Useless! And the parking lot? Total pie crust, good for studying edges and the life cycle of modern asphalt. Despite the facts, there was some other voice calling down the halls of my brain that cajoled me to the purchasing table. Only the shadow of an angel’s advice. But it was enough. And there I signed in red Diamine at 11:11AM; Greener Pastures Shopping Center, my dearest own. I stood from the folding table to shake his hand, the man with the oil field tattooed on his face, and said “If all goes well, I’ll never see you again.”
He got what he wanted all right.
And I, mine.
And them, theirs, (oh God)!
For many days it was my Xanadu. I swaggered down the tongue of the mall like it was all a big mouth with the teeth jacked out. Odd relics of merchandise littered the gaps: flat shoelaces, the plastic capital “I” of a pricing gun, bludgeoned soda cans, napkins smeared with various beiges and grays. What kind of life had been all the way here? Generations of melting-glacier-families that shuffled into isotopes of other people, and so on. I could hear their lives like the ocean in a conch shell, a constant frequency broadcasting from another world. Almost like an empathy headache. I sat in the center of the food court fountain, long since bled, rubbing dust off the wishing coins and dispensing them into empty gumball machines. Their gears still turned but only scraps of bright colors slid from the openings into my hands.
One day, while lying in the middle of an unmarked grave (once a piercing parlor), I felt the voice return, this time in the form of a flock of pigeons which must have entered through one of the blasted-out skylights of the center atrium. At first I bared my teeth, hoping to frighten them back to their elsewhere sanctuaries, but they did not so much as palpitate out of avian courtesy. They looked me right in my sunless face.
It was only clear the pigeons intended to purchase me. Was I already that cooked? Their leader approached me with the deed to my soul scrawled tightly in its beak. Of course it was written in their plant-based language which relies heavily on color and shade rather than distinction of alphabetic characters. I ran my eyeballs across the documents, wet with bird mouth, which were, I confess, legally sound within the confines of Extreme International Law.
They moved in that day; I’d been foreclosed. And with a voyeuristic curiosity they hollowed out my body until I was reduced to scraps; a chalk-drawn memory from childhood, a smell from a dream, radio jingles that loiter in the suburbs of consciousness. The pigeons made a home for themselves in me. They found no secrets, no poetic truths, only a place that expanded horizontally with the passage of time, which is different, I’ll argue, from growing. But I guess that was enough.
As I lay on the exuberant mall carpeting with my eyes neither open nor closed, the man with the oil field tattoo on his face returned, his body a soft outline in the feathery air.
“Your one dollar check,” he said, “it bounced.”
When I opened my mouth to refute, a baby pigeon flew from between my teeth and issued to the man a series of tweets and chirps that explained I was legally dead. But like the shopping center I was still almost alive. There were tenants animating us both.
The pilot light inside me whispered, “Bounced?”
“I’ve no choice but to scrap what's left of you to cover your debts.”
So he swept me into a plastic bag, much to the pigeons’ protest, and off to the Body Depot we went for a midnight pricing. The birds had left me a total of seventy-six cents in physical mass. Twenty-four short. There were lines out the door at the Body Depot.
“Any other assets I could liquidate?” The man asked in a hurried way, as if he had a million more of these to do tonight.
And right before they were to throw my circus-tent body into the human pasta roller for reissuing, I said “Wait—the fountain! At the mall.”
The tattooed man made an order to pause the machine.
“Quarters,” I cried. My last earth word. He’d make a profit after all.
