if he was an angel but the ten to the Full Moon isn’t exactly the stuff of revelation. Even coming from Azure House, where let’s just say the blottos love to circle up and talk god. But on an empty bus headed to my evening shift he announced: Chadwick, here only for a time. Like cicadas. Just us there, gray sleety hellswirl outside, me in slip-resistant clogs, nauseated from God knows what—rag water, embryonic somersaults, probably both—and the little curly top fade says that? Sure I’m calling that psychic we always pass on Milwaukee, I actually have this baby and it starts gabbing like some future Chadwick. Explain, your highness. Because the next night before I nearly coughed up my first aluminum chip, the kid sermonized from his window seat like he saw it coming: Harry horror story, bald like butterball with damp tea bags under his goo-lidded eyes, saying bitch I have to tell you again this, some mother you’ll make that. Like he knew my designs: Sorry, kiddo, woolly mammoth or not, Sonja’s back in her cups, McCormick-brand vanilla bean extract. Digestif, as in the second I bin the last half-eaten omelet. Only he really did say that about the dinosaur elephant and when Harry finally did condemn me to supply, a tusked beast with slow-blinking boy eyes waited there, all rueful snuffaluffagus as it watched me waddle by. Zappo, right to the brain, as if that singular screw-up would somehow retroactively annihilate a once great mammal. Who wants to kill elephants? Too heavy, nevermind where that particular vein of the PACE network goes, the boy’s and mine, if you don’t exit at the diner: downtown, so deadville commerce, courthouse, and pretty much nothing else. The seedy theater palace that Gordon Lightfoot once played. Exactly where the big guy upstairs would drop his paragons if he had them, no? Shoot, higher power as you understand it. Chadwick being a latch-key foster deal would only make it worse, because what I wanted to say the night he wasn’t there anymore was hee-hee, hoo: Sonja sea elephant, straight out of the piss-flecked nature mags in the Azure House honey bucket. Pupping, it’s called. Even practiced pushing short breaths through my coffee-stained teeth. If he were still there and pantomiming a fat laboring seal wasn’t complete batshit. If I could explain the cherub on the bus at all.
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Fiction - ISSUE #28