She encountered much joy. She had no way to gauge it all, except by sitting in a tattered chair and cramming her fingers into all its holes and damages. Horsehair in the chair. Straw. Outside, her mother was hanging upside down from a treebranch. Her mother had her legs around a branch, and those legs of hers allowed her to hang upside down. Her dress fell over her head. A gardener came by and trimmed her dress with the shears he had sharpened in Tangiers. The family trait was jowls. They all had jowls with old acne scars on them. They all sat on tattered chairs and couldn't help but to cram their fingers into them. They hung--not hanged--from hickory trees. Elms. Chestnuts. They sat on their roofs and sang. They sat on their floors and cried. They, as a family, showed very little emotion. But it was guaranteed--by whom?--that if you were to get them on the roof they would laugh. And if you were to get them on the floor, they would cry. It was not uncommon for people from the town to wrestle them to the ground at funeral time. The funeral bell. It would give two loud dings and then the third one would be off rhythm and muted. The family sent a bus through the town to pick people up for the funeral. The family did this, even though they themselves did not board the bus. It was the first funeral to have not a single family member present at it.
The innkeeper was frail. The innkeeper became an inkeeper when he lost his inn. His lost his inn, but, on that day, he swallowed all his keys, so he became an inkeeper with just one n. The authorities did not visit him. Instead, they flew kites over his new house. He bought a small house and lived in it--only to have the authorities fly kites over his house. He still had all the keys from his old inn inside of him. He was sure of it. Do not ask how anyone could be so sure because that is a sure way to end up with a bowl of grass, no milk, and no spoon with which to eat the grass. It's one thing for a dog to eat grass every time you take it out. What most people say is that it is an indication that the dog is sick. If you take your dog out--and if your dog can't help but to eat grass--then that's a sure sign it is sick. But what if it's your child that won't stop eating grass every time you take it out? What if it's your child? And this same child, when you take it to the seashore, it can't help but to drink some of the ocean. This child might slurp at the little purlers. This child might have its own cup with which it drinks. That it drinks with. This child might have a hole in the side of its head--the result of an early trephine. What if this child were to become a famous cartoonist? This child sits on a concrete patio, a patio that's otherwise used to dry out coffee beans. The bean roasters complain that they often find bits on concrete amongst their coffee beans.
It was terrible because she had a cape made of eyelids. She had once heard of people making capes out of bird feathers. There might be a bird in a forest. This bird has just a smidgen of yellow on its chin, and a king decides that, yes, it's this yellow that must make up his long cape. He wants the cape so long that all these birds must be killed to make it. "How long should the cape be, King? Five feet? Nine?" "No," he says. "The cape will be as long as it must take to kill all the little birds with yellow on their chins." And so she had a cape made of eyelids, but she didn't have to kill everyone on the planet to have it made. In fact, she didn't have to kill--or have killed--a single person because she used the eyelids of dead people. These eyelids had to be treated with certain chemicals to keep them from drying out. In their dried-up state they become raisins. Not raisons. They have no reason, these people who have silly capes made at such great expense. A cape of eyelids. And the eyelids still have their lashes. Twenty lashes for those who don't wear capes. Give me a reason to share with you the essence of the unfairness. Its essence is that you have no frenzied moments in your family's historical interpretation of the rational focused turpentined creatures. Let me give you my motto: Never squat where the squatters lay their pavement.
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