“Yay for us! One more for our side!”
Sweet Pea was flinging flower petals which could be smelled but not seen by those outside the pastel world of the park phronik. Her partners danced a little mid-air dance, watching Arthur and Julia move slowly down the walk, occasionally brushing a little grass or dirt off each other, bumping shoulders now and again in lieu of holding hands, and discussing the Historiologic Theory courses.
Meadow Saffron sniffed at them. “Huh! I bet they think it’s THEIR idea!”
Unfirom’s upper eyelids came down a bit. “They think it’s their invention.”
Bluebell flew up to consider his eyelids and demand, “How many times have we done this now?”
The angel blinked. “I don’t count. It would be like numbering my headaches.”
Having run out of petals, Sweet Pea started to gather her hair up like a chocolate kiss on the top of her head. “Weren’t they darling when they were falling all over everything?”
“Thanks to us,” Bluebell agreed, juggling a couple of broken pencil tips.
Primrose sniffed. “Oh, they must’ve had some natural talent to be quite so lummoxy.”
“How come they all say that about ‘Remember me’?” Meadow Saffron shook her head, and then zipped over to Sweet Pea, quite unfairly poking the other phron in the stomach while Sweet Pea’s hands were up in the hair. “You almost messed it all up there at the end, when you had to go and poke her in the behind that way.”
Sweet Pea wiggled her hips, not releasing her grip on her hair. “We-ell, I thought she’d like it.” Her chin came up. “I believe she did.”
“You are so shallow,” snorted Meadow Saffron. “Love ain’t all pokes in the bottom. When would you eat?”
Sweet Pea snorted right back at her accuser. “Oh, you’re so deep I need my boots.”
Bluebell flew over to assist Meadow Saffron in jabbing Sweet Pea’s tummy. “Well, I need clothespins for my nose.”
“You’d look better,” Sweet Pea retorted, pooching out her stomach in defiance.
“Hold there.” Unfirom reached down to pull the phronik away from each other. “No more poking. “You each have your voice in the chorus, with your individual talents for this work.”
“And it is so much work,” put in Primrose, sticking her tongue out at her partners.
Unfirom nodded. “That’s why there are phronik in the parks. Sex is inevitable, but love takes work.”
Sweet Pea’s nod echoed that of the angel. “I saw a couple last night and they were doing a whole lot of work. He had her hang by her knees from the fence over there and….”
The gaze of the angel made her story trail away. Meadow Saffron shook four fingers at her. “You should have been making them fall in love!”
“They didn’t have time!” Sweet Pea stuck a thumb in her mouth and pulled back a ways from those fingers. “And neither did I.”
Unfirom sighed, and released his grip on the phronik. Bluebell flew straight at Sweet Pea, whispering, “You didn’t call me!”
“Well, well, you were so piggy about that Double Booty Burger you found,” retorted Sweet Pea, wiggling back some more.
“Hey!”
Unfirom stiffened as Meadow Saffron poked two fingers into his stomach. “What is it?” he inquired.
“Hey, are the people we go to all this work for going to be happier because of us? Or what?”
The angelic face was noncommittal. “Some of them.”
The phron took offense at this lack of commitment. “So why bother, hey?”
Bluebell zipped up to join her, also poking the angel’s stomach. “If it doesn’t make ‘em happier, we got all kinds of fries to eat!”
Unfirom nodded to Arthur and Julia, who had just reached the street, stepping out of the park. “Because you changed the nature of their meeting, their future has been changed. They will move in together at the end of their junior year, and get married the following summer. After five years of struggle, she will come into a great deal of money, which will enable them to complete their studies. They will become important scholars, she perhaps a bit more respected than he, but it is the money which will lead to a separation, reconciliation, divorce, remarriage, and, in general, a series of rifts and patches which will go on for the rest of their lives.”
He found himself the focus of eight enormous eyes.
“Will they be happier?”
He shrugged. “At times.”
Bluebell tossed her head. “Oh well. They’ll be tons more interesting.”
“I s’pose,” said Meadow Saffron, nodding slowly.
Sweet Pea, however, leapt straight up, high over the angel’s head. “Hey-hoop-dee-hah!” She kicked out her right foot to point, using her left hand to shade her eyes. “Lookit lookit lookit! He’s throwing away half of a perfectly good Booty Biscuit Basket.”
The phronik scattered in the direction she led. Typical, Unfirom knew; once the couple had left the park, they had no further interest in Arthur and Julia. And it would be wrong, of course, to get too personally involved with one couple with so many more to service. Angels with guardian assignments had a steadier line of work.
He turned and moved up the path and came upon them tearing into the leaden biscuits from some pedestrian’s discarded breakfast. He passed without comment; it was an added service of theirs, really. The thought of doing something to discourage litterers had crossed his mind more than once, but the thought of what he could actually do had never accompanied it. He would get no help from the phronik on such a crusade, as it would cut into their meal plans. They didn’t really need to eat at all, but, unlike Unfirom, they could. And they did, with gusto. Gusto was not in Unfirom’s nature. Litterbugs who had visited Booty Burger, the Ranch Wagon, Nathaniel’s Pizza, Big Boo’s Chicken, and smaller, similar establishments, provided the major part of a phron’s diet in Griese Park.
The powerhouse among these was Booty Burger, which was funding the fight against turning the location into a passive park. The other dining establishments, though generally opposed to the move, let Booty Burger do the battling. Museum management had hinted that some eatery not involved on the wrong side would get the café franchise inside the new building. Booty Burger declined to be swayed by such enticements, and carried on its battle without fear of reprisal. Booty Burger’s whole public image was, after all, based on fearlessness (or, some said, shamelessness.)
“We’ll turn our liabilities into assets,” their CEO had declared, back when Booty Burger was little more than three push pins and a handful of paper clips on a map of the state. “Everybody sees the health reports on Eyewitness News. What we can’t hide, we flaunt.”
So a line of popular and audacious commercials now filled the region, letting everyone know that Booty Burger would “Put Beef On Your Booty”, contrasting the pale, lifeless waifs who subsisted on kale with the curved and crooning sirens who dined on what the management had the audacity to call “real food”. Besides the Booty Burger (and its larger sibling, the Double Booty), there were Booty Shakes (the commercial for which had been banned), the Big Bundle, the Big Dog, and Mr. Greasy Fries. The design team had gone the distance in producing the most obnoxious packaging possible: the food came to the customer in burnt sienna boxes covered with big black splotches.
It seemed to the angel that almost all patrons of the nearest Booty Burger contributed to the advertising push by tossing their empties in the park. Stained baskets clustered like pimples on the pavement. In a graceful swoop, Unfirom caught up a large basket and tossed it at a larger metal basket near him. He did not miss, of course.
Not far away, a grumbling man did the same with a Booty Burger bag. Unfirom did not warm to his fellow caretaker. His eyes narrowed.
The man was a tall man, thoroughly and perfectly groomed. His collar button was undone, true, but the collar was open only to a degree which spoke of casual professionalism. His expression was pleasant without being warm, handsome but not offensively so. He was no stranger. Unfirom was used to seeing him in the park around dawn or at dusk, the rest of his hours being spent in conference with museum officials about details of the grand new building or the latest scheme for landscaping which would set off the magnificent new structure. When his eyes strayed toward the center of the ball diamond, Unfirom knew he was seeing a grand fountain which sprayed silvery water in a manner wholly new and beyond the scope of any other museum fountain in the state. His eyes, turning next toward the little playground littered with chicken wing boxes, saw instead a grand concrete terrace, as required by any good museum’s beauty. One did not need to be an angel to read his eyes when he turned his gaze up the street toward the nearest Booty Burger.
During the glance at the home of heretical hamburgers, Unfirom blinked himself into view. “Interesting use of space,” he noted, coming up next to the developer.
The man turned and looked up at Unfirom, apparently startled by the need to do so. He was not shorter than most people. The angel, appearing not to notice, said, gesturing to the cracked blacktop of the playground, “I understand that bit was built atop old sod houses.”
“That so?” The developer frowned. Such a thing might affect stability, but it would certainly bring hordes of preservationists into the discussion.
Unfirom’s right arm swung back and forth. “When a truck goes by, you can see the swings wobble.”
“You don’t say.” The developer’s eyes narrowed, but looking more narrowly at Unfirom’s face failed to divulge any Booty Burger guile.
“Some people blame the ghosts of the children who have played there over the last seventy years.” Unfirom took a deep breath, putting his shoulders back. “But it’s hard to believe in ghosts on a morning like this.”
The developer looked to the playground and then studied Unfirom again. “And the story about the sod houses….”
“I was involved in a county boundary project and did some research at the U.” He had, in a way, some eighty years back before the park was established or he was condemned to help phronik in it. “I wasn’t working on this part of town, but I saw some of the old maps which referred to ‘dugouts’ in this area.” He nodded to his listener, footnoting, “That’s what they would have called any cabin that was partially underground.”
“Mm…yes.” The developer’s eyes went up and down Unfirom, still trying to find the Booty Burger agent beneath the air of a man who had to share his research with everyone he meets.
“If it’s true,” Unfirom went on, looking at the playground again, “Then putting a playground here was an act of genius. Anything heavier would have sunk over the years.” Nodding to himself, he moved to the curb, as if planning to jaywalk across the street. Out of the corner of one eye, he watched the man stomp one foot on the ground, eyes on the swingsets. He nodded again. He had not changed the man’s mind, of course, but from one seed of doubt, much might come.
The angel vanished, his eyes suddenly on another tall man, who looked to be about sixty but was, in fact, seventy-three. This man was idly watching his track, his eyes having no reason to wander toward the sturdy white-haired woman coming up the sidewalk, a German shepherd ahead of her on a slack leash. For her part, she was paying no attention to the man.
Well, they WOULD pay attention to each other. Where were the phronik now? He strode through the grass, leaving no footprints. The people who came to the track to get in shape should have his job, he thought: the number of miles he covered every day just hunting for his crew would wear an elephant down to poodle dimensions.
The size and shade of the stains on the pizza box told him the crusts they were passing around the circle had been lying in the park since at least noon on the previous day. Well, it kept any dogs from eating the crusts and getting sick. The phronik sang as they passed each bit of crust around the circle, so no more than two mouths were full of food on any single note.
“John didn’t like the way his popcorn popped
So he built a new machine that had the poppers topped;
A drop of oil and it made corn that folks would crave
But then somebody came out with the microwave!
Percolator, coffeemaker
Subaru and Studebaker:
All ya got is all yer gonna get,
Waddya bet?”
Unfirom stepped up to the musical circle, taking inventory. “Where’s Primrose?”
They didn’t look at him. He was opening his mouth to repeat the question when a whistle blasted in his ear.
The phronik in general limited their musical accompaniment to blades of grass, which were excellent for a variety of rude noises. Unfirom swallowed before inquiring, his tone angelically gentle, “Where did you find that?”
Primrose pointed, her wrist the highest point on her arm, level with her forehead. “Next to the red horsey swing. I think Booty Burger is giving them away with the Chunky Chicken Chews. Don’t you think we could bake cookies with whistles inside?”
“No.” Now he pointed. “But that may come in handy while you’re dealing with these two.” Now he pointed.
All the phronik swooped up to viewing height. “Gosh!” cried Sweet Pea. “A puppy!”
“Sweet,” said meadow Saffron, not looking at the full-grown German shepherd. “Have they met yet?”
The angel nodded. “In college, they thought they were in love. The affair broke up after two years. They have not seen each other since a class reunion thirty years ago.”
Bluebell shrugged and kicked at a passing gnat. “Is that any of our business? They already….”
The angel looked over to the man, still oblivious to dog, woman, and the invisible conspiracy. “They do not, at the moment, even know they’re in the same part of the country. If they do not meet soon, they will meet again fifteen years from now, when he moves into the same senior facility where she is living. They will renew their acquaintance at dinner, and she will invite him to visit later. In the wee hours of the morning, he will slip into her room, and her bed, and remain there until morning, when he will finally realize she died shortly before he came into the room.”
Sweet Pea’s hands were over her mouth. “Oh, dear!” said Meadow Saffron
“The shock will cause a stroke which will leave him unable to speak until his own death two years later.” Unfirom nodded to the couple. “Shall we?”
Blogsy Babbles 