l i f e
the collected
contributions
christopher@30seconds.org
In these dark dusty buildings folks put up for sale their lives as they were years before. Some broken and worthless, some powerfully expensive, some tacky, tastless, and altogether rusty. The spiders claim what they can and the ivy, with a life all its own, chokes these places clutching them so tight it twists the very planks and nails holding it all together.
But inside, with the dust and shadow, the lives are still there. The frail owners follow you about, a sort of narrative streaming from their dry throats. They really don't want to part with anything, rather they'd like to trap you and reopen the past.
Their eyes glaze over and look past, even through you, to some object. You turn to look and see a cracked pane of glass, maybe a chair with a few slats gone from the back, a lamp with no shade next to some old crockery. But they see it new. Someone sits in the chair, plays just outside the glass panes, reads by the lamplight, or eats well tendered meals around a table of family and friends.
Then you look at the price placed on these events, haggle over it, come away with what you beleive is a good deal, shell out a couple of bucks, and hit the road. On the seat next to you rides the object, forever separated from its clan. Your buy. Your addition. A piece in the collection.
You never think of the building and the owner again. The contents of both growing ever smaller until there is nothing of value left to anyone but the holder of the memories. The handpainted signs say antiques or treasures, but there is only the smell of midew and sad eyes in hollow sockets.
But there is something else there too. This is where the stories live. The real ones. In the objects too worn to be haggled over, too scratched or chipped to be grabbed up by dealers. Too painted over or repaired. The narrators know they have nothing left and they look at you strangely when you stop. Maybe a flicker of momentary hope runs through them, they get to talk again. Thus the surreal begins in a story that costs you nothing but the time it takes the words to flow.
Sometimes you may learn someting of how things used to be done and you think, ah...
Sometimes you find that the spot on which you stand is the last place, the end of the line.
Sometimes you know that the only reason a sign blows back and forth on a rusty hinge by the roadside is for you.
Not for the armless and naked dolls. Not for the rusted tin or the cold-painted pottery, but for you. You are the collected.
Welcome, just don't slip on my glass menagerie...
goodnight 12.06.97
