You may have noticed during a rainy or wretched day of late, the “for sale” sign, brown with white lettering, that was once upon a time erected on the foul-smelling lot across the road from Tony’s Super Store. And you may have wondered what exactly was for sale. Because, in that big hay field, home only to a small, smoke-emitting tree, and a broken down fence encasing a potpourri of junk ——— the particular item intended for sale could be any of the countless items the area. It could be any old piece of hay, amongst broken down vehicles, war-torn snowblowers, rusted out trailers, and the occasional piece of circus equipment.

I was on a late night jog. It was four or so in the morning, when I was made curious by this mysterious sign. I passed it by, but then I asked myself why? And I concluded: as a journalist, ignoring the sign would be to slap away the hand of charity after many meals missed. So I removed my shoes and trudged step by soggy step through the broken, septic moistened front yard.

I had hopes of finding a personality to taste, or a mindfulness gyro to steal. But I found neither of these things. Instead, what I found was an allure toward the backside of the tree whose silhouette we all remember.

Remember back to Thursday or the previous, during one of your reluctant drives to the liquor store to buy wine for your friends. Do you remember seeing the tireswing? Do you remember the way it succumbed to being pushed rightward by the wind? And the way, when the wind withered down, it would swing leftwards, hit something that you couldn’t see behind the tree (making a “thud”) and bounce back rightward again, destined to be caught by the subsequent gust?

I circled in toward the periodic thud. I hopped from rock to rock in my shit averse bare feet. I eventually came to a doghouse shadowed behind the tree, and attached via chimney pipe into an owl hole. This small hut bore the brunt of each downward swing of the tire. It had no life inside. But a half-rotten, root-sprouting potato claimed the floorboards —— along with a pair of boots, a spoon dirtier than the boots, a pot dirtier than the spoon, and a crumpled newspaper that looked like someone had wiped his ass with it.

Above the entryway, painted in red were the words: “Lost River Auto Body.”

I’d say, if you are anything like the average modern bloke, then you never in your whole life ventured close enough to read the name of this place. I doubt you ever once read the fine print on the for sale sign either. What I mean by this is that you wouldn’t have seen the little yellow footprints hopping from letter to letter across ‘f’-‘o’-‘r’-’s’-‘a’-‘l’-‘e’, or the tiny map engraved within the colon following these letters.

You wouldn’t have followed this map. So you wouldn’t have known that the item for sale was the big giant paper mache foot the size of a van, bolted atop a de-roofed snowmobile trailer. And you wouldn’t have learned, seeing the letters ’s’-‘o’-‘l’-‘d’ scraped into the lower end brown sign, that the foot had been sold. Or that it was destined for ‘d’-‘e’-‘l’-‘i’-‘v’-‘e’-‘r’-‘y’ ‘o-n’ ‘o’-‘c’-’t’ ‘2’-‘0’.

So, understandably, probably you along with a great many others, were PERPLEXED when a giant foot appeared beside your campus POND, towed there by a group of shaggy leather-wearing HUNCHBACKS. Or when the hunchbacks scurried into the forest of books, and by early dawn returned hopping like pogos, each hunchback having severed his or her right leg and wiped slug slime mixed with blood over his eyes. Or when these one-legged hunchbacks cooperated to climb the giant foot, and to arrange each of themselves perched in their own unique position like a flamingos, with crates of books hanging from their necks, a stopwatch in their left hand, and open book in their right.

You probably had never heard of the Autonomous Reading Group, the group impelled by something or other to scan their eyes over as many words as possible before the you-know-what. You probably criticized the way they let the wind flutter their pages in such discontrol… and the way they periodically tossed their handheld books to General Wingsoverman and his ducks in the pond… and the way the hunchbacks neverendingly picked new books from their respective crate until the end.

And you probably yelled at them to stop, interrupting their autonomous reading and stopping their hearts.

Asshole.

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