Tracing Gould - oo4

Three of the four corners of the strip clipped at clean right angles, I rotated the sunday supplement and spread the scissors anew.  Paused.  Listening.  Sam's wry eyes a little uncertain.

"Kid, I'm not one to gild lilies.  Further you clip into this thing, the woolier reasoning is liable to get."

From deep in the metal throat and lungs of the house, faint chuckles, repeating.  Heat register flaps chiming, gently resonant.  The subliminal music of the family hearth.  Imp giggles.  Then:  "Neki Hokey!"

"What?"

Elbows on the freed bottom frame of the panel in my hand, Sam sighed a cartoon balloon of smoke.  Hanging his head, rubbing his neck. "Just what we needed.  Comic relief."

"Neki Hokey!"  Shrill with glee.  Bouncing through the ventilation.

"What is that, Sam?"

"Fertheluvvamike...."  Heaving a sigh like a sack of dry cement.  "I thought we left those brats in the 50s!"

The haytangle haired twins tumble, a human wheel free down the sundappled hall adjacent to the kitchen, the pirate map tattooed across their soles flashing.  "Neki Hokey!"  The cackling tumblers reel across the checkered kitchen floor and through the breakfast nook, their wheel breaking on the threshold.  The pair spill against the faux-edwardian walnut chairs and come to a bruised stop.  

Massaging reddened shoulders, the comic relief critically eyeballing the leafy, dark, nubbled motifs of paw-paw's prize furniture.  "Ugly!"  "Dang!"  "Smarts!"  "Neki Hokey!"

"What the hell are they saying?"

In a snit of agitation Sam lunges, groping impotently from his pane for the blunt outer rim of the scissors.  "Just finish, wouldja!?"  The cigarette in his mouth switching corners with an audible click, sounding like nothing less than an automated turn signal in a 60s model Ford.

Hesitant scissor hand dropping.  "Do I recognize these kids?"

"You shouldn't.  But don't let me stop you..."

Tracing Gould - oo2

Sam Catchem casts his sardonic eye my way and says "Kid," around his perpetual cigarette.

Retinas gliding across the surface of his whites with ice-skate, stop-motion celerity.  Suppressing a shiver of the uncanny I force my focus in, down, onto the rustling newspulp.  Sam's rheumy gaze locked outwith the frame beneath me, making contact, he raises a hand to cock his plum-coloured trilby back.

"Kid," he says, "you're on the level."  The cigarette clicks from one side of his freckled mew to the other, almost audibly, as he turns, looking up.  "But what level?"

The waxen glow of the hardwood beneath me is gold as sunlight.  Redounding off the cut glass corners of the candy dish on the mirrored tabletop, misting butterscotches wrapped in their crisp whispering cello with particulate rays.  It's always afternoon in the front living room, by paw-paw's recliner.  I'm on my stomach on the floor, elbowpropped, and Dick Tracy's back at war with Big Boy.

"You remember that?" raps Sam.  "I mean, actually remember."

"I believe so," I answer, pulling legs beneath me,  "Like, I think I recall Paw-Paw telling me Big Boy was a Tracy villain from when he was a kid."

"Interesting," not sounding interested at all.  Testing the border of the panel he's speaking from, little exploratory taps with nicotine-stained knuckles.  "Think you can help me outta this rig?"  His cynical kewpie eyes sliding to the scissors beside my hand.

"I believe so," I answer, admiring the sheer glint of forever afternoon all around me.  The reflections off wood and glass and steel all caught and sponged up by the Sunday supplement.  The loops of the heavy scissors immense as trigger guards to my adolescent knuckles.  "I believe so."