Observations of a Dad-like Cryptid

Wendy Rutrage,

When I was young, we had a table at a flea market. I sold my catatonic toys and he, old masonry gear. Or, we tried to sell stuff, but the buyers wouldn't bite. Things scream of stories and won't shut up and hoarding is hereditary. When we were packed up and leaving, we cleaned out his truck, with a handful of other trash I handed him a hostess powdered donut with a bite taken out and stoned dust filled in. When he thought I wasn't looking, but was peaking through the rear view, he ate it.

Before he hangs up the phone he always thanks me. But he is gentle to dead things, especially gentle to types of people who aren't real. The day he was born, they knew there would be a long line outside his wake. He is kind.

A toothy muffling, bounding along, its contents hit like rain stabs against the tupperware he held out of place in his hands. Not remotely his, like eyes of old seers. There is something over his face, like the swallow-scented rubber masks he kept in the attic. He killed nostalgia caught dripping, stepped on it accidentally, pausing to look back over, causticly whispered "from me to you and you to me."

He stumbled over development rubble, the inbred seedlings of burnt down houses. He walks through regression breaking. He walked past the second time I stopped believing in Santa Claus. I overhear his words slur themselves over the edge of his tongue. His friend he hadn't met said something to him.

He paused, pulled a slug out of his ear. Looking afraid at the eyes of a woman from the big moldless houses uptown. He thinks for a long time, "You know, I don't think necrophilia is really a middle-class value." That was how I learned that word. He approaches the screen door with holes I cut for mosquitoes to enter.

There is a room with a smaller room or a large closet, I'm not sure which. This is where I am. Where fragmented and outwardly dangling bits of vestigial strings on string dolls played with next to plastic store bought figures. Tiny painted eyes that see things I forget. Specks: tinier plastic ants swirl around thru make believe patterns, swirling into masses of interlocking monkey puppets. I let them eat the candy I have left. You can see stars in a young ant's eyes and none of them are dwarfed and dying.

He's in front of me, shouting. And I just want to know where he left the tupperware. Then he's talking to me, sweetly. And I need to feel what was mumbling inside the tupperware, it eats my nails away. He sits down with the plastic figures, playing with them, and tells me how his father screamed and flashed images of manhood. He sleeps loudly: "your brother was silly and strong when he tied his tie. I don't know how I breathe at night." He again walked to me. I wanted a hug, he was on a drug trip. I exhale myself back into the bed of ants. The sudden decomposition of one Kermit P. Frog.

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