I feel as detached, as puppet ridiculous, as the woody dorks I’m forced to hoard here. Why am I keeping them? Do I need these? Why not run to another car, abandon these heaped here like the Homeless? Who’ll miss ’em, Robert’s parents? What good are used ones? More intimate than borrowed toothbrushes. God knows, Robert will never want these guys again.

But he told me to save them. And I’m doing it. And what I keep hearing as I scoop them up anyway is a shrill half-human mantra. Repeated, repeat it. Someone not unlike myself must be shouting, even as he tries to gather peckers, stuff’em in his britches, jam some under his belt, cover tips with spare wet scraps of Tiffany blue. As I tuck several beneath my soggy wind-breaker, with the rest stacked over my arms like firewood, the point of my chin, dainty, steadying the load, I find myself calling in exhaustion something I’m not proud of: “They aren’t really mine. Just carrying them for … a friend. Not for me! They’re … friends’.”

I must be downtown to let his folk upstairs in under twelve minutes. I must let poor Robert’s poor parents through all those locks. I dread leaving them stranded on the street outside. They’ll have packed too much; they’ll be full of falsified optimism, trivial flight detail. The senior Gustafsons, decent people, overdressed, underprepared. As if anybody could ever prepare for this. —Is it possible to feel this tired and still stay conscious?

Why am I trying to pick up sticks, and am now dropping them? Why keep gathering and failing and stooping and making arrangements of them, now like vegetables, like lilies? Why do this?

Jeering people bunch tighter at the car’s far end. Looks like they’re actually passing around a petition. But, no sweat, I am by now some diva, a bit exempt, I’m really incognito—a beloved star and singer, plucking roses off the apron of her stage while spilling others, not caring, since there are plenty. Now I have slid from “These things are my friends’” to “These’re my friends’”—till finally, deranged, I achieve an odd immodesty, recalling so many absent ones, the thirty or so lost already. And as I now touch each of these colossal members, cut off from a bloodstream, now apart from being anything past Artifact and Matter, now just Art—a familiar family litany surges back.