The Wise And Hot-Diggity-Damned
The folder said US Immigration at the bottom right corner and he sat slumped in his barstool. What a scene. The barback made sure he wasn’t passed out. The guy next to him stared straight ahead and kept pounding his fist. “A proposal, that’s what it is, a proposal.” Now he smacked his palm. “A very important proposal.” A writer asshole ordered a burger with salad and described what he saw but the man with the immigration folder noticed him and said “Hey, my friend, what are you writing?” and the writer-asshole said “poetry of the moment” and felt serious about it. The man, whose name was ___ said “Cool.” The writer-asshole noticed the folder. “How’s that going?” he asked blind to incipient jingoism. ___ said it was for his cousin. ___ was, in fact, born in Alabama. “ A very hard place but” — he kisses the sky — “it makes you good.” The writer-asshole nodded serenely because he’d never been legitimately angry. Nearby a very tall woman with incredible hair checked her phone and told her boyfriend she was tired; a nearby bald woman with a skull tattooed to her neck said that was boring. They both rolled their eyes and released quiet farts. The guy talking about his proposal smelled one but didn’t care. The writer-asshole considered the smell just perfect and wrote a poem and the guy with the folder texted his cousin “Someone farted here” and his cousin, a minute later, replied “LOL, let’s go somewhere else.”
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Tattoos. Towels. Shorts. Muscles. Bikini bottoms. Bikini tops. Coolers. Cups. A porch. A pool. A beach. Flirting, fighting, flying birds threatening the porch and towels. Castles. Burials. Holes all the way to China. A piper investigates and gets chased away, away. Frisbee. Football. Good throws. Bad throws. Under it. Way in the water. Go get it. Surfing, skimming, swimming. A sailboat, a quarter mile to sea and the winds whip it right along.
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Mr Penultimate lived in a briny soup of shouting and long-winded explanations on the importance of Christ so he would leave his apartment to trap birds in Prospect Park. He deployed a lasso fashioned from woven dental floss and a bait of Boursin cheese lightly seared onto buttered saltines. Sparrows loved it. He had no idea why. Mr Penultimate had developed a technique where the bird found itself ushered directly into a magenta carrying case for a dog. Here the trapped fowl flapped and squawked and people shot Mr Penultimate One Of Those Looks, hoping he’d shut up his animal, and certainly having no idea that he’d just snatched the bird from flight. Accordingly, he’d walk the trapped sparrow through the streets of Brooklyn, caressing the package and wiping his nose, until he reached the East River. Here, he’d release the bird. The foul, reasonably upset, would explode into flight, only to realize the lasso still bound its thin leg. Mr Penultimate would tie the other end of the woven dental floss to a motorized craft and push the vessel into the water. Off went the boat. Off went the bird, invariably trying to escape but lacking capacity to comprehend the tensile persistence of eleven woven strands of unwaxed floss.
[Caleb Garling is a writer in San Francisco and the author of The St George’s Angling Club, a novel about the outdoors.]
