The June bug is born.

I know nothing about it.

The sun rises on your town.

I go for coffee with acquaintances and wait for your call and watch the mothers and fathers walking their children to school.  The slow pace, the stopping to look at things, the hand-holding, the stooping of the parents to say what might be said to little ears.

The bell goes.

Stragglers walk by.

My coffee grows cold waiting for your call.  I have anticipated it, but know that you are still young and that it won’t come today.  The others leave, and I sit, not so much waiting as holding down space, occupying it so I’m sure it’s not just me that’s a vacuum.

Meanwhile, in the world that matters, there’s money to be made.  There’s no time for this, no patience for fancy.  No time for anything but trade.  The rest of you, shoo, go, begone, find some way to get by.  Go.  Last man standing.

Your call won’t come because the pillows are soft and the sheets are clean, they’re smooth, and your bare legs slide across them making almost no sound.  From the foot of your bed, what anyone would be drawn to is the way your hair tries to hide your mouth and your lips, making them only more points of interest.

And so, in your town, the sun begins to climb.  It rises above the trees and over the buildings.  You have no love for any of it and I can find no energy to blame you.  I have said it already.  It’s nothing to me.

The leaves have not come out this year.  They’ve chosen to hide.  And I can’t blame them either.  Who wants all that attention?  They called last year, some of them, but had little to say.  A shu-shu here, a shu-shu there.  I wasn’t about to make the effort.  Understanding is cheap and I am lazy.  I admit it.  And they are too much in the sun.  Perhaps they’ll…  But I don’t know.  I know nothing about it.

At twelve o’clock, or thereabouts, the men begin to parade.  Back and forth they go across the square, this way and that.  Six in a row east, twelve in close order bound for the west.  There’s duty for you, there’s grit.  And you, you roll over, your legs coiled up in the sheets.  A little more sleep, another dream, this time flying perhaps, a repeat of others you’ve had where you soar high above then swoop down till the freshly-mown grass brushes your belly and everything stops and all around is briefcases.   

Take one if you like.  You’re owed one.

 

The last I see of the waiter he’s gone to bring me my bill, but the place is so busy, so filled with waiting maws that I expect he’s too scared to reappear and will never come back.  My money awaits, but why try in the face of such unforgiving odds.  And deriving satisfaction from failures such as this, well, it’s just not done anymore.  Mistakes are mistakes, not means of elevation, and whoever said they were has been shot.

Something I’ve been holding onto, something I’ve meant to say, not just to you but to everyone, is that the plastics room is now open.  Here you can see all types of packaging materials.  You can swim in it.  For fifty cents you can strip to your underpants and wade through all the varied, form-fitted, shape-specific plastic which once-upon-a-time encased all manner of objects for sale: golf balls, for instance.  Or fuzzy dice.  Toy trains.  Generic indicator lights for some makes of sport utility vehicles manufactured prior to the fall of the twin towers.  Remember them?

And still you don’t call.  Plastics be damned.

You murmur something I’m not there to hear.  No one hears it, so no one knows what it is, but I can bet it has something to do with holding onto the folds of the sheets, as your little lips form shapes that look very much like the words: Here we go.

Oh, but where?

In your town the sun twitches towards half-way to sunset.  It proceeds the way the second hand of a watch might, not with a sweeping motion, but incrementally.  Click, click, click, the shadows jolting in the bare hedgerows, the plump brown beetles wheedling in the dirt.  Call them June Bugs if you like, since they are.

And then, with this, I find that all I can say is that I have long since left my table, my coffee unpaid for.  We won’t call it dine and dash since I am not only someone who moves far too slowly to satisfy the idea of ‘dash’, but what I prayed for, what I really wanted was for someone to stop me, to take my arm, to stay me and say, This is what is owed.  Pay and be on your way.  Instead, the coins are my mine for now and I shall hang onto them.

In the streets the children crawl home from a full day of school, pulled this way and that by invisible leashes, and boiling with the afternoon heat.

But you wouldn’t know.

You have just entered the deepest sleep possible.  Or so I should think, though it’s nothing to me.

I am satisfied.  A day without speaking to you has left me feeling indifferent and unengaged in enough ways that I have been cleverly deceived into a state of mind that resembles contentment.  I could be making things.  I could be contributing.  But passivity suits something so fundamental in my nature that I am loath to upset its delicate structure.  Remove one peg and who knows where I’d be.  Dangling from a limb somewhere.  That’s one option.

So we find a front porch, I and all the people I might be, while the sun drops.  It goes down like lead, since no one is willing to hold out his or her hands and risk the inevitable burns one would sustain when attempting to catch it.  Whose hands are big enough anyway?  Not mine.  Imagine the gloves needed!

So down it goes and on you sleep, though really I don’t care.  Not a whit.

And yes, where am I?  And where is the town square?  And where has that mythical room of plastics got to?  Please, tell me its state.

Closed.

All closed, you would say.

Closed for the day.

I hunker down on my porch, which is someone else’s porch.  They’re not home, whoever owns this porch, or else they don’t care, or I’ve frightened them and they are hiding, too afraid to even phone the police, which is silly, since I’m not the least bit threatening or harmful.  I’m just an unknown, sitting on the porch.  Little old me.

What next but little old me is visited.  I have a friend in the growing dark and it’s not you.  I light the stump of a candle I produce from some mysterious place: a pocket perhaps, or from under a hat I don’t wear.  Maybe it was here all along, melted into the small table next to this swinging bench I have commandeered.  What is more interesting to me is where did I get the match?

But here he is, my new friend.  He.  She.

Six legs, tangled and sticky in the threads of my sleeve.  A round shiny carapace.  Brown and smooth.  Carrying no briefcase.  I pluck him with my fingers and try to settle him on his feet on the table beside where I sit but he ends up on his back, struggling.

How can such a thing survive, I wonder?  So lumbering, so graceless, so wanting in charm.  No means of income.  None at all.

I say he’s my friend, but what do I know?  Maybe he wants a bite.  Or maybe he no more wants a bite of me than I’d like to bite you.  You can’t be too sure.

But soon I forget him.  He manages to right himself and get away.  Well, he must have, since I can see him nowhere.

This is me.  Knowing nothing.  Eyes little more than slits.

If I look around like this what shall I see?  What could I make out in the growing dark?

I’ll tell you.  I’d see plumes of smoke and funnel clouds, which, in your town, are of course interchangeable.

Soon it’ll be too dark to see anything at all, as it always is.  Part of the progression of things and to be expected.  Such as:

Still you don’t call.

You are young and not to blame.

I can only pretend for so long to be privy to life’s mysteries.

And…

And the June bug dies.  That’s it there, under the table.