Andersen Prunty's Blog, page 6

Aliens

We go out to the field and drink a lot of beer. Paul starts walking real strange. I’ve never seen anything like it. He says, “If you see an alien, do you film it or shoot it?” I only have a phone, so I film it. I go to bed that night convinced Paul is an alien. Why else would he have said that if he wasn’t? I’ve always believed in aliens, I just didn’t think I’d ever get to see one. I upload my footage. No one online believes Paul is an alien but they rally behind his strange walk. Paul becomes internet famous and stops hanging out with me. Whenever someone recognizes him, he has to do the strange walk for them. He’s drunk all the time, so it isn’t very hard. He’s eventually able to afford a trailer on the outskirts of town but later gets arrested for being involved in some pretty nefarious stuff.

The Call

I’m in a room full of people, all of us wearing wigs. I have the nagging suspicion mine is on crooked and try to adjust it while studying my reflection in the wineglass in front of me.

A man with a crazy mustache has just made an ass of himself by trying out a new style of dancing.

The phone rings from the kitchen and we all drunkenly scramble to reach it, trying to squeeze through the door at once. An older man with a worn-out thin white wig and strange buttocks is the first to answer it.

“Hullo,” he says. “Mm-hm. I see … No … Yes, of course … I understand.”

The man gently places the phone back in the cradle, takes off his scraggly white wig and tosses it on the stove. Dejectedly, he slumps his shoulders and slinks past all the staring eyes. He reaches the door and looks back. On the verge of tears, he raises his hand in a half-hearted wave and leaves the room. We all adjust our wigs and take a deep, collective breath, knowing we’ll never see him again.

The Ohio Grass Monster

“I ain’t gonna let you butt fuck me,” Karen said.

“You would if you loved me,” Todd said.

He sat on his couch, shirtless, wearing tight cut-off blue jeans, the portable phone pressed to his ear.

“’Sides, I thought only fags did it that way.”

In the background, he heard someone laughing.

Todd shouted into the phone, “I just wanted to do it that way so I didn’t have to look at your FACE!” Then he clicked the off button and tossed the phone onto the floor. He unbuttoned his jeans and slid his hand into the moist warmth of his crotch. His cell phone rang and he picked it up. It was Matt. Todd flipped the phone open and said, “You comin’ over?”

“Yeah.”

He flipped the phone shut and lodged it into the couch cushions. He grabbed the remote control and unmuted the television. It was that show where the guy goes out and survives in the wilderness. Todd wished he was that guy. He sat and waited for Matt. Todd was only fifteen but the determined expression on his face made him look thirty-five.

A half hour later he met Matt at the door. Matt was a little overweight and breathed heavily. He wore a black sweat suit.

“You ride your bike over?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s go out back.”

Todd shut the door behind him and walked around the house, Matt breathing behind him. The air was cool and the sky was gray. The trees were still bare. Cars whispered by on the interstate but it wasn’t visible from back here. No other houses were visible either. The smell from a distant trash fire hung in the air, burning plastic and maybe some rubber.

They walked out to a makeshift wrestling ring, an old king-size mattress with canvas over it. Metal fenceposts stood at the corners with three strands of clothesline wrapped around them. An old couch, its stuffing and springs popping out, sat to the side.

“I figure this summer,” Todd said, “we can get some more couches out here and start chargin’ admission. You know Darren? From Fink’s? He wants in on it too. We had a match a couple days ago. He’s pretty tough. I won though.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Okay, you get in there first.”

Matt stepped into the ring. Todd announced him with his special voice. Then he announced himself as the reigning champion. Todd stepped into the ring and made a sound like a bell. He said he would buy one as soon as he found the right kind.

Matt wandered out into the middle of the ring, his arms to his side. It was hard to walk on the mattress. Todd approached him, flipping his hair back off his shoulders. Matt stuck out his hand and pushed him in the chest. When he brought his hand away there was a red mark on Todd’s pale skin.

Todd moved in again, real quick, and got Matt in a headlock. He took him down to the canvas. Matt outweighed Todd by at least fifty pounds. He put his hands in the sweaty backs of Todd’s knees, lifting him up and flipping him over. The headlock broke. Matt threw himself onto Todd, pinning him down.

“One!” Matt said. “Two! Ow, fuck!”

He leaped off Todd and stood up.

“You can’t do that.” Matt’s eyes teared up.

“Do what?” Todd rose to his feet and approached Matt. Matt held out one hand to stave him off and rubbed his neck with the other.

“You bit me on the neck.”

“I did not.”

“I can feel the teeth marks, Todd.”

“The match still has to go on.”

“No it doesn’t. I quit.”

“Then I win.”

“You’d be disqualified.”

Matt left the ring.

“Disqualified?”

“For biting me on the neck.” Matt sat down on the sprung couch. Todd left the ring and sat down next to him. Matt rubbed his neck, suppressing sobs. Todd pulled a notebook out from between the couch cushions.

“I been doin’ some drawings.”

“Drawings?”

“Yeah. Of our costumes and shit. We can’t just be us.”

Todd flipped through the pages. Matt caught a glimpse of the design for Todd’s costume. He had a long robe and fabulously styled hair. He stopped when he came to Matt’s.

“I think this’ll be pretty cool,” Todd said.

“What is it?”

“You’ll be called the Ohio Grass Monster.”

Matt looked at the drawing. It was done from several different angles. The figure in the drawing had on a skintight black suit and something like a gorilla mask.

“See? It’ll be just like your sweat suits only tighter and thinner so you don’t sweat so much.”

“What’s that on the back?”

“That’s just some grass or hay or somethin’. You won’t wrestle in it. You’ll take it off before you start. Like a cape or robe or somethin’.”

“Oh.”

“Now we need to work on your finishing move and then I thought we could go in and get started on the costumes. Maybe we can get into the state fair next year.”

Matt stood up. He pulled up the waistband of his sweatpants. “I gotta get home.”

“You just got here.”

“I know. I forgot somethin’.”

“You comin’ back?”

“I don’t know, Todd.”

Matt was already walking away. Todd closed the notebook and headed back inside. The television was still on. He continued to watch the show about the survival man and wanted him to get eaten by something. Anything. It didn’t matter as long as there was blood.

Frustration

A frustrated writer comes home from his dull dayjob to check his mail, finding only another dehumanizing letter from New York. He tears the envelope open, the “Dear Author” opening the letter confirming the dehumanization. Entering his house, he surveys the walls. They are covered in rejection letters save one small space in the lower right-hand corner of the kitchen. He affixes the letter to the empty space and decides he is now officially a failed writer. He has waited for this day, it just came a little sooner than expected.

Upstairs, his office is filled with manuscripts, none of them accepted by a major publisher. The room smells of paper. Reams of failure. He has an overwhelming urge to set the room on fire but knows he won’t do that. It’s just not like him. He is a sober, forward-thinking individual. It just wouldn’t do to burn down the office and, probably, the entire house. If he destroys his house and himself then he has failed as a human being also. Now that he no longer considers himself a writer, being a human is the only thing he has left. But, he can’t see himself as a human. Not yet. Perhaps over time. For now, he can only see himself as a failed writer. He has no wife, no children. This was to be his legacy. No longer. He’ll use the manuscripts for kindling come winter. He gathers up his typewriter and stamps. The envelopes he’ll use for kindling along with the manuscripts since they are, in a sense, the vessels of his failure.

He takes his typewriter to a pawnshop downtown. A bearded man with rickets tells him he’ll give him a dollar for it. “No one uses typewriters anymore,” he says. The failed writer chuffs and storms out of the shop, leaving both the typewriter and the dollar behind. He takes the stamps to the post office. The postal clerk, a dapper man with, inexplicably, a parrot on his shoulder, tells him they do not take returns on stamps. The failed writer tries to explain his situation to the clerk. “I don’t need them anymore. I’ll no longer be sending out any manuscripts.” The clerk only shakes his head and tells him maybe he can use them for bills or something. The failed writer also shakes his head while the clerk explains this to him, peeling off the stamps and sticking them all over the counter, muttering, “Yeah,” and “There you go,” under his breath. Eventually, he is escorted out by a burly carrier just coming off her route.

The failed writer returns home and sits on his couch. He wishes he had a television. The room of books no longer holds any appeal for him. He realizes he only read as some form of study and requirement anyway. It was only his goal to surpass those writers he had read and, now that he no longer writes, there is no one to surpass. He takes a deep breath and looks at all the rejections papering the walls.

The time passes, the paper yellows, his days grind on. The stack of manuscripts in the office, over many winters, slowly dwindles. Eventually the failed writer becomes an old man, leaving behind his job for whole days of staring at his yellowing, peeling wallpaper. Then, one day, the failed writer becomes a corpse. Although he never got around to living, never really became a human, death accepted him.

The Bright Side

I go downstairs to the kitchen. I have designs on finishing off all those chops. As I pass through the living room, I hear a low moaning.

“Dad?”

The moan again. He must be sitting in his easy chair, sunk down in the dimly lit room so I can’t see him.

“Dad? You feeling all right?”

“God no.”

“Indigestion?”

“Worse.”

“It can’t be all that bad.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you were an antelope.”

I rush around to the front of the chair.

“Come on, now. That’s ridiculous.”

But the words are barely out of my mouth before I see my father. There he sits, a slender, beautiful antelope. He looks very sad.

“Life is miserable.”

He reaches his hooves over to the end table, trying to grab his beer can between the two small things. It slips away from him and foams onto the floor. He leans his head back in the chair and groans again.

“I hope you’re not ashamed of me,” he says.

“Of course not.”

I pick up the beer can and pour what’s left into my palm. I proffer my hand toward my father. As though he can’t control himself, he laps greedily at the beer. He politely wipes some foam from his fur with a shiny hoof.

“Better get some sleep,” I say and playfully shake one of his antlers.

In the kitchen, eating my chops, I hear him get out of the recliner.

“Hey!” he calls. “This isn’t so bad!”

I go into the living room.

“Look at this! I can walk on my hind legs!”

He’s drunk, I think. He obviously licked the remainder of the beer out of the carpet. I try not to think about him doing such a degrading thing. Now he’s heading for the stairs.

“You be careful with those stairs,” I caution.

“Oh, I think I can handle it,” he says and twitches his little tail as he shakily climbs the stairs.

I don’t want to think about what he’ll do next.

Jack and Mr. Grin

My second published book, Jack and Mr. Grin, is now back in print for the first time in years. I pulled this and all my other Eraserhead Press and Lazy Fascist Press books from print back around 2018 after I realized they hadn’t paid me in like a year. No reason. No apology. Lesson learned. Anyway, I was never happy with the original publication so it’s nice to see this edition come out looking the way I want it to and edited the way … well, edited period.

As always, thanks to the handful of you that have stuck around over the years. I truly can’t express how much it means to me.

Jack Orange is a twentysomething guy who works at a place called The Tent packing dirt in boxes and shipping them off to exotic, unheard-of locales. He thinks about his girlfriend, Gina Black, and the ring he hopes to surprise her with. But when he returns home one day, Gina isn’t there. He receives a strange call from a man who sounds like he’s smiling—Mr. Grin. He says he has Gina. He gives Jack twenty-four hours to find her.

What follows is Jack’s bizarre journey through an increasingly warped and surreal landscape where an otherworldly force burns brands into those he comes in contact with, trains appear out of thin air, rooms turn themselves inside out and computers are powered by birds. And if he does find Gina, how will he ever survive a grueling battle to the death with Mr. Grin?

Reading Manko

Entering a bookstore, I discovered all the books had been replaced with authors. Angered, I nearly left but decided to stay and have a look around. The store no longer smelled like books. It smelled aged—liquor and old cigarette smoke hanging around the authors. For the greater part, the authors—mostly white, mostly male, mostly older—wandered aimlessly throughout the store. Some of them sat in the cafe, sipping overpriced coffee and engaging in inane babble. Some of them played board games. Some played with stuffed animals and other things the bookstore still sold. Others spoke on their cell phones. I wondered if authors were especially good at text messaging. Or did they find it too confining? These people who had let their brains dribble out over countless pages.

Disheartened, I found myself in the fiction section. It was virtually empty except for one old man sitting in a comfortable-looking armchair. His faded blue eyes, below his wisp of thin white hair, stared vacantly into the distance. His suit was mostly brown. He twisted his gnarled hands in his lap. I noticed his withered-looking legs and it finally hit me who he was. This was Gregory Manko, an obscure writer from Otlatl, a small European island. I had read a book of his short stories a number of years ago. Only a handful of his books were still in print.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Are you Gregory Manko?”

“Yes.”

He looked resigned.

“Are you for sale?” I asked, not really intending to. Sometimes I just blurted things out.

“Yes,” he said with the same resignation.

I wondered how much an author like this would cost.

No matter. I had a credit card.

I looked around to see if he had a wheelchair nearby. I hadn’t known he was crippled. Had he been crippled when he wrote those beautiful stories? I’d have to go back and read them.

“I don’t have one,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“A wheelchair. That’s what you were looking for, wasn’t it? I don’t have one. You’ll have to carry me.”

“Oh. Sure.”

I bent down over the chair. I didn’t want to hurt him. He seemed so old and fragile.

“How do you …?”

“Probably easier if you just get down on your knees and I’ll scoot off onto your back.”

“Yeah. Okay. Right.” I figured he’d probably done this kind of thing before.

Turning so my back was to the chair, I crouched down in front of him. Grunting, he maneuvered himself onto my back, grabbing my shoulders with his gnarled hands. Getting a firm grip on the underside of each of his knees, I stood up.

“Easy,” he said.

“Sure. Right.”

I walked slowly to the front registers. A cute, intellectual-looking girl leaned against the counter, leafing through a magazine. Once I reached the counter, Manko on my back, the girl huffed and dropped her magazine on the floor. She had a nametag but whatever name had been printed on it was crossed out.

“Hi,” I said.

She gave me a look as if to say, “Please, spare me,” and held up the laser scanning gun. She opened Manko’s blazer and scanned a barcode on the inside of it. Turning her attention to the register, a look of surprise crossed her face and she said, “That’s way too much. Someone’s wandered out of the bargain section again.”

I didn’t know how Manko could wander anywhere but I wasn’t going to argue if it meant getting him on the cheap. Besides, I figured maybe he’d gotten one of the other authors to carry him there. She gave me the new total, which was nearly half the original price. I handed over my card, signed the receipt, and left the store to load Gregory Manko into my car, not really knowing what I was going to do with him once we got back to my apartment.

Things didn’t go very well. I was exhausted after the first day. I had to carry him to the restroom each time he had to go, which was a lot. Mainly because he ate and drank all the time. I didn’t see how anyone so thin and old could eat so much but it was like he was trying to pack it all in before he died which, from the look of him, could be any day. I began thinking about how much a funeral would cost and whether or not I would have to pay for it. Already, I had resolved to purchase a wheelchair—soon I would have to go back to work and I couldn’t just tell him to hold it all day. He was probably incontinent, anyway.

By the end of the first week, I didn’t know why I had purchased him in the first place. Honestly, what did I expect to do with an author? I didn’t even read very much. Maybe I thought he would be the stuff of drama—more thrilling than television. But thrilling he most certainly was not. He didn’t talk in anything other than monosyllabic answers to my questions so there wasn’t even any type of intellectual discussion to engage in.

Careful that I was out of Manko’s earshot, I called the bookstore.

“Do you take returns?” I asked.

“Depends,” a girl said in a bored voice. I wondered if it was the same girl who had sold Manko to me. I listened for the fluttering sound of magazine pages flipping but I couldn’t hear anything over the din in the background. They’d either gotten more authors in or they had livened up a bit since I was there.

“Depends on what?”

“Lots of things, really.”

I gritted my teeth. I most certainly would not be purchasing any more authors from this bookstore.

“Would you like to know what it is I want to return?” I helped her along.

“Not really but I imagine you’re going to tell me anyway.”

“Last week, I purchased Gregory Manko from your store and I’d like to return him.”

“Why?” she asked. “Already have one?” At this, she chuckled.

“No, I … I don’t already have one. I just didn’t … I guess I just didn’t realize how expensive it would be. And physically taxing.”

“It’s not his fault he has a handicap.”

“I know. I’m not blaming anyone for anything. I just don’t think I’ll be able to take care of him.”

“As I recall, he was a sale item.”

“Yes.”

“We don’t take returns on sale items.”

“What am I supposed to do with him?”

“That’s your problem.”

“But surely this isn’t the first time you’ve had this problem.”

“I don’t have the problem. I guess you could try donating him to the thrift store. Or selling him to the used bookstore if you need the cash although, quite frankly, I don’t think they’ll pay you very much for him.”

“Thanks. Maybe I’ll try that.” She had already hung up. I pressed the OFF button and walked into the living room. Manko sat on the couch, his hands resting on those withered legs, watching television. He hadn’t picked up a book since coming here. I thought that was odd. Shouldn’t an author read a lot? It seemed like I had read somewhere that an author was supposed to read twice as much as he wrote. For that matter, he hadn’t requested a single piece of paper or pen or typewriter or laptop or anything. Didn’t he write anymore? Sitting down next to him, I noticed his bottom lip was trembling. He blinked back tears.

“Say, you want to go for a drive?” I asked.

“Getting rid of me?” he said.

“This just isn’t what I expected,” I said.

“Not what you wanted, you mean?” He wiped a tear away with a knobby knuckle.

“Yeah. I guess you could say that.”

“You people don’t know what you want.”

“You people?”

“Readers.”

“I liked that book of short stories you did.”

“And you wanted something like that?”

“I guess.”

“And you got real life instead.”

A heavy silence hung between us. He sniffled. A phlegmy, wet-sounding thing. Then he spoke again. “People say they want to read about life but that’s not what they want at all. They want a version of life. Don’t you realize, someone else’s version of someone else’s life is still fiction? It’s still a story. But it has no imagination. That’s what you people have done. You’ve murdered imagination.”

He pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket, blew his hairy nose and farted, most probably involuntarily.

“This is life,” he said. “And it’s not what you want at all.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t know what else I could say.

“You want to help?”

“I can’t let you stay here. I would love to but I can’t afford it and I’ll have to go back to work soon.”

“I don’t mean that,” Manko said. “There is no help for me here. Look …” He reached into the inside pocket of his blazer and pulled out a wad of bright, exotic-looking foreign money. “Take me somewhere and buy me a wheelchair. I’d prefer one of the motorized kinds, if I have enough here, and then take me to the center of the city and drop me off. Just, please, don’t take me back to the bookstore. That’s where my dreams died.”

I folded his lumpy hand back over the money.

“Hang onto that,” I said. “You might need it. I’ll get the chair. I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

He wiped away another tear and tried to force a smile.

The next morning I took him into the city square, full of pigeons and benches and people and statues and lights and noise. I settled him into his wheelchair and watched him burr into the thick of things. Selfishly, as I watched him, I wondered if he would find another story out there or if the imagination, once killed, remains dead for life.

Flex

I go to the gym. I flex.

Other people are there, flexing.

Then they stop flexing.

I don’t stop.

I hold it.

Eventually, some of them notice.

Finally, everyone in the gym notices.

One of them says, “What he’s doing looks so weak and lazy but he’s been doing it for so long …”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t want to do that.”

I never stop flexing.

By the time I do, I have muscles on my eyelids.

And soon, it’s time to flex again.

Fad

Teddy and I are in his blacklit basement, huffing glue and listening to Judas Priest. Teddy turns to me and says, “So, you tried fuckin’ your mom yet?”

I chuckle. “No. Not yet, Teddy.”

“You think I’m joking?”

“Have you?”

“Oh, yeah. Sweetest pussy I ever had.”

“My mom’s like sixty … and she has that thing on her head.”

“Yeah, I used to think my mom was pretty sick too but, man, that pussy.”

I pretended to think about it for a minute. “No. I don’t think I could.”

“Well, you’re one of the last then. I’m from California and everybody out there’s doin’ it. You just wait and see. You’ll come around.” Teddy smiled knowingly through glazed eyes that were little more than slits.

“Maybe so,” I said, the idea already seeming less absurd than it once did.

Princess Electricity

Immediately following a heated argument, the man with the lice-ridden beard and gnawed peg leg throws me from the pink dirigible. I barely have time to think about the genesis of this argument as I fall through the air, the trees, the soil, and the bedrock, crashing down on a quiet suburban street somewhere in the middle of the earth. An object, apparently hurled out after my ejection, hits me in the head. It hurts quite a bit and I run my hand along the top of my skull to make sure it isn’t bleeding before checking to see what the object is. Looking down, I see that it is an old, rusted skeleton key. I pick it up and put it in my pocket. Something like that … you can’t just leave it there.

Huge trees line either side of the street. The street is empty save for an old lady in a loud floral print dress pushing an empty shopping cart. I stand uncomfortably in the middle of the street and wait for the lady’s squeaky approach. She reaches me and pulls the cart to a stop. She’s very skinny with white, aggressively permed hair.

She clucks her tongue against the roof of her mouth and points to the basket of her shopping cart. I stare absently at her. She’s all bent up and slightly hunchbacked. It makes me think of a question mark. She relinquishes the cart to scamper toward me and kick me in the shin with a soft house shoe.

She clucks again and points to the cart.

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you want.” I search her eyes, filled with something close to fury or fear.

She pulls her false teeth out and throws them at me. They bounce off and clatter to the asphalt. Not knowing what else to do, I climb into the empty shopping cart, pulling my knees up to my chest. It’s painful and I wonder how I’ll ever get out. I look up at the blue sky. Why is there so much sky if I’m somewhere in the middle of the earth? The old lady begins pushing the cart. She wheezes with the added weight. I guess she’ll just cluck some more if she needs me to get out. Maybe she knows where I live. Maybe she’ll take me home.

She continues to push the cart down the middle of the road, pausing a couple times to unleash a rheumatic cough and fluff her perm. After making a couple right turns we reach a modest brick ranch house located on a street called Powersport Drive. She stops the cart, points to the house and clucks wildly.

“I live here?”

She smacks me on the back of the head with her big, gnarled hand and I take that as a yes. I can no longer stand up so I shift my weight left and right until the cart crashes over onto its side, bringing the old lady with it. I straighten up—nothing more than a few scrapes—and look down at the old lady. She lies on the pavement, sweaty and drooling. Her elbows and knees are bleeding. I stand the cart upright. I pick the old lady up and say, “We’ll take you inside and get those scrapes cleaned up.” She whips her head back and forth, slinging sweat and drool. She points to the empty cart and clucks some more. I put her in the cart and give it a great heave. It rolls smoothly down the street and continues rolling as though guided by an invisible shopper.

Walking toward the house I feel a great sense of underwhelming blandness. Why do people live in houses like these? Why do I live in a house like this?

Slightly unnerved, I turn the doorknob to the house but it’s locked. I reach into my pocket for the key. It slides easily into the keyhole and, turning it, the door clicks magically before swinging inward.

Stepping into the house, I have no idea what I might find. I might have a family. A wife and children could be rushing throughout the house. This could be some fragment of a life I don’t remember. But the house is empty save for a fat man in the same floral-patterned dress as the old lady. He looks at me, his mouth creased into a permanent frown, and says, “I was just leavin’.”

I stare after him, trundling down the walk, looking for something to say and coming up with nothing.

I close the door and look around the house. It is completely empty. Wallpaper has been ripped from the wall. The carpet has been torn up, leaving glue-covered concrete. A bare bulb hangs from the ceiling and there is a phone plugged into the wall and resting on the floor in the corner. I stare at the phone, its cord coiled like a snake, half-expecting it to ring. It doesn’t and I find myself exhausted. It’s been a rough day.

I sit down on the floor and survey the dim room. It’s depressing. There isn’t anything to do here. Once again, I stare at the phone. Perhaps I could make some random phone calls. Ask people what they’re wearing. I pick up the phone. No dial tone. Soothing music comes from it. The most soothing music I’ve ever heard. It makes me think of a sleepy coastal town somewhere I’ve never been. Hypnotized, I pass out.

When I wake up, the phone is back on the hook. My mouth is very dry and my head throbs. My back hurts. The house is filled with a wonderful smell. Like donuts or bread. I walk through the house but it isn’t coming from in here. The only things left in the kitchen are a few cabinets, the doors hanging askew, some of them missing completely. I walk outside into the night and the smell is stronger. I leave the door unlocked. I don’t trust the key. It might not work for me when I come back. This might not even be my house when I come back.

Outside the night is purple and gray with fog. The fog seems to carry this scent of baked goods and I want to eat it. But I follow my nose instead. The fat man who left my house earlier is sprawled face down in the neighboring yard. He’s immense and dormant. I want to go jump on him, like a trampoline or something.

I continue walking to the end of the block. There, I see a two-story house. On top of the house is a large rectangle, long side down, made from metal mesh. It makes me think of the old lady’s shopping cart on a much larger scale. Maybe it’s an antenna of some sort. Standing next to this contraption is a little girl, maybe seven or eight. She signals toward the sky, a flashlight in each hand. One of them shines green. The other shines red. I’m worried. Little girls should not, I feel, be on the slanted roofs of suburban homes.

“Hey!” I call, not too loudly. I don’t want to startle her and cause her to tumble from the roof. “You should get down from there.”

She shines the red-beamed flashlight into my eyes and says nothing.

Where are this girl’s parents? I walk up to the house and knock on the door. The girl keeps the flashlight beam trained on me. No one comes to the door. I knock again, louder this time. Now I hear coughing and footsteps. A thin disgruntled-looking man with tousled hair, a shadow of beard, and a rumpled brown bathrobe says, “Do you know what time it is?”

“Actually, no,” I say. And it’s true. I don’t have a clue what time it is. “I just wanted to let you know there’s a child on your roof.”

“Yeah, so? You don’t think I know that? You don’t think I know what my daughter’s doin’ up there?”

“Well … I just … um, that can’t be very safe, can it?”

“Hell no, it ain’t safe. But she’s up there doin’ good work. If she don’t stay up there then we ain’t gonna have no power tomorrow. You wanna go a whole day without power?”

I think about it and realize I don’t really care. I don’t have anything in my house that would require power save the single yellow light bulb dangling from the ceiling. In fact, the light from the light bulb depresses me and I could do without it. It has the glow of mental illness. But I also realize I’ve stepped into the middle of something incomprehensible to me. Things here were done a certain way. And I did not know how things were done.

“I’m very sorry,” I say, bowing my head in shame. I want to tell him to keep an eye on her but that seems too much like stating the obvious. “You have a good night.”

“Yeah, you too. And just think about what you’ve done tomorrow when you’re in your house enjoyin’ all that free power …”

I’ve already started back toward the sidewalk but swivel back around just as he’s ready to shut the door. “If I could bother you for one more second …” I say.

He sighs loudly. His shoulders slump even farther. “What now?”

“That smell …” I hold a finger up in front of me, as if a smell is something that can be pointed at.

“Yeah. What of it?”

“Do you know where it’s coming from?”

The man looks down at the ground and shakes his head. “What are you, a fuckin’ alien or somethin’? You really don’t know how things run around here, do ya? That’s comin’ from the bakery.” He says this last word very slowly, like I’m a child learning his vocabulary. “Almost everybody works at the bakery. In fact, I gotta get up in just a couple hours and go in. I’m losin’ out on sleep … ’causa you.”

“Thank you,” I say. The man slams the door behind me. I continue toward the sidewalk. Within a few minutes, I come upon a huge, brightly lit building bellowing the delicious smelling steam. This must be the bakery. I wonder if it’s open. I’m starved. I find the front door, the glass covered in condensation. I don’t see any sign suggesting whether it’s open or closed. I knock on the door. A fat man in chef’s whites opens it. A bell jangles.

“Can I help you?” he says.

“Are you open?” I ask.

“Always open,” he says.

“I was wondering if I could buy something. I’m very hungry, you see.”

“You wanna buy a loaf?” The way he says ‘loaf,’ it’s like a bark.

“Sure, I guess.”

“Ten ideas,” he states, holding both hands splayed in front of him.

“Ten ideas?” I say.

“Yeah, if you ain’t got ten ideas then you don’t get a loaf.”

“Ideas like …”

“Look, if you ain’t got ten ideas then maybe you need a job.”

Well, that sounded like an idea.

“I mean,” he says. “If you had any ideas, I woulda heard ’em by now.”

“Sure. Are you hiring?”

“Only if your name’s ‘Terry’.”

“Terry?”

“Yep. We got all kinds of Terrys here. Terri with an ‘i’. Terry with a ‘y’. Teri with only one ‘r’. Terree with two ‘ee’s.”

“No. I’m sorry. My name definitely is not Terry.”

He wipes his hands on his apron. “Sorry, then,” he says. “No ideas—no loaf. Name’s not Terry—no job.”

I think about standing and arguing with him but … there’s no point. I hang my head and turn to walk back to my house.

Dawn is coming up over the neighborhood. The girl is no longer on the roof. Nothing’s happening. Fat Man is still in the neighbors’ yard. I open the door to my house. Someone has filled the house with sticks. They are very dry and all different sizes, covering the floor, piled up to my knees. I can’t deal with all these sticks. I clear out a spot just big enough for myself and, still ravenously hungry, lie down for a nap.

I sleep well into the day. I dream of eating. Eating everything. Clouds. The sticks. The key. The phone. The fat man, collapsed in the yard while I peel his scalp away from his skull. He screams something that sounds like “Dying” and then I wake up.

The house is dark. Why is the house dark? Wasn’t it dawn when I came home for a nap? Shouldn’t it be full daylight now? I pull on the chain dangling from the ceiling but the light doesn’t come on. I climb up on some sticks and unscrew the bulb even though I’m sure there are not any replacement bulbs in the house. I shake the bulb. It is not blown. I must not have any electricity. Maybe I didn’t pay the bill. Of course I didn’t pay the bill. I don’t even have enough ideas for a loaf. Besides, here, the power is free. Free because of Princess Electricity, the girl on the roof top.

I step outside, leaving the door open behind me. All the lights are out. I walk down to the house at the end of the block. The girl is once again atop the house. She sits dejectedly on the roof beside her wire contraption.

“What’s wrong?” I call up to her.

She points the flashlight at me but there isn’t any light coming from it. My stomach is still growling in the fog of the night. Then I remember that it isn’t fog. It is steam from the bakery. I bet it’s like this every night. Delicious.

“We’re disconnected!” she shouts.

“Disconnected from what?”

“Everyone,” she says.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“We can’t get any power if we’re disconnected.”

“So that thing …” I say, pointing up at the contraption. “It connects you to the rest of the world?”

“The world above,” she says.

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Whaddya got?”

“I got some sticks,” I say. I’ve already picked up their regional dialect. I have some sticks, I think.

“Nah. Sticks won’t do no good. Terry’s been lookin’ to get rid of them things for months.”

I wonder who she’s talking about and realize she could be talking about anyone if everyone in town works at the bakery and everyone who works at the bakery is named Terry.

“Give me a minute,” I say.

“Ain’t ya got nothin’ else?”

“I got a key. And a phone.”

“Is it a magic phone?”

“I guess.”

“That might help.”

“Give me a minute. I’ll need to go grab the phone,” I reassure her.

I walk back to my house. If I had a lighter, I’d set all the sticks on fire, just to teach Terry a lesson. I grab the phone. I have no intention of coming back to this depressing house. I lock the door behind me. On my way to the corner, Fat Man (Terry, I guess), has finally stood up. He begins walking and stops only a house away, goes down onto one knee, and falls onto his back in yet another yard. The owner of this yard comes out of the house. He’s dressed like a cowboy and carries a garden hose. His wife comes out behind him. She is completely naked save for smiley face pasties covering her nipples. She turns the knob to the water and the cowboy begins spraying the fat man. The fat man opens his mouth and catches the stream of water, drinking it all down, growing even fatter.

I continue to the girl’s house. Spotting me, she says, “There’s a ladder on the side.”

I walk to the side of the house and climb the ladder.

“You bring it?”

“Here you go.” I give her the key.

“What’m I s’posed to do with it?”

“I don’t know. It’s a key. You open things with it. It’s from the world above. It hit me in the head.”

“You know I’m Princess Electricity, right?”

“Yeah. I know that.”

“I’m a very important person.”

“Definitely.”

“You fuck with me, it’s gonna piss a lotta people off. They depend on me.”

“Duly noted.”

“How ’bout that phone?”

I hand her the phone.

“Looks like a shabby old phone. What good’s it gonna do if you can’t plug it in?”

“It plays music.”

“Music?”

“All the music of the world.”

She lifts the handpiece from the cradle and holds it up to her ear.

“I can hear it,” she says.

“Nice, isn’t it?”

“Mm-hmm.”

I pull it away from her ear before she falls asleep. I hold the key up to the mouthpiece. Amazingly, this amplifies the sound. It swirls around us, louder and louder. Other neighbors, all named Terry, walk out of their darkened homes and look toward the girl’s house. After a while, the huge wire grid begins heating up, glowing first orange and then an almost cool-looking blue. In my head a voice whispers the word “Destiny” over and over again. The clouds split, the sky splits, and a pink dirigible hovers over the house, a rope ladder descending from the body of it. I offer the phone and the key to Princess Electricity. She takes them and puts them in the giant pocket of her dress, no longer needing them. I climb the rope ladder, my stomach growling as I crawl into the dirigible. I look down at the neighborhood and the girl shining her two lights toward me. The neighborhood is awash with electricity, glowing ferociously. Now it’s daytime again. The Captain scratches his lousy beard, says “Welcome aboard!” and claps me on the back. We sail off into the night and I wait for things to go sour.