Withdrawing Fables From The Memory Bank
Part Three: Old Clothes and Newspapers
At first it comes from very far away, faint, somewhere near the horizon-edge of Basil’s dream world. Old clothes and newspapers. The proclamation approaches, slowly, increasingly louder. Old clothes and newspapers. Along with a wooden cranking sound, the voice begins to fill his room. Old clothes and newspapers. He leaves sleep completely behind, lays there, listening, as the sounds pass and begin to diminish. Old clothes and newspapers.
It is like this every Saturday morning. He yawns, stretches his arms, gets up, and goes to the window—open to the warming weather outside. Old clothes and newspapers. The old man, like clockwork, pushing his wooden cart down the Brooklyn street, calling for offers to his weekly recycling parade. Old clothes and newspapers.
The Callery Pear trees outside his window are just beginning to bloom—their white blossoms are notoriously known—here’s a brief dendrology lesson—to have a smell similar to semen.
Over breakfast Basil’s mother, Maria, asks if he’d help her carry a package to the post office. This is the third parcel she has mailed to her older son Marko, who has been living in Cleveland with his girlfriend Abby, since they left New York in October of last year.
As she is seventeen, Abby’s father —…
