn it one week too long.

 My eyes followed the lines to where they gestured, to the roundness of her belly where, underneath her shirt, I imagined other lines that told other secrets.

This town is crazy for football.  I’ve seen more people wearing green today than on the 17^th of March.  Shiny green, too, like the leprechauns won’t see them if they don’t look like they’re going to the disco.  One man pushing a walker could’ve been John Travolta. 

The skinny men hold up signs for parking, parking, park in my driveway for four dollars.  The signs are cardboard.  I wouldn’t leave my car with them.  Not even for free.  The skinny men buy two cans of spray paint and hitch their pants.  Their signs are made with magic markers.

Disco magic.

He was named Brussel at birth only because his father had celebrated his shaky spelling into near annihilation at the local pub.  But all turned out for the best because his mother was rather fond of that particular dish anyway, so no arguments ensued following except for the loss of money meant to go toward Brussel’s diapers.

Instead, Brussel wore yesterday’s comics for the first few weeks of life.  Because of the particular nature of newspaper ink, The Far Side was often read off Brussel’s backside and the chuckling at his exposed genitals created a scar that lasted a lifetime.

Where have all the aliens gone? he wondered absentmindedly as he passed a rather dusty VHS copy of Close Encounters of the Third Kind of the movie rental shelf.  Could it be they’ve disappeared, or relocated?   Or maybe they just don’t find Earth that interesting anymore?  Maybe Men in Black dispelled all the rumours about mean aliens and now they can live peacefully knowing that we think they are kind and humourous.  

He picked up a copy of Blade Runner and put it down again.  Too realistic, he thought.  Plus, I think I’ve seen him in some other show before.

They wander aisles of every garden centre come May, come early June, and some stragglers into July.  They sleepwalk and drift, caress and meander.  There is no music here, no soundtrack to their individual lives because here they share the greens as one.  Here is where there is nowhere left to be. 

They covet the perennials and their lasting nature, while hustling each marigold into their cart.  Eyes linger on the oaks jailed in plastic containers, and though they long for freedom for their brothers, they have to think about colour, and how well it displays on the front lawn.