Squonk

Vincent peered between the seat cushions of his couch; he had found his purpose in life. With a victorious screech, he ripped the yellowed recipe card from the clutches of the hungry sitting-apparatus. The delicate handwriting was in pencil, and while not smudged, was spidery enough that certain letters seemed to blend into the paper they were written on.

“How very inconvenient,” Victor said to himself, ignoring the echo of his words in the very empty double-wide. Turning the card sideways and placing it in the left-hand-side pocket of his tattered windbreaker, he walked the ten feet to the kitchen. Sometimes Victor felt frustrated with the size of his trailer, but other times he was content with it, especially on days when he got the cleaning bug. He looked around the trailer with disgust—on this particular day—as he paced the customary three times around the refrigerator, taking care to step on only the brown tiles. He had more trouble than usual, since all the tiles looked brown. Those crazy city officials had pointed out the filthiness of the floor last week and now he couldn’t seem to get the idea out of his head.

“Why am I thinking? I should be cooking!” he yelled to himself, hoping for once he would listen. Victor shook his head. Sometimes there was no telling yourself. He broke an egg over the rim of a cracked glass, and then peered at the yellowy-white liquid--eye-level with the aborted chicken fetus. He glanced down at the card and searched for the word “egg”. It wasn’t there.

“You idiot, Victor! There’s nothing like that written in these directions! Stupid!” and poked himself in the eye with his eggy hand. He proceeded to throw the glass and egg out of the window. Victor grumbled as he got down on the floor and searched through his plywood cabinets for a mixing bowl. The fifteen-minute quest produced a narrow flower pot, a ceramic ashtray, and a miniature Venus plaster statue. Then, after two seconds of rummaging through the cabinets in the kitchen itself, he came across a large mixing bowl. Victor began cooking.

“Okey, so bananas, I know I got bananas some’er in this house, just gotta find them.” He left the kitchen and went into his bedroom.“Yep, sometimes finding things in here is like trying to find--sheoot, that’s a long nail sticking out of them floor-boards, I oughta take it out sometime.” Victor went upstairs to find his trusty hammer that he used to carry on a string around his belt but stopped when he’d taken to wearing draw-string pants. Coming downstairs again, he noticed a bowl of bananas, and remembered the recipe he was trying to make.

“Lemme see, what kinda bananers am I gonna need? Oh well, this card just says bananas, so I guess these green ones will do, but I wonder if yellow ones would be better….” Victor decided it didn’t matter what color bananas he would need, because they would be baked anyway and things were always a different color when exposed to hundreds of degrees in the confines of a small metal box. “Gee, my granny sure is vague, she says to mush the bananas up, but she don’t say nothing ‘bout how to do it. I’ll just put them in the bowl and step on them like they’s do in Italia with the raisin-grapes.”

With the bananas sitting vulnerably in the bowl on the floor, their peels quivering with fear, Victor raised his foot above the bowl. But he had a second thought. “Then my foot will be all messy with banana goo and that’s icky,” he said, frowning. So he sat down on the floor to think.

He got up a half hour later and picked up the bowl. “That’s it, I’ll chew the bananers and spit them out into the bowl. They’ll be all mushed then and then I don’t got to clean nothing ‘cause it’ll just be with my mouth….” He trailed off, lost in the splendor of his incredible idea. Victor wasn’t the least bit worried about bacteria or germs—he knew the temperature of the oven would kill them right away.

With his mouth full of banana, he opened the fridge and groped for the milk. He spit the chewed banana into the sink and poured milk on top. Upon finding the crusted bottle of vanilla in the spice cabinet, he turned back to the sink and yelled in surprise.

“Where’d the bananer go?” he wondered, and stuck his hand down the drain. It came up with a handful of yellowish-brown goop. “Ah, well,” he said. “This’ll do.” And he put the mixture in a drinking glass and turned to the oven.

Or, where the oven would have been if he had one. Victor sank to his knees. He didn’t have an oven. He curled up into a fetal position and rocked back and forth. O O, what had become of the meaning of his life—to fall like an unwanted egg onto his kitchen floor—he would never achieve this dream of being a great banana-muffin maker. He would never stand upon the cliffs of the South Carolina coast, watching for his cargo ships to bring him money in place of muffins.

“Shut up, Victor, you old crazy! You’re a Caroliner, born and bred, and we don’t like to talk like no no-good smart person. The only smarts you’re gonna get is when I hits your behind with a wooden switch for being all down and sad like that! So go find yourself something else!”

The next morning, he had the strength to get up off the filthy kitchen floor. He had been thinking about the next day and the rest of his life. Victor went over to the couch, ready for a new meaning.

posted by Sarah Ruiz  # 10:52 PM