Ofelia Hunt
If eggs aren't meant to be thrown, she wants to know, why are they hand-sized? All hand-sized things must obviously be thrown. A period of throwing lasts three years. With technology, larger things can be thrown. People might say, "I want the devastation," while tiny Volkswagens tumble high above a stadium. Later, tractor trailers, tiny faces in their growing shadows, or fingers and ears, scattered in the haphazard grass blades. She doesn't think any of this. At Fred Meyer retired men want to lick her elbows. "But the elbows are so-o dirty," they might say, the liars. There are no elbows, or if there are elbows, they must be thrown high into the air to fall then on waiting puppies. But what it was is never answered at the grocery store, or the library where there are now more tables than books, more computers than people, more windows than walls. The library—an anxious place, full of counting, symmetry-less, where lines of people form out of nothing. In the class on the evolution of class, she twists her eggs into a bracelet. Which is not to say that eggs are twistable but to say instead that there was no bracelet. Her brother always says he'll give her a ride from any one place to any other but when she calls his cell phone there's no answer. Her parents were dead were alive in Alaska are in a submarine researching the Marianas Trench, the deepest trench in the world. There's a doll house in her doll house and this is where she lives. Lacing her toes together, or removing them, to then be thrown out into the river as skipping rocks. When the jet-planes rise up over the river, she throws her hands at them and watches as they stick (splat) to the fuselage. The hands might fly to Singapore or Albuquerque. The hands might fall over Kansas and grow slowly into miniature trailer-parks, or murder passing children as they pedal big wheels up grassy slopes.
A name is not a thing is not a name. That the elbows may have been licked at the Fred Meyer, beneath the fluorescent light, frozen peas there, frozen potatoes. To be held down then with one thousand hands and licked. To be licked is not to be liked. The bicycle, lockless on the sinuous rack, which was not thrown into the air. Which was stable and attached carefully, with bungees, to her brother's Kia. The bridges that piled high up the hills of a city, of Portland, OR of Vancouver, WA. The Kia was upon them, and she was there, is there, back upon the back seat, the soft felt of the roof above her. She might touch it.
What will we do with you? he wants to know.
Storage locker, she says. Walk-in closet. Everyone should have a midget in the walk-in closet. To roll along the edges of a staircase.
The threading sun through the threading window. Over one bridge and another and the tapping of the bicycle against the Kia. She wants to lay softly in the haphazard grass blades of one yard or another, to calmly toss libraries high into the air where they will stay, to remove her hands (splat) from the fuselage. That there is a ladder. That there are ladders. If when walking, a ladder appears, you climb the ladder, up or down, and if there is another level, is it a maze? To move then in two dimensions would be more wonderful than anything.
It is the problem that there are too many people and on the people, the t-shirts they wear, the similarities, one to another. If any one person is the same person as any other person then who is to say which person should be erased? The brother does not approve of erasure. He will purchase a house, father children, lay out a solid slab of concrete for a BBQ oven. Seeding then the haphazard grasses of his very own backyard, owned and plotted, a piece of paper a document a file on a server in a room of many servers high above the Columbia river where the wind is harnessed to cool the million CPUs. There is a room within the room atop the brother's house and this is her home. Not her home. A place where one home becomes a room. The eight corners of a room, the sixteen.