Bowing monkeyward, as he does every morning, Caleb Strepthroat, a porcine conundrum with thick yet opaque features that avoid reliable description (bean & bacon soup and a whiskey sour being the meal that comes closest to describing his icy heartfelt Meg Foster eyes), feels a sharp ping of gristle pop in his gut and his stoop hardens like cartoon Quick-Dry. Stiff, stuck in his supplication, Caleb groans in code. The monkeys chatter and laugh, watching his pain and distress with gloating, merry, simian eyes.
“Shut up, youse guys,” he tells them, sparking a new round of bubbling hilarity.
A telephone rings with the dying cry of a wounded mountain man, his blood-sapped plight informed by the testimony of trees and the blind science of weather-cruel in its chaos, freezing the hirsute trapper to a tree trunk. Scavengers will find him thawed soft in the spring and eat him, like a TV dinner. Consumed by the slobbering jaws of seasonal starvation.
Pain-clenched Caleb reaches the phone. “Strepthroat residence,” he says.
“Hi Caleb. It’s me, Marsha.”
“Hey, Marsh. What’s up?” He hopes she’ll detect the agony in his voice.
“I wrote a new aria. Can I sing it for you?”
“Are you coming over?”
“Aria. New. Sing?”
“I’m really not in a good way right now. Can it wait?”
She begins to sing, Marsha Schizophrenofski, 37, a divorced mother of two, (Johann and Kevin, who wear only pajamas and have never played tag). Marsha lumbers wearily at her job, carrying black plastic objects to the mute women on the assembly line. “Here,” she says and then turns for more. Unending bits and pieces spawned from the groaning industrial yawn of an oven-slash-tunnel. Baked with hardening heat. Boxes and boxes. She wears gloves with pictures of Snoopy on them. She is an angel with a soft body that invites inappropriate hugs. “Don’t hug me!” she has to say to crestfallen strangers who slowly lower their limbs and wonder what they did wrong.
An hour later, Marsha finishes singing.
“Well?”
“That was nice,” Caleb tells her, honestly.
“Thanks. Hey do I hear laughing monkeys?”
“Well, yeah, they’re laughing at me, you see…”
“Of all the nerve!” She hangs up.
And the monkey’s cruel laughter pounces anew.
Crumbling Asphalt 