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4.
Alex Kirk lived down the street from a little girl with dimples and white teeth. Her name was Maryan Shurey and they often got into trouble together.
They ran away one afternoon. A bright blossomy afternoon, the autist might have said as a young man, a moo-day, so winsome the ifty leaves and crowny trees, all green and hackathorny, the magpies dancing their cartoon dance under white clouds {glued cotton on Popsicle sticks} on the refrigerator door in the kitchen.
Later that afternoon, Alex and Maryan came back riding in an ice cream truck waving waffle-cones piled high with scoops of vanilla chocolate and strawberry music—Pop Goes The Weasel!
The dreams were like a narcotic, filling the young man with warmth and pleasure as he slept in his stone womb.
The Watcher, too, dimly remembered Maryan Shurey and Alex Kirk.
Maryan stood on a stool and leaned out of the truck, telling each kid who came close: “Hey, what flavor would you like? Chocolate? Vanilla? Or Strawberry?” She’d fold her hands together, incline her head to one side so her locks bounced, cute as a button, and she’d say: “Personally, I prefer strawberry. That’s because it’s my favorite color. Don’t you think?”
Thus, in nature’s complex and odd ways, nothing was lost. The sleeper twitched briefly. Maybe his eyes flickered just a bit, the lids lifting as the lashes trembled, while the Watcher tore open the rich cheese containing the fishness, the yolkness, the momness, the thick bloody pudding of oxygen and iron and life flowing into the newly formed young man. The sleeper was days away from being born, and his perfect fingers closed once, twice, silently in the water. His hands fluttered and grew still even as the tank’s color turned from transparent green to wine red, then black and the water roiled. The water bubbled and foamed, filled with the violence of the watcher now eater who reached in with both hands and tore out the tubes, tore off hunks of rich life, stuck his head into the very water and groaned with need and pleasure as the orgasm of satiety filled him like a sick full tide. Leaving his dead prize to dry and mummify, the eater, now Watcher again, staggered away from the feast still steaming with the warmth of the tank and the bloody fatty sweet creamness of a dead summer morning that would never see its afternoon.
When the Watcher finished what was left in the tank, it belched noisily and wandered off, getting lost in the lower galleries for days. Sleeping off the fullness. Dreaming of another boy’s summer days. The Watcher who now slept on a soft sandy corner in the stone caverns knew hungry because of the ice cream truck. He could see in his own dry dreams the boy and the girl smiling. Alex and Maryan. The taste of vanilla ice cream lingered on the side of the watcher’s tongue from a long sucking slurp a million years ago. The tongue like an icebreaker cut through floes of chocolate to reach the steaming frozen vanilla meat wrapped around the clean little pinewood stick that smelled like a forest or a wood mill.
After sleeping a long time, the watcher awoke feeling that hunger again. He lifted his misshapen head and raised himself on hairy arms that were brawny but not quite the same length. In fact, the left side of his body was much smaller than the right, and even his head was oddly shaped with a large right side and a little left side, except the two frog eyes were alike.
The caverns smelled of love and mint and freshness. Sponges glowed faintly on the walls, some more yellow, others greener, with bacterial luminosity. Eating sponges helped soothe the hunger, but they were not the meaty food that made the stomach feel good. The Watcher remembered how scary it had been to run away with Maryan and began crying—its howls resounded heart-brokenly among the stalagmite/stalactite galleries. Maryan gone forever. Better to have stayed home and watched cartoons rather than this dangerous adventure. Daddy coming home with the evening newspaper—where? The Watcher was alone and wanted its mother, but that was long ago and she might have forgotten by now. Maybe the ice cream truck would come again? And maybe the little girl? Would she taste good?
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