pegasus in red

It was never clear if he even liked us.

We gathered round and he jiggled the plastic pokerlike chips|tokens. He had a bag of them — round bulging, like a cartoon sack of acorns.

Acorns didn’t grow here so only knew them from cartoons. We were cartoon age. Watched Popeye and Olive Oyl without understanding much except that eating spinach somehow made you able to beat up bullies ‘cept it didn’t.

He worked the road, sales to gas stations — additives?, maybe.

He had kids — used to hide in his room undisturbable — do not enter — as if he the teenager against his own teenagers. No one dared cross that, no one did.

Great myths created to explain what he did in there.

Unconsidered that it was to get away from them, the creators of the myths.

When those teens left, some early, some later, and had kids, some not all and often only 2 — replacements but duty done … that’s who we were gathered there at his bag of red plastic tokens.

We quiet (we thought) and gentile lined up stood to take turns, the man cartoon bag in hand would other hand a child up token slotted and we would ride the fire-engine re, red as the token, all one ride the horse in motion and when motion subsides — off with one one with the next, no seconds, soon enough over.

It would happen once in a blue moon or so, so we’re told, hard to know.

Was pegasus a stallion or a mare? We didn’t know or care, content to accept the treat from someone we rarely saw barely knew and though delighted were afraid of him as he stood cigar in yellowed teeth, Marxian mustachioed, never shared advice or a word or two.

We flew and he was gone soon thereafter, that was a different fright. Sickbed, cancer, tubes and the smell a childscare smell.

We flew his and his brood’s coops. Rode away into a freedom we soarhoped.

Pegasus carried our dreams the wings blood red, not white, spread wide our heels at the joint between wing and ribs.

The sky was always blue, cirrus clouds only of the wisps. Whipped through above, no thought of thin air or too close to the sun, no Icarus, we rode on into and out of dreams, ours and other’s.

We soared through the web of other’s dreams watch wildeyed at the world we had not dared imagine.

Was this the power pegasus brought to us, were the tokens blessed with a desire to fulfill desire? How old could you be to still take off and not return?

We did age and the tokens, the bag, the mustachio, none are more, none can ride.

Yet once ridden ride again.