A massive yellow duck claps his wings, skipping through a meadow of smiling flowers. He wears a cloth diaper, blue bonnet and a wide smile. He sings, “I’m a goin’ to granny’s house! I’m a goin’ to granny’s house!”
A brick-red fox sits fast asleep against an apple tree. A duck feather floats above his wheezing nose and sputtering mouth. As the skipping draws nearer the ground begins to tremble violently, though the fox remains deep in his trance. Without warning, the sleeping fox is pounded from above by a shower of falling apples, one after another knocks him on the head in a glissando of xylophone notes until he is completely hidden from view. An angry head bursts from the enormous pile of fruit, and shakes off the tiny Isaac Newtons that dance around him dizzyingly.
Livid, the fox spies his rouser. He blinks three or four times and his hard, black pupils are transformed into roast ducks, complete with tiny paper caps for the legs. A long tongue glides across his trembling lips.
The fox steps momentarily behind his tree, emerging in overalls and carrying a pile of wooden planks. In a flurry of activity, the fox saws this and that, bangs here and there, until panting, he finally reveals a crudely constructed, structurally unsound shack with “Ye Olde Granny’s House” painted across its face. He snickers and shakes his head, marveling at his creation.
Hiding behind a nearby tree the fox watches as the duck skips towards the waiting trap. The duck is surprised to see his family homestead so unexpectedly close. “Time sure does fly when you’re having fun!” he shrugs. “Granny! I’m here!”
The duck has been inside the house for only a sliver of a second when the fox, now dressed in a chef’s hat and apron, screams onto the scene, tearing down the home to reveal a standard, fully-functioning oven. The duck’s diaper can barely be seen sticking out of the open door before the fox slams it shut. The fox leans against the oven, consulting a book entitled “Fowl for Foxes”. The page reads: “To cook duck, roast for two hours turning once, draining liquid occasionally to ensure crispiness. Best served with fresh plum sauce.”
Time passes. The fox’s stomach begins to rumble, his belly quavering. A bell rings somewhere and he runs to the oven rubbing together protective mitts. Opening the door, the fox removes a tray on which, garnished by carrots, potatoes, and even cut up apples, sits not a moist yet crispy duck, but rather a sleeping, drooling one. The fox is furious. He sets the duck on the stovetop before jumping up and down on his hat several times. He yanks open the oven and shoves his head within in an attempt to discover some sort of malfunction. Without any word of warning, a yellow-feathered arm descends from above, slamming the door in one swipe, trapping the fox.
As the duck skips off, a blackened, grimacing face presses its nose up against the unyielding window of an oven, around which a circle tightens until only black remains.
The television which this drama plays out upon is bolted to a panel of dark finished particle board. The board sits in a cabinet and thanks to a special mount swivels two or three inches either way. This is to allow for comfortable viewing two to three inches away from exactly in front of the television. The room is painted a color somewhere between orange and pink. The room contains among other things: a chair with turquoise cushion tied to its seat, a blue ice bucket and two glasses, one still wrapped in its cellophane, two towels—one hung on the doorknob, the other folded neatly by the sink, three small bars of lavender scented soap, four hangers, a small iron, two pads of paper, one pen, a queen size bed with only the right side turned down or showing evidence of sleep, a framed watercolor of a girl flying a kite on the beach, a round side table without drawers, a lamp which matches the walls screwed down to the tabletop. Seated on the edge of the bed, Hat Markam was also in the room.
Turning off the television, Hat looks at himself in the blank screen. He is wearing a light grey hooded sweatshirt—the full-zip variety—and black fleece pants. The sweatshirt is new and still has enough elasticity that it clings to his belly, which, though it has never been mistaken for a bowl full of jelly, does have a rather distinct curvature. While warm and fuzzy, the fleece of his pants becomes easily static-charged and as a result picks up dust and various other forms of airborne matter. This at first bothered Hat to no end, but he has since resigned himself to the ubiquitous existence of lint.
There are some things which Hat refuses to allow get to him. For instance, though his hair has grayed he does not use one of the coloring products advertised on television during the nightly news. Instead, he does his best to keep his hair neatly trimmed, especially around the ears where it tends to go curly if left unattended. Even now, looking at himself in the reflection of a hotel television, he runs his hand over the top of his head and uses his thumb to curve the front off his brow sufficiently.
In matters of health, Hat is somewhat less cautious. He has spent time in and out of hospitals over the course of his life, though no one stay has exceeded a week. Many such visits have been spent in taking care of a lingering kidney stone problem. Hat’s bowels in general have been a lifelong war zone, now scarred and riddled with great craters. A portion of the duodenum area of his small intestine is missing, the victim of a blockage that would not remove itself. This has left Hat with a list of foods he is not supposed to eat: various forms of nuts, raw vegetables, corn, broad or soybeans, raw seafood such as oysters. He drinks three-and-a-half liters of water a day.
Last night in the hotel cantina while Hat looked at the menu, he knew that the chile pepper icon printed next to number forty-six was a sign of doctorly disapproval, but he decided that vacation (like many other things) warranted a level of disregard for such concerns. After all, he was supposed to be celebrating.
“What’ll you have?”
“Well, barring any insistence from you,” Hat notices that the waitress’s name is Missy, “I’m going to try this number forty-six though I’d like black beans instead of refried if that’s possible.”
When the food arrives, Missy smiles and asks what brings him to Fort Lauderdale. Spring training? She tears off his check and leans her forearms against the counter.
No, Hat explains, he is not in Florida for baseball. He tells her the story of the night last November when, returning from the grocery he drove his Toyota pickup over a slight crest into a fog-filled depression. There he saw a smaller car, foreign-made, sitting against the guard-rail with its brake lights on. Pulling off the road, Hat shone his high-beams through the car’s back windshield. He saw no heads.
Hat scrambled over to the car. There, laying in front of the vehicle was a fully grown mule deer, its neck bent and broken. Caught in the light from a streetlamp the head was encircled with this terrible black halo of blood. Looking away, Hat yanked open the driver’s door. A young man, who he would later learn was a sophomore at the community college, leaned against the center console. Hat shook him and got no response. The man was not wearing his seatbelt and had obviously hit his head against the windshield at a very painful speed. There was plenty of blood. Hat grabbed the man by the neck but felt no pulse in the jugular. Not knowing what else to do, Hat put his hands on the man’s head, one on the forehead, the other down around by the base of the skull.
Hat shook this poor man’s head. He shook it hard, not like you shake a piggy bank or a present on Christmas, more like shaking the last seeds out of a pumpkin. He shook it again and for some reason thought of those toys for children where the shaking erases the image you etch in the sand. He had the notion—he didn’t know what could have inspired it—but that if he shook hard enough, the blood would go back into this man’s head, the bones would fuse back together, whatever pain he was feeling would go away. For whatever reason, he just couldn’t think of anything else. So Hat shook and shook. It doesn’t make any sense, and Hat always gets a funny look on his face when he gets to this part of the story but at the point when he didn’t think his arms could take any more shaking, when he began to wonder if he was doing more harm than good, when he didn’t know what was going to happen but kept slamming this man’s head back and forth in his arms, the kid woke up. Long story short: He got well—it took awhile because he had broken a few ribs—but it actually happened.
Missy raises her eyebrows, exhales, and pushes herself off the counter. “Pretty amazing story.” Hat nods once and takes a bite of rice. In between chews he explains that the local Rotary club surprised him by putting together some money to send Hat down here for a week—they called it a “good works bursary”. There was an article in the paper and a few people even got together to send him off. So here he is.
Sitting in his hotel room after a day on the beach, Hat thinks that he likes Florida, though he wonders about some of the people. Everyone seems altogether predictable: too much the age they ought to be, too much the bronze color expected, too much in line with the stereotypes maintained by comedians and AARP brochures.
The weather really is something else though. Tonight is the third night in a row he sleeps with the window open, the mix of indoor and outdoor temperatures providing exactly the preferable equilibrium for sleep. A beige moth enters the room and circles Hat’s body as he lies in bed. Hat watches from below as the moth traces a shaky figure against the pink ceiling, like a spirit descending peacefully upon him. The moth lands on his arm and Hat can feel the fuzzy tickle of its feet. It looks like a tiny paper triangle resting on his arm. The moth steps up and down, turning its little body so the head faces Hat’s. Then, another moth lands quietly on his shoulder. A third settles first on his left leg, then a fourth and fifth on his right. Hat feels wings ruffle through his hair. Three more triangles appear on his chest, hopping up and down, their wings tapping against the sheets. Soon Hat has lost count of the insects in the room, there must be over a hundred. A car drives past his window, momentarily illuminating a cloud of wings suspended above his body. The swarm looks first like a boat with sails whipping in the air, then a man with a dog’s head carrying a staff, an apple, a blinking eye, a book with turning pages, and finally taking the shape of the face of a weeping woman. Hat lies transfixed in bed, wondering if what he is seeing is real or a dream he didn’t realize he was having. If it is real: why? Hat wonders what, if anything, he could have done to provoke something like this. He also wonders if he shouldn’t feel more afraid than he does right now, perhaps less in awe and more surprised. As the moths fly out the window they came in from, like a string of hairy twine, lying there in his hotel room Hat sees in his mind this great mass of moths floating up into the Florida midnight, dispersing themselves among the stars. He can see them draining the milky light of the heavens until the sky is entirely black but the moths have become like a hundred new twitching stars, in new formations with new stories to be told about them.
The next morning Hat wakes up uncharacteristically late but feels refreshed, he hums while shaving. He turns on the television while dressing and watches a few moments of the local news. He watches a story about a new city ordinance concerning garbage pickup, a story on local men back from Iraq, a health feature, and the weather. Today is to be warm and sunny with a chance of showers at night.
After breakfast Hat takes a newspaper out by the pool. A mother sits on the edge of the pool watching her two children swim. Two small birds fly past, landing on a second story balcony. Hat wonders if they aren’t some kind of tropical love birds chasing after each other, or if they’re just normal birds doing what birds always do.
The older of the two children, a boy who looks to be around eleven or twelve ducks momentarily under the water only to emerge and spit a stream of water at his sister. She screams something in Spanish and splashes him, slapping both arms against the surface of the pool. Hat adjusts his towel on the back of the yellow chair, refolds his paper. He catches the eye of the mother who smiles. He nods. The children notice their mother looking at the man in the brown bathing suit and grey hooded sweatshirt. The girl says something to her brother and they both fall backwards into the water laughing. Hat smiles and goes back to his paper, reading an article about beach erosion. He moves on to an article about hazing in area high schools, what disciplinary measures are being accepted. Hat feels someone watching him and looks up to see the mother standing by his chair.
She smiles. “Hello.”
“How are you?”
The mother apologizes and explains that she needs to go inside to use the restroom. Would he watch her children for a few minutes?
Hat answers that of course he would, and jokes that nature always calls at the worst times.
She smiles and says something in Spanish to the children. As she walks away, Hat notices the dotted trail of water she leaves on the sun whitened concrete.
He lays his paper on the ground and slides it under his chair. The boy lifts himself out of the pool, turning his back to his sister bouncing up and down in the shallow end. He does not look at Hat as he walks to the edge of the patio where there is a patch of scruffy grass. He says something to his sister, adjusts his bathing suit and begins to run. When he reaches the edge of the pool this skinny boy with long black hair leaps forward and out into the air, his arms stretched in front of him like a human knife. His sister turns away from the splash he makes, brushing her hair out of her face. From his chair Hat cannot see the boy underwater, but imagines him gliding along the bottom of the pool, sneaking up to surprise and tickle his sister. A breeze blows through the courtyard and a palm front scrapes along the pool deck. The little girl begins to scream and point at the bottom of the pool.
Hat is standing and leaping into the pool, sweatshirt and all. As he hits the water Hat Markam thinks that this is life: doing what seems completely natural though it entirely surprises you. When life pushes up against you in a way you don’t like, stay natural, let your faculties take over. Hat thinks that he is learning to step outside himself for a moment.
As he rights himself in the water Hat first sees the little girl’s legs kicking furiously and then the boy lying on his back like a table upturned. His eyes are closed and he looks strangely peaceful. Hat is surprised at how much light there is in the pool, it seems to be diffused and floating all around the boy, across his face, behind his arms and legs. The boy is so beautiful lying there on a bed of concrete, black leaves, bits of other debris that Hat considers for just a split second actually leaving him there, just let him be still for a bit. Hat thinks the boy is using this time to be peaceful, to be quiet. Frowning, he grabs under the boy’s left arm and right leg. Expecting a twelve-year-old to be quite a burden, Hat lifts hard and is surprised by how light he actually is, like the boy is filled not with muscle and bone but with air. Pushing off the bottom, Hat lifts the child out of the water, practically throwing him onto the side of the pool. Hat stands half submerged in the water and looks to see the mother screaming, running from the hotel trailed by several employees in white shirts. Hat thinks this looks like chaos, and again for a moment wishes they would let the boy rest in peace for a moment. He does not look sick or deflated, but rather full to the brim with color. The mother falls on her knees by the boy’s side and puts her hands on his cheeks. She turns him one way and then the other. Hat still crouches in the pool while the employees turn the boy on his side and thump him on the back, one holding his head the other pounding three, four, five times. Hat thinks they are hurting him, his back is not that strong, that he is still a child. They should let him recover on his own, they should bide their time and be patient with this young man’s body. Hat opens his mouth to say something, to tell them to give the boy space when he rolls over on his stomach and coughs up water and vomit. The mother pushes the hotel employees aside and takes her son in her arms, cradling the boy as if he were only a baby. She cries and wraps the boy in a towel so he looks even more like a child just out of the bath. She holds him and whispers something, she rests her chin on his head and looks at Hat. She does not say anything.
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