Mar 5

01

THEY ASK FOR THINGS

* * *

You must prepare for short trips out, for errands and such, because they will ask of you.

Short trips mean generosity, for as you walk down the street they will ask. They always ask. Their eyes plead, make it rain, make it rain.

And so, before entering the mall under the hotel with the bright and positive music and the locksmith who grinds metal and the optician who grinds glass and the repairman who melts solder and the supermarket just exactly like the one in Repo Man, so long ago, before you enter, you turn around to face them all, with their pleas and their pain.

And I do. I inhale and let everything fall to the ground and bring my hands together: clap, clap, clap. Louder and louder. Bringing rain, shouting I apologize for nothing.

If I had a band it would be called Hector. We would bob our heads in unison at the chorus. Our genre would come to be called sway.

The sky mocks. No rain for you.

Sometimes the other people standing in lineups become bumpers, such as you would find in a pinball machine. Touch them and you bounce back with ten times the force. Bells dingdingding.