Next to the car there was a trash can filled with what was certainly delicious food. The rich bastards around here would throw out anything that didn’t satisfy them immediately. He had witnessed a bald millionaire toss in a bewitching turkey sandwich.
Now he was lifting a newspaper fully expecting to see a caviar-encrusted hortobágyi palacsinta. Ants crawled over his hand to get a look. At his feet a mouse ran the hundred-yard dash in scale. Before he could glimpse so much as a morsel of mince, the nearly silent sound of a yo-yo going up and down its string consumed him from his right. He let go the Canal Of Intelligence and faced into the reversible whisper of the toy. A boy stood there in short pants and a miniature captain’s hat. Beyond the boy the sun was going down. Sudden panic filled him. “Will you tell me something?” he asked the boy.
“Depends what it is.”
“Why should it?”
“I have to withhold a commitment. Not every request is equally reasonable.”
He was flabbergasted by the boy’s eloquence. “Whose are you? Bart and Annie’s?” They were a lawyer and an inventor who lived down the street. He had made a million surfboard aerodynamics.
“No.” The boy shielded his eyes. “But I need to vet your inquiry. Give it to me, man, now, and in the plainest language, please.” Rhythm, consonance, composition—and the yo-yo never stopped!
He was just going to ask the boy for the time. But now he had his hackles up. Man? “I need you to tell me why I have been separated from the only person I ever loved. She’s not very far away but might as well be a million miles. I saw her climbing a fire escape and then accepting a ring from another man. His face was bathed in light.”
The boy took down his hand from his face. His lip was quivering. “I’m not even real.”
Now he began to understand. People were at his back, a crowd of them. The smell of smoke reached him just as he felt the weight of the gas can in his hand. He knelt, taking the newspaper with him, thinking that this was the last day that he would not be in it.
©2020 Ben Greenman / Stupid Ideas
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