Faded Houses Green

Reading Ulysses in Montana #546

When leaving the Danube for the open seas, Ginger alighted on the idea of fluid stamps.

Blushing, the unconsoled taxes on solemn paper brushed aside the splendid, silent clerk. Ginger paused. Sorting out the strained tunnels and shuffled phantoms of guilt, warped skulls mounted a phrase, as though it were a horse, and called their lack of direction challenged.

Heralds packed George a pack of pudding and found a whistling jug to shake the herring from his ears. Ginger had always considered such things buffoonery, but buffoonery prevailed in tense conquests where the instruments of contempt consented to whimsical modes of science and bee keeping.

Ginger told George Duck. George told Ginger Goose. The boom knocked George into the sea where he swam the length (not width) of the Hellespont, besting both Leander and Byron at one go and proving once and for all the Hellespont was the birth canal of Western Civilization.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #430

Her poetry was like the skies of the dinosaur age: full of terrible dactyls.

But without a nuance or two to share with the neighbors down the road, Ginger could get no closer to a solution to the problem of what to get George for his birthday. Not that his birthday was pending, but it was wending its way through the corridors of time and place and would arrive as frivolously late as though unexpected–and she would certainly not be prepared.

Egg on her face was the most likely outcome, although game theory and albumen masks were not in the habit of joining in shared existence in anyone’s mind, let alone Ginger’s, who had a deep antipathy for doing such things since her mother had collapsed the three-meter souffle her father had constructed three days before that fateful New Year’s party.

Ginger collapsed into a heap of scrambled potatoes and wrote three more meters of over hard, terrible dactyls.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #37

Picking up the phrases that other phases of other matters whimsically deplore, Angie entered the station once more.

Another seven years would pass before another seven years would pass, and the fourteen years would turn into twenty-one and then all that’s left is getting old, growing mold, and reaping what you’ve sold. Were blenders more forgiving, the height of modesty would deter nothing more than a bore at a disco party, doing the quiver with a forgotten liver–living it up till all hours of the most recent special on network teevee.

And yet, there’s more. More fardels to bear, more weary lives to grunt over and sweat through, more dread of undiscovered countries such that Kirk would have no end of extravagant gallivanting in store, even to the end of the third universe from the most local post box, invented by Trollope in concert with Bukowski–a finer pairing never pared before or shared since.

Angie told Kirk to carry on, so he did as he does and he slept to the end of her twenty-one years at the station.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #670

Heavy hands make empty works of Shakespeare and Marlowe (with and without the “e”), capitalized and uninspired eyes with civilized perspectives not included.

Imbued with the kind of ink made by kind hands, Holly hitched a ride to the edge of town and, standing on the corner, she lifted the hood and tinkered with the solenoid and said try it now. Click. Zoom. Room for improvement notwithoutstanding, the next room down the hall was free for some jai alai practice, the fronton of her heart being occupied a dozen more days for extensive remodel. Or was it the way the red settled into black into nothing? Nothing would do for an hour each day, but the flowers of followers consumed their tidy toast in due course. Overdue, of course.

Horses for courses and chicks with fleas were fleeing the falling skies–the weltering skies.

Fibs in the forecast proved too daunting for Darlene to carry through the back door while carrying three bags of groceries, smothered in southern gravy.

Navies of Davies shipped the whorled peas into seas of infinite regress without redress to the commander in leaves of grassy knolls, John having been sequestered in questions of fruit of parlays since the incident of the tree branch and broken legs. Separate peas were all the rage with pages of pages requesting higher wages in ages gone by when sages corrupted the cages of gold upon stones untold when Vegas was but a train stop on the highway to greater destinies.

The matinee was over before Darlene had discovered John hadn’t written about Ginger and George since the bridge over the Moyie Gorge had assembled into a fraud of a million little pieces, all told.