Three Scraps

1.

We were driving through a snowstorm, ascending a hill. A moose stepped into our headlights and raised its splendid head. We had no control over the situation, the car needed a rest. There was a gully beside the road, and it decided to sleep there.

Later, gathered around the hearth, with the poultices from the lovely couple seeping into our wounds, we discussed the moose, or more specifically the moose’s lips, whether they’d moved before the crash or whether it was a trick of the storm. None of us knew.

“That’s the way it always goes, isn’t it?” the husband said. He was swilling pomegranate juice from a wine glass and had his shirt buttoned up to the collar. “The quilt is lifted for a second, you almost get to think, Miraculous! and then a hand descends from somewhere or other and yanks it back down.”

“Be quiet, please,” the wife said. “You don’t know a thing you’re talking about. A leprechaun could crawl over right now and whip you in the skull, and you’d think a piece of airplane had fallen from the sky and hit you.”

“Maybe it was lonely,” we said. “Maybe the other moose had abandoned it, and it was pleading with us to be its friend.”

“Don’t be cute,” the husband said.

“Yes, that’s horrible,” the wife said.

“Why don’t you shut up and lay back and rest?”

At dawn, a metallic sound rose from the forest, and the couple yawned in unison. Together they lifted our bodies on a handsewn stretcher and deposited us in a basement room.

2.

I am in the bargain basement of an automobile market. An imp mans the counter. Its eyes roll out and tumble into my maw.

“Your peepers taste awful,” I tell it. “Subpar mouthfeel, too. Like an ice cube recently melted. Something’s missing and I don’t know what to do, where to go, who to suckle?”

“Have you viewed our automobile constructed from a baby carriage?” the imp asks. “I can no longer see it myself, as my vision now belongs to you. In my workshop, as well, I am building a jalopy that runs on muffled screams. I will need your assistance with the jacks, the wrenches, all of the responsibilities under this roof.”

A month passes. Rain comes and rain goes. The roof fosters several holes, which weep as they witness my plight, as they enact their own dramas. I dry no tears except my own acrid drool.

When the imp sleeps, almost never, I fashion a castle out of the most dilapidated tires we own. They take me nowhere. I draw the moat, wield my scepter, watch the shadow of the jester flicker on the farthest wall.

The chassis in the workshop dreams of a heron pecking at its steel.

3.

Mid-tussle a pan slopped on the ground, its contents gone grassy. I met a snail once whose home sat beneath the iron curve. Can you believe the weight of the thing, it made an indent in the dirt, now ants crawl there, it’s a pathway for them, a highway, I wonder if little deer cross and are slept. In the home the snail hosted three children. Human ones, not snail, but nevertheless they were covered in slime, they’d built stalks for their heads out of the smallest of sticks, it was an ingenuity I’d never witnessed before. One of the onions became a carrot, it becomes a maggot. Many maggots in this tapenade, can you taste them? Every one of these bubbles comes from underseas, I hear they hire divers with special tanks that last all of their lives, it’s rather sad actually, they never see the fruit of their labor, or the champagne of their labor, whatever this potion is that we’re drinking. Weren’t we fighting about something before this feast? I can’t imagine that, I can’t imagine anything before this meal, in this yard, the falconers squatting down in the corners watching their prizes drift through our smoke. A dollop of blood has coagulated on your shirt, or maybe it’s that special jam I made, the one your mother loved before she discovered the divers, she fashioned herself an advocate, she condensed. Did she herself invent the recipe, or did she stumble upon it like she did a great many lessons? You’ve imparted this world I live in, and I thank you for it. Now for the horns to sprout from my trunk.