Ian was eating ice cream. Hope was eating ice cream. Mariah was licking ice cream. Nell was looking at her ice cream. Gene was upside down.

It was indeed almost impossible to convince the man that something was wrong with the way he had cooked the chicken. And that was why we left him there, why we left him alone in his kitchen, cooked chicken almost entirely un eaten, chicken getting cold and bait for the crows outside the open windows, long beams of light strewn about the kitchen and falling in pieces across the chicken.

He could have sat but didn’t.

The man didn’t know what to do. He simply didn’t know what to do. And so he sat there staring forward, or looking closely at the chicken, or watching time inch by while the chicken did little more, a whole chicken with its burnt feathers still attached.

Eleanor was in the pantry. Grog was washing dishes. I was out back.

Besides me, none of us felt the tremor that slighly shook my cup of coffee, or admitted of it. And so I told myself then, ‘expect nothing and nothing will be expected of you.’

But the thought did not last the hour as I was expected at the ice cream parlor from which I was to have an informal meeting with one Mrs. Julie Z, who was a hairdresser at an upscale hair shop and whose fingers had a set of long nails, multicolored and scratchy, well attached. I was meeting with her to discuss my taxes, among other things.

At the parlor Z was already seated in the corner and was licking at an ice cream cone. An old shoe, heeled high, had been set upon the shoe rack by the door, which was also near to where she was, which was also near a window with an egg colored curtain that gave out through a foot long opening to a park.

I...

Edward P then returned to the patio upon which a pair of songbirds had settled and sat facing the mountain. The mountain did not and could not cast a shadow over the town as it was too far away and besides it was situated at point N in relation to the town yet the mountain was quite large. The mountain was perhaps the second largest in the world without ever being heralded as such, at least in popular media. Yet the mountain did not impose.

I was already on the patio and had been staring with possibly a glazed expression towards the mountain. Edward P said that my pupils were dilated and was I high, not that he would mind. I was not high and said as much; also I was mildly suprised to hear that my eyes seemed to be dilated and wondered if they often looked that way or if they often actually were.

The cat from the flat nearest this one was pawing with its declawed paws at the chair...

Edward P did not believe in much nor did he have a wife or children. And yet Edward P had lived as most people do by shoveling away his past.

Finally he was awake and his eyes were open and before the open eyes there was a hummingbird which he almost didn’t see owing, perhaps, to its smallness, or more likely, that he was groggy. Yet soon the young man was quite alert and he saw and heard many of the birds that flew or didn’t fly all about him, and he told himself that it was about time that he visited his Aunt named Jessica for reasons that he had since forgotten.

“I am almost a person,” he declared, almost to no one.

Generally, he was himself a tomato. He had a tomato colored hat that he had worn to the festival, he had a tomato colored bedspread upon his bed, he had dreamed of a yellow tomato and a green tomato, and he had a little garden on his top story apartment’s patio that screamed tomatoes.

The man was not important it seemed, as he had very few guests at his flat and not many big ideas, or rather he was very important indeed but nobody including himself had noticed. Sometimes, however, a fat cat that lived next door in his neighbor Mildred’s flat was found to be wandering about his patio as if in search of a bird.

By noon the man had completely forgotten that he was generally a tomato and began to incline himself towards his favored project, which was the design of a new kind of barn, and for this he would have to finish his brunch.

All well and good, he thought to himself, except that I...

He was basically a businessman, he got off of work, he prayed for money, he slept, he ate, and then he went back to the building where he was occupied with building a contraption.

But the businessman had only a small role to play in the construction, or rather the invention of the contraption, yet even so he believed that his role in the project was large enough to warrant a certain amount of respect from the woman who lived next door to him, who also had an office much like his own but worked across the lake and would sometimes gaze upon him from her office window with a long seeing device that relayed his image into the laptop computer that lived upon her desk.

Moreover the man felt that this woman who lived next door from him should at least say something to him or communicate to him in some way while he ventured outside his home to water the plants or rearrange the polished rocks...

You were walking on a beach with a human on your hand, a small human being the size of a small shoe, and the little man had kept his balance on the hand by gripping it firmly with its arms and legs, such as would a parrot on a shoulder. The man had a scraggly beard and a squeaky voice. Overall I felt that he was very unpleasant and would have warned you about him, if only you could have heard me.

But you were in the story and, after locking the man in a bird cage for the night, you returned to your bed where you either slept or pretended to sleep while listening to the small man, for roughly 8 hours.

Then you made breakfast, among other things.

You were always thinking about something. You were thinking without end and your thoughts began to pile and layer, sometimes loosening, sometimes growing branches, but overall getting more and more complicated by the hour. Sometimes, you were...

While in the hat store I came across a woman. The woman was seated in the corner and was holding up a book before her face but it seemed she wasn’t reading it, but rather was using it to hide her face from me. But then she sneezed rather violently, the book flew across the room, and I turned to face her face for as long as I could. Her hair was pretty and long. The hair wasn’t curly at all, it seemed, but rather it hung about her like the part of a p!ant or a tree that flowers outward in the spring. But more than that her hair was not hatted at all, which did not seem at all important.