Ugh.
Here came one now:
I am digging away at the surface of “school desk” with the point of “compass” from “Sears” as “Mrs. Kiley” drones on. The lesson, as always, eludes me. What I want is to go home and play “PrettyPetals.” That, at least, I am good at. Through a nearby window (so close I might reach over and touch it, if I dared, which I don’t), three children too young for school play among gently swaying “swing set” seats. Lucky ducks! Butterflies dart about, seemingly more quickly or slowly in proportion to the joy in the children’s voices.
The more joy, the more agitated the butterflies.
Darn.
Darn it.
To my chagrin, I now recalled:
“Jill.”
“Jill Blaine.”
“Jill ‘Doll’ Blaine.”
In the bygone days, that (alas) had been me.
—
Sitting on the edge of the fountain, I resisted several additional recollections:
The feeling of toting in two bags of “groceries,” one in each arm; the “glassclunk” (one, then the second) as these are set down in sequence.
No, no, no.
Dangling one’s feet in the “new aboveground pool” as crazy light-stars danced across the surface of the “heavily chlorinated water.” Having “hopped right in,” one felt, through “plastic liner,” one’s footprints imprinting upon the soft swells of underlying sand.
Oh gosh, oh dear.
Surely that Frenchman must be done by now.
I vaulted up, passed through the bedroom wall, found him standing on the bed sweating profusely, treading on the feet of my charge while rapidly reading aloud from his tremendous stack of papers.
No sooner would he finish and drop a page than it would, as if guided by a gentle human hand, slowly descend and add itself neatly to the accruing stack on the floor.
What he was reading was nonsense, a fantastical poem or rambling drunken narrative.
The cardinal, he shouted, feeds on bits of plastic piping. In a ballroom filling with mud, chairs squeak in objection. A groggy hippo (What hippo, I wondered, why speak of hippos in this fearful place, at this somber moment?) rolls yellow eyes up at a hunter seeking its ivory canines. A juvenile jaguar creeps forward, dismembers a poodle in a bright pink jacket.
Clearly the fellow was unhinged.
Among our ilk, many were.
(Ours was not an easy road.)
Fish nibbling corpses in a lakeside graveyard, he shouted. A squalling infant borne away on a gray-black mudflow.
Enough, I said. Please.
But he only began reading faster, soon too fast to be understood.
From the house next door came a great cry, as if many individuals all at once had glimpsed something pleasing to them.
This celebratory sound appealed to me very much.
