by Jeremy-Joseph Rosen
Jeremy-Joseph Rosen is an author, ingenue, rabble-rouser and roust-a-bout.
Scooter’s first memory of Friday was being in the Kalisotta Koffee Klatch. He had picked up a huge coffee, black, and proceeded to talk to the register girl. She was pretty, intelligent and coquettishly flipped her long black hair every time he was there. As Scooter had just woken up, the conversation consisted entirely of an inarticulate moan and, if he was remembering correctly, a tiny amount of drool.
This was the entirety of every interaction Scooter and the Register Girl had ever had. She seemed to take in Scooter’s befuddled responses with the clinical posture of a doctor and the bemused twinkle of a flirt.
He never could quite get the hang of talking to the register girl, perhaps because didn’t even know her name. Talking about her involved a lot of references to “Register Girl” or “that chick at the KKK.” This last often confused people.
Similar problems had plagued the Kalisotta Koffee Klatch and its stock market price. The board was at a loss to solve the problem. Many new names had been suggested with similarly ridiculous abbreviations.
The second memory, floating out of his Tuesday morning fog, was of walking down verdant hills populated by wild flowers and couples frolicking romantically in the middle of a park lawn. Scooter doubted this memory, as it was the middle of December.
What Scooter should have remembered was walking down the street, where he found a corn stalk laying within the boundaries of a section of pavement. It was aligned precisely with the corners of the square with the leaves facing away from him.
It was a memory as out of place as the verdant hills, but this one was true. It was even verifiable. All Scooter needed to do was walk a couple of blocks to see this apparition.
No one was sure where the corn stalk came from, but it was impossible to make it go away. Cutting it down merely made the thing grow again. Digging up the pavement, digging up the soil below and replacing it all with new soil and pavement did nothing. That corn stalk still grew.
This oddity had largely bypassed the nation’s weird news columns and the local Action News fluff pieces. Everyone knew about it, fewer people commented on it and almost no one passed this information on to anyone else. In short, deniers of the Holocaust could have learned a lesson from these people.One child in a decade not long passed had burned the nether regions of the stalk with a magnifying glass. While the plant is still there, the child has since disappeared. In fact, few people even remember the child.
His name was Javier, by the way.
Drenched in a mist of nicotine, befuddled by the remnant elements of a case of beer in his blood stream and picked at by the grumblings of hunger in his stomach, Scooter remembered Javier.
A bright child. He liked the colour blue.
He wrote poems. He made fleets of ships from newspaper. He never brought spoons back to the kitchen. Scooter had seen Javier burning the corn stalk when he was a child.
Scooter began to fall asleep. The soft snuffling of his nostrils guided streams of cigarette smoke all over the place. As his falling hand made the cigarette touch his bare leg, Scooter arose with a loud yelp.
“Yelp,” he said.
And through the slight pain and surprise of that burn, Scooter suddenly knew where Javier was.