Cars were parked in the sense that the man was seated but there was no one playing chess between the cars only a chorus of alarms sounding under the aqua blue sky that had a tint of rose while the sun set on Eastland, the place where out of towners came to get malled and shopped out of their instinctive credit line.
Brady had no idea that there were no chess games going on between the parked cars, and was surprised that no man nor men could be seen seated in front of tables hunkering on elbows and callused palms over a chess board they hadn't touched. This was not the Fourth of July. It was instead his birthday, a day without the graces a greaseless salad gives you--often times he felt sluggish when there was the wrong dressing on the lettuce, gamy , bittersweet nonsense concocted from Miracle Whip and even grosser things.
Brady liked his salad with a punch of mayonaise, no chaser, and preferred it not chopped up with a knife but cut up with safety scissors, the ones you find in kindergarten class during art period, the ones that will not cut the skin as you make your erratic, swerving way through piles of orange and blue construction paper in an urgent attempt to create a sun that would get a gold star and, Brady's drifting thinking assumed, increase the gravity around the school room and force the solar system to collapse on itself, into a nasty, compressed ball of gung ho. But what of the parked car s , and who left this baby here? There were odd things afoot in this Michigan twilight. All kinds of things did not spell kosher.
Poway reminded him of that inconceivably vast fungal growth underneath the soil of the state of Washington, the biggest living in the whole world, sprawling and blind and mindless, cells without God’s zoning laws, white matter without thought, the ultimate empty head with no thoughts just fungoid crawl slow beyond the finest slivers of time, without feeling, like the thoughts in the heads of his neighbors in the vanilla wafer “townhomes” that stretched for miles under the magnificently brainless blue skies of Poway Mesa, adorned with a billion billion interstitial gestures and pat canned cable TV phrases out of sunburned lips from liposuctioned stomachs, flat vowels with vaguely lustful drawled “r”s and clipped-off “g”s, puffed-rice words tossed against stuccoed interior walls with that dry autotuned crispy resonance, pssffft, the hiss without the balloon, the hives from a bum plastic shaver (like the time he used his ex-wife’s Venus Breeze under his chin), moist in all the wrong places, only alive when faced with oblivion, like that afternoon four years ago when the wildfire threatened to reduce Poway to a comprehensible square of taco shops and nail salons, hoses dancing on shivering insanely green lawns from pressure and panic, the coyotes erect at the ears, somebody’s lhasa apso sneezing on television while he stood in the bathroom videotaping himself in the mirror as the flames across the street made the eucalyptus trees explode into clouds of perfumed apocalyptic resin and the voice of Ron Roberts from a radio down the road promising the Poway Phoenix will rise and lay more eggs and leave guano pellets of pure home equity and appreciated value from here to Temecula if we just get really really wet for the next several days. Then he took some medicine with lots of x’s and z’s in its name and went back to sleep.
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