She had stuffed the shoulders of her periwinkle blouse with socks.  She said she never wore socks anyway so what’s the difference?

I found myself on the street, lying beneath a double-decker bus, staring at a rusty gasket set against an ominous canvas of fiberoptics.  I blinked.  I crawled out from underneath the bus, hailed a taxi and told it to take me home.

“Where’s home?” said the taxi driver.

“Home.  Home.”

“Home,” he reiterated.

At home, she tried to eat the pasta without boiling it.  She rested the long, hard strings of linguine onto a plate and stabbed them with a fork.  “It’s not working,” she complained.  “I can’t pick it up.”  She stabbed the pasta with increasing angst until it had been broken into small enough pieces to nibble.  “It doesn’t taste the same,” she noted.

I found myself on a rooftop looking across the landscape of the city.  Spires, steeples, mirrored skyscrapers surrounded me in every direction.  The sky was blue and quiet and it was hot.  On an adjacent rooftop, a giraffe stared at me.  Its long, spotted neck buckled in the wind.  But its gaze never wavered.

I jumped off the rooftop and pulled the string on my parachute just in time, although I skinned a knee, and I had to dive out of the way of oncoming traffic.  On the sidewalk, I cut the parachute loose and bought a newspaper from a kiosk.  I opened the newspaper to the business section.  This picture was on the front page:

There was no title, no caption, no accompanying story.  Beneath the picture rained the sharp columns of the stock market.

I walked home.

She had stripped the hides from all of the umbrellas and stitched together a vast cape.  She demonstrated how the cape might also function as a flag, given a tall steel pole.  Additionally, the cape could be used as a tent during jungle excursions.  She set it up in the living room, using kitchen knives for tent clips, stabbing the fabric of the umbrellas into the carpet, urging me to pretend the walls were deep, dark foliage, a rain forest, full of monkeys and wild things and other preternatural beasts that had existed on earth for millions of years, that were prepared to eat trespassers even if their flesh disagreed with the most sensitive palate.

I found myself at the zoo.  All of the zookeepers had been locked in the cages by the giraffes.  They were everywhere, immobile and quiet, loitering.  I recognized one of them from the rooftop.  I tried to get its attention, waving my arms, but it either didn’t see me, or ignored me.  I stroked its leg.  It made a chirping noise.

The zookeepers pleaded with me to set them free.  I said I would have to think about it and went to use the toilet.

When I came out, she was waiting for me.

She had climbed atop my giraffe and was trying to ride it.  “Giddyap!” she shouted, thumping platform heels against its belly.  The zookeepers cheered her on.

The giraffe swatted her with its tail.  She flipped backwards over a fence.  A loud crash preceded a tsunami of curses.  She climbed over the fence, caught her dress on a picket, and somersaulted onto the asphalt with a great tearing of fabric.  She stood, dazed.  She realized she was naked from the waist down and tried to cover herself.  She yelled at me, insisted it was my fault.  Everybody watched her quietly—giraffes, zookeepers, me.

I told her it wasn’t what I had imagined.  She asked what I meant by that.  I said she knew what I meant and we should leave it at that.  She accused me of breaking her heart.  I apologized.

I climbed onto the giraffe and whispered into its ear.  It loped out of the zoo.

The other giraffes followed us.  We made our way through the city in a long, proud parade.  People gathered on the sidewalks.  Soon it was a full-fledged extravaganza, comparable to New Year’s Day.  As the applause and cries of joy grew louder, I leaned my cheek against the soft neck of the giraffe and fell asleep, dreaming of nothing, waiting for the animal to take me home.

BB

My daughter wanted a goldfish.  I said, “We can do better than that.”

I took her to the pet shop and asked a clerk where the whales were.  She escorted us through a maze of aisles into a separate room, pausing to reprimand a stock boy who had stolen a nap on a tile of Astroturf.  My daughter gazed wide-eyed at the caged lizards, birds, insects, monkeys that we passed en route.

“This is what we call the Whale Room,” said the clerk.  She made a sweeping motion with her arm.  “We also have an Elephant Room and Brontosaurus Room.  The dinosaurs aren’t real.”  She gave us a hand buzzer and told us to press it if we needed anything.

Excusing herself, she closed and locked the door behind her.  My daughter and I looked at each other, then at the Whale Room.

It was the size of an airplane hanger and smelled like a bowl of cereal.  “Golden Grahams,” said my daughter, nodding.  I told her cereal didn’t smell like anything unless you got really close to it and sniffed very, very deeply.

My daughter said, “That’s silly, daddy.”

The concrete floor was immaculate and had been cleaned, lacquered and dusted.  An aquarium the size of a two-story house stood at the far corner.  There was nothing else.

I put my daughter on my shoulders and we walked over to the aquarium.  The bluegreen water glowed with toxicity.

A copious layer of florescent cow and pig skulls had been spread across the floor of the aquarium.  Aggressive algae-eaters darted in and out of the eye sockets and jaws, unhinged for lack of any food other than their own regurgitated stool.

There was no whale.

My daughter began to cry.

I pressed the hand-buzzer.  Nobody came.  I pressed it again and again and again.  My daughter cried harder and I told her not to worry.  “Things always work out, somehow.”

Finally the clerk attended to us.  I assumed it was the clerk; she was faraway and I didn’t have my glasses on, and she put on an ornate gas mask as she approached the aquarium.  She spoke to me through a contraption that resembled a CB radio, holding the microphone to the mouth-chute of the mask.  A cord attached the microphone to a long, cumbersome speaker that she held at her side like a suitcase.

“Good afternoon,” she said when she reached us.  The greeting boomed out of the speaker and echoed across the Whale Room.  “It is a pleasure to see you again.”

I put my daughter down.  Sniffling, she cowered between my knees.  I stroked her hair reassuringly and said, “Don’t worry, little girl.”  I looked at the clerk. 

“You’re frightening my daughter.  What is this?”  I gesticulated at the aquarium.

Harsh sledges of static punctuated the clerk’s subsequent monologue: “Ah yes, I forgot, we had to submit the mammal for repair.  Too many potential buyers wanted to see inside of the mammal.  All of the potential buyers said the same thing: ‘We won’t consider purchasing this unit unless we can see inside of it.’  So the owners of the pet shop had a meeting and decided to install a series of zippers onto its vast girth.  ‘Consumer thirst must be slaked,’ they said.  This decision was made only recently and we only recently sent it away.  You should have seen me duke it out with the mammal; I pushed its head back into the wall with both of my hands while monstrous tidbits fell from its mouth to the floor.  I promise it will return soon.  In fact, we expect to receive two additional units, all of them equipped with zippers that might be opened and closed in a highly user-friendly manner by courageous scuba divers.  In their absence, perhaps you could exercise your imagination.  Tell yourself the whale is there.  The mind cannot deny what you tell it.”

The clerk bowed awkwardly and excused herself.  We watched her walk away, across the expanse of the Whale Room.  She walked slowly.  It took over two minutes.  She tripped once, dropping the speaker.  She got up and tripped again when she tried to pick the speaker back up—I suspected it was much heavier than it looked.  Then she disappeared through a thin rectangle of door.

My daughter and I held hands and stared at the aquarium.  “Don’t believe that horseshit about imagination,” I told her.  “The real thing is always better.  That’s why the imagination exists.  Mostly, people can’t get the real things they want.  So they have to pretend.”

The algae-eaters threaded through the skulls.  They seemed to multiply before our eyes as they devoured crumbs of excrement.

“I’m hungry,” said my daughter.

We went home and grilled hamburgers.  Big ones.  I grilled them and then we sat on a blanket in the back yard and grinned deliriously at one another as we ate.

BB

WHALE

by D. Harlan Wilson

GIRAFFE

photo by John Maurer

photo by Ryan Wilson