It was one of those days in which you can’t get full and the rain won’t stop. Just as I was about to walk out the door to grab something to eat, the phone rang and made the kind of sound you hear as the Judas-calf hooves onto the platform, or the puckered lips kissing the horn announcing the birth of Jericho, or the intercourse of a distant car crash, or the walled in mechanics of the nuclear family, or the opening and closing of the register drawer..
On the other end would be the voice, it was alway just one voice, the same voice, just different each time, each time shifted and new. It was already late and I could feel my teeth moving in on the concave of my inner cheek, (with it’s strangely pitted and smooth surface, wet) circling in, a pack of wolves. I answered the phone and stated I could not help and hung up before a voice could push through. As soon as it was set down it rang again. I answered this time and listened or I tried to listen but my hunger was speaking too loud. I don’t know what I heard, but I listened. In the end it played out as they tend to, someone missing or lost.
The voice was like a paper held out a car window in a rainstorm. No one would look for anyone out here, no eggmen, no private dick, not even a down and out used to be. People will go missing and in the mind's eye of the ones left behind, the missing passes a barrier into the underworld. exiles of the exiled gone and forgotten. I followed the voice with a pen on paper tracing out a map as it was spoken. the map moved towards a vanishing point, a location where things fell away. The voice wanted to find someone and would pay well.
My stomach had dust in it and I needed food. I thought about a room so full of snacks the sun could not come through. I thought about a city made of snacks, the walls sticky and sweet.
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