PHP Pointers at Hardee's

Wobbly on desiccated legs, a proud father of three dictates his grocery list on the grand veranda. Potted trees hung with opals - the most magnificent any of us has ever seen - rotate on unseen mechanisms behind him. Occasionally a child throws a bushy little mitten or decorative writing instrument over the edge, and it falls into the mostly ineffectual moat below.

Fiddlers and trumpeters recline on salvaged comforters on the lawn, awaiting their moment to raise a joyous noise. Wistful in poultry waste, a music expert balances on a sycamore log, forming a capital G with her beastly body.

Interior Wand

The young women next door communicate with each other by way of rocks, painted with intricate patterns and left in designated locations in the yard. I have discovered that the content of the messages is determined by a number of factors, including the colors and shaped used in the pattern, location in the yard, orientation of the rock, size of the rock (ranging from the size of a plum to the size of a grapefruit), and taxonomic identity of the rock. 

My efforts to decode the messages these clever young women leave each other have been fruitless. I applaud their ingenuity but gravely fear the intent of their clandestine communiques: too often, I have observed, such extreme measures are only used by the most nefarious individuals!

The Best Socket

We have been commanded to make a specific soup recipe, a flat soup with caustic fibers suspended in a brash peppered broth, topped with a mixed-starch crust.

When I say "commanded," I do not mean that some fickle Earthly authority has issued a painfully-worded dictum from the musty den of a tiresome bureaucrat; no, this command comes from that great ineffable presence we all are subject to, and whose presence you yourself may have grown increasingly aware of in the months since inauguration.

The soup is offensive to all but the most finely-honed palates, and I am personally honored to be among its most vociferous proponents. Sir, will you crack the crust with your preferred oblong utensil and verbally communicate your reaction?

We Hung the Dinosaur

Cantankerous, the author must attend church. His lapis lazuli finery and porridge-colored briefs are admired by 33% of the parishioners. The other 67% feel threatened by him, so they pack heat in the form of really good and powerful handguns. 

Fruit and free chewing gum fills the collar of the grunting book writing guy in the back pew (stained as it is with greasy exhalations of five decades' worth of Christian rectums). But when the bad kids come around they get their fruit and gum. Because two thirds of the congregants value their childrens' pleasure, they refrain from shooting the novelist in the face, thighs, breast, and wormy dick.

Trouble with the Thick Stencil

My pet, on the end of the waxed rope, a heavy head like fly agaric, deposits scraps of itself along the scarred walk. Occasionally a business owner or driver attempts and fails to guess the pet's name.

Along the canal, abandoned toys prove to be an alluring prospect for the pet, and more than several times I'm forced to wrestle a worthless thing from its mouth. 

I throw it hard into the water and they are carried slowly down stream. They pass the cannery and metallurgical academy. They pass the fictional mausoleum. Eventually, inevitably, they're pulled into the eddy and pile up under the scenic overlook where estranged families attempt and fail, usually, to reconcile.

O! Off Their Moult!

Family means writing and rewriting the rules for cooperative sports and playing word games until the distant scent of the beach seduces the elders. I thank God for hobbies: climbing a lot, tumbling by myself, coming repeatedly for the perfect man. Why doesn’t he love me?

Anthony is ready to bring girls to Chicago, letting me live in their world. Letting me notify God of my new arrangement. Letting me play alone in the garage. Anthony is on God’s phone.

I can't see the cat in my mind these days. There was a blue sheen to its fur that seemed possible, if one had the privilege of ecstatic product.

Going to Flaccid Golf World

Verification of slop! Yucky goo in the pocket and weeping ooze in the cone under the porch. Ouch!

Just a Blissful Renal Strategy

I was allowed to lounge beneath the static sizzle for most of my forties: patient like a meal uneaten, dull to anxieties, promised to the gentle pull of entropy. I was seen or unseen by relations and colleagues and strangers, an occasional reassuring reminder of existence. 

The throbbing didn't begin until the lichens had gained purchase, transforming flesh into vapor and light into flesh, transforming ambition into a gauzy sense of retreat upon its fresh exposure to the electrochemical background noise of the home neighborhood. Standing erect, the concrete was hot white foam and the fiction crackled like ribbons of ceramic.

Pre-sensitized Succulent

Upon graduation, I grabbed a pumpkin-shaped hand and it took me somewhere new, the dominion of odorless doctrines. I found most of the relevant equipment there defective, most of the tissue friable and pale, most of the beverages inoffensive and listless. I let go of the hand after several days of purposeless chaperoning and fell immediately into a shallow trench, where I was allowed to have sex finally. Great sex! Certified, I plagued the starchy citizenry with strident requests for clean garments, none of which have, as yet, been granted.

Emil "Slab" Chastain

The sugar bear is my spiritual mother. The luster of her fur dazzles passersby while she naps in the town square. I buy buttered bread and eat it while I recline on her heaving sparkly body. She smells like ginger. I will buy her a cool digital watch.

Real Plastic Biscuit

This thing I found has tendrils, hirsute vining threads that leave welts. I cover them with gloves, but then I'm wearing gloves, and people ask me about the gloves. Is it an affectation? No, I  hiding the welts I got from handling the thing my living mannequin friend sent me via UPS.

Crumbs of a Jewel

A green face witch questions my choice to wear two aprons: one in front, one in back. But I have been told that a mess can sneak up from behind. I listened to her counsel and removed the front apron.

This left me with an extra apron. Which I sold to a duckfoot gnome under the pier at Golf Beach. With the payment (seven striped crab carapaces), I purchased my own swift little wooden scooter.

Slathered in the Heathen Goo

As a current hunter and science fiction fan, Joshua is always ready to become extinct. The governor of Nevada will survive if he has life changing allegiance. Going ahead with his plan to quit smoking or die, the man behind daytime television series dated both of my parents. That is unbelievable!

I was inadvertently involved with a serial killer when I became a bounty hunter. The casino workers didn’t cooperate with a policeman. The “cowboy” was a rookie police officer, the son of a powerful father. The catholic priests that murdered the youngest mayor in California had lots of enemies. If I didn’t cooperate with a crooked cop, I would have grown up an only child!

Characters in a Teal Box

Chime and we fall theatrically. Rubber snakes on concrete, startling the occasional passerby for a moment, but we're quickly forgotten as they walk, the next place and the place after that. They might hear the chime themselves, but they don't know.

We fall as we do and let the things on the ground traverse us. A hand might fall on a calf or a finger might attract a sourceless trickle of blood. A tuft of killed plant (maybe a sweetgum seed) might sneak under a sweatshirt or blouse. A gaze might line up with another gaze and the exchange will never rise to the verbal like a plunged thing desperate for the surface of the water. The chime, the specific type of fall, and then silence for the allotted time. Sometimes things fall on us. Insubstantial, usually.

The things on the ground learn us and ignore us again. The people come to scoop us up, load us into the truck. And eventually we'll find our way back here, or another place, form another clot, hear the chime, fall in the customary way.

Four Tin Sticks

Throttled by hubris, disastrous husbands careen towards middle age with gross burgers in their glove compartments, with lubricated condoms. Under their flatulence-soaked bucket seats: cigar boxes full of dog tags they never wore. Their guitar string thongs and suede ponchos and pepper pelts inspire revulsion among anyone with minimal cognitive ability. 

Vomit. Bile. Tree bark elbows, broken toothpicks in our heels. Ducks' heads in a circle on the floor under the throbbing bed. Paper cut mouths in N95 shells, sucking at themselves. 

Stained thermoses of something bituminous, rolling on the corrugated rubber. Patches and emblems and insignia shaped like shields because that's exactly what they are. 

Crooked shopping carts, gritty citrus soap, screw broom on pegboard, smelt. Nets. Tents. Denim. Scattered beads, not beads: popped baseball cap pegs, everywhere.

Accepted Cookies

You have learned to honor the chieftain with sprigs of dill behind the ears, bearing eggs of swallowtails. Jellied jewels of possibility. Behind the scaffolding of your waking ambitions, a stuttering mist in the vague form of a child projects an unheard song. It's picked up by keener instruments than yours, and you'll mistake the hunters it beckons for half-mothers.

Hi We're Flotsam

Big Buck kicks a brown ball to Kyle Gray. Rye bread morning breaks into platinum blonde afternoon. Kyle Gray, generous sniper, architect of misfortune.

Aunt Rosalee lifts the oblong trunk, leaves grease fingerprints on the lacquer. Leaves footprints in the dust. She's been pranked by cotton faced Big Buck. There are no vintage costumes in the trunk, but she will find a dead crab for the Christmas wreath.

Kyle Gray pumps a bubble of groovy scrap talk in the side yard when he sees the great crab in Aunt R's brown basket. Pilfering tiptoe titty skips, she laughs like a plain scrambler on her way to the wreath barn.

Raggedy Harmonica Sack

In the rock and roll graveyard, she learns the astronomy of insects. The great motorcycle sculpture, looming above the troubled population of this town, her birthplace, ignites its headlamp for the first time in a generation. Bandanas and fairy shawls drift to the ground, crystals of frost reaching up to catch them and pull them into the organic substrate.

Cherub with Goals

A fifty year old bachelor will give you plenty of ideas for a singles weekend, and serving a healthy realization of those traditional flavors. Teenaged boys of his interesting and unique conspiracy will want to turn to tough guys, and deceive him with sometimes decadent brunch recipes. He defies them with a quick breakfast. Whether you are looking for a powerful photographer or not telling his wife what they were looking for, his pipe collection is your source for what they were looking for.

Diagonal Nicotine Park

married to a dentist

graduated from the New Age

the first wedding, thus   

took one of the ribs

the same word used of a potter

after divorcing she practiced

years of seclusion, being

his gratification or his flesh

the first use of anesthesia