Breakfast Street

.Sunday.
While amidst a partitioned hour, created specifically for swimming and writing, I came across something remarkable. Here, to the best of my abilities, I will try to recall and decipher what I saw and scribbled.
An airliner weaves around the gray clouds as the sunlight chokes its way through to the cool, brown earth below. The wind is blowing from the west over my bare feet. I imagine my feet are old man's feet with bronchitis. They are struggling to remember where they left their slippers and whether it's Tuesday or Thursday afternoon. I tuck them in under each other, switching occasionally to give the one on top a change of pace. From the hills pours a stream of tanks; warlords of clouds, balls of nightfall racing toward me at 3 in the afternoon. Another wave of planes adjust their angles of attack. But it's the ducks along the river banks that begin to make for the shores, and their homes; rounding up their families before the rain causes a panic.
The paths resemble conveyor belts; shuffling contents from location to location. They wrap harmlessly along the waterway. A woman wearing multiple sweaters and attached to a very brown husky strolls up to me and asks, "where is there a pool around here?"
At first I found this question to be odd. She clearly wasn't in swimming attire. But then I recalled that I was wearing flip-flops, a bathing suit, and a bright orange and red Garfield towel. This was common attire for writing in 50 degree storm weather, I assured myself. I notion that there exists a pool behind me in the apartment complex where I'm from.
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A deceptive pool of blue breaks through momentarily. I am distracted. Sunlight bursts through like a flare; reaching across everything. What if the picture was reversed? The houses, land, and everything in them suddenly began to float up. Certainly an odd sight for the cows in the hills. Their lives are so quiet.
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The human blanket moves out of sight, replaced with another woman wearing a purple track suit. Bouncing boysenberry trunks. She stands out. Her track shoes crunch on the rocks underfoot. The sounds reminds me of the sound my jaws make while chewing cereal. Some bits kick back up and off to the side as she runs. The next course arrives on wheels. A bike-riding couple peddles by, oblivious to the giant man-moving mechanism that they are on. He's wearing a long-sleeve, marmalade-orange sweater. They match. It's not that cute.
Tempos ring down the paths. As my hour nears its end, I am left with one image. One man in particular cannot stand the ringing. He is not wearing bright colors. He does not have headphones on. He is not smiling. The guy sits down and covers his ears. For a minute he stares out across the view, silent. The ducks have left. The wind picks up. A muffled noise rushes across my face. And without notice the man begins to wobble his head like a clock in reverse: up, left, down, right, up. Then in reverse order. The pattern continues for some time and during so the man says nothing. Up, left, down, right, up, right, down, left, up.....After this he stands up quietly and walks out of view.
The whole picture feels like clockwork or coffee at 9 a.m. - deceptively normal. My time is up. I head back home, taking a shortcut down breakfast street.

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Author's Notes:

• Imagery could be a bit more conducive
• Feels a bit disjointed. Like two stories that never knew each other just found out they had the same mom, she just remarried.
• Wait, so what is breakfast street?
  

For the Birds

My current girlfriend and I traveled to visit my parent's last weekend for Easter. She hates when I call her 'my current girlfriend,' but I like to think it gives her a note of ambiguity.
The sun was setting when we arrived at their country home. Clouds turned pink. The sky switched sides on the spectrum until the clouds turned to a misty gray. In the garage my old faithful dog, Katie, lay sprawled out on the cool concrete floor. It had been brought to my attention that over the years Katie had developed a severe case of arthritis. No longer could my childhood companion bound through the grass after jackrabbits or chase me around our acre of grass, seeing who was faster. She let out a sigh, as I approached. Perhaps the best she could do to say 'hello.' I knelt down to pet her, finding the exact place on her belly that made her hind legs do a sideways-gallop. Her eyes followed me as I got up to go inside, flicking off the garage light as I closed the door behind me.
Though Katie suffers from acute arthritis this has not seemed to impact her appetite one bit. Startling at first, my sister has warmly bestowed upon her the nickname of "Katie-Seal" since the two had first met. Since giving up the daily routine of walking around the property, Katie has gotten larger and larger; requiring us to loosen the notch on her collar a handful of times. She sits down in front of me, the weight on her shoulders forces her to lean slightly to one side. I loosen her collar again for added comfort, she's not trying to escape.
There is a marsh outside the window of my current apartment. Birds of all kinds share its waters and its food. Humans share the view, along with the path that runs through it. While walking along this exact path earlier today, I came across an alien breed of sandpiper. Sandpipers can be distinguished by their needle-like beaks which they stab into the sands along a water's shores, probing for their next wiggling snack. The specific bird that I spotted had a fiery orange head.
If I were this sandpiper, I would have gotten used to the taste of sand by now. It's not that it was particularly bad at what it did, it was the fact that this bird let its mouth hang, partially open, as it dove its tool into the buffet. The orange alien retracted its head violently, shaking it forward and backward with such force that any heavy, non-snacky particles would jettison loose. This is a gold digger's trick. If the sand weren't as malleable as it were I would suspect that these birds would quickly pace their beak-diving expeditions.
With their mechanical engines, the planes overhead butt into the conversation. How it is that a large, hunk of steel manages to stay afloat while a penguin cannot I can't tell. Something about bones. Something about propulsion. Flight is a gift reserved for the evolutionary elect and those with enough paper money to ward off gravity. "Flight" can be replaced with any number of words.
The planes' tiny reflection out swims the ducks. Reflection and real thing soar unhindered through the blue. What it must be like to be free, floating alongside the birds.