In the 700s

Posted on July 26, 2006 in Encounters Prose Arcana

She came by, a bold white liner, clutching Catch-22 as if she had knew the author in her youth and could quote the colonel with the big red moustache shouting “In sixty days you’ll be fighting Billy Petrolle and you think it is a big fat joke.” But it wasn’t a joke, sir. Tell that to the crew-cut boy in the war section, somewhere in the 700s, reading every book on killing that they had in the collection and which wasn’t checked out, his head propped up by a shelf and the two of them never met, never discussed literature or the writing of history or the news reports out of Iraq.

(I suppose there is something to find underneath the beige blanket. It has a big crater near my knee because we’re house-poor and doing our best to make it on what we have. I suppose there is something but I am not sure what it is. Lynn sits at the computer, taking in, taking in.

(And when I get on the computer, I just keep putting out, putting out.)

There are things that you shouldn’t repeat before soft-scrubbed yuppies who read the real-estate listings. Terrible things.