There is a wall made of muscle.
It is as if there were a shoulder pressing into a leg, wrapped
under a pair of arms, and a back bent in many segments. It is
twenty feet tall.
If one takes a flashlight under the crease of two long muscles
near the ground, one sees the shine of an eye.
We hear its muscles twisting up at night.
It is left to me to talk the wall out of existence.
Hello, Mr. Wall? We do not want you around anymore.
Is it the children? Tell them I’m only a wall.
It’s actually everyone. You are too horrendous. The birds are
dropping dead from the sky. They are too afraid of the ground.
Our grandmothers are afraid to make jam. They look at their
own hands kneading the jam and they weep.
The wall twists like a man checking his heel.
I cannot move, I am a wall.
I’ve seen you swat a bird.
Captain by trade, Cpt. Eric Thralby works wood in his long off-days. He time-to-time pilots the Bremerton Ferry (Bremerton—Vashon; Vahon—Bremerton), while other times sells books on amazon.com, SellerID: plainpages. He’ll sell any books the people love, strolling down to library and yard sales, but he loves especially books of Romantic fiction, not of risqué gargoyles, not harlequin romance, but knights, errant or of the Table. Eric has not published before, but has read in local readings at the Gig Harbor Candy Company and the Lavender Inne, also in Gig Harbor.