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Canary-Yellow Dresses
Chapter 1
The once multi-eyed moon, rendered sightless over the years, its eyes punched out by wayward meteors leaving it marred with dusty sockets can't see its own light shine through the window and onto the hardwood floor of a small house nearly a quarter-million miles away. Nor can the moon see the mouse its light has changed from gray to silver as it nibbles cookie crumbs spilt onto the floor by the dark man asleep on the vintage sofa in a dark room. The mouse cleans up the crumbs then lifts its whiskered snout into the atmosphere of the house and detects peanut butter. The mouse trots towards the kitchen, and after a short while the dark man asleep on the sofa is awakened by a "SNAP!" His eyes open wide as he asks the darkness "what was that?" then remembers the trap he set in the kitchen. The moon has since gone west and shines its light on other things.
Chapter 2
Around noon the dark man opens the door of the small house and steps outside. He stands under the sun which seems to get brighter as he grows darker. He walks over to the edge of the porch and lifts the trap's metal bar from the broken neck of the mouse and shakes its corpse into the bushes there. He stands scratching his belly then notices flowers abloom at a streetside corner of the yard. He walks over to them to get a closer look. He doesn't know what kind of flowers they are. He doesn't know much about flowers or plants in general. The flowers are red and yellow with green leaves. He bends down and picks one of them and holds it to his nose. It doesn't smell like anything. He drops the flower onto the weedy grass he is supposed to keep cut short using the lawn mower the landlord keeps in the garage. There is a can for gas in there, too. He hates lawn maintenance equipment. He hates the noise it makes, the way it feels in his hands. He always feels like a fool when he uses them. "I might as well go get beer while I'm up and about" he thinks to himself and begins the three-block walk to the small, local, store where he buys his groceries and beer. The houses along the sidewalk look to him like tombstones with doors and windows. No one is about. He assumes the inhabitants of the tombstones are all at their awful jobs. His mother died recently and left him enough money to survive for a year or so without working. He wonders if when the money is gone if his mind will allow him to get an awful job of his own or cause him to blow his brains out so he can go hang out in heaven rent free. He wonders if he would see his mom up there. He has his doubts. He imagines heaven must be a huge place and to him all the clouds up there would look pretty much the same.
Chapter 3
Henry didn't mind the homeless lifestyle, and in many ways he actually enjoyed it, but summer was beginning to blaze, and clean, cool, water was getting hard to find so he thought it might be time to find a human to stay with for a while. He found what seemed like a quiet neighborhood with streets lined with small houses and little traffic so he casually walked up a sidewalk while sniffing the ground and air around him as a way of sizing things up. Henry had walked a few blocks when he noticed a dark man sitting on a porch drinking beer. There was a lawn mower sitting in the small, half-mowed yard of weedy grass. He liked the fact the yard wasn't perfectly manicured. It meant the human wasn't real fussy about neatness.
Henry slowed down in front of the house and the dark man and pretended to sniff the sidewalk in a serious manner while checking out the dark man's demeanor out of the corners of his eyes. All seemed mellow, so he slowly approached the dark man in a zig-zag rout until he got close enough to cause the dark man to ask "where did you come from, fella?' Henry took that as a cue to walk right up to the dark man and look into his eyes with tongue hanging out while exaggerating thirst. "You thirsty? Asked the dark man, then he stood and went into the house, which had an upbeat Rossini overture streaming through the open door. The dark man soon returned with a stainless bowl full of water and set it on the bottom step of the porch. Henry went to lap lap lapping up the cool water until the bowl was almost empty. He then licked drops off his chops and walked up the two other steps and plopped down on a shady spot on the porch while the dark man started the lawn mower and cut the remaining half of the yard then put the mower back in the garage. Having finished his bi-weekly chore, the dark man went inside the house then returned to the top step of the porch and sat down with another beer. After a few minutes Henry got up from his nap and went over to the dark man and gave him a soft nuzzle with his snout. "You are probably hungry, too." said the dark man to Henry, then went into the house which still had Rossini overtures playing on a laptop, then returned with a cold, leftover hamburger patty. He broke bite-size pieces off the burger and tossed them to Henry, who caught them in his jowls, mid air. The dark man noticed the dog wasn't wearing a collar, and so of course wore no ID tags, either. The dark man decided the dog could hang around for a while and see how things went. He thought a little companionship might be nice.
Chapter 4
The dark man got up from his seat and went over to some bushes near the porch and retrieved a rubber ball he knew was there. He tossed the ball towards the edge of the yard and said to the dog "Go get it!" Henry just sat where he was. He had no interest in rubber balls. The dark man noticed a cat walking along the sidewalk across the street and wondered if the dog would chase it. Henry saw the cat, but didn't budge. Henry had no interest in chasing rubber balls or catching a mouth full of screeching cat. Henry thought chasing things was stupid.
"Let's go inside and see if we're at war, yet the dark man said to the dog, and they both went inside the house and closed the front door. The dark man looked at the dog and said aloud: "You need to have a name. Let me look at you and see what name you look like." The dog had a square head like a pit bull while the rest of his body looked like it might be that of a lab. His coat was dark brown with some white splotches on his flanks. "I know, said the dark man, you look like a "Henry." Your name is Henry, now." Henry decided he would stay with the dark man for a while.
Chapter5
The dark man is a news junkie. He monitors several news entities on internet social media. Every day when he turns on his PC to check the news he fears seeing images and videos of bombed out major cities of the United States in flames with huge billows of black smoke rising from them. He expects the war. He believes it's inevitable. He's convinced human kind is insane for the most part and wasn't meant to exist for very long. The dinosaurs existed much longer than humans will, he believes, and they would have existed much longer had nature in its randomness not wiped them out with an asteroid. He sleeps on the old sofa in the small living room of the house and keeps a loaded handgun under it. There is a small bedroom in the house he uses to store a few boxes of stuff he hasn't thrown away, yet and it's where he keeps his clothes and other possibles. He wouldn't feel comfortable at all sleeping back in that room. He needs to be on the front line of his dwelling in case of bad guys.
Chapter 6
The dark man and his friend, Henry spend many hours on the porch while the weather is friendly. The porch is covered, so even on extra hot days it's fairly pleasant in the shade of it, and the dark man has an electric fan he sets pointing at them for extra comfort. With the arrival of Henry the dark man now has someone to talk to, and does, frequently. "I was just thinking," began the dark man one day out on the porch. "Oh, boy. Thought Henry: here we go with more philosophical jibberish."
"I think it's strange after hundreds of years of exploration by astronomers that no assholes have been located anywhere but on Earth. It seems to me that nature would make at least one asshole somewhere up there. I don't see how she can get around it. Assholes are everywhere on this planet. I bet if we went out of our way to meet the neighbors we would find at least three or four assholes living right here on this street, and I bet there are several more spread out in the neighborhood. I just hope if astronomers do discover assholes elsewhere they don't invite any of them here. There are plenty enough to go around already."
Henry lifted his head about an inch, looked at the dark man, then put it back down on the porch boards and went back to sleep.
Chapter 7
It is some hour between midnight and dawn and the night is moonless. The mouse roams freely in the house while the dark man and dog are asleep. The mouse has found the dog's food bowl and the bits of dry food on the floor around it. It nibbles for a while, then catches the scent of peanut butter. The mouse follows its nose to the peanut butter in the kitchen. The mouse finds it easily. It is on a small piece of wood on the floor between a refrigerator and a hot water heater that stands like a sentry in a kitchen corner. A loud "SNAP!" awakens the dark man. "Henry? he calls: you okay, boy?" Henry doesn't respond. He is sound asleep on his small stack of folded blankets on the floor of the bedroom where the dark man never sleeps. "Ah." Says the dark man to himself. "It's the trap. I got another mouse." The dark man puts his head back down on the pillow, and as he goes back to sleep he wonders if killing mice will keep him out of heaven.
Chapter 8
It's July 3rd this hot, Los Angeles suburb Saturday and most people have the holiday weekend off. It looks like all the dark man's neighbors are home. Their cars are still in the driveways and parked on the street. The dark man fires up his laptop to check what's happening in the world. It's about noon, so he has his first beer beside him. Henry snoozes on the porch. The front door is open. "Oh, my God!" exclaims the dark man. Henry hears him, and lifts his head and perks his ears for more details. "Oh, my God!" the dark man exclaims again, then gets up from his PC and steps out onto the porch with his beer. Some of his neighbors are coming outside, too. "Have you seen the news?" one of his neighbors hollers from across the street. "Yes. replies the dark man. I wonder if we'll be hit." he yells back to the neighbor. "We might." responds the neighbor.
More people have left their houses and are standing in their yards and sidewalks. Some are pacing in the street. Several of them have bottles of booze and beers. The dark man chugs what's left of the beer he has then goes into the house and brings out the five cans left of his six-pack. He walks to the curb followed by Henry. He introduces himself to some of the neighbors. They start chattering nervously like budgies in a Walmart cage. They are all drinking, now. Henry lies belly-down on a cool lawn. "This is different." he thinks to himself, then rests his jaw on his paws and closes his eyes.
The dark man is now chasing a neighbor's whiskey down with his beer and is feeling fine. His neighbors seem to be fear-free too, at the moment, when they all look down the street and see the crazy hippy chick of the street pushing a clothes rack full of about twenty long, canary-yellow dresses towards them. "These were outside Macy's on display. she hollered. Check them out!" One of the neighbors handed her a coffee cup full of booze and said "join the party!" "Thanks!" she replied. "Anyone want to try on some dresses help yourself." A neighbor's wife walked to the rack and took one of the dresses off its hanger and pulled it over her head. "It fits good." she said, then watched as other women helped themselves to the dresses. jack, a neighbor from across the street feeling spry, grabbed one of the larger dresses from the rack and pulled it on over his clothes. "Does it make me look fat?" he asked, then let out a drunken "guffaw." Some of the other men pulled dresses on, then the dark man decided he would join in and pulled one on, too. Henry looked up at the dark man weaving slightly while standing on a lawn in a yellow dress. "I think I'll go for a walk." Henry thought to himself and discreetly began walking down the street. He could still hear the humans being loud and silly a block away. Three blocks away he couldn't hear them anymore. Henry saw the flash while sniffing a white, paper, bag held loosely by tall weeds in a vacant lot.
