With cherry red fenders once, the entire right side was clearly meant for wildflowers and fireflies that cleverly kept just out of sight. All recalled in those clouds steaming out the radiator. Without biting into it, paying not much attention to anything in particular, a trailing worker with loose sleeves slips up against artificial intelligence disguised as a grape harvester, and gets harvested.
Third person writing, but it's quite another thing, isn't it, playing the Third Man Theme? Birds and plants don't say much, never asking, “Are we having fun yet?” It's not just your ordinary flat tire or cardboard box, or job interview, your unexpected friend who happens to remember . . . that tendril?
Curling into empty space, wavering like a worm sniffing the air. Read no further. Imagine it. The words are self-fulfilling.
Twinkie jumps down from her chair in the living room. Not that I said anything, but she just knows I've picked up my pen. She flops one big paw over my arm and purrs. The tendril, in keeping with the contract, has taken up residence, as unlikely as no man's land, sorting out the briar patch, waking The A Train from its slumber, tripping down brown stone New York tenement steps, not asking whether I've met Cinderella sitting there on a fable, by any other telling. It was the sepia tones of a book cover, a book to own but not to read, that traveled another dimension.
Truck times in thunder and lighting were rain over radiator fins, gnarly struggles with the fan blade Muhammad bent, bare handed, accidentally in the course of trying to balance the generator pulley and, I suppose, a searching tendril. Working with Muhammad was fun.
But we haven't gotten far, have we?
Sifting through leaves, sun searchers tumble down large square Spanish tiles, spilling over glazed ceramic urns designed for curing olives in their muted shades, astringent, absorbing. Go to your local gas station and never expect to find anything like this.
Twinkie is kneading her favorite blanket, scrubbing paws and cleaning behind ears. She knows about the tendril, or maybe it knows about her, she's so playful.
I have seen her catch a fly in mid air. A fat, slow fly. Now she's caught a dry yellow heavy hackberry leaf which was dropping almost straight down, although it twitched and wiggled in its death like a fleeing mouse. Then another. She watches. No way to get all of them. She reverts to a temple cat, perched on front legs straight as columns. For the first time, her eyes seem philosophical.
It was not so long ago. Davey Jones' narrow gauge rail road train rolled on tracks laid over a hillock near Winchester Road in Los Gatos. Most visitors thought it was for their kids. It rattled around, steam whistle very satisfactory and, when hardly anyone was watching, the whole business went much further, the kids knowing no boundaries.
An inspiration that happens once, possibly ~ a flash in the pan ~ at a switch in technology for dial phones that eliminated snoopy operators. So just let your fingers dial what they will and some hapless soul will answer, to be summarily awarded a case of ketchup. With grandiloquent fanfare learned from a circus barker at the fat lady's tent. An invisible thread, stronger than steel, spun by silk worms fed with grape leaves. It's beyond suspicion at the miniature railroad. But the kids already know. Cherry red with apple blossom fenders, a complete side of wild flowers with fireflies, water cascading bowler hats in sleepy clouds, and several lady bugs that escaped.
Sometimes sitting in the heat, like a pilot in the front seat, I'd wish to be a court reporter typing at warp speed. I could capture cotton seeds in sage brush blooms, measured out in Brer Rabbit's feet, out there in the briar patch, with this little pin hole hissing steam into a cloud demanding sandwiches that might feather into a plausible story. Somehow. But with cotton it's a dry mouth, and hard to spit out the seeds. Have you ever tried that?
A peanut butter dilemma. Jimmy Carter might speak up for peanuts, their down home truth known better than calving glaciers ~ thumbs up or thumbs down. Who would've believed that hidden within, like clever fireflies, are some answers, hidden in an armor suit under a hot leather seat.
Such a curious cat, she follows me to the shower, certain there's something in there under the cabinet. Splays out on her belly, looking funny, poking around with her big paws. I crouch down and look, meeting her eye to eye under the cabinet, seeing nothing. It seems familiar. Unsympathetically I wait for her goblin to evaporate. When it's gone, I slide the door closed. From outside she manages, almost, to slide it back open (big paw wriggling through the crack).
Only in retrospect does originality become evident. And now that I've had my shower and brushed my teeth and gotten the pen back out, she comes over to sit on the clipboard and purr. I guess whatever I was going to write will have to wait.
