soapboxdiner

And that, as they say, is the rest of the story

Picture the moment:

SBD steps out of her house, black denim pants tucked into nice sexy white gym socks, leather open toed Burk-type flip flops atop them. Tucked down tight at her waist, a paint-stained Henley. On her exceptionally large head, one of those hoody-type baby towels wrapped into a turban.

In the woman's hand, she holds a key. She saunters down her front steps and sash�s to the shed. Her neighbors, who are rather predictably gathered in the middle of the street in front of her house, interrupt the planning of their next 7-11 hijacking to point and snicker at the oddly clad woman. She pays them no mind. She will not be swayed. Her mission? Find some rubber lined gardening gloves.

Her goal accomplished, she moves to the trailer. Moving aside the previously askew aluminum skirting, she stoops and pokes her head into the abyss. She quickly removes her head. Whew, the stench! Like Quincy from that 70s investigative coroner show, or probably more like Clarrise Starling, she runs back into the house. She knows what she needs. She needs.... Ben Gay to smear under her nose.

With the pleasantly scented menthol greased up on her nose, she descends. For the first time in her eight years of residency in the trailer, she notes that it is only jacked 18 inches off the ground. Quickly, she does the math: her five feet and six inches of height divided into those mere eighteen inches. Her mind tilts at the complexity of the mathematical endeavor, but she decides anyway that there probably won't be enough room for her to hand-and-knee it into the creepy crevice.

With the Mission Impossible theme music reverberating through her head, she lays herself out into a military crawl. Soon the daylight disappears and she is alone with her industrial flashlight and the crawly things that scurry in dark places. She shudders and says aloud in defiance of the dark, "Oogy."

As she crawls further into the recesses, an entire world of mechanical, electrical, and water workings open to her. The woman remembers, this trailer has resided on these concrete cinder blocks for over 20 years. In the past five, they have heaved under the geologic rumblings of at least three earthquakes - one of which, a 6.8. She shivers as she observes the cinder blocks beneath the trailer's axels, the tires long since removed and haphazardly tossed further into the depths.

In those blackened 18 inches, nothing is clearly visible. The woman discovers as she slithers on her belly that she must be directly upon a thing before the shadows depart. She lifts the tatters of insulation sheets hanging in threads like spanish moss above her and she feels their dust rain down upon the back of her neck. The particles roll off her flesh, reminiscent of tiny little spider legs scurrying, ominous.

With a shaky hand, she surveys the chasm. Nothing. She can see nothing out of place. But then, there, within the decayed insulation curtain hung low, she spies the dryer vent. She remembers the "wash room" bears heavily the olfactory evidence of death. Does that dryer vent hide the tragic creature? The woman cannot tell from her relatively safe position. Laying as she is on her belly, she is unable to peer up into the hole.

She realizes she must roll over onto her back. She must shimmy on her back and align her head beneath the vent. All around her, the dusty ground is littered with detritus - pillows of fiberglass fluff and other nondescript and therefore suspect objects. She brushes these aside. As she does, she sees a bit of shiny black a foot from her head. She reaches for it. But no! Just shy of grasping the object, she realizes that she recognizes this thing - the shiny thing before her is the entire tail end of a black bird. She lets out a revolted, whimpering gasp and swipes it involuntarily away with her flashlight.

The woman takes a moment to recover her composure... and her courage. Her purpose has not yet been satisfied, and she knows her nose will know no relief until it is. She returns to her backward supine shimmy. Soon she is aligned. She can now see that the vent above her is clear. A momentary sense of defeat washes over her. She withdraws.

More detritus before her. By now, she is desensitized to its presence. She brushes it away without so much as a glance in its direction as she continues on her quest for the dead thing. She notes that like all the dust colored things surrounding her, this debris is benign. That is until the back of her hand encounters a hardness uncharacteristic of the fiberglass guts of insulation. But she cannot see this unyielding thing, as her hands have encountered the thing from behind her head. She tests it for solidity and (or perhaps or) liquidity. She lifts it and tests it for weight. It is as light as a paper, yet large - of deceptively substantial size for its negligible weight. The woman arks her arm around down and stays it slightly below shoulder level. She turns her head to inspect what she holds in her rubber gloved fingers. It is roughly spherical in shape she notes and it has apparently snagged itself on some similarly compositioned yet unidentifiable "cloak". She sets it down.

Then she picks it back up. "What is this?", she questions. This, right here, below the sphere. What are these bilateral projections? And then it dawns on her. In her dainty girl fingers, she has hold on the skull of a long passed cat, and the projections are its ribs. With this flash of recognition, she scans the carcass and sees for the first time, the entire creature - head to tail, dead and in her hand.

She screams! And at that revelatory moment, the woman knows down to her bones that she cares not for her quest, her mission. With every fiber of her retching being, she knows that nothing could make her continue to seek out death and decay. No matter the smell, she admits that her success has been her failure. No more dead things would be pursued. And as she undulates back out of the cave on her back, she at last fully understands the degeneracy of her self pacifying murmur, "Dead things don't stink for that long anyway."

8:21 am - 09.28.03
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