Flash Monday; Oedipus in Flash Friday

Some random motherfucker says over my shoulder “Hey, buddy, you’re leaving your prints.” He meant on my phone. He probably thought he was a specific motherfucker and technically he was right, random to me meant I was indifferent to his continued existence and his existence to date.

“It’s my phone, if it comes to be being dusted for prints I’m already fucked.”

I think he actually said Gee whiz as he scuttled away like a crab with a bad claw or a clown with hurt feelings. Shit. That’s how a motherfucker stops being random; analogy, metaphor or simile. Now he’s going to show up. He’ll be at the starbucks, a traffic light, the ass end of a midnight ravine where I’m trying to shuck the husk of the last specific motherfucker.

Outside the window it’s trying hard to rain and leaves blow by; beautiful in their autumnal death, bright and colorful. Six months of the year those leaves are a dull uniform green, sucking up chlorophyll, adding a healthy ring where the community of tree keeps it’s calendar of health, along it’s spine. But when they die, when they stop working making sunlight into sap, they are brilliant, flamboyant, queens of the madri gras.

I touch my head and find only hair, thinning hair. The chair next to me is empty. I want my hat. I have a hat the way I have shoes. One hat, one pair of shoes, like the rings of a tree used until their season is done. I had a girlfriend who thought that was funny. She wasn’t very bright but she sure could fuck. That was never going to work, if my hat and shoes could talk they’d have told her how much they had in common.

If you have to do complicated things it’s best to keep life simple. Sounds like a bumpersticker, life is simple anyhow. If you have to do complicated things you’re better off not pretending life is complicated. A comfortable hat, comfortable shoes, a comfortable girlfriend and keeping as many motherfuckers random as possible.

The waitress brings me the check. I smile and give her twenty five percent. She smiles back. I ask her if she’s seen my hat. She furrows her brow and little flecks of cake makeup flitter to the ground like tan leaves. “No,” she says, “I don’t think so. I’ll check.” In the service industry you always leave a chance for hope. She teeters off in heels. She either hasn’t been a waitress long or has a high threshold of pain or is vain. Her calves look stronger and her ass higher in heels, but at the end of a lunch rush she probably takes them off in the alley, sighs, and has a smoke.

She comes back frowning and shaking her head. At least one of us is aware she didn’t ask what my hat looks like. I shrug and am out the door. It smells like rain. At the end of the block I see the random motherfucker coming out of a store as I’m waiting to cross the street. He nods at me like we shared something; a secret, a past, a mutual respect. If a daylight assault weren’t so complicated it would have been best to hurt him right then. The wind blew over where my hat should have been; I could feel it on my scalp.