American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,168

grout lines like a curiously crimson irrigation network. It was blood, of course: she had stood there until her feet bled. The blood has hardened to become a flaky grid of brown, but she knows that since this fix-it session is so bad it’s likely she will bleed again, probably soon.

An image, always still, always melting. Oh, what a pain it is to wear these bodies.

Why is the work never done? Why must we work so hard to maintain these trappings that only harm us?

But these are bad thoughts, she knows. Because they are living a good life. They just need to work a little harder to make sure everything is all right. And they have a beautiful car.

Such a beautiful car.

Listen, there is more:

Mr. Trimley is old and alone, but he has his diversions. Specifically, his model trains, which occupy nearly every waking moment of his life and most of the eighteen hundred square feet of his adobe home. His trains are his hobby, he tells himself, just a hobby, yet sometimes he wonders if it is all right for a hobby to grow so extensive that he throws out his bed, stove, tables, chairs, all in the cause of allowing more room for his many trains.

No, he thinks. That’s silly. He is an old man, and old men are allowed their eccentricities.

One day, Mr. Trimley thinks, he might have enough trains. But he is not sure when—for there is always an anxious, gnawing hunger inside him, telling him that this is all not quite right, and he needs to adjust things just a little more…

It often takes a lot of adjustment. He has somewhere in the range of 950 model trains, all running on electrical tracks from four to four hundred feet long… and perhaps longer. Mr. Trimley knows that it is a good thing to be a man, just a simple old man living in his simple house, but he does not feel it is wrong to help things a little, all in the name of his trains, of course. After all, if he can alter things to make his trains more impressive, then he should, correct?

Yes. Of course. And Mr. Trimley can alter quite a bit.

Some of his trains, when they enter a little plastic tunnel or trundle under a miniature wooden bridge, take a very, very long time to come out on the other side. The most extreme example is the Northern Line, which comes back to his house only every three days or so, usually at around nine in the morning. And when it returns, the Northern Line is frequently bedecked with snow, and reeking of sulfur.

Mr. Trimley has laid a lot of track for his trains. It’s just that some of the tracks go places outside his home, or to places invisible to the naked eye. But that’s just a detail, really—after all, this is just his quaint hobby. Isn’t it?

Listen:

The Dawes children are merry children, playing fun games in their big sandbox in the backyard. It is just slightly unusual that they come out and play at odd hours—often well after midnight—and that, in their happier moments, they sometimes have the tendency to levitate.

But the neighbors do not mind. No, they do not mind. They are not allowed to mind.

Listen:

No one goes in or out of the Crayes house—you can only tell it is the Crayes house by the name on the mailbox out front. But during certain nights, often around nine o’clock, you can hear Big Band music blaring through the windows, and if you watch the drapes (and you would never do such a thing) you would see the form of someone very, very small dancing a curiously stiff dance…

Listen:

Mrs. Huwell tends to her garden every morning and every night. What she plants there, no one is entirely sure: no one ever sees anything grow, or ever sees a single blade or stem poke up through the soil. Yet on windy nights, if the neighbors listen closely, they can hear leaves rustling in the wind, as if on the other side of the fence is a lush, dense jungle of a garden, though there is nothing to be seen; and in spring, when it is cool and wet, sometimes a soft green glow filters through the fence boards…

Listen:

Mrs. Greer throws a garden party once a year, and she invites the same list of guests every time. This party lasts only forty minutes: the guests will walk down the sidewalk in