Breadcrumb #132

BELLE HANN

It’s not easy to be the son of the pineapple salesman. Seeing as Ralph’s still in Kalamazoo doing god-knows-what, I’m keeping the business going, and right now, that’s all I can ask for. Pop used to say the pineapples pretty much sell themselves. Most of our business is scratch-offs. The same old man comes every day and doesn’t buy anything; he just sits around and talks about how it was a mistake to keep the store in this economy, but what does he know. Besides, I love this stupid place. It was my pop’s idea to open a store that just sold pineapples. Back when he opened it, we sold pineapple everything: pineapple T-shirts, pineapple egg creams, pineapple hats, and if you wanted to just buy a pineapple, you could do that too. Now me, I wasn’t so crazy about pineapples. Still not crazy about them. I mean, I enjoy a pineapple now and then, but not like Pop did,  He was obsessed with the things. I overheard Mom telling her sister that when they went to Hawaii for their honeymoon, Pop was more interested in pineapples than making love to her. What a putz. The worst part was that Pop would walk up and down Main Street handing out flyers in this pineapple costume Mom made. It even had the spiky green things on top and a hole for his face to pop out. Boy, did we get shit for that when we went back to school.  He was only supposed to do it one time for the store opening, but after it opened, he kept at it, every Saturday, up and down Main Street.

“The same old man comes every day and doesn’t buy anything; he just sits around and talks about how it was a mistake to keep the store in this economy, but what does he know.”

    Ralph and I got sick of getting called “pineapple boy” day in, day out, all the time. And we were sick of hearing about nothing but pineapples. Pop was planning on wearing his costume during the county parade. We couldn’t stand the thought of Pop embarrassing himself in front of the whole town. Think of the teasing we’d get at school!

    One night, before the parade, we waited 'til everyone was asleep and took that pineapple costume and threw it off the Talmadge Bridge. It bounced all the way to the bottom of the ditch. Then we ran back home as if we had committed an awful crime, which I guess we had.

     Pop didn’t notice the costume was gone at first 'cause, you see, he’d only wear it on Saturdays — the rest of the time he was in the shop doing pineapple stuff.  Wednesday came, Thursday came, he didn’t say nothing. Friday came, and my brother and I started to feel like shit. We didn’t want to see Pop’s face on Saturday morning when there was no pineapple costume. So on Friday, again, in the middle of the night, we waited for Mom and Pop to go to sleep, and we crept back to Talmadge Bridge. You may think that a giant yellow pineapple costume would be easy to spot under a bridge, and you would be thinking wrong. It took about an hour to find it, and it was still in good shape. So we thought. We dragged it back into the closet and thought nobody would be none the wiser. Well. The very next morning, my brother and I ate our breakfast very slowly and watched Pop get into his pineapple costume. It had some dirt on the back, and Mom brushed it off without him noticing. Off he went, I remember he was even whistling as he left for work. What we didn’t know is a raccoon had made his nest in that pineapple costume. And in the middle of the parade, right when Miss Baldwin County was passing by on her float, that raccoons nearly bit his balls off. It caused quite a commotion, a big round yellow pineapple man fighting a raccoon out of his underpants.

    Pop said it was great for business. Now, he’s dead, not because of the raccoon, just old age, and so I ended up with the pineapple store. Never wore the pineapple costume, though. And right now, that’s all I can ask for.

• • •

Breadcrumb #131

ANASTASIA WORTHINGTON

“THIS IS MY WORLD AND I SHOULD BE LOVING EVERY SECOND OF IT! I HATE YOU RIGHT NOW, MAN! YOU KNOW WHAT HATE IS?! HATE IS THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE!”

“...”

“HATE! IS! THE! OPPOSITE! OF! LOVE! RIGHT NOW YOU ARE CREATING THE ABSENCE OF LOVE! WHY?!”

“...”

“I um… I don’t…”

“I know you know who I am. I KNOW YOU KNOW! But guess what? I don’t know who you are. I DON’T KNOW! WHO! YOU! ARE!!! And I never will if you don’t start caring about what you do, if you don’t strive to make a difference, if you don’t do everything in your power to make your business a better business. A better business makes the the universe better and your girl’s pussy wetter. What are you doing to improve the universe? From here it looks like jack shit.”

“Look man, I just work here.”

“All I hear from you is negativity! You need to turn that negativity into positivity and you know what you need to turn that positivity into? ACTivity! Activity means action. TAKE ACTION! GET ME A DAMN SHAMROCK SHAKE!”

“I already told you, the ice cream machine is broken.”

“EVERY FUCKING TIME I COME HERE! EVERY!!! FUCKING!!! TIME!!!!!! WHY DO YOU HAVE AN ICE CREAM MACHINE IF IT’S ALWAYS BROKEN?! Unless… Unless being broken is its TRUE FUNCTION IN WHICH CASE IT IS NEVER TRULY BROKEN! 

Damn. Damn, that’s pretty good. Now I get it. Now I see. And you know what? I see something else. I see opportunity. I see an ultralight beam through the fog of this ice cream machine bullshit. I’m gonna make my own ice cream. A new ice cream for a new planet. We won’t have flavors like chocolate or vanilla or shamrock. We’ll have flavors like platinum. Flavors like mink. Flavors like wifey’s toe. You feel me?”

“Sure.”

“Damn right you feel me! I was wrong about you man. You get it man. You get it.”

“With um. With all due respect Mr. West, there’s a line forming behind you. Did you want to order anything instead of the shake?”

“A line? Listen fam, everything is lines! You gotta blur the lines to make a clothing line to make the hot models do the lines to make them dutty wine and stick their fingers in your behind!”

“So, nothing?”

“...”

“...”

“I’ll have a large fries.”

“Great.”

“BILL COSBY INNOCENT!!!!!!!!!!”

• • •

Breadcrumb #130

DEVIN KELLY

Even trees kneel, bent branches
descending beneath the light. & I know
the song of a bird in a tree is a kind

of invisibility, the way I would trade
my limbs for night, the skin of my body
for the kind & colored paraphernalia

sun gives when it is setting. Once, you
ashed your body toward mine in the cold,
left pine needles trailing the sidewalk.

Once, I read a story about a hunter
who thought, before the bullet he shot
carved a passage through brain, he gave

the deer a heart attack, its life gone before
it fell. I don’t know what happened next.
He might have left it there, too scared

to touch a thing he killed with only his mere
presence, the deer not even pooling blood
by its eyes. I want to say something here.

I want to say my mother once wrote
a book for children called If Trees Could Talk.
I want to say my mother never finished &

I want to say I never read a word of it.
Where you have been with your body,
where you have entered & then left & then

gone back to return. Who you take with you
when you go & who you leave behind.
Something will come of this. I watched you

never look back at the leaves you left
to color the grain of city & I watched my mother
dry my wet baby body with her hair

just minutes after I was born. There is something
of tenderness in nature that we are
only just discovering. It aches like a tree

cracking under its weight in winter. It burns
& spits like firewood. A deer can die
the same way you or I can & you can leave me

without my permission. Mother, wherever
you are, finish the book. Teach me all the words
you left inside your mouth those nights we spent

reading late into dark. & lover, wherever
you are & wherever you have been before
I meet you, please know love is closer to tree

than flesh. We can climb it to see the world
from a high place. We can a string a rope around
its branches & swing, as bodies do in life 

or death. So yes, even a tree knows something
about leaving. In winter, I write this & there is
nothing on the ground to mark what has departed

a branch. The next time you touch me, think
of this. I want to be marked before
the fall. I want to be autumn.

• • •

Breadcrumb #129

CLAUDINE NASH

Consider that right now
somewhere
beneath a sycamore,

a trace of you
is drifting from the cracks
of an abandoned
cigar box.

As you sleep soundly
clear across the eastern
seaboard,

a stranger
with a rusted spade 

is reaching down
to brush the earth
that has been weighing
upon its wooden lid  
these nights.

Now he lifts this
muddy capsule, 

he peels back its seal
ever so gingerly,

and the universe
reclaims the air
that sits inside.

This is how
you come to awaken
whole and weightless,

how when you raise
your eyes towards
the morning sky 

up floats
a peace sign pendant;

your first forty-five;

an ink well;

a perfectly preserved set
of words and beliefs;

the self you buried, 

intact
and free.

• • •

Breadcrumb #128

ZACHARY LENNON-SIMON

“Excuse me, but are you Jewish?”
He asked me this with the tone of someone inquiring whether this chair was taken. On instinct, I re-doubled my efforts to read my book and pay him no mind. 
“Excuse me sir,” he was insistent, “I was just wondering if you were Jewish.”

With great reluctance, I looked at my inquisitor. He sat in a seat directly to my right on the other side of the train. The man had on black trousers, a black jacket, a white button up shirt with a tie, and a copy of the Wall Street Journal rested in his lap. 

“Were you talking to me?” I asked
“Yes. Oh I didn’t mean to interrupt your book,” said the man hastily. 
“Why?” 
“Well reading can make the train ride a little less painful.”
“No I mean why do you ask whether I’m Jewish.”
“Oh right,” the man laughed and shrugged, “I really don’t know. Guess I was just curious. Is that wrong?” 

I studied him closely. He sported a thin moustache and there were several wrinkles under his eyes. His smile was suspiciously cheery for a morning commute. 

“It’s a peculiar question,” I replied. 
The man nodded absently, “Not too many people ask you then.”
“No, I’m quite used to being asked this question. It’s just the nature behind it that always intrigues me.”
The man did not follow where I was going. I continued. 

“When was the last time someone asked you whether you were a Catholic? ‘Excuse me but I couldn’t help wondering, are you a Presbyterian. You’ve got a very Presby type of nose so I merely was wondering.”
The man was confused, “Is there such a thing as a Presbyterian nose?”
“Who knows? But those questions are rarely if ever said to a stranger, no?”
“No.”
“This is what I’m saying.”
He furrowed his brow, attempting to understand. “I’m sorry sir, I still don’t follow.” 
I looked at him and understood how far apart we were from understanding each other. 

I got up and walked to his row, “May I?” 
“But of course,” he said while moving his briefcase in order for me to sit. 
He looked unprepared to continue our conversation but I continued anyway, needing to make my point.  

“Nobody asks whether you’re Methodist, Christian, Buddhist, or anything. But ‘are you Jewish?’ It is asked in such a manner because, in these people’s minds, there is obviously no other answer, right?” 

I smiled at the man to let him know he was among friends. He smiled back, “Well I don’t know about that.”
“No, no let’s be honest.” I began gesticulating comically, “They have seen this man, with a schnoz out to here and his curly brown hair and have determined that he without a doubt, is a Jew.” 

The man, fidgeting with his paper timidly asked, “But they are so what’s the harm? What’s wrong with being right?”
I laughed more out of the incredulous nature of his statement than because I found him amusing. The man interpreted incorrectly and laughed with me.  

“Look I don’t know you from anyone else and I don’t know where you came from or what your relatives were like but what I know is that that question. That question that so many other people, some like you and some not so much like you, have asked can be very harmful to answer. You have to understand that some people come from a place where answering this question meant they could either continue grocery shopping or they could go up like smoke.” 

He flinched and I saw anger rise inside himself but before he could talk I pressed on. 
“And I can see that you didn’t like that comparison. Why would you? I made a snap judgment based on a small question you posed to determine the type of person I believe you to be.” I dug in, “Isn’t that awful? Isn’t that low of me?” 

“Are you Jewish?” I asked him. 
The man laughed, “No, no I’m not a Jew.” 
I looked at him quizzically, “What’s so funny?” 
The man gave me a knowing look that I did not understand, “Do I look Jewish to you?” 
“Do I look like a Kike to you?”

The man crumpled his newspaper in his fist, “Hey now that is not what I meant!”
I titled my head, “I’m sorry, have I offended you?”
“Yes!”
“I can’t imagine what that’s like,” I replied, holding his gaze with fire in my eyes and soul. 

The man had nowhere else for our conversation to go and so he turned for comfort out the moving train window. I got up to return to my seat. 
“The next time you see someone like me and wish to ask whether they’re jewish?” I said as flat as I could. 
“Do yourself a favor and bite your fucking tongue."

• • •