The Forgotten Works

Nobody knows how old the Forgotten Works are, reaching as

they do into distances that we cannot travel nor want to.

Nobody has been very far into the Forgotten Works, except

that guy Charley said who wrote a book about them, and I

wonder what his trouble was, to spend weeks in there.

The Forgotten Works just go on and on and on and on and

on and on and on and on and on. You get the picture. It's a big

place, much bigger than we are.

Margaret and I went down there, holding hands for we were

going steady, through the sun of a blue day and white luminous

clouds drifting overhead.

We crossed over many rivers and walked by many things,

and then we could see the sun reflecting off the roofs at inBOIL’s

bunch of leaky shacks which were at the entrance to the Forgotten

Works.

There is a gate right there. Beside the gate is the statue of a

forgotten thing. There is a sign above the gate that says:

THIS IS THE ENTRANCE TO THE FORGOTTEN WORKS

BE CAREFUL

YOU MIGHT GET LOST

A Conversation with Trash

InBOIL came out to greet us. His clothes were all wrinkled and

dirty and so was he. He looked like a mess and he was drunk.

"Hello," he said. "Down here again, huh?" he said, more to

Margaret than to me, though he looked at me when he said it.

That's the kind of person inBOIL is.

"Just visiting," I said.

He laughed at that. A couple of other guys came out of shacks

and stared at us. They all looked like inBOIL.. They had made the

same mess out of themselves by being evil and drinking that

whiskey made from forgotten things.

One of them, a yellow-haired one, sat down on a pile of

disgusting objects and just stared at us like he was an animal.

"Good afternoon, inBOIL,' Margaret said.

"Same to you, pretty."

Some of inBOIL’s trash laughed at that and I looked at them

hard and they shut up. One of them wiped his hand across his

mouth and went inside his shack.

"Just being social," inBOIL said. "Don't take no offense."

"We're just down here to look at the Forgotten Works," I

said.

"Well, she's all yours," inBOIL said, pointing at the Forgotten

Works that gradually towered above us until the big piles of

forgotten things were mountains that went on for at least a

million miles.

In There

YOU MIGHT GET LOST

And we walked through the gate into the Forgotten Works.

Margaret started poking around for things that she might like.

There were no plants growing and no animals living in the

Forgotten Works. There was not even so much as a blade of

grass in there, and the birds refused to fly over the place.

I sat down on something that looked like a wheel and watched

Margaret take a forgotten sticklike thing and poke around a

small pile of stuffed things.

I saw something lying at my feet. It was a piece of ice frozen

into the shape of a thumb, but the thumb had a hump on it.

It was a hunchback thumb and very cold but started to melt

in my hand.

The fingernail melted away and then I dropped the thing and

it lay at my feet, not melting any more, though the air was not

cold and the sun was hot and blue in the sky.

"Have you found anything you like?" I said.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 782