Ricky GARNI
JIM DOUGLAS
Jim Douglas liked to take naps in the sand on sunny days and listen to old Beatles songs and comment upon them.
“That’s terrible!” he would say, while listening to “Let It Be.”
“Poignant and arresting” he would say while listening to “In My Life.”
“I am so hungry” he would say while listening to “She’s So Heavy” as he drew circles with his toes in the sand that looked like the shape of a mop-top, or sometimes, four mop tops, but it wasn’t meant to be a double entendre: it was a single entendre. He really was hungry.
“I wonder what John Lennon ate when he wrote his good songs, not his bad ones?” Jim would ask of Paul McCartney who wasn’t in the room with him ever, although he certainly had the money to fly to Jim’s home town and be there if he wanted to, but why should he?
No reason that I can see, and so it would be very surprising if he ever did.
Other than the Beatles and the Beatles songs, what Jim loved best were the little collapsible umbrellas that you could buy as party favors in party stores and drug stores and Japanese restaurants. He wished that he had one to protect him from the rain, even though, he would admit candidly, they were of a size and substance that was neither sizable nor substantial. He always felt this way every time it rained, and this time as he pondered different and favorite Beatles songs outside in the sand during what would most certainly be a terrible rain storm, Jim did not seem very aware of this elemental calamity. This was due mostly to the fact that he was really more interested in trying to remember a single Beatles’ song with the word “umbrella” in it.
ELSA (AND Jöbi)
Elsa adjusted her hat. Jöbi looked out the window at the bluebirds that were making love in the cypress tree.
“Tomorrow I will be eight years old,” Jöbi announced. and I have decided not to use umlauts over the ‘o’ in my name and to put them in your name instead elsa, specifically, over the ‘a’. So you see,” Jöbi said, “you shall from now on be known as ‘Elsä,’ and it is Elsä that you shall be.”
Elsa, quite naturally, began to cry. She felt as though she were suddenly the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire.
“But Jöbi,” she implored him, “it cannot be. I can’t bear it. I don’t want things to change. I want things to stay just the same, and I won’t let them change, Jöbi!"
(Jobi, Jöbi thought to himself)
“You can’t do it. I don’t care what you say!” she cried.
“Now Elsä,” Jöbi said, conciliatorarily, placing a tiny little yellow crocus in her straw hat, “now now Elsä..”
“Stop that!” Elsa screamed.
“But El--”
“NO!”
“But...”
“JÖBI!”
“But it’s my birthday!”
And so this went on for some time until it all became terribly dull and both Elsa and Jobi fell asleep at the kitchen table. Their milk chocolates grew warm; day turned into night; the blüebirds, sated, flew away forever.
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