by Garrison Frost

A man is sitting in his bedroom alone. The window is open. Suddenly he realizes that the weird sound he's hearing is the sound of seals on the bell buoy just outside the mouth of King Harbor. God, that must be half a mile away, he thinks.

At precisely the same moment, another man not more than two miles away is trying to calculate how much money his home is worth and how much that value has increased every minute since he bought it in 1996. But what's money, he says to himself, and laughs. It's everything.

A man who has popped into a mall to buy a gift stops in the middle of the mall and asks himself, Are you really telling me that this place doesn't have a Gap?

Directly west of this a young teenager is sitting on an eight-foot longboard rising and falling with the waves. There aren't any waves now, and he knows there won't be any, but he feels weird paddling in. There's just something wrong with paddling in, he insists.

Right at that second, a little girl is laying in her living room watching a talk show on television that she doesn't understand completely. She is stretched out on her stomach with her face resting in her hands which are propped up by her elbows. After hearing someone on the screen say it, she wonders what a pimp is.

Across the street from the little girl an old woman is sitting in a chair and staring at a wall. I hate it here, she says over and over again to herself. I hate it here.

A woman bends down to trim a branch when she notices that there's a huge grasshopper sitting on it. "That's something you don't see by the beach," she says aloud, and then notices a huge hawk flying toward a tree across the street. "That either."

At that instant, several blocks away a man dials a number on his cell phone as he drives down a major boulevard. He's dialed six numbers when, for a reason he won't be able to explain later, he looks up. At that moment he slams into the back of a delivery truck. "God dammit," he shouts. "Shit, shit, shit, shit!" Then he smashes his phone against his steering wheel over and over until the cover breaks off.

Just as the phone falls apart, a politician on the other end of the adjacent city decides to run for higher office. It's not that I crave serving the people or anything, she admits to herself. It's just that I've always wanted to do this, and I think I can win.

(Nov. 23, 2003)

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