Bash us, we roll up in an impenetrable ball, said R.
Criticize us, we put our fingers in our ears, said G.
Kick us, we kick back harder, said R.
Speaking of kicking, said G. Earlier, you kicked us.
We have a dim memory of that, said R.
Then they seemed to smell something on the wind.
Uh-oh, said G.
Nearly time, said R.
Hustle back upstairs, girlie, said G.
His wee body teeters at the edge, said R.
Of his mud-black forever-pit, said G.
Soon will come that special thunk made by: inert load, dropping, said R.
After which, devoid of its former vitality, his sad former-person-bearing meatlump will begin to rot, said G.
From the window of my charge’s room a light-rectangle, longing for the wedding, landed instead on the redwood fence, where it manifested as a frustrated, malformed polygon.
Up I shot, bent hard to the left, and was in.
In with him again.
My poor doomed charge.
—
He lay as before, as ever (eyes closed, one hand under the covers, the other above). In his mind he stood at the window of his New York office, thirty-eighth floor, gazing down at an angry mob swirling around below.
How had those morons gotten here, anyway, from all over the country? With their filthy clothes, their swear-word-laced posters, these supposed nature lovers heedlessly trampling thirty grand’s worth of planters, berms, and flower beds into a mudfield like something out of goddamn Verdun?
Did theywalk?
Ridehorses?
Don’t be funny.
I joined him at the window.
Were you down there? he said. That day?
No, I said.
Is Dell down there? he said.
I don’t believe so, I said gently.
He thinks poorly of me, he said.
He moved away from the window. And was, strangely, nowhere at all.
