ARI ROBIN MCKENNA – mckarirob@gmail.com – 206-380-5658

(this novella is the first of four ‘seasons’ from an incomplete novel with the working title “Solace and the Frollicking Personas”)

SEASON ONE:

A Similarly Ample Space

Our protagonist is offered up

Like an animal for slaughter

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

I.       THE DOBERWOMEN ARRIVE

Ii.       THREE MICROCONTEXTS OF DIVERSION

Iii.          FAUSTO’S TALL TALE RUNS INTO A BRICK WALL

Iv.       AN ABASHER AND NEVER REALLY KNOWING JASMINE

V.       SLICK-WING RENAMED AFTER FALL; MOSES MOSES GHOSTED

Vi.       PARIS AND TROTSKY BUILD A FORTIFIED WATCHTOWER ON THE CLIFF

Vii.      TELEZA STRIKES AND AN IDEA IS BORN IN THE SHADE OF THE PERIMETER BUSH

Viii.      THRICE BUBBLES POP, THE FURIES

I. THE DOBERWOMEN ARRIVE

1

Trotsky was named after his next-door neighbor’s late cat, who was named after a particularly ill-fated paramour¹ of artist frida khalo, or so trotsky’s neighbor petrouli—known by this misspelled moniker after the brand of perfume which incessantly rallied around her and trailed from her personal space—had thought she remembered. You see, petrouli didn’t care much about history, politics and/or economics, believing them all to quickly lose salience and reek of trivia.

Petrouli proffered useless artwork instead. For her current undertaking, she aped old impressionist favorites, adding technological items such as cell phones, computer chips, or space ships in ‘neat,’ precarious places. For instance, she’d affixed satellite dishes to monet’s haystacks, and had renoir’s victorian couple swaying to the output of a large boom box on the restaurateur’s shoulder.

Between trotsky’s parents’ house and petrouli’s there was a much needed fence, for although her aspect may seem harmless, petrouli’s faith in humanity had been lost long ago, and standing-in its place was an inhumane need for the illusion of security. Besides her regular intervals at the shooting range unloading her preferred lady smith², and “street smarts” that bordered on racist paranoia, she had four attack dogs to boot.

A few years ago, petrouli—always the eccentric—had taken on the four doberman sisters from the mspca, who had been ordered to put them to sleep after they had lethally mauled a pair of mormon missionaries in central m____________. Their former owner, a sixty-eight year old nanny named ida may, was sentenced to eight to twelve years in the w______ womens’ penitentiary for manslaughter—a sentence she did not outlive. The bitches, however, somehow got lost in the vast mspca bureaucracy and were offered petrouli when she stopped in to neuter trotsky—her late cat, of course, not our beleaguered hero.

The newly neutered cat either lost its will to live along with its ability to reproduce, or was so thunderstruck by the new pack of animals now sharing its owner that it died the next day on top of the refrigerator, discovered shortly after when petrouli brushed it off of there by pushing its backside—as she usually did—and it fell with a startlingly limp thud onto the kitchen floor.

Trotsky’s parents—partly in an attempt to console the inconsolable widow—decided to name their first son after this woebegone-before-death, neutered, domestic feline.

2

Because the fence dividing these backyards was over two meters tall and didn’t offer even a peak into petrouli’s yard, trotsky’s parents felt reasonably safe about young trotsky being left out there to disport himself. But what did not emerge during their conversations about the ‘issue of safety,’ was that they could both feel the bloodlust of these vicious dogs whenever they were out there, and it would often leaven into distinct dis-ease. For this very reason, neither of the two spent much space down in the yardtime, and when dinner was served and trotsky was still out there, one or the other usually skirted the ineluctable tension by hollering off the third floor porch:

— “trots, come on up, wash your hands for supper hun.” (ali) —

Or

— “trotsky, get your fuckin’ ass in here! Didn’t you hear me calling you?” (art) —

Trotsky had spent what seemed to be the better part of his childhood sitting, crawling, stumbling, peeing, falling, walking, playing, digging and running in the small yard. He liked it out in the yard because he never felt alone, he always felt this cozy, calming blanket covering him, comforting him. What trotsky didn’t realize was that his invisible “blanky” was in actuality the bloodthirsty desideratum of petrouli’s dogs, and while he sometimes would hear the sisters snarling and pawing at the fence, he never put two and two and two together: he felt attended to, because the snarling sisters ensnared in the lazeretto next door were acutely aware of his every move, for no other reason then that they wanted to devour him!

3 initial digression to serve as a disclaimer

While it was perhaps trotsky’s destiny to by dumb luck survive the eventually manifest danger presented by these snarling sisters³, there was little else it can be said that trotsky was destined for, and though fatalism is inherently creepy and best left as subtext, trotsky’s role as the harbinger of your readership is only fitting due to his ability to stumble well.

For this reason readers should be dually warned that rooting for trotsky—like you would for a traditional protagonist—would be an exercise in masochism, but hoping for him to bumble his way near enough to some sort of spectacle that has primordial aspects, or allows for meaning to sprout up and do it’s temporal shimmy, is this, our fictional game.

4

Trotsky’s fourth favorite aunt was living for only a short spell in one of the second floor apartments and brought her boyfriend who was very affectionate with everyone, but perhaps more importantly, she brought her dog batman’s butler who was a mutt, and was to eventually be eternalized by an informal, earthen mound in the far corner of the backyard.

Batman’s butler was a true mutt. He looked like a mutt, acted like a mutt, slept like a mutt, sulked like a mutt, drooled like a mutt…he even had sad old eyes and a black ever-wet nose like a mutt. And this mutt-ness is in no way a commentary on the mix-breed makeup of the dog, but rather the stretching of the sound and evocation of the word “mutt” to perfectly embody this creature; to imply that mutt was indeed a phoneme in its description of batman’s butler, or rather, an ideograph, or whatever those linguists pluck from their tooshes.

But what a damned great, refined creature this mutt was with whom trotsky had the pleasure of spending his time! Part german shepherd and part golden retriever, batman’s butler had a rare temperament for an alert dog, and barked only once in 126 dog years. There was something distinctly noble, humble about this dog, and art used to muse when he was stoned that ‘old butt’ must be the re-incarnation of some old mongolian monk or something. In this lifetime, however, he was confined to being an overqualified “butt the mutt.”

This mutt was husky enough for young trotsky to ride him around like a horse, and trotsky did indeed ride batman’s butler around like some dashing rocinante before his well-documented decline, usually in pursuit of the neighborhood cat, slick-wing⁴, who was so nimble, so quick, she was to be an untouchable for the inseparable but rather incorrigible—by the cat’s likings—duo.

5

One spring Sunday morning, while Trotsky was in the backyard working hard to keep his bowels from moving so he wouldn’t have to climb the three-and-a-quarter flights of stairs to a bathroom and stop playing with his stick in the dusty dirt, something very predictable happened: a first-floor tenant of Petrouli’s, an analysand, ambled out of the gate at the rear of the large rectangular yard, leaving it slightly ajar.

Apparently, this addlepated convalescent (AC) was wending his way towards an appointment which he hoped would enable him to—with the help of his trusty psychoanalyst—peel back the blanket of disapproval he had thrown over his entire context. Due to the fact that the Doberwomen were well-trained to ignore tenants, in the self-obsessed trance that was his current life, it slipped the mind of the AC that these Doberwomen posed severe somatic danger to anyone but Petrouli and his co-tenants, and despite his instinctual familiarity with figurative blankets, the AC was of course unaware of that which the Doberwomen had draped over Trotsky, who was not at that moment visible, but whose codal groans were slightly audible from the other side of the fence.

So exit AC stage right frowards, off with the best of intentions towards himself, but in his wake was great potential for tragedy—although the Doberwomen were not yet aware of this, their accidental portal to freedom and yardmeat, too busy cleaning each other’s kooters.

By late morning, the entropy began by the unclosed gate was whispering and hissing about the contiguous yards; it was only a matter of moments...and soon the vernal wind was in the trees on the incline behind Art, Ali, and Trotsky’s home—we’ll call them the Madrigals for the sake of expedience; they were swayed even to their stubborn trunks, their young, green leaves whisked almost off their twiggy branches. The restless, pre-rain wind it was was whipping directionless, and the trees impatiently tossed about, darkening suddenly when what was minutes before a glorious welkin, gave way to the arrival of doomsday nimbus.

With one especially strong gust the gate to Petrouli’s backyard—which had been rocking tigerishly—flung completely open and hit the chain-linked fencepost with a loud “clanang!?...?”

The Doberwomen’s ears perked up. They looked at the open gate: dumbfounded…; they attempted to process this most exclusive occurrence. Then, all at once, as if enamored by a collective consciousness, they recalled the delectable olfactory idea of the small human being next door and broke into a joyous, frenzied dash, ravishing at the thought of Trotsky’s fleshy slightness. They ripped out of Petrouli’s yard through the gaping gate, veered around the Madrigal’s garden, shot across the driveway under the basketball hoop, and leapt into the yard where they were greeted by a viciously poised and hissing Slick-Wing, who distracted them for a crucial moment.

Trotsky was squatting in the far corner of the yard under the sour cherry tree with his arms wrapped around his knees, now beneath two figurative blankets⁵, groaning, waiting painfully in affected constipation as the less spritely colored cherries dropped at infrequent intervals around him. When he raised his glance up from the shuddering shadows beneath him to greet this explosive moment, he encountered the Doberwomen dashing towards him from across the small yard, their teeth unsheathed and drool flailing from their gums past their innocently flapping lips.

Trotsky’s reaction was portentous, but he was thrilled. As one free-falling sour cherry bopped him on the head, he wondered what had taken them so long…

6 explanation of episode castration

Please excuse me for this slight divergence, but what happens next is an extremely...heroic moment in the early life of toddler trotsky and involving batman’s butler, slick-wing, and trotsky’s fourth favorite aunt’s boyfriend. So much so that its telling would cast a looming shadow over trotsky’s childhood, his middle childhood, his later teenage years, even his early adulthood, none of which are exactly basking in glory. So we will skip over this occurrence with a light step and hope that we remember to fulfill it later on in this manuscript.

Ii. THREE MICROCONTEXTS OF DIVERSION

1

Art and allie had moved to j______ p____—a small, rough neighborhood in b_____—along with dozens of other former hippies in their mid to late twenties. Many couples included in this emboldened set were given to starting families, and so trotsky’s conception was imbibed into a sort of local baby boom. That trotsky was born into an abundance of playmates and playmates’ parents meant he rarely had a shortage of company, and ali’s friend and midwife, maddy ian, even brought her eight-day-old son marvin to trotsky’s birth, and before being able to utter a single comprehensive word, trotsky had become familiar with about a baker’s dozen of his playmates’ mothers’ breasts.

When trotsky was just a few touches older to the point where he could usually pour his own milk out of a carton without spilling it and his event memory began to stabilize somewhat, he often had members of this set over as playmates or vice versa, and for a time he imagined that he would enjoy their company outright. If he was hosting, he’d spend hours before the other child arrived delectating in advance on the delight the two of them could find, ordering and arranging their activities. If he was the visitor, he’d think about the perks of the space offered by his friend’s abode and its microcontext, imagining the types of native games particular to it that they would likely play.

2

When a local baby boomer (lbb) would arrive he would find trotsky in the laundry room that doubled as a playroom, sitting between binary phalanxes of good and evil, each composed of transformers, he-men and women, voltron, thundercats and exalted land animals molded after those existing in the triasic era up to ones that still roam the earth⁶. Trotsky—not looking up as knocking sounds of the clonic dryer masked the lbb’s entrance and even their first attempts at a greeting—appeared to be carefully inspecting the balance of the moral binary he sat amid.

But while trotsky and the lbb had already been exposed to an informal list of shared, communal values, there were distinctions between them that made the acting out of these types of moral dramas precarious, if not impossible.

Trotsky was accustomed to playing ‘judge’ when his parents had their frequent shouting matches that sometimes escalated—despite his efforts to point out who was in error and when—and therefore trotsky had become absurdly careful when weighing moral matters, as if the consequence for disrupting the brittle, abstract forms would descend on him.

There was also a question of education, a question his parents would later answer, but which was a constant for the lbb’s parents already. Four letter words were thrown around with a lot more frequency in the madrigal household then academic diction, ergo, trotsky: the careful & the crude, a byproduct of his environment.

For these reasons an allegorical play between toy symbols of degrees of morality was an inherently flawed idea, as it lead to irreconcilable disagreements and an eventual stalemate between he and an lbb. The moral value of a particular decepticon or velociraptor would be called into question, and while trotsky was quick to feel his playmate an epigone, his playmate was just as quick to label him a cursing fool.

3

Strangely enough, trotsky’s early, eventually dovetailing friend, whose parents were also not yet distinguished⁷, was an individual whom he could somehow enter an alternate moral realm with, one of fecund amorality. Let’s call him joseph segundo, or just joey is alright.

To trade sports cards with joey was uninteresting, despite how lucrative it was for trotsky, and so the two reveled in wild, crude fantasies in the carnal yardspace of human youth, with it’s single sour cherry tree and its tacitly attentive doberwomen.

4 brief parenthetical to introduce “eidetic”

(the most accurate word to describe these fantasies—that the author is aware of—would be an ‘eidetic,’ because both trotsky and joey’s minds were so often occupied in fantasizing, that while what follows to them was vivid and ‘present,’ there are many elements of it—most of its phrasing and its phrases were ready-made stock drawn mostly from their frequent, private, yet somewhat overlapping fantasies about mave and lyta, two of the three prettiest girls in their class, with lyta getting the nod between the pair, ever-so-slightly.)

                  TROTSKY:

      Let’s play Mave & Lyta.

                  JOEY:

            (Nods.)

TROTSKY AND JOEY:

(With fearful zeal)

      Oh no!                        

Sputtering around the yard.            

                  JOEY:

(Whispering almost without sound)

Shhhh, I hear them coming…(beat)…There she is!

(Imaginary) Mave appears, flickering armorclad: short steel shorts, a weirdly twin-conical golden top and carrying a crude, slim spear. Slightly behind is Lyta, donning a knee-length dress and a girdle strangely slung over her shoulder; she wields a librys.

TROTSKY:

Let’s make a break for the oasis!

(The boys scurry and dive towards a mostly unused picnic table wedged between the yard fence and the porch.)

Then, reaching the dirt in front of it, crawling on elbows and knees underneath. The smell of fresh bird corpses slowly flutters up towards the four combined nostrils of the two imaginary adventurers from underneath the porch.

                  TROTSKY:

They don’t have shields…

      JOEY:

(Holding his nose.)

Let’s surprise them and strike them with stones!

Both boys swivel around underneath the picnic table fitfully grabbing fistfuls of rocks. They slither out through opposite sides of the table and away from the smell of a stage of rot, engaging the porch/fence with their forearms before springing up off the seat and onto the table where they, crouched, let fly.

(Both chucking rock after rock across the yard.)

                  TROTSKY:

Aim for Mave. She’s the leader!

      JOSEPH:

But Lyta is getting closer…

      TROTSKY:

I’ll get her! Take this evil Lyta!

      IMAGINARY MAVE:

Hahahaha! You think your pitiful pebbles can effect us. Typical. Little boys are so…immature.

      IMAGINARY LYTA:

Aren’t they? As if…they’re even too scared to come down off that hill and tangle with us.

MAVE and LYTA turn their heads back and laugh with joyous cruelty together.

(Leaping down from the table)

      TROTSKY:

Engage!

But the boys criss-cross the yard, pursued by the imaginary mavens instead and clearly overmatched. They are eventually caught.

                  TROTSKY:

Joey help! Lyta’s got me and I can’t seem to escape. If I can just…

                  JOEY:

      …

TROTSKY continues to jump and dodge in a frenzy over in the solitary corner where Butt the Mutt was one day to be buried; Joey, towards the cherry tree, stops, bends down to pick up a fallen branch, produces a penknife from his pocket and begins striating a stick.

At this point the eidetic has bifurcated because joey was under the distinct impression that it was lyta’s lybris that he was so heroically dodging and jumping over.

A somewhat absurd amount of time later, trotsky realized from within his frenzy that neither joey nor mave were nearby. A quick glance at joey who had already tossed the notched stick and pocketed his penknife, triggered the immediate liquidation of both mave and lyta, and trotsky and joey—slumping slightly—stood still for a moment, all the stray balls lying around the yard seeming flat, the doberwomen sniffing and pacing in the next plot of yard.

5 brief, explanatory interlude

What saved trotsky’s anfractuous relationships with some of the lbb’s was simple: petty competition. At first in trading baseball cards, and later in various one-on-one games. Competing, the two could engage in a way where the tension of their differences enflamed the interpersonal currency within the spaces they shared, and as conflict was pretty much the point of competition, it did not hinder them.

6

When Trotsky arrived he found Emiliano (Emil) Bellamy in his room, baseball cards laid down in secretive tiers across the red oak floor facing away from him, sunlight arriving at an angle as if arranged for from a large, paned window, and marked silence. Composed for their age, Emil was intent on not being taken, confident that he would outwit this, his present foil. He glanced up through glasses that were clearly borrowed from someone’s grandmother (and yet had a particular panache) and greeted Trotsky, who was always a touch shier inside LBB’s houses, feeling like just a yegg, and looking, as usual, confused by something invisible.

Trotsky, not-so-swiftly, arrayed his cards under Emil Bellamy’s keen gaze and then they both fell into this, their element—there were observed formalities, a cultured exchange. The boys admired the other’s signature cards and took turns expressing said admiration, especially for those cards that were newly acquired, often questioning how the other had obtained them⁸. They chuckled over how cheaply they had been able to pry certain, valuable cards away from other ‘traders’ who only sought their pet players with no regard to the quality or rarity of the parting card(s).

Value-added factors⁹ involved:

The current popularity of a player

The inexplicable mystique of a particular card (individual or shared)

Any unintentional hilarity factors

Local, likeable heroes were elevated—though during this era there were mostly false heroes, often even disgracefully leaving for their richer rivals

Similarities between the position of the player and the preferred position of the trader

The boys, much like GM’s who’d played on the same team during their respective primes, got right down to business after the formalities elapsed.

—“What do you want for that Topps Ozzie Smith?” Asked Emil, his voice almost cracking on the question mark.—

—“Maybe…that Ricky Henderson “Stolen Base Leader” 5th year card.” Said Trotsky, hoping his voice had remained deadpan.—

For both of them, these requests were predictable. The challenge was balancing the deal. They slid these cards across the oak so they were sunlit. Emil knew he would need to add value.

—“i’ll throw in this bent Oil-Can Boyd card, and the Diamond Kings Strawberry.” Offered Emil, sliding the cards into the spot lit zone.—

—“i’ll take the Boyd, but keep Strawberry.”—

—“Yeah he’ll probably end up going to the dark side anyway.”—

—“So will Wade Boggs. That chicken-eating shit. I wish I liked that guy. Here, i’ll throw him in. Mattingly’s better anyways.”—

—“Deal?”—

—“Deal.”—

And just like that the decisive first round was through, with both Emil and Trotsky content, a balance in ‘value’ having been struck, and both having further catalogued a player they admired. Yet the reward for a rare flush trade was both a feeling of honor and an appetite, and both boys struck downstairs to the second floor for something to eat, for-the-moment-worthy Trotsky expecting something exotic, which was for Emiliano, the valiant LBB, to be perfectly mundane.

Returning to Emil’s room the light had shifted and so he flipped on the light, immediately abating the former mythical mystique in the room—neither boy seeming to notice.

7

Apparently, the inevitable return to the mundane was just the flick of a switch away, for the main curse of the world reached out to touch these two now. What was tension quickly lapsed into impending conflict, and while there was no drama, no thrown cards or destruction of property or even verbal or physical attacks, the impending conflict (of interest, of values, for resources) was uninteresting to trotsky and his bellamy, and so after a few rounds of failed trades, and with frustration building, they made off in separate directions, trotsky getting picked-up by ali who asked what was wrong and got no tangible response; meanwhile, emil relapsed back into his civil war phase.

Iii.    Fausto’s tall tale runs into a brick wall

1

Art and ali madrigal owned¹⁰ the now-colorful triple decker at 288 spring st., a robust rectangle of a building flanked by two other robust rectangles of buildings—all designed with a hefty touch of pragmatism. A commonplace throughout b_____ since the turn of the 20th century, triple deckers had allowed three immigrant families to share a single parcel of land, however they were now often characterized by their sagging porches, which bellied out at their centers and tilted towards the street. These sulky protrusions were allowed to droop until they had the dip of a belt-over beer gut—they were then promptly judged unsound by the local building authority and renovated . But once returned to level, the porches were no longer as engaging, were proud to the eye of the passerby. Art, who was in construction, kept 288’s porches tight but painted his house bright—celadon with red trim emerging from the more mundane, inviting facades to either side, both standard brown with white trim and leaning in.

These three rectangular prisms roughly capped the summit of a formidable hill made up largely of r______ puddingstone. Formed into steep drumlins during bygone glacial or subaqueous eras so long ago that human history is a single yawn in comparison, puddingstone put the “rock” in both r______ and w___ r______. A dim grey to gainsboro conglomerate, it is primarily distinguished by its small, pockmark-looking indentures, which call the moon to mind and are often volcanic pebbles, both mafic and felsic, imbedded into sandstone. Roughly fifty yards behind the triple deckers and on the other side of their common driveway, r______ puddingston broke through the earth. Although ‘broke through the earth’ is an admittedly dramatic way to describe bedrock, the girth of which is arguably five kilometers underfoot, but let’s just say this ubiquitous comglomerate boasted a handsome, albeit pockmarked, cliff face overlooking the neighborhood nursing home that no one visited.

2

Art and ali madrigal had converted the two, third floor apartments of 288 spring into one. With an ever-decreasing sliver of a view over the maple-tops of the west side of terrestrial r______, and enough space for a few small children¹¹, they thought to bear and raise a family within. The four remaining apartments were home to a disparate cast of characters, from the saintly, to the motley and back again.

Since trotsky’s birth inside apartment 3, apartment 2b had been rented out to the guamans and their son, fausto. Fausto was more than a half a dozen years trotsky’s senior, but was bemused by him while barely able to stand over him, and certainly welcomed him during weekday afternoons as a distraction from his homework. Trotsky, who was always courting the secretive realm, would regularly try and muffle the sound of the latch signifying the madrigal’s back door closing, creep down the stairs, and slip in through the guaman’s always-ajar door—often greeted by fausto’s smiling mother cava to the right in the kitchen, or occasionally by his paunchy father diego, who was usually in the front room watching futbol but would tenderly check in on his savant wife at work. If the kitchen was empty, trotsky simply turned left and walked down the hallway towards fausto’s closed door.

After his customary octadic knock admitted him, trotsky would usually leaf through fausto’s expansive collection of comic books. Fausto plucked out certain comics which he knew would disturb or delight trotsky. His expensive ones, however, were to be seen only from across the span of the room, so trotsky’s breath or the oil on his fingertips wouldn’t diminish their future value.

3

Somehow, the permanent inch-crack between the guaman’s back door and its frame seemed a pointed commentary on illusions of security, but through this telling slit came a continuous efflux out into the dusty, often-dark hallway, a steady offering of the scent which infused the would-be-stale air with a salty, profoundly hearthful warmth. Ali madrigal would often just shake her head as she ascended into and past this mind-blowing aroma with the family’s groceries, trying to identify the spices that when put together would blossom with such unity—often becoming slightly depressed with this, her ascendant ritual, when she could usually only pick out a parsley-like herb and a cayenne-like pepper, and perhaps some cumin.

For the most part, art and ali didn’t frequent the apartments they rented, mainly because of their undeniable status as ‘landlords.’ despite the below-market, stabilized rents they offered, ali’s fetching demeanor and art’s prompt and complete execution of any maintenance concerns, the awkward, ethereal barrier of distinction remained. But trotsky, who as a youth unwittingly ducked these invisible barriers, spent much time in most of these apartments, empyreal 2b in particular:

Trotsky accepted the ruby red kool-aid in a chilled glass he was offered by cava while in fausto’s room with wide eyes; she demurred his profusion of gratitude with an equally redundant, wonderfully full, forthright smile while fausto smirked with scorn at the easy admixture of trotsky’s idiot excess and his mama’s calm grace, irked to see her so overtly appreciated. As the door closed, trotsky resumed leafing through the semi-pornographic comics that a clearly amused fausto had handed him, unable to believe that something could taste so perfect or that a home could smell like this, reveling in and lip-stained by the redness and elated by its ambrosial sugary sweet, sipping and breathing in the savory musk of celestially stewing chicken while he feasted his eyes on the sacred, comic profanity.

4

If we can at least hypothetically accept the premise that most friendships involve a relatively equal exchange, then granted, one counter-weight for this seemingly lopsided friendship between fausto and his much younger neighbor was his bemusement towards trotsky’s naiveté. You see, it was one of fausto’s petty hobbies to feel trotsky out as the victim of one of his clever ‘storytellings.’ fausto teased credibility’s boundaries for these his eager ears, and while trotsky was swilling the end of his cool aid around in his glass and enthusiastically ogling an absurdly vivacious, scantily-costumed woman in one of fausto’s comics, fausto sometimes scratched his head and searched for his opening…

— “i ever tell you how i got this scar on my head?” —

— (shakes head horizontally) —

— “wanna know?” —

— (shakes head vertically) —

Fausto takes out a small, dark felsic stone that trotsky sees glint in the light for a flash. He has trotsky feel the scar on the back of his head, and then holds out the glassy black rock so trotsky can run his finger along its sharpest edge . Then he appears to match the edge with the scar it made.

— “see…it fits…” —

— “…” —

— it fell off the moon and hit me there on the head. Mi primo jorgito was out there in the yard with me and he saw…it just fell from outer space and hit me and bounced under the porch, where those blue birds that your cat kills are. Then it started bleeding and i had to get eight stitches at the hospital.—

At this point fausto adds another tactile dimension to his tale, passing trotsky the catlytic obsidian stone from the moon.

— “that’s what made it…” —

5

As Trotsky accepted the felsic stone into his hands and fingered it, his gaze abstracted as he searched into its obscure, translucent surface. He was already off and running with the words that had just left Fausto’s mouth. ‘How did the rock “fall” from outer space?’ It was quite obvious to Trotsky that it had fallen from the moon, and that some small child about his age who had been living there in a crater—hiding from the periodic moon missions of earthlings—had chucked it into the lighter air there off towards the Earth’s atmosphere.

This figment of an imaginary half-moon child—Trotsky called it “Skytrot” for the sake of expedience—tasked him for an origin myth and so Trotsky’s eyes glazed further over as he began to concoct:

‘Skytrot’s mom was living at the bottom of a crater and an astronaut named…maybe, Artimus, was hopping along the moon’s surface. He was hopping away from the space shuttle and the other astronauts--they were hopping off in other directions to take samples and explore stuff.

When Artimus looked back once towards the shuttle he tripped into…the canyon where…Alifatic, lived. He couldn’t stop rolling and bouncing until he got to the bottom and then he just lay there bruised and with his eyes closed for a while.

She came out to find him lying there discombobulated¹² in his dirty astronaut suit, asleep

When Artimus came to he was still on the moon and he saw a woman with skin the same color of his planet’s sky. Alifatic had never seen anything like this earthling. He talked to her about all kinds of new things and even taught her to fly the space shuttle when the other astronauts were far enough away. He also warned her about humans.

Later they went into Alifatic’s cave and did that sneaky thing adults do to make Skytrot.

When Artimus had to go Alifatic was not sad because she was used to being alone. And soon she had his child.

Skytrot grew up on the moon and when he was older wanted to contact people from Earth but his mom wouldn’t let him. They hid in their cave whenever a moon mission came, and Alifatic snuck out to see if Artimus had returned, but she made Skytrot promise he wouldn’t follow; he took promises very seriously. She always came back a little sad, but eventually, after so many fruitless visits by earthlings she stopped checking at all and they just stayed inside their mooncave.

Skytrot would stare at the Earth, and when it was a circle he felt like he could almost touch it. He wanted to go there and find out what all the different colors meant. He wanted to see what his father Artimus was doing and why he never came back. He never wanted to see these shades of grey anymore.

Because Trotsky had promised he wouldn’t talk to humans, he started to realize he would never get to touch Earth. He began to throw rocks.

Like people who get really good at skipping rocks across the water, Skytrot got really good at throwing rocks at the Earth. He practiced and practiced until he could throw them for kilometers. He always felt stronger when the Earth was full and looked closer, and he would run and turn around a few times and hurl a moonstone as hard as he could and then fall down while watching it fly and trying to guide it with his mind.

Then one day a space mission came and he asked Alifatic if it was OK if he went and checked for his dad. She said that Artimus had warned her about humans and that they should never make contact with them.

— “But if my father is human, then what am I?” Skytrot asked.—

— “You’re like me. We’re moon beings.” Alifatic answered.—

— “If my father was human, then why did he tell us not to talk to humans?”—

— “He said they would never leave us alone.”—

— “Like him?”…“Am I bad because I’m human?” —

— “You’re not half bad.” Said Skytrot’s mother.—

Skytrot obediently waited until the mission left and when it was almost out of sight he came out of the shadow of their crater. The Earth was full and as close as it ever got, making the sun look really small. Skytrot was angry. He ran and twisted, chucking a rock harder than he ever had toward the space ship with the Earth behind it. The rock went hundreds of kilometers and hour but missed the ship and headed towards Earth. Skytrot threw it so hard that it went all the way towards Earth and towards the continent of N____ A______. Trotsky’s mind guided it through the shield that surrounds Earth and it went to a place called J______ P____, B_____, where it fell out of the sky and hit Fausto Guaman in the head and then bounced down next to some dead bluebirds that Slick-Wing killed.

Fausto had to get eight stitches.’

As Trotsky’s eyes lost their glaze, he could almost see his reflection within the obscure, felsic sheen.

6

That night at dinner, arms on the table over chicken drumsticks, mashed potatoes and steamed kale, trotsky recounted to the two faces of his parents the symbiotic fictional organism which we’ll now entitle skytrot and the chucked obsidian. As trotsky unveiled his lore, the faces of his parents passed from mild but guarded amusement to consternation the moment the story arrived at earth.

Art’s in particular drew stock stolid; trotsky felt the lambency about his story flicker and then dissipate in the face of their consternation. Feeling all of off balance, even with his aft against the chair-back, trotsky grew defensive and produced the actual 'moonstone,' which of course--as it was only a felsic puddingstone pebble--only worsened art and ali's consternation.

— “this side fits perfectly into fausto’s scar…” —

Art and ali, interested until they were asked to stomach the tale's etiological element, turned to each other significantly, continued to eat, and set trotsky adrift.

Later that night after he had been tucked under his blankets, he overheard his parents’ kitchen discussion about whether it was such a good idea for trotsky to be playing with a boy that much older than himself. He cringed at the thought of his mother, accurately imagining her pouting frown and the long, meaningful shakes of her head as he heard her add, without irony:

— “and i think they’ve been giving him kool-aid down there.” —

Iv. AN ABASHER AND NEVER REALLY KNOWING JASMINE

1

Trotsky readied himself to be abashed as he shuffled down the back stairs. Ali had called to check if the Spitz’s had enough eggs to spare two. They didn’t just then, but - - - - Spitzt¹³ had invited Trotsky over to play board games with Jasmine and her older sister Nicole. After an eggless breakfast, here came Trotsky.

Trotsky went to knock on the Spitz’s warped aluminum door, raising his hand and making a loose fist. Bearing in mind the sound the door would undoubtedly make (kkher?-eeeehrnfh!) As it dented in and popped out after even the lightest of knocks, he had a second thought.

Between Trotsky's humdrum first thought: preparing to knock on the Spitz's timpanic apartment door, and his second thought: one of instinctual hesitance and not yet fully formed, the door handle turned with a practiced and perfect silence. The Spitz's apartment door crept open just enough for him to see one of Jasmine’s bright eyes and half of her toothy smile. Then, the aperture remained, but it was momentarily empty as her feet could be heard scampering away to her room at the end of the hallway.

Trotsky now resumed readying himself to be abashed: he squinted and looked down at his feet as if practicing, then he reached for the doorknob and half-expected to see Leo Spitz already there hovering over him half-heartedly, but all there was was the patriarch’s cigarrette smoke now beginning to weave out above Trotsky through the aperture and into the hallway...

2 an interruption to explain trotsky's mysteriously truncated relationship with jasmine

Jasmine had been born a day before trotsky, but they had another circumstantial link in common: their fathers, in dogged pursuit of headway out in the rough and tumble world, often returned home and sighed so deeply, inhaling so lengthily, that there was little remaining air for those same loved ones whose dependency sent them back out into that cold world. So jasmine also appreciated the feeling of sanctity when out in the backyard of 288 spring, despite or some how because of the doberwomen.

When the two played, jasmine usually took charge. She would play with trotsky’s curls, pinch his cheeks, and make funny faces right up close to his so they’d touch noses. Besides an underlying fondness for one another, the two merely tolerated each other: trotsky was vexed by the intensity of jasmine’s attention, and jasmine by trotsky’s spurious aloofness. Unlike with some of the lbbs—there were rarely any hard feelings between trotsky and jasmine, in part because both expected little of the other.

Jasmine often wanted to play doctor and feel trotsky’s heart bouncing around in his chest and then, around the corner on the picnic table where the parents wouldn’t see—and, perhaps as importantly, where the doberwomen lost interest in their scents—she’d ask him to be the doctor. While jasmine was with eerie cheer directing their medical activities despite being the patient, trotsky often became spiritually disheveled, wishing he could take her up into the small urban forest plot and further from the site of her trauma. There perhaps they could run free in the abundant air begun by the cliff overlooking the nursing home, dodging the trees and rusted-out cars and she could pretend to be just herself. Yet as jasmine ran show, they usually stayed at the table, and trotsky bit his lip and was at least glad to have gotten her out of that apartment, where her older sister nicole, taking more after her mom and the secondary brunt of leo’s angry antics, was already one eighth invisible. While he couldn’t imagine someone as buoyant and bossy as jasmine starting to sink into omission, trotsky also wished they could play together, in childhood, outside the shadow of leo spitz’s cheshire grin.

1 continued...

Trotsky slipped in underneath the weaving smoke and secured the door behind him, heeding that the beveled head of the latch bolt barely clicked back into its hole in the strike plate. By their giggles, jasmine and nicole were down at the end of the hallway in the room they shared, but trotsky feared offending his abasher, and because he was also not necessarily in a rush to go into the kitchen where the unpleasant smoke was still originating, our unwitting protagonist hesitated for a second time. Trotsky stood, stilled, just inside the spitz’s threshold.

Just then - - - - came out of the bathroom across the hall...her motion was towards the kitchen and trotsky followed her wavering outline to the edge of the room where he noticed her complete disappearance in the sour languorousness of the swirling cigarette smoke, and the seemingly visible profusion of anger emanating from her husband.

For once leo spitz was not expecting him, and so his being abashed was indefinitely postponed…

3 another interruption to explain a typical instance of abashment

Trotsky would knock despite the sound, hearing - - - -’s scurrying shuffles come closer, the deadbolt turn, and then:

    — “- - - - git! I got it.” —

Then - - - -’s scurrying shuffles back away and some slow, sauntering steps. The door handle would turn and the door fly open. Trotsky’d enter only to see leo’s, pear-shaped back side, returning in a bossman-casual wobble toward his aluminum chair at the circular, formica table with a lit cigarette in one of the three holsters of a glass ashtray.

   — "so trot, what in hell can i do fuhyuh? Ya need some sugah a something (stings trotsky with a knowing look, and then slowly)…oah didja come to see my doahtah?" —

This last interrogative, leo spitz would—leaning in toward him—level at him complete with trademarked chesire grin and two invasive, bleary-eyes, one of which would never fail to wink at least once. It was this jesting tawdriness that would abash trotsky so; he was unsure about being let in on such a bleak secret; his eyes downcast towards the black and white, he would reply with uncharacteristic meekness:

    — "i was wondering if jas’d like to…" —

Or

    — "is she done with her homework yet?" —

Or

    — "can i get two tablespoons of baking powder?" —

1 again continued

Leo sat over a plate of food, dwarfing it. At his left was the glass ashtray with one cigarette almost to its filter and another mashed out in the tray. Today Leo Spitz—who had one foot in the door of the laundromat business—had received a public relations setback. One of his under-the-table, non-citizen workers had supposedly mixed the reds and whites of the husband of one of his more gregarious patrons¹⁴. He was soon to spur himself into a bout of shouting and probable violence. In fact, had Trotsky not been invited down¹⁵, it would have started precisely after he finished this—his second—cigarette.

Trotsky--timely for once though not of his own accord--stepped into the smoky room with care, only coming down with his feet on black squares. As he took his last careful step he was perceived, peripherally: Leo was noticeably unnerved. He cast a frightful gaze at someone to whom Trotsky was perfectly invisible. - - - - allowed him nothing, no consolation. Leo Spitz sighed profusely.

Mustering only a half-cocked grin and with no imposition he curtly/gruffly asked ‘what Trotsky was there for’ and told him to ‘go about it then.’

In this moment of unease, Trotsky’s abasher betrayed himself. The tank of worry which usually fuelled Leo’s explosions, imploded; his head bowed, hardly, as he mashed out that second cigarette.

At precisely the same, stunned instant, Trotsky turned to see Leo's wife became a flesh-flickering, an almost complete, unprecedented visage in the kitchen’s corner. As spaced out as he often was, Trotsky could not ignore the momentous correlation between Leo's defeat and the infilling of his wife's silhouette. And while he had no idea that his status as the landlord's son had been put in play by - - - - to empower him as an ideal peacekeeping puppet, or for what purpose, or more importantly how successful or for how long this ceasefire would last, Trotsky played a passive role in the temporary neutralization of his abasher, in preventing him from abusing his millennia-old position as ‘man of the house,’ at least until he’d gone.

Trotsky turned away towards the girl’s room to go play a seemingly never-ending board game called Monopoly, while his abasher, Leo Spitz, sat almost collapsed in a pile of restraint, in mirror opposition to the last of his cigarette smoke, slinking in twists, upwards, above his now colder plate of food.

4 aftermath

That night, Trotsky lay awake ear up against the window screen beside his bed, listening to the sound of a door being kicked repeatedly and the three Spitz females screaming.

— "All ‘er husband’s clothes ah pink and she’s gonna tell everybahdy…and you wanna have lil Mr. Fricken Madrigal ovah fa boad games!?" —

Then a sustained explosion of sound as the door and then tables and chairs crashed and other objects smashed against the walls and dropped to the floor.

Then seconds later to his parents, scrambling, awoken by the ruckus they realized was inside 288.

Then to the continued screaming of Jasmine and Nicole.

Then to Art’s dazed but driven descent down the back stairs.

Then to the building's back door slam as a much larger Art had sent Leo out into the spring night to “cool off.”

Then minutes later, to Ali and - - - -’s wistful conversation off their third floor porch, where they smoked¹⁶ and - - - - Spitz, uncharacteristically, cried.

Then hours later, Trotsky considered Jasmine: curled up under her sister in a corner of their room, the Monopoly game from early afternoon left out and now turned upside down, paper money and useless pink laundry all over.

V. SLICK-WING RENAMED AFTER FALL; MOSES MOSES GHOSTED

1

Trotsky’s fourth favorite aunt and her boyfriend, mainstay inhabitants of 1b, were splitting up after what had been a not-very-tumultuous relationship. They’d begun to bicker about silly yet acidic things, like who was the better masseuse, or why when it rained they never made it to the movies despite planning to on sunny days, or why they’d named their dog batman’s butler and not albert.

Before they knew it, their subconscious began to instigate corrosion, and they’d awake at the dregs of morrow as if not having slept, having dreamt horrific earthquake bridge disasters or funneling phenol wounds and 1b swirled into a bleary hotbed of insults and insinuation.

Both trotsky’s fourth favorite aunt and her boyfriend dreaded moving on, and as young adults drew at least conscious positives from living literally underneath big brother and sister figures in art and ali, and being around their now three boys: trotsky, abram & colm. With the exception of colm—who was but a just-born bundle at that time—the madrigals loved their shared dog batman’s butler, who split his time between apartments 1b and 3. Nevertheless, the now threadbare pair gave a week’s instead of a month’s notice—and in fact the procession of intended space continued to shrink even as that never-ending week somehow passed as though it were a day—before two moving trucks, one reading “zulu bullhorn chest moving” and the other “herculean taskmasters,” pulled up in front of 288 spring in synchronicity, whisking they and their separate belongings off perfunctorily on a breezy spring weekday morning, leaving batman’s butler to the madrigals, who immediately foreshortened the mutt’s name.

2 trotsky’s subplot

Trotsky clutched fistfuls of Butler’s lengthy nape hair neck as the mutt scurried around and around the wooden beam near where the seasonal wood stove would have been if it were not spring; then within the swallow legs of the kitchen table¹⁷; past the kitchen and into and through the only carpeted room in the apartment where Trotsky and Abram slept in a bunkbed pushed up against the near wall; then through the bathroom—Butler clawing at the floor tiles to keep upright; through Art & Ali’s bedroom and slowing slightly as they circumvented Colm’s crib and back to where they started. Trotsky dismounted and they conspired to corner her, but she simply leapt over the nearest piece of furniture and continued away from her pair of inept pursuers.

3

That next week, ali—having enough empathy for a whole family of five—nursed both trotsky’s fourth favorite aunt and her ex-boyfriend’s emotional wounds over the telephone. While ali had anticipated problems in their relationship, she had been surprised that they had never seemed to emerge until just recently, and then was subsequently surprised at how quickly the relationship had finished unraveling.

Art was between building contracts so he was able to spend the mornings of a week in the vacant apartment getting it ready for its next inhabitants, before taking lunch and retiring to his in-house office to lay out the excavation and foundation timeline for the twelve low-income units he was to build in d_________. In five mornings he was able to repair the few creaky cabinets, re-grout the bathroom tiles, and buy and install a new oven, as well as spackling the many holes from all of their wall-hangings, and when they dried, sanding them down and then slapping a fresh coat of white paint on the walls and ceilings. On friday over lunch he wrote up a vacancy ad for the next day’s newspaper. It read:

2br 1ba on top of a hill in j______ p____. Hrdwd fl, access to 2 shared porches, additional storage and washer/dryer in basement, and use of back yard. Kids/pets ok. No smoking inside. $425 + util. Contact owner directly: 524-____.

Since they only got a few applicant tenants, the choice was simple, as art was predisposed towards families. He liked them from the perspective that they often made friendlier, less-likely-to-vacate tenants, and in general, more interesting neighbors. Of the three applicants, one was an unpublished writer of fiction with neither a day job, a co-signing sugar mama or a potential roommate. Other applicants were a pair of crapulous male college students who smelled hung-over but exuded empty, excessive confidence that they were ideal tenants because of…, and a mighty rasta trumpet player named moses moses with his younger wife and small child. The child meant additional lead proofing, but this was offset by the rasta with the redundant biblical name’s ability to expose his trio of boys to some sound live music.

4 trotsky’s subplot continues

Trotsky and Butler took a water break, and Trotsky brought his plastic cup over to where his now full-time companion lapped into his red bucket so they could commune. Butler, the leaping, twisting catcher of Frisbees and Trotsky, a novel ballplayer already with both his hands and, especially, his feet; they both contemplated Slick-Wing’s coordination:

— ‘…’ —

— ‘…’ —

Niether couldn’t comprehend it. They weren’t close.

While they were failing to comprehend Slick-Wing’s coordination, she walked by within two meters of the inferior pair without hurry and with tremendously utter feline swagger¹⁸, each weightless paw-step an earmark to the elusive historical utility of her species. Slick-Wing fulfilled all these original archetypical roles, except perhaps the last:

Slayer of zokers - niether mice nor rats dared to come within an eighty-five meter radius around 288 spring st any more; needing a hobby, she’d taken to leaping towards the sky and grabbing birds out of it, then toying with them until they died, and storing them neatly under the porch like dolls

Grain protector - so obviously the madrigals never worried about rodents in their pantry anymore

Goddess - she was being distinctly worshipped in this very, albeit fictional, moment

Eventual pet of the humans - the only problematic part of her traditional identity; she seemed to not except this designation, and while drinking the Madrigal’s water and chomping their barely-delectable cat-food, she acted as if it were they who were unnecessary; the Madrigals, however, accepted her for what she was, wild—although Ali did wish she were a tad more pet-able

5

It wasn’t long before moses moses was lumbering up a flight of the back stairs to play his trumpet off the back of the second floor porch¹⁹, often but at inconsistent intervals. He crooned out over the yard and projected his sound well past the nursing home porches and into the eardrums of even the hard of hearing there, and above through the reaching branch-tips of the forest plot, and peripherally into the neighboring yards of the two flanking triple deckers. The doberwomen resented this initially and added their chorus of barks; then even they realized the sure organization of this new noise and were placated into an almost-peaceful state. Moses moses would play for a few mournful hours then turn in into the hallway, lope down the back stairs into his family’s apartment, and often mute his horn and keep at it inside 1b.

Moses moses muted his horn despite not needing to worry about waking up his young daughter because she had gone deaf as a toddler due the abundance of lead paint chips that had found their way into her mouth at the last house where they had lived. She—why don’t we call her naima—always saw her stark father with the muted horn to his mouth, but couldn’t remember the sound it made or be woken up by its muffled blasts. Taking after her mother, she loved to draw constantly and was often saturated in half-finished crayon-made masterpieces which were hung all over the kitchen with tape or magnets.

Naima’s mother, who had her surname “bertha” shortened, somehow affectionately, to “bird” by moses moses, struggled more openly with a sense of guilt surrounding naima’s disability, simply because her art was visual. The doleful fact bled deeply into even the warm colors of bird’s palate, which she mixed and motioned onto the canvas while her daughter was at school, and when someone—knowing about naima—looked back and forth at bird and her canvass, there was an unavoidable propinquity. The same common tragedy also breathed a deep, dank duende²⁰ into moses’ nodding notes, but since there was no plasticity for comparison and always a line of movement, only a particular type of synesthete would be able to confirm the similarities existing within the couple’s tonal palate, and none were on hand.

Despite naima’s “disability,” her self esteem and mental state were remarkable, and she thrived in an inclusion class at school. Besides a shyness of minor note²¹, naima beamed with a booming silence. Her eyes teased and peered into and at the same time around and up towards where another’s gaze came from when their eyes met hers. It was as though her parents’ arts were conversely emanating from her mind all the time, or maybe, improbably, it was just trotsky who saw her in this light, for when trotsky was around the young child he felt proud and didn’t know why, and found her contralto attempts at stringing phrases together to be almost as raw as the riffs her dad scorned from the ether.

6 trotsky’s subplot continued

Feeling the relief of temporary defeat, Butler and Trotsky wandered into Art & Ali’s room, where Colm, only a few weeks old, reached and gargled, staring at nothing as if it were everything. Ali was studying on their bed, having just nursed her third babe into a thoughtful stupor.

Trotsky looked at Colm between the bars as what appeared to be frustration flashed across his little brother’s face: he was unable to bend nothing/everything to his mystical will. His big brother stared in wonder, forgetting about the household Goddess, and in doing so tacitly signaling Butler’s naptime.

Suddenly Colm’s eyes widened to their ability and he appeared pleased—a moment later he was sleeping.

Trotsky, his active obsession with a Goddess having been shattered by a newborn’s gaze, moved through time dazed as he left the room in which he and his brothers were born. Something about the stillness of the air made him turn to his left, and with the porch door open he was blinded momentarily as the low sun peered under the lip of the roof. When he reconfigured his vision he noticed that there was indeed a slight breeze, and that there she was.

Trotsky thought to woof for his loyal companion, but was transfixed forward, dumbfounded past the ability to utter. Into the sunlight he reached up toward Slick-Wing with one hand as she hovered by, becoming herself a blinding vision over her outlines, as her body above mostly-eclipsed the sun. Slick-Wing showed not a trace of fear of this boy who spent much of his leisure time²² hunting her, despite her precarious perch on the third floor porch railing. Like a squinting zombie, Trotsky reached out with both hands now towards this apparition of Slick-Wing, realized. Vaguely, he processed that she seemed open to the possibility of being touched by him for the very first time in both of their lives—and didn’t process²³ that it had coincided with the sudden disruption in his, a primary devotee’s, worship. Trotsky’s hands floated closer and he became conscious of her acquiescence. He felt her soft fur brush against the back of his right hand, and as his left hand began to sweep across her there was suddenly only air and blinding sun: Slick-Wing had fallen.

Trotsky’s captivation quickly became paralysis; he stood, stunned.

Art found his oldest son however long later, looking like he was holding his breath and with pupils which had almost completely eradicated his irises. Sensing something unfortunate, he asked Trotsky pointedly:

— “What’s wrong?” —

Trotsky pointed up over the railing.

Art looked out across the street then, down over the railing and saw the mound of cat below. For the whole neighborhood:

— “Holy shit, Trotsky just threw Slick-Wing off the fuckin’ porch.” —

With this he stormed past Trotsky and down the front stairs and Ali came out of their room.

A full twenty minutes later Art came back upstairs. Trotsky and Ali were standing near each other inside; Trotsky, now at least partially sensible. Art spoke to his wife.

— “She’s gone.” —

Trotsky bowed his head down slightly.

Also expecting this short independent clause to denote death in the form of a euphemism, Ali let out a knowing nasal sigh, and with furrowed brow:

— “Did you bury…” —

— “I mean she’s moved already and I can’t find her.” —

— “What?” —

— “Fucking nine lives Al; I don’t know.” —

7

After Moses Moses had endeared himself to each and every inhabitant of 288 Spring St., had begun to teach Abram the trumpet at regular intervals, and had been getting clean to the point where his old band-mates were seeking him out for gigs, he was suddenly gone.

As he waited for traffic to part in front of him on the rougher side of J______ P____ directly in front of the Police Station, two younger men who had been pursuing him—unbeknownst to Moses Moses—for days, came up to him and began stabbing him until he was only a body.

At the funeral that weekend, staring at what Moses Moses’ had become, Trotsky thought the horn placed to the right side of his coffin looked more alive than he did, as did his little brother Abram. After all, it had been played vigorously less than a week before and hadn’t quite lost its luster like its master had—and, even as a mere object it looked as though it gleamed in anticipation of Moses Moses’ two great hands again raising it to their lips.

Art spoke to Moses Moses’ friends but they had no answers, and didn’t seem about to do anything. Ali cried with Bertha, and took a sullen Naima for a while, passing Colm to Trotsky. Abram was to eventually inherit Moses Moses’ trumpet, along with its mute, from someone no longer named Bird.

8 trotsky’s subplot softly resolved

Deep into that night—long after Ali and Art had discussed both what Trotsky’s punishment would be and how to help alleviate his feelings of second and third-ness²⁴, Trotsky lay wide awake and still somewhat petrified until Slick-Wing came out of the dark of his room to nestle down on his ear, sending Trotsky off like a shot into a vast and wonderfully darker darkness where his subconscious seemed to await him with open arms.

9

A short time later and there was a ghost in moses moses’ household. Or rather, another rasta—rounder around the belly, less proud of posture and unable to play the trumpet—was ghosting him. Soon the man, known as dibs²⁵, had moved in and trotsky was horrified that moses was murdered and now imitated. He had some of his first despicable thoughts as a result. Whenever trotsky encountered this man he imagined how he could facilitate his leaving, even hoping he would follow his predecessor into nothingness. But dibs did not die as he was already, primarily a ghost, and he just continued to ghost moses moses until naima got tired of him and drew a picture of him being kicked out of a door with “1b” over it by a big red boot. Bertha told him she wanted him out, and she and her daughter began to try and make it on their own, in moses moses’ wake.

Vi. PARIS AND TROTSKY BUILD A FORTIFIED WATCHTOWER ON THE CLIFF

1

Paris wrote and drew holding the pencil firmly in his fist. He fit it into a crevasse of his palm, and wrapped it up with his right hand so only the sharpened point poked out from underneath. When touching pencil to paper, paris leaned over the page until his left cheek almost touched the desk to access proper leverage, and to view his handiwork from this²⁶, his acutely preferred angle. All the teachers he and trotsky shared at the walt elias disney elementary school on the edge of r________ and d_________ would try and correct paris’ ‘bad habit,’ even keeping him in from recess to punish his refusal. Yet paris persisted in writing as he always had, carving out his rotund letters and pictorial sentences as if into stone.

An especially wily kid, paris had developed a thick skin as a result of the sporadic moves of his mom cassie and her often man jax minor, yet this adaptive persona was uncalloused as a result of his creative output down various avenues.

Paris, cassie & jax knew that apartment 1a, 288 spring st. Would not be their final address, but both paris and trotsky’s parents approved of their sons’ friendship, as they had a bevy of overlapping interests, and so trotsky and paris had themselves fortunate neighbors for a space.

2

Both trotsky and paris found early-mid elementary school to be a cinch. They both took to their classwork with ease and after much prodding from their parents usually completed their homework as well. Their fast friendship—which had been solidified and sharpened in the back yard under the doberwomen’s watch and with fiercely intense and competitive physical games—translated into an accession through recess yard politics. Both remained outside the dominant kickball game for only a matter of weeks despite hailing from a lowly grade, and soon thereafter both boys found their separate ways into the top of the kicking order: trotsky—who had been playing soccer since he could walk—could kick the ball far and true; paris—who could later in life do a back-flip from a standing position—could with facility dodge even the hardest-thrown peg attempts. Once he was on the base paths, trying to get paris out was a foregone travesty.

On their very first day in this game, trotsky played the then-best kicker sufficiently deep to right field by the basketball hoop, and easily basket-caught his booming homerun kick as it fell from the blinding sky, first covering his eyes to understand the drop on it. He then proceeded to seal his selection as his subsequent kick had sent the same opponent scurrying after the ball, only he lost it in the sun and it hit him, causing him to peter off balance and spill hilariously as trotsky walked leisurely around the bases, the ball bouncing off sideways towards the other kickball game. Paris was pure oddity: he didn’t even bother to kick the ball hard, basically bunting in order to prolong the fun he would have on the base paths. No matter how close someone got, and no matter how hard they hurled the vermillion ball at him, they missed. And the things his body did to make them miss! Spread-eagling his legs at head-height, crouching on a dime until he was knee-high, leaping in stride off either foot, appearing to change direction midair or becoming gumby-like at the hips; paris was the friskiest thing that even tenured teachers had ever seen on this school’s base paths, and all this transpired with a mocking playfulness which endeared him to almost anyone concerned—except perhaps those with ambition that were skipped over when other kids offered paris the option of cutting them in line just so they could see more of these, his frisky antics.

Not long after, trotsky and paris were default captains, as it was understood that for the game to be close they needed to be separated regardless of their inferior ages, and indeed paris could sometimes track down trotsky’s home run blasts, and trotsky was so familiar with paris’ movements from the thousands of times they’d thrown balls/rocks/sticks/chairs/bikes/etc at each other in the back yard, that he could sometimes anticipate where paris’ body might end up and graze him with the kickball.

3

As it was a post time-change friday, and trotsky and paris had some shaved daylight to work with, the necessity arose for some sort of production to be born. The nerdo nifferson cartoon strip—their last stab at killing time out on the picnic table—was abandoned when they grew tired of caricaturing these poor fictional figments of their collective imaginations²⁷ to death, and reverted back to drawing comic book heroes, their recourse when uninspired. But the two did not lose faith in what they didn’t know then was ‘art’ when once-good ideas became stale, they remained enamored by the process of creation in general, merely needing new venues to break their steadfast.

— “hey, i’m kinda bored a drawing wolverine, you wanna go fuck around with shit up in the woods?” —

—  “yeah sure; let’s go.” —

Trotsky and paris left the yardtime and walked between two cars parked underneath the regulation basketball hoop which they knew they’d be able to use one day, but which for now only loomed over them uselessly. They crossed the neighbor’s driveway and scrambled up the loose ground and past the old oak from which, on a dispirited branch, hung the trailing ends of a senselessly severed rope swing²⁸. Soon they were in the urban forest plot, and began scanning the area for anything changed: there was a single, tread-less truck tire, a new pile of glass shards next to a puddingstone boulder and acorns everywhere. Cat-wary squirrels scrambled about in the branches above them, regarding the two boys in a primordially caustic fashion despite the sheer abundance of what they were collecting, and the boys current disinterest in acorns.

After manipulating the doors of the same old rusted-out cars, kicking through the discarded periodicals for anything spicy, and throwing acorns at a target and each other, paris and trotsky ended up on the cliff overlooking the nursing home, which housed who knew how many peoples’ grandparents. They both grew pensive.

— “man, I hope my grandma never end up in a place like that. And if she do, imma visit her even if it stinks in there.” —

— “why do old people smell anyway?” —

— “…it’s probably not they fault…” —

— “…yeh…maybe it’s the food they feed them down there.” —

— “like that shit they feed us tuesday’s for school lunch.” —

— “yeh…prolly is the food.” —

The two crept closer to the cliff’s edge. It wasn’t the type of fall that would kill you, but it was hard to imagine not breaking some bones, and they both felt the queasy tightening at the base of their scrotums as they looked down the sheer, pockmarked face. It is likely at that very moment they both began to prematurely contemplate not their rise, but their eventual decline. They were unafraid, but felt the continuance of a gut-wrenching sympathy for those who had long ago gone over the edge, into the protracted frazzle of adulthood—and in their gallant but muddled minds—onto a sort of invisible conveyor belt which delivered them eventually into white walled, rubber-roofed nursing homes with unnecessarily large, often-flooded parking lots, where ducks swam and splashed unmolested for days.

While paris and trotsky may or may not have been following this same line of thought, they both tightened themselves from the middle and became frightfully determined to protect these olid, ill-fed and abandoned folks. They agreed: ‘we’ll build a fort, and given our perch just beyond the cliff face, it will serve as a fortified watchtower.’

4

Imbued with a sense of purpose which was to abandon both for long stretches in coming years, they somewhat formally²⁹ petitioned Art to bring them certain types of scrap wood from his construction site. Art, impressed by their respective demeanors and always eager to aid in others’ enterprise, went to his jobsite early the next morning and salvaged some dumpster-bound scraps for them; he brought them home in the back of his pick-up truck before the dreamers were even awake, surely still conjuring up fortified watchtowers from whatever substance one finds in dreams.

Still drowsy and ignoring calls to breakfast, the two boys dragged pieces of non-rectangular plywood, some strapping scraps, and a bunch of broken two-by-fours to the site where the fort was to be built, and piled them separately, and as neatly as was possible. They had during the evening before—just after their idea had spawned—discovered a small area of earth without too much bush cover, definable by the connect-the-dot trapezoidal perimeter of four adolescent pines and a thick maple tree that was nestled into a further, two meter high outcropping of puddingstone behind the fort, which provided it cover from blindside attackers coming out of the urban forest plot. After they’d emptied Art’s pick-up, they ate hurriedly and with disinterest, and returned through the urban forest plot with clipboards, before spending much of what remained of the weekend working out the functional details, based on their supplies.

Fully enamored by the desire to work towards their plans, school—which was normally a swift, dull blur—became a purgatorial nightmare in extra-slow motion. Even recess was a wallow-pit. Each day they went straight from the school bus, around the house, and into the urban forest plot, beginning the many tasks involved in building, heaping handful after armful of solicitude on their emerging creation, often with their backpacks still on. Ali and Cassie, chuckling in wonder over the boys’ drive, decided Ali would bring them snacks on Monday and Wednesday, and Cassie on Tuesday and Thursday.

Their first weekdays were spent chopping away the thicket that was within the fort’s blueprint and as briskly as possible hauling it in the building’s bumpy wheelbarrow with its almost-flat tire to a sizeable compost pile in the corner of the garden next to the basketball court. They soon got better at stabilizing the wheelbarrow on the steep slope near the oak with the limply hanging rope, and only spilled their contents twice and early. Pretty soon the fresh dirt shone through their outline, which they further flattened and then raked.

Next the two went about puzzling up the structure. Trotsky was practiced and steady with the twelve ounce hammer he’d used before at Art’s jobsites, while Paris was a more apt twine tier and could get higher up in the saplings if it was necessary to hold a board or beam in place as they were fastening. Silence was the working dialect so as not to upset their brimming minds, and although their paces were quite different—Trotsky’s a sort of airy plod quickened deceptively by his enthusiasm, and Paris’ a gritty grip of the moment’s doings emphasized by an occasional flourish of quick motion—their pace had been denominated: the neighbors’ energies harmonized in time’s sweet-song accompaniment of the intent.

The only outside help Paris and Trotsky required to complete their three piecemeal walls was for Art to cut a 4’ by 3’ rectangle off of the corner of an almost rectangular piece of plywood. They initially proposed to carefully use his table saw, but Art said he’d need to do it for them, and promptly did. They used this rectangular absence as their front doorway, with the back door being a quick climb up over the puddingstone wall, with its pockmarks providing a convenient abundance of footholds. For a roof they hosed off a moldy blue tarp they found in 288 Spring’s basement, tying twine through its corner grommets; standing on the two milk crates they’d previously brought up to sit down on when they broke for snack, they could quick-up their temporary ceiling when hypothetical rain came, lashing it to the four young pines and covering most of their footprint from the elements.

Totally consumed with execution, neither Paris nor Trotsky had thought about the unfortunate inhabitants of the forsaken nursing home below since Tuesday—when they had begun the walls in earnest—and with the help of ex-soldier Jax Minor, they lugged up a pleather easy chair that one of their neighbors must have abandoned out front on Spring St because it was stuck in recline, and arranged another seat by pushing a torn cushion they’d also found on garbage day up against the outcropping and piling leaves in front of it for softer sitting.

On the second Friday Paris and Trotsky left their backpacks outside the fort and sat for a moment, feeling almost done but suspicious. Then they remembered the watchtower’s original purpose and scrambled off to add all the necessary enhancements and embellishments to their fortress before the dusk fell and their effectiveness was stunted. They set a third milk crate right side up, lined it with newspaper and half-filled it with hoarded acorns³⁰, crab apples and rocks to hurl at enemies. They fashioned personal shortswords from fallen branches, engraving them with “P” and “T”, respectively, and had them hanging just within the front entrance by their hilts on nails. A rope swing they’d hung from a large, low branch of the maple tree allowed them to swing off the rear-protecting puddingstone ledge and into their fortification.

Then for a few minutes they sat again just past dusk, Paris in the permanently reclined pleather chair and Trotsky against the giant rock in the leaves; they marveled in silence about the structure around them, almost as if it wasn’t of their creation. For at least a week their effort had been steady and unquestioned and they were both aware that this was by far their crowning achievement to date, putting the assortment of Nerdo Nifferson cartoons to shame.

— “Pizza pot pie!” They heard Cassie shout from back at the house.—

Both boys jumped up and grabbed their swords, passing through the door and howling maniacally off the cliff into the night with swords brandished at the drop, probably frightening members of their protectorate below whose hearing had not faded.

Trotsky followed Paris tearing down the fresh path that they had worn that week through the darkness of the urban forest plot past the cut rope swing of years past and down onto the lit driveway, still presided over by a regulation basketball hoop that suddenly didn’t seem quite so far out of reach, and into 1a where they devoured their favorite dinner without remembering to taste it, falling asleep over their video games, heroically remembering to grab hold of their shortswords as they toppled over and konked out, Cassie shaking her head in wonder and chuckling again as she found them as such and shut the light.

Vii. TELEZA STRIKES AND AN IDEA IS BORN IN THE SHADE OF THE PERIMETER BUSH

1

By the time they approached the downhill stretch of third grade, paris and trotsky had grown tired of their own kickball showboating in the default kickball game (dfg), and they idled around the schoolyard looking for something to do before the most important twenty minutes of each weekday was cut short. Paris was swept swiftly away by teleza toland—his female counterpart in raw speed—and she would chase him at unprecedented velocities around the schoolyard until the bell rang, neither tiring. Left to his own, dawdling devices, trotsky wandered towards the charged vicinity where mave and lyta played hopscotch with a particular group of girls. Mave happened to look up and seemed to welcome a potential incursion, but trotsky veered off quickly when another girl got mave’s attention and pointed in his direction. Narrowly avoiding being attacked by a swarm of giggles, trotsky circled back towards the otherworldly kickball game (okg) in the shade.

Trotsky had taken notice of this other game during the infrequent, empty intervals when someone from the dfg had managed the feat of sending a homerun rolling into the highway, where it was bounced downstream, crushed or lay inaccessibly against the divider. At such times, trotsky tended to peer around the bend: the secondary kickball plot was begun by the triangular meeting of the kindergarten yard fence—padded with car tires—and the jutted-out front foyer of the school building, which cast the entirety of the huddled infield³¹ in mid-morning shade. While the game was not typically entertaining, trotsky entertained a certain bafflement about what appeared to be a form of otiose hypnosis that his classmates in the okg were under: they appeared to be only pretending to play kickball, with neither energy nor enterprise.

With time on his side now, trotsky³² fancied himself—in this cusp-age before an upper elementary school humbling—to be some sort of local institution, and thought he would be able to single-handedly infuse this game with some enthusiasm. He encouraged teammates boisterously, tauntingly joshed opponents, and in short was fast wearing out his welcome. Trotsky, himself, became bored of being bemoaned for always kicking the ball onto the now-nearer highway.

Despite discouragement, trotsky stayed within the adumbrated infield of the okg for weeks³³. Once he had quietly set aside his jester’s hat as the instigator of competition, it began to dawn on him dimly that the game was governed by a different set of principles than the ones he was used to. ‘who am i to judge this other game,’ thought the surprisingly thoughtful, juvenile, kickball-jock oxymoron.

Freed from judgment—and after some calm discerning in the slow-moving kicking line or wallowing away at shortstop—trotsky began to hone in on what he had initially suspected to be ineptitude. The players in this other game were more interested in playing out a sort of social charade that involved a critique—but also a connection—between teammates and opponents alike. While playing what was to many of them a mind-numbing game, they expressed this rejection by animating the more cartoonish aspects of many of the people attending or somehow involved with the disney school—and their fellow players reacted. Some of the okg’s while-kicking-caricatures were mean-spirited or too easy, and they were dismissed with a mostly-silent chorus of frowns and smirks, but the successful animations were both in a good vein of humor and aimed at people who deserved to be slightly diminished; in response, there was a wave of amusement, barely perceptible, that swiftly swept through the gallery of faces, faster even than the pair who still chased each other through the meantime, untiring.

2

Not long after trotsky began to partially appreciate the okg’s use for kickball’s framework³⁴, he found the false heroes of this comedy, the two shadiest comic depreciators, who had a sort of diminutive reign over the rest of them, yet, in some twist of regal irony, stood just outside of the pleasant shade and just closer to the highway than was allowed. These anchors of synicism, opie and the previously introduced joey segundo, rarely kicked at all, preferring to huddle together, musing and making fun of the world, as they knew it, at large, by the highway.

Despite the initial unrest it caused opie, and the kicks it cost trotsky, he soon fell in with these two, and found a sliver of solace in the company of their critical snickering.

At lunch opie would likely make fun of trotsky’s lunch, which often contained food items supposedly less than ‘normal.’

— “the fuck is that?” Opie—a pudgy kid who looked like a miniature version of a middle-aged man—would say, pointing at trotsky’s leftover artichoke or pesto pasta, and causing joey segundo—a partially shy, devious lad—to chuckle through his nose or out loud. —

— “joey, i’ll trade you some pesto for half your tuna sandwhich…” —

— “alright.” —

— “trotsky…always eating all kinds of green shit.” Muttered opie aloud, wearing an emetic expression that somehow flattered him. —

Opie also had stories to tell about his high school-aged brother’s girlfriend, which joey and trotsky ate up like tater tots. He told of how her moans sounded like a cross between a sheep and a hyena, and how when she leaned toward him to tell his older brother ‘just how cute little opie is’ what he saw down the stretched neck of his brother’s oversized t-shirt…

3

After the three had spent some time together, Joey began to gravitate towards Trotsky, much to the horror of Opie, who knew co-conspirators in negativity were not easily replaceable. Joey and Trotsky would sit at the far edge of the yard and watch vigilantly as their classmates played, often discussing vague sexual enlightenments which had dawned on them as a result of Opie’s gospels, thoughts that did not have a foothold but were flapping and pecking around in the boys’ minds like a recently-caged woodpecker missing a wing.

— “You see the way Mave runs,” said Trotsky on one of those cool, sunny, late-spring days; the two sat in sweatshirts in the shade of the brush that limited the far end of the schoolyard. —

— “...Yeah.” —

— “She looks like she’s about to fall down.” —

—“…”—

— “And when Lyta jumps, her hands curl up …” —

— “…” —

— “And Teleza, she’s too fast, she’s gonna hurt somebody.” —

4 background on teleza toland

Teleza toland was well-liked at the h____ because of a sort of aggregated awe: no one really understood her. How she could run so fast, for example, or how she and her mom—who worked as an administrative assistant—could coexist so gracefully, and what jehovah’s witnesses even were, was another big mystery. They found it strange that they could find not a hint of melancholy about teleza when she had to leave their kitsch holiday celebrations; nonetheless, kids appreciated her and her natural gifts, and though she hovered above, she didn’t give the impression of looking down.

5

And while Trotsky and Joey watched this rigid, peppy girl with white and black beads in her hair that rattled wildly yet daintily when she ran and click-whispered when she walked, she did end up hurting someone. While chasing Paris around the schoolyard at breakneck speeds that most kids could only dream of, following his snaking trail between the gamut of animate and inanimate objects, Teleza tripped up and crashed headfirst into one of two poles supporting a rimless basketball hoop. Paris, who was immune to awe until now—as he doubled back to her under the basketball hoop—was stricken.

Teleza’s mother reached her a minute later and she parted the miniature crowd with her hands, trembling under the black headdress she always³⁵ wore. She found Paris leaning over her unconscious daughter, crying and looking up at her with swollen, apologetic eyes. Ms. Toland, as she was called, signaled stiffly with her hand for another lunch monitor nearer school to call an ambulance before swooping down upon Teleza’s now-soft, heaving body. To a traumatized and guilt-stricken Paris, she appeared a desperate figure of death as she descended from aloft the crowd of hazy children surrounding he and Teleza. To Trotsky and Joey, who had seen the event unfold from their disassociated distance—from Teleza’s tripping on her left shoelace, which had been flailing about, to the disappearance of the ambulance sirens way down A______ L_____ Highway—it was one of two chilling moments within a gripping spectacle.

6

Teleza and her mom were absent from school the next week and so paris joined trotsky and joey under the perimeter bush. Opie also sat down against the fence with them, sighing as if it was a last resort, and was wise enough not to launch into any of his consuming tirades, as paris was much too learned of the world’s ways to be impressed.

The four sat spending slow adjustment, silence promoting the attunement of their temperaments. A shaken paris at first strained the quartet with solemn, one-sided talk, strands of which trotsky madrigal gently tied into slipknots and let rest.

By wednesday, they sat without the need to hear their own voices, excellently spending what’s known as time³⁶, thriving on visions of motion in the cool sunlight, their forgotten peers.

7

On Friday morning, the assistant principal, we’ll call him Mr. Barry Chopwell, announced that Teleza had sustained a level three concussion and still suffered from the painful impact-bruise, but was almost better now and would be returning to school on Monday.

In the recess yard that morning the quartet occupied their recent spot on the outskirts of the yard with a view of it all, today standing. They watched the two games of kickball: the OKG full of lackadaisical play and exuding malaise and humor despite Joey and Opie’s absence, and the DKG full of taught melodrama despite Paris & Trotsky’s absence, and long, anxious lines for the kicking team. There was no one hurling tennis balls at netless hoops as all the hoops were now rimless as well—since a few neighborhood kids had recently dunked them off—and the hopscotch games seemed to have dried up, but on the large yard there were some patches of grass and small groups of boys or girls—like themselves—walking slowly, sitting down or standing.

— “What were you always doing with Teleza?” Asked Opie gruffly. —

— “She was chasing me.” —

— “Looked like you two were flying.” Said Trotsky, distractedly. —

— “Yeah, you two were going fast,” added Joey. —

A few moments later Paris, Trotsky, Opie and Joey got girls to chase them around by calling them “chickenheads” or “bawk bawk birds,” with arms a-flap, and then running. By the end of recess there were twenty or thirty children swirling around the yard, chasing each-other through the patches of grass. When Teleza came back to school on Monday she joined in the fun, and by the end of Tuesday’s recess the kickball games were without outfielders.

As the game became airborne, it began to demand some sort of organization. Opie gladly took on the role of ‘switcher,’ and he would yell out in full exuberance “BOYS CHASE GIRLS!”, and then after a reasonable amount of time, drably, but loud enough for most of the participants to hear, “Girls chase boys.” Most everyone followed whom they fancied, trying to get their hands on them, to hold them still for a moment. Boys like Paris who smiled a lot had it rough, often having to call dramatically for Trotsky, Joey and Opie to help him out from underneath a heap of female adoration³⁷. On Trotsky’s up days, he seemed to attract a homing instinct in certain, stubborn girls, but was usually able to outmaneuver them through the pandemonium, only occasionally caught by surprise, and never chased by Mave or Lyta—who ignored Opie’s gender designations and chased each other around, laughing with clever zeal. Partially due to lingering guilt, Paris exclusively chased Teleza, and Trotsky and Joey mostly tailed Mave and Lyta while they chased each other, although neither ever got too close, as if fearing the girls’ cachinnations could be turned on them like less-then-imaginary weapons. Opie wasn’t much of a chaser or a chasee, and often bided his time musing and chuckling from a central position before calling out switches. Besides Opie’s relative stillness, the couples fallen to the ground, and the occasional Paris-pile, at this point every student at recess was involved in the whirling motion, folded individually into this rapidly orbiting singularity. On Trotsky’s down days, he joined Opie in the calm of the eye of the whorl, and couldn’t help but stare off into it like some sullen, alien stargazer.

Recess went on this way until one particularly brilliant Friday when teachers came out early to enjoy the weather before they picked up their classes. They saw what the lunch monitors didn’t: disorder and chaos and mayhem and occasional piles of co-ed bodies. Albeit pre-hormonal, rolling around together in the splotches of grass or stretches of dirt, laughing and screaming excitedly in anomie. They were appalled.

Ms. Toland seemed to echo the sentiment of the presiding lunch monitors as she said:

— “They’s just kids being kids.” —

— “We ain’t had a fight since they started doing this,” said another chided lunch monitor, defensively. —

But the group of concerned teachers brought the matter to the attention of Barry Chopwell, who came out the next morning and was surprised to see no one playing kickball or hopscotch as was allotted for, just the whole lot of them on the mostly dirt field. He blew the end-of-recess-whistle himself six minutes early, had them line up at attention by class in grade order, and delivered this succinct message:

— “This game, whatever it is called, is over. I am Vice Principal Chopwell, and I have spoken.³⁸” —

Coincidentally, the Disney kids were just tiring of the game as it was; having picked up many, physical bruises in their besottedness, and an emotional wound or two from their heartstrings being tugged within the whorl.

The Disney School first to third grades lugged their now-heavy hearts back to the humdrum kickball and hopscotch lines, Trotsky and Paris to their default game, and Opie and Joey to their otherworldly one. And everyone seemed to re-appreciate their roles, their positions, even their time in the tedious lines, the main sanctuaries of the structure.

This dazed, spurned spell lasted through Tuesday recess after the prohibition.

By Wednesday, the memory of the mixing of the two games into one, all-spiraling frenzy dawned on all, and, resonating, eroded the separate existing orders of the games into similarly dull farces.

Viii. THRICE BUBBLES POP, THE FURIES

1

Paris and Trotsky sat for the first time with their legs dangling off the puddingstone cliff, feeling the preponderance of their well-stocked fort lording over anything that would lay in wait behind them. Above them was a down-reaching tangle of branches, in front of them the bone-crushing drop; beyond and below a pair of nursing home attendants oversaw a handful of occupants, who were out on a rarely-used porch during this season of rain and ever-warmer evenings.

One man in a flannel shirt sat in a wheelchair in a nepenthean stupor, while two silver-haired women stared phlegmatically at the flowering peonies Petrouli had planted on the other side of the perimeter fence, and into the green overhang where the last light of dusk still played. Two senescent gentlemen leaned together on the porch railing with their backs to the uniformed attendants, chuckling conspiratorially, unaware that they were being watched from above. To the boys, dazed by the sum of their surroundings on the dusky precipice, these gentlemen appeared to be reliving something that they had experienced long ago, something from within the invincibility of their lifelong friendship. Ignoring the possibility that these gentlemen could have met for the first time only a few weeks before, the boys’ imaginations bridged the gap between themselves in front of their fortress and these still-lively old men, chortle fishing together.

— “Pizza pot pie!” Called Cassie from afar. —

A pause as this phrase penetrated the bubble of the boys’ meditations…then both of them—forgetting where they were—almost fell off the cliff right then and there as they scrambled to their feet.

Cassie awaited, ready with two bowlfuls of Esu Friday night tradition, Paris’ favorite staple for as long as he could remember, and a dish Trotsky had come to crave: ground beef and pink beans in salty tomato sauce cooked in the oven until it was crusty underneath and the thick layer of jack cheese on top had browned some. Passing them theirs, Cassie’s frowning smirk mocked their eagerness even while it marked their gratitude. Both boys ate at the table near the stove, cherishing it this time and politely asking for seconds while praising the flavor with an assortment of interjections. Washing their seconds down with milk, they handed their dishes to Cassie and let her know they were going downstairs.

— “Paris bring your key. I ain’t stayin’ up long after I wash these dishes. And don’t make no sounds comin’ in.” —

2

The last of our unexplored spaces within 288 spring’s celadon, rectangular prism, was one neither boy would go by themselves if they could help it. Dimly lit and smelling strongly of sawdust and faintly of flammable agents, the basement was—at least initially—a dark den of suddenness.

Anyone turning a knob or depressing a lever anywhere in the house led to a rush of sounds down into this realm, from the burst of the controlled flame that began the roaring of the gas water heaters, to whatever swished past in the wider pipes towards the city’s sewers.

The two often-used areas of the basement were well lit with fixtures holding three tubes of fluorescent light above, and paris and trotsky without delay groped to turn them on—a task which sometimes became a minor struggle at this hour if alone and tricked by fear. Paris found and flicked on the switch over the tenants laundry area, while trotsky’s fingers felt the string to pull; all six tubes flickered spasmodically on to illuminate the washer and dryer, and the ping pong table under the gas pipes.

Both boys grabbed their prefferred paddle, and trotsky fished for and found a ball below. They started hitting back and forth, finding each other fresh and focused.

— “let’s play win by two games³⁹.” —

— “alright. The gas pipes in?” —

— “yeah shit pipes too, as long as it ends up back on the table.” —

— “volley for serve…ready?” —

The two boys were foils in this game of reflex, and since neither had a psychological handicap at present, there was nothing to swing the balance far enough in either direction for one to win by the established margin. Whenever trotsky ebbed a game ahead, necessity made paris more precise, and the pendulum swung back in his direction until he pushed trotsky to the brink—at which point trotsky’s competitive instincts enhanced his coordination, and it began its swing back. The games graduated from a steady stream of toc-toc-toc-tocs to brief, decisive flurries, the point winner usually ending up in a ninja-like stance—eyes expanded and teeth clenched—with the point loser often hitting the concrete floor still thinking they could rescue it. Both paris and trotsky had eaten cereal for breakfast⁴⁰, had consumed the same cardboard for school lunch, and had drunk a glass of milk with their two helpings of pizza pot pie a few hours ago, so when the fury that propelled their paddle-swings waned, it was at a similar nutritive rate.

Much later on, tied at fourteen games apiece and straining for focus—with not a clock around to tell them what hour of the morning it was—paris and trotsky heard a noise. They at first thought it to be a sleepwalker’s bowel movement…then quickly realizing it was liquid-sounding laughter: they froze. For the second time already that weekend the bubble around them burst, and in that instant they realized it must be morning and that anyone still up most likely posed a threat. The boys made eye contact as they hid behind separate water heaters, and were glad they did because suddenly there was an efflux of sound, then just shuffling…sneakers and boots half covered by baggy pants-bottoms swiped past the window and the last pair of legs stopped. They saw an upside-down head peering in but they couldn’t make out any distinctive features or colors, yet whoever it was shook the window frame to see if it was locked, and discovering it was, disappeared.

Paris and trotsky nonverbally called it a stalemate and snuck straight upstairs. Paris quietly turned the key and trotsky cringed the door closed behind them. Paris climbed into his bed and trotsky onto the couch; both reaching for and finding blankets, they pulled them over their heads and fought with their tremors before falling wordlessly to sleep just before sunup.

3

Art knocked softly on one-a’s door at seven in the morning and cassie answered already having had her coffee.

— “smy oldest here?” —

Cassie nodded and the two joked about who would do the honors; the boys were partially awoken by her booming rasp of a voice surging soundwaves from down the narrow hallway:

— “boys, wake up. Paris, you ain’t sleepin’ all day.” —

Then art’s forceful bangs on paris’ bedroom door completed the job, and trotsky got to his feet incommodiously, feeling both robbed of dreams and unprepared for diurnality; he stumbled out with his father mumbling something about an upside-down face while paris protested vainly in the background and was told with brutal certainty to start his homework.

In the hallway, art was unsympathetic⁴¹ towards trotsky in his obviously sleep-deprived state.

— “what’d you do play nintendo all night you vidiot⁴²? —

— “no, we were playing ping-pong.” —

— “oh it was you who left all the damn lights on. You can sweep up then down there before you come up for your waffle. Don’t take too long or it’ll be cold.” —

Trotsky thought to argue but found his wits dim of a rebuttal, so he slunk down the basement stairs and searched for somewhere to sleep. The laundry table was adjudged too high if he were to roll off, and the ping pong table was not sturdy enough, so trotsky grabbed a broom and began sleepily pushing around sawdust.

4

Trotsky reconvened with Paris in 1A early in the afternoon, having slogged various chores across the centuries while Paris had battled the narcoleptic swoons that plagued him while he did homework, yet mysteriously ceased when he took covert breaks to draw. Both bleary novices were well-bored by this ban on horizontal pastures, but video games offered a potent distraction from their depravity.

The two were hoping to beat Paris’ recently-borrowed⁴³ game which had hooked them hard a few weeks ago. “Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!!(sic)” featured protagonist Little Mac, the child-sized contender, who leapt up and stung a multinational array of stereotypical rivals with lefts and rights and star-punches on their cheeks, and once in a while with jabs into their bulging guts. The boys set in at it, trading opponents and quickly climbing out of the minor circuit, cocky enough that they didn’t even bother writing down the ten-digit circuit code. They soon regretted it though, as they were on the final fighter of the major circuit—against one turk named Bald Bull, and the screen suddenly went bezerk and then all of blue.

— ‘…’ —

— ‘…’ —

Both boys let out a blistering torrent of curses at the Nintendo and throbbed with disbelief.

— “Whaat?” Shot Cassie from down the hall. —

— “Nothing ma!” Returned Paris Esu, indicating amusement with a one-cheeked grin, and also that they were lucky she hadn’t heard them by wrinkling his forehead up. —

— “Aight, well, ya’ll better come when I call for lunch. I know how you boys are when you get on that machine…” —

Paris plucked the game out and held it up in both hands to his mouth, blowing so hard into the plastic casing that it whistled and the dust thought to be muddling the cartridge’s circuitry was surely unattached. Paris then dipped over his Nintendo, taking it in his left hand and tapping it with the gold Superbowl-type ring he wore these days on his middle finger; then he cleared it of dust as well with his trademark knack.

Back to frenchie Joe Glass, who had not a single deke and was otherwise waiting to be stung in the face. They repeated the minor feat of climbing out of that circuit; then they nervously crept up through the major circuit, but Paris got caught in the Bonsai Rush Attack of the nip Piston Honda⁴⁴, and was unable to recover. Trotsky blocked diligently and avenged Paris, and then the intermittent pair began to ebb, the idiotic background tune working into their bloodstream. They punched with the impossibly simple rhythm of the robotic jingle, and they passed Little Mac’s fury back and forth, the warm controller seeming to pulse with the flurry of uppercuts it was about to divest. However a tired Trotsky was defeated by Mr. Sandman, regardless, before Paris avenged him and a resurgent Little Mac TKO’d gringo Super Macho Man to the tune—they’d made it: Paris vs Tyson. The fight lasted about as long as the real Tyson’s fights did at the time—not even long enough for that usefully catchy jingle to get into full-swing—and the screen read just: “GAME OVER.”

With no more energy to climb through that tiresome hierarchy of stereotypes again, the pair capitulated for now with brief, audibly nasal sighs.

— “Hey Trot, i’ll kick your ass at Ice Hockey.” Rapidly declared Paris, emanating an unnaturally frenetic energy.—

Trotsky shrugged, but his shoulders seemed to continue echoing that shrug. Neither vidiot noticed the other’s current state of peculiarity.

They both selected a team full of skinny, medium or obese players, each with their own pea-brained theory about what mix worked the best. Then they chose the longest game possible and began playing and talking smack at a rapid cut. However, the gameplay didn’t quite allow for the fury the boys continued to seek, yet, the game stayed close.

— “Come getchya grits!” —

The two hungry lads were initially arrested, especially⁴⁵ Trotsky, but the score was eight-seven. Paris, noticing his opponent’s longer lapse in attention, easily evened the score with less than one minute left to play, or so these plucky vidiots thought.

—“One more minute ma/Cassie!” They begged with what they hoped sounded like enthusiasm, but was of course perceived flatly as addiction. —

Play resumed but Cassie entered as if out of a black hole—emerging from the hallway with inconceivable speed—and turned off the TV. Then Cassie stood over the two swaying with scorn, their placating eyes lacking any reservoir.

— “Either of you two got more cusses like before? You got ‘em good and ready? I didn’t think so. Didn’t think I heard you, didja…Come eat. No more video games for the rest a deday; you two don’t even look right.” Cassie turned around with clenched confidence, underestimating the vidiots’ addiction yet again.

—“MA!? You fuckin’…(under his breath) Trotsky, quick, turn that shit back on, I pressed pause.”—

—“You did? I did too…”—

Trotsky turned the television back on but the game had ended a draw, the bubble they sought to confine themselves in bursting again. There was a brief moment disposed to the sheer horror of what had just happened, resolved in similar fashion by both:

— ‘How could…I thought I was going to…He wouldn’t have…But I was ‘bout to…I woulda won anyway.’ —

5

After sweet and salty grits:

— “You want to go to sleep in the shelter?” —

— “…sure.” —

The two meandered up the slope out back and down the path, doggedly watching their feet as they walked, yet neither computed the two beer bottles that hadn’t been there the day before, kicking the foreshadowing empties off into the thicket. When Paris and Trotsky reached their fort, they found it had been stormed and thoroughly decimated.

Both boys drew in breaths as it failed to register. Meanwhile, their brains, enfeebled by their bubbles having thrice burst and their rest-less fatigue, attempted the calisthenics of comprehension. They advanced, exhaling, with extreme caution—as if afraid to disturb the murder scene of an innocent.

Each wall had been knocked down and the plywood trampled on after being half-torn in various directions, settling in a cringing state between two and three dimensions. The easy chair had been slit up and was oozing its foam. The crab apples and acorns were spilled far and wide and another rope swing had been cut down. There appeared to be blue splotches everywhere, almost as if the tarp had exploded onto everything and stuck, but when they stepped away they soon saw it below, ripped and crumpled in a corner of the nursing home parking lot that was illuminated by some twist of low-lying light. Still unable to bear the sudden and complete, purposeful demolition of this, their sheltering cathexis, they again passed inside the original, trapezoidal constellation of trees that had been the naturally occurring basis for the fort’s existence, and then they saw that the blue splotches were in fact smeared marker defacement. They stood with dread reading phrases which could be neatly divided into two categories: slander of a rival race, aggrandizement of the writer’s race. But neither the race of the drunken vandals, nor that of their rivals included either Trotsky or Paris, who still teetered on the edge of a pre-racial paradise, their fort overlooking the drop now destroyed.

Not needing to know more, Trotsky picked up a crab apple and chucked it onto the nursing home roof. Paris kicked the oozing easy chair, the sixth time tipping it over so that it fell with a dull thud on its side.

Paris grabbed a milk crate with one side cut out, and Trotsky yanked the back of the hammer out of the thickest footprint tree.

6

Back out of the urban forest plot and into the yardspace of youth, with inescapable rage that drowned out even the vaguest thought of the Doberwomen; they affixed the crate by nailing it thrice to the much shorter, moveable, spaced picket fence. With each nail going in they put it all together: the teenagers from the corner of Division and Link…the legs that slid past the basement window and that upside-down face…after doing that to their cliffside fortification and leaving bottles behind. The boys began preparations for a dunk contest.

Paris and Trotsky practiced dunking with ferocity, putting a slightly flat mini-basketball through the crate and slamming into the forgiving fence as their momentum carried them into it, and then off of it. They traded warm-up dunks in silent respite. There was no hope of retaliation…These were much older people with weapons—as evidenced by the deep gashes in the wood and chair and the cut rope swing and tarp…in short revenge was impossible, hate is both meaningless and contagious, and evening was fast falling.

7

For Trotsky’s first dunk, he ran along the fence, approaching the crate from the side, the mini-basketball tucked between his palm and his wrist. He jumped at the rim with his head, the arm with the ball attached windmilling around once wildly before he threw the ball down through the red crate and hung on to its rim with his hand, then with both hands, and he kicked off the fence to indicate disgust, landing on the ground.

Proud of how his dunk expressed his state of mind, he handed the ball to an approaching Paris, who took it, and, unimpressed with the athleticism involved in order to execute his friend’s dunk, muttered a score of “six,” which shocked Trotsky into immediate scorn for his friend, who was nevertheless in rare form and a sight to behold:

About a dozen paces from the basket, Paris Esu crouched slowy down into the stirred dustcloud, seeming to begin a demanding prayer to some earthly force that was falling all around them with the dusk. Drawing from this force humbled Paris, kneeling in the small spherical distort of spring’s full twilit glory. The grafting charisma of this vision partially eclipsed all but the edges of Trotsky’s hexagonal bitterness.

Paris stirred, and with a slinky stagger rose slowly upwards and forwards, swooning Trotsky’s thoughts and breath along with him; Paris’ motion bore from its depths towards the final extension of his arm in an upswinging arc, shaped much like the distinct, arced sliver of a chesire moon that had recently snuck overhead. His outstretched arm, with miniature rubber ball in palm, began a delicate axis that ran diagonally down until his feet, which when they left the ground, began the turn of this axis as it rotated once completely around, Paris dunking the basketball with umph.

Now while this flowery description may sound to your readership like the author is flirting with hyperbole, Trotsky was indeed dumbfounded by his friend and neighbor, and was momentarily without reason. Nonetheless he murmured a mark of “seven” without so much as the slightest thought-shift away from the above spectacle, despite the fact that he was degrading this very spectacle with an obscenely low score. He came to when Paris’ last-straw paroxysm took the form of the ball hitting him squarely in the nose.

— “Your turn…you do a motherfuckin’ 360 then.” —

Bleeding slightly, and now instantaneously devoid of either thoughts or recent memories. Trotsky was himself staggered into action, instincts aflame: with two surreptitious steps he had recovered the bouncing-away ball, palmed it in his throwing hand, and his third step planted himself towards Paris’ midriff.

So deep into sorrowful thoughts about the uselessness of accomplishment was Paris, that Trotsky’s throw actually hit him in the stomach and dropped off to the side. This might very well have been the first time Paris had been pegged before in his entire life, and he was stunned. He looked at where the rubber ball had struck him as if there was a bullet wound there, and, fingering this lack of a wound, he decided to take it personally. Looking up with squinty, determined eyes, Paris rushed at Trotsky, beginning the weekend’s third fury.

Trotsky was taken aback and initially feared the intensity of his friend’s onslaught, especially when it manifested itself in ring-tipped rights that whizzed ever closer to connecting, leaving scratches and once or twice bruising the side of Trotsky’s skull. But as the pain of receiving blows registered, it was his anger that swelled, and Paris was forced to retreat some as Trotsky charged at him, trying to wrap him up and wrestle him to the ground.

Like warriors of the correct spirit their passion was fueled by a hatred of injustice; but they fought each other, only, as their enemies were well out of the third grade and drunk beer and carried knives and had racial rivals. Paris and Trotsky found themselves somewhat well-matched in their rage, however, because Paris was tougher and quicker and Trotsky was taller and heavier, and so they fought each other into the dusk, tearing about the yard, the pendulum of aggression again swinging between these two combatants within the yardspace of youth, the Doberwomen egging them on in their ferocity through flurries of well-timed barks. When exhausted with hand to hand combat they took opposite ends of the small, fenced-in yard and viciously pelted large rocks and chunks of brick at each other. Then, near-missing over and over again until they were both in adrenaline heaven, they found sizeable sticks and attacked with venomous wrath, spilling out of the yardspace and into the narrow walkway between their house and the higher Petrouli-side fence, where piles of firewood reached up almost to the fence-top.

Trotsky, backed up against a lower part of the woodpile, his stick just having cracked in half, rolled out of the way as Paris’ stick came crashing down, shattering on the woodpile with a report that seemed to elevate the volume of the barking from within the harmony of the boys’ hatred. Paris let his broken stick drop and hurried back into the yard, Trotsky in pursuit. As he turned around, mid yard, Paris—who always seemed to be quicker than people thought he could be—finished swiveling and in the same motion struck Trotsky directly in the cheek with his right fist. So directly in fact, and so hard, that Trotsky Madrigal was knocked back—almost falling—and blood came from where his skin had been pinned by the ring against his cheek bone. There was in effect a moment of brief stillness, Trotsky stunned and Paris almost guilty, and the two boys stood obverse, heaving breath.

There was no recognition in the locked gaze between the two of their friendship. It had fled their violence. Nor did they remember why they were fighting, only that they had steeled themselves against giving in to this particular adversary; they had staked everything on this battle, and whatever anger it was that engulfed them was still burning.

One Doberwoman barked and the rest followed: the two boys charged at each other again in near-darkness. Trotsky got under Paris’ swinging fists this time and caught him above the waist, picking him up and half-turning him as he dropped him on the swerving brick walkway. Paris landed strangely and let out a howl and held his shin, rocking on his side. Blood begun to run towards his sock.

— “You split my scar from D_________!”, he bellowed looking up with desperate spite.” —

Paris hobbled angrily up onto the porch, and, reconsidering, turned to glower this at Trotsky:

— ‘I may be leaving to tend to this leg, but I in no way concede.’ —

Still heaving, Trotsky read this look and found himself nodding assent dumbly, as Paris slammed the back door.

Blood still dripping from his cheek and dried beneath his nose, Trotsky was left alone in the stirred backyard dust, which did not quite settle per say, but expanded into the air, becoming sparse in time.

8

Cassie Esu met with Art and Ali the next morning in one-A’s kitchen. Paris had been to the hospital the night before to get eight stitches on his shin, and the boys were refusing to apologize to each other, or explain why they’d fought, or acknowledge the other’s existence, even as consequences loomed. Their parents deliberated that the two boys would be grounded until both made full-hearted apologies which one of the three of them personally witnessed and judged to be genuine. Additional measures could be taken separately. Thanking each other politely, Cassie saw Art and Ali to the door.

9

The following Friday night Trotsky lay awake, his ears trained to the infinitesimal sounds of the neighborhood as his senses flared uncontrollably. What could usually be referred to as silence swung its doors wide open and yet he could find it nowhere; there was no envelope of darkness behind his eyelids, just obscure, pulsating motion and light-stains. Trotsky sat up suddenly and pushed off the covers; he climbed down the ladder of his bunk bed, careful not to slip and wake up Abram.

Out in the back hallway all seemed quiet for a long moment, but then Trotsky heard what sounded like a real door opening, and he began to descend.

On the second floor landing in front of the back porch where Moses Moses used to steer tunes with his horn, the moonlight pouring in through the window, Paris and Trotsky came face to face.

Evening gazes at each others’ surprisingly familiar faces, they also remember in that instant their opponent from the Friday before, and a rapid scattering of their own attempts to destroy the face that confronted them now. Neither flinched from these visceral scenes, or was sorry or ashamed, but while at their age the patience to reconstruct the set of circumstances that lead to the dusty dusk-battle did not exist, they knew they had fought fair, riding waves of fear and fury, and that they were here together alone—their parents and gaurdians far off wrapped in sheets and in repose—meeting, without any other goal but to remain equals.

The boys became as dignified statues for a moment on that second landing as they clasped hands gruffly and shook, fortified by the gravity of coming together, preserved in the moonlit landing for any who would follow them.

10

While in some great hall or museum, in the middle of some grand intersection or plaza, paris esu and trotsky madrigal surely deserve to loom large and immortalized in some cast of ore by some wispy master sculptor for the moral accomplishments within these episodes⁴⁶, either wielding their shortswords in celebration after completing their fort to protect the elderly on the cliff face, or grappling each other for their lives in the yardspace of youth surrounded by howling dowerwomen, or even still, shaking hands of enduring brotherhood in the moonlit hallway as they just had, yet, these honors are perhaps better reserved for singular men, men who—as if alone on horseback and not at the rear of their own falling hoardes—slayed still bigger dragons, found and claimed previously inhabited places or even subjugated and lorded over whole fearsome peoples, with guile, precise violence, and the never-ceasing desire to advance their culture’s ideas and diseases, often intertwined, like the threads of some blimp-of-a-drill.

However, back in the mundane second floor landing of 288 spring st’s back stairway the moment elapsed, in fact the season elapsed as well—spring st becoming summer st—so the boys exchanged pleasantries in a patient tone about the punishments they had endured for not apologizing to one another.

— “my moms wouldn’t give me no pizza pot pie tonight, and she cooked enough for me too but then she just dumped it in the trash right in front of me.” —

— “pizza pot pie…in the trash? That’s cold. (a few beats) art said no nintendo for two weeks. He stuffed it in their closet. I think he might have broke it by accident when he was trying to stuff it in there.” —

— “i got mines downstairs. And they wouldn’t let you get mike tyson’s punch out anyway…” —

(two beats)

— “you beat it?” —

— “i finally beat super macho man again yesterday…i think i’m gonna beat mike tomorrow. He’s hard though: just one punch and he knocks you out.” —

— “your leg alright?” —

— “yeah, what about your face?” —

— “fine.” —

— “…let’s beat mike tomorrow. Then i can beat you in ice hockey too.” —

— “aight.” —

Turning away, paris walked down the hallway past the spitz’s timpanic door, then past the guaman’s ajar door before descending a flight of stairs, and, as he turned to his own door past bertha and naima’s place, trotsky—having ascended a flight of stairs—had reached his, and now both boys opened their doors and drifted into their different apartments towards their bereft beds, falling off into a similarly ample space where they fashioned their dreams.

Notes

[←1]

a suave stalin assassin weaseled into his vetted social circle and struck him a fatal blow to the head with an ice ax

[←2]

which she lay under her long-deceased husband’s pillow while she slept

[←3]

who we’ll label from now on in this manuscript “the doberwomen,” as the “doberman sisters” is clunky and makes them sound like bearded women from the circus, and “bitch quartet” is a bit too slick, and additionally the word “bitches”—despite its literal accuracy—has in our lexicon all but disappeared to make way for the apparently more important derivative.

[←4]

slick-wing was based out of the madrigal’s home

[←5]

1st blanket: the desideratum of the Doberwomen, 2nd blanket: that of AC’s disapproval

[←6]

albeit now mostly consigned to the historical parentheses of zoos and reservations

[←7]

his mom was the winner of the unofficial most consistent tuna sandwich award, and his dad was one of many armchair champions of after-work television watching in their ‘hood

[←8]

An important part of this ritual, however, was to fail to mention the cards that they were eying in earnest/that piqued their interest.

[←9]

It should be noted that at this time they did not yet use price guides and so ‘value’ was relative fiction, but like the imaginary play Trotsky and Joey engaged in, there was a mostly-shared lore, a currency, so to speak.

[←10]

their lowball offer at a poorly attended auction was accepted.

[←11]

as long as they remained small

[←12]

this word, which a young trotsky was certainly unfamiliar with, reminds us that this is the author’s summary of Trotsky’s imaginings, in what would have been their general tone, but with shortcuts taken

[←13]

She, - - - -, is unnamed in this manuscript because her overwhelming fear of her husband renders her almost entirely invisible. Her better qualities are petrified in her terror, vitrified in the heat of her survival instincts, and whether they exist or not is not this episode’s concern. But due to her verbal/figurative invisibility, nothing disparaging or diminishing which could be said about her, will be said about her, for we can imagine it has already been said, and, tragically, internalized. This being said, while we could conjure up an angel of sorts in her stead, that would be too easy, too black and white like the printed tile pattern on the Spitz’s linoleum kitchen floor-covering, not as right and wrong appear to anyone with even a miniscule moral aptitude. Let’s instead see if we can envision her as the figure of a woman stripped of meaning, merely wreathed in smoke and insults, a wholly transparent human entity that hovers as such in direct lines, shuffling forwards and backwards in slippers, aghast from making movements too noticeable or from speaking in the conditional tense.

[←14]

A seemingly trivial event, but one that had the potential to spoil a portion of the most profitable side of his business: his socially interconnected wash ‘n fold customers. Meanwhile, a new Laundromat was opening up just around the corner. A somewhat more humane person outside of his own apartment, he had actually given his worker a raise as incentive to not make the same mistake again, while begging her to be more careful in the future.

[←15]

Unbeknownst to her husband had Trotsky’s invitation been, an opportunistic - - - - ploy positioning Trotsky as a sort of lone Bluebonnet-type pawn between Leo’s flaring temper and she and the girls.

[←16]

Ali Madrigal uncharacteristically indulged when sororitizing with smokers.

[←17]

A smaller table supported a heavy, recycled side of an industrial-sized spool, which served as the madrigals’ round dining table.

[←18]

Butler thought to woof, but decided against it, as usual.

[←19]

an action for which permission was granted by art madrigal: “we’d love that.”, diego guaman: “claro que si.”, leo spitz: “well…shuah.”, and cassie mack: “i don’t have no problem with that.”, respectively

[←20]

as defined by spanish poet frederico garcia lorca in his essay “theory and play of the duende”; not to be confused (in this case) with a mytholigical pixie

[←21]

a certain degree of shyness seems to be insuperable for those without auscultation.

[←22]

At Trotsky’s age, most of his time was leisure time

[←23]

at least consciously

[←24]

They soon-after decided to rename their cat Rikki Tikki Tavi/Rikki Lee Jones, thinking these names would disassociate their cat with flight in their oldest son’s mind.

[←25]

art had recognized him from the group of ponderous friends at the funeral

[←26]

approximately eighteen degrees

[←27]

most likely based on certain lbbs

[←28]

some local teenagers had cut it down during a night of drinking

[←29]

They knocked and even waited for Art to answer, then strode in together, and standing straight and side by side—not pushy but nervously expectant—put forth their request in detail.

[←30]

the Hobbesian squirrels had watched this as though it was utterly predictable

[←31]

the lopsided outlines of bases were haphazardly scratched onto the asphalt by a quick, unpracticed hand in colored chalk, in clear opposition to the sprawling, official kickball diamond laid down with (albeit now faded) painted stencils by the exacting yard designers of yore.

[←32]

often delusional for better or for worse, due in part to his oscillating moods

[←33]

weeks for children this age translate into months of perceived time for the average adult

[←34]

the okg’s players in the shade were only using kickball to give them a forum for ridiculousness, and to arrange the pattern and rhythm of their humor. the serried group trod on a flimsy blueprint ripe for their superimposition, and trotsky fell short of understanding all this due to his suspicions about how the okg had poked fun at him before he’d arrived, his subconscious grumbling about his near future.

[←35]

She wore the headdress everywhere but church, where there were circumcised males familiar with the gospel and available to lead prayer and teachings.

[←36]

although the author often gets it mixed up with space

[←37]

Something Paris assumed, correctly, that his comrades relished as a hilarious subplot.

[←38]

It is unclear whether this 2nd declarative sentence was actually uttered, or just inferred.

[←39]

To win a game a player needs to score twenty-one points, with players trading serves every five points until one player is on the brink.

[←40]

Paris’ with more than ten grams of sugar per serving, and Trotsky’s less due to his parental limit.

[←41]

Art had zealous beliefs about getting an early start on the weekends, and was affronted when his oldest son did not seem to care for this particular, thinking it overzealous.

[←42]

art’s aptly invented word for people who stared at a screen, held a controller and were therefore oblivious to everything around them, temporarily useless to both family and society.

[←43]

at high cost, mind you

[←44]

his second coming

[←45]

Since discovering grits in one-A a couple years prior, Trotsky had accompanied Ali to the supermarket with the express purpose of finding them, and had been eating them at least once a week for breakfast ever since.

[←46]

Certainly more so than the filthy fraternity of amoral enterprisers who ended up subjects of such tangible commemoration.