Faded Houses Green

Reading Ulysses in Montana #604

A yawn erupted across the fawning chasm between the two belligerents, unfooled and unfoiled though they were.

Ginger felt her way along the dark hallway reaching for the light switch, and, having found it, dawn devoured the space between the walls in the hall and ascended rapidly to noon where it remained until George came in from mowing the lawn and said why is it so light in here. Ginger complied, but not with George–not today anyway and tomorrow wasn’t looking so good either. George went to the enlightened kitchen and made a prawn sandwich which he ate with a barrel full of cocktail sauce–with extra horseradish–sawn in two.

By the time George found the dimmer switch, Ginger was gone–and so was the chasm.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #628

The total collapse of the heart of darkness could not come quickly enough for the fortunate dolls enrolled in the courses of rivers beneath the souls of lipid time.

Given over to another round of whether she will or whither he goeth, the anchor of earthly delights uplifted the spirits of an enormous gas giant, enormous and giant all at the same time, for units of charge would sweep the plain dry during the duel of one over the other, without one moment to spare. Pitched minutes, on the other hand, worked deep into the count, having forgotten the number of the day–the number of days before the total collapse would enroll the dark-hearted dolls beneath another kind of river.

Behold, the nature of another nut, anchored to the pilfered horse and angry bride in the uncanny valley of sodden crepes.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #302

Sprites of munificent proportions proposed to propel the iron banana into the slough of tough tinsel.

Sloughing off for an hour before her appointments with her hair dresser and the local reptile man, Medusa wondered what exactly had happened to the little girl she once was. Out of sorts, she watched as her sordid history arose from the earnest pile of drivers while diverse remains of fleeting memories and quarrelsome imaginations disposed of the worst of her best of times. An ice cream bar and a banana split assuaged her inner demons, but her liver and pancreas had elsewise to say about those decadent decades of unjust desserts enjoying the sweetness of the desert air.

Full many a sprite was left half-propelled when the hair dresser finished Medusa’s pedicure and passed her into the gentle hands of the local reptile man to restore her bad hair day.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #263

Exaggeration becomes her, but the memories attached to the beguiling Electra electrified Bullwinkle’s questions about God, the universe, and public slag of pizza drowning in musical silk.

Silken purses, though, forayed into the frayed fray of foraging pig ears searching for truffles to comfort Iphigenia–sighing in great repose: What sacrifices I must make for this family! Sacrifices of remoulade and rubbing knowledge. Having a chance to breathe the nature of the earth, earthen vessels plundered the high seas with collisions of remittances for remedies not yet dreamed of in Agamemnon’s philosophy. Private and public furniture alike boast of a partial adequacy in Latin verse and Greek poetry.

The vigilant Virgil kept vigil over the trespasses of ransacked soils, but remarkable pleasures and consequent zebras found he none.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #482

Clutching her empty desires for nimbles of thimbles, the seamstress entered the madding crowd to seek out the oysters of forgone distress.

Ordinary habits sewn with halting care and discursive comments gifted a dower of answers and sumptuous books–never once stopping to consider the battles of passions raging in their fifth of amity. Clementine, on the other hand, remembered how the flag drifted, like socks in a game of tug-of-war when empty scours of sour pleasure measured it a little too tightly for the nightly game of gibber and dread. Lead weights could not resist the impending charm of her majesty the seamstress and her royal retinue of sinews and yarn.

Spinning a good yarn was her great severance from the past and mighty reparations for futures of sutures.  

Reading Ulysses in Montana #546

When leaving the Danube for the open seas, Ginger alighted on the idea of fluid stamps.

Blushing, the unconsoled taxes on solemn paper brushed aside the splendid, silent clerk. Ginger paused. Sorting out the strained tunnels and shuffled phantoms of guilt, warped skulls mounted a phrase, as though it were a horse, and called their lack of direction challenged.

Heralds packed George a pack of pudding and found a whistling jug to shake the herring from his ears. Ginger had always considered such things buffoonery, but buffoonery prevailed in tense conquests where the instruments of contempt consented to whimsical modes of science and bee keeping.

Ginger told George Duck. George told Ginger Goose. The boom knocked George into the sea where he swam the length (not width) of the Hellespont, besting both Leander and Byron at one go and proving once and for all the Hellespont was the birth canal of Western Civilization.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #430

Her poetry was like the skies of the dinosaur age: full of terrible dactyls.

But without a nuance or two to share with the neighbors down the road, Ginger could get no closer to a solution to the problem of what to get George for his birthday. Not that his birthday was pending, but it was wending its way through the corridors of time and place and would arrive as frivolously late as though unexpected–and she would certainly not be prepared.

Egg on her face was the most likely outcome, although game theory and albumen masks were not in the habit of joining in shared existence in anyone’s mind, let alone Ginger’s, who had a deep antipathy for doing such things since her mother had collapsed the three-meter souffle her father had constructed three days before that fateful New Year’s party.

Ginger collapsed into a heap of scrambled potatoes and wrote three more meters of over hard, terrible dactyls.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #37

Picking up the phrases that other phases of other matters whimsically deplore, Angie entered the station once more.

Another seven years would pass before another seven years would pass, and the fourteen years would turn into twenty-one and then all that’s left is getting old, growing mold, and reaping what you’ve sold. Were blenders more forgiving, the height of modesty would deter nothing more than a bore at a disco party, doing the quiver with a forgotten liver–living it up till all hours of the most recent special on network teevee.

And yet, there’s more. More fardels to bear, more weary lives to grunt over and sweat through, more dread of undiscovered countries such that Kirk would have no end of extravagant gallivanting in store, even to the end of the third universe from the most local post box, invented by Trollope in concert with Bukowski–a finer pairing never pared before or shared since.

Angie told Kirk to carry on, so he did as he does and he slept to the end of her twenty-one years at the station.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #670

Heavy hands make empty works of Shakespeare and Marlowe (with and without the “e”), capitalized and uninspired eyes with civilized perspectives not included.

Imbued with the kind of ink made by kind hands, Holly hitched a ride to the edge of town and, standing on the corner, she lifted the hood and tinkered with the solenoid and said try it now. Click. Zoom. Room for improvement notwithoutstanding, the next room down the hall was free for some jai alai practice, the fronton of her heart being occupied a dozen more days for extensive remodel. Or was it the way the red settled into black into nothing? Nothing would do for an hour each day, but the flowers of followers consumed their tidy toast in due course. Overdue, of course.

Horses for courses and chicks with fleas were fleeing the falling skies–the weltering skies.

Fibs in the forecast proved too daunting for Darlene to carry through the back door while carrying three bags of groceries, smothered in southern gravy.

Navies of Davies shipped the whorled peas into seas of infinite regress without redress to the commander in leaves of grassy knolls, John having been sequestered in questions of fruit of parlays since the incident of the tree branch and broken legs. Separate peas were all the rage with pages of pages requesting higher wages in ages gone by when sages corrupted the cages of gold upon stones untold when Vegas was but a train stop on the highway to greater destinies.

The matinee was over before Darlene had discovered John hadn’t written about Ginger and George since the bridge over the Moyie Gorge had assembled into a fraud of a million little pieces, all told.