On the other side of the higher wall on the other side of the concrete walkway, there was a chicken which the incredibly tall young man had not even noticed standing there in the kitchen, though he had come in a few minutes before. And next to the chicken was a barbecue, next to the bed. It was the only place he'd lived where there was a bed in the kitchen. He loved it.
On the ceiling next to the rack for pots and iron skillets was a painting. He took the time to study it for the first time, while simultaneously wondering why the chicken was standing below it. The painting was old, but well dusted even in the attractive slight cracks. It seemed it had been painted over another scene, which showed through intriguingly in some areas which had been worn off a bit. The scene was of a city rising from the churning sea. There was froth around it spewing up, and in the froth, were stuck large chocolate dipped cherries as if in whipped cream.
You rarely see framed paintings on ceilings rather than on walls. This was the kind of kitchen where you could look at it for a really long time before noticing the paintings on the ceiling and the chicken. The gas stove had been on, flaming up steadily, when the very tall young man walked in. Why was the chicken there? And the landlady not there?
Had the chicken revolted in a conspiracy of poultry and cooked the landlady, who regularly slept in the bed in the kitchen? Was it about to cook an egg? Had it escaped being cooked itself? Or was it just roaming as one of the housemates?
"As soon as I saw that place that's a painting"..... Martin said, pointing with a jerk of his eyes and a slight angle of his head towards the house the young man and the chicken were in, on the other side of the wall which was painted realistically during that section very vividly as a completely different type of building, with shadows painted in full relief, looking like more stories than it was, more elaborate and off on a melee of shattered and contorted angles, stairs going off here and there disappearing into painted windows at odd directions, which had a real window that compositionally fit inside one part of the large painting of a window, looking across to the hole in the lower concrete wall where the hyper-yellow mushrooms were growing undisturbed..."I thought it must be where.....you know......"
Ambry turned her face away from him quickly, because she thought the boy ducked into the hole in the wall where the yellow mushrooms were. She turned back, confused by whether she had seen that or not, as she had looked back at him a little prematurely. There were a few moments of silence. "Those are hyper-yellow." She said. "Hyper." She widened her eyes and pushed her face forward towards him slightly.
He was finding himself fascinated by the closely knit line of ravens along the top of the low wall. They were startlingly large as always up this close. Above the curled-over boy going past the yellow mushrooms in the hole in the wall, was a raven amongst the strangely present loomingly large, very close up row of ravens who had just landed all along the wall next to them, coming down at them from a slant above the ocean, from out of the pearlescent overcast atmosphere. One of them, in the center of the row, had a walnut sized roundish chunk of extremely bright orange color in its beak.
The other ravens were probably wishing they had the thing, carrot, or whatever it was, and that raven was fluffing up his feathers and extending his wings, hunkering over in a C shape for awhile, standing out strongly against the subtle lichens and mossy greens and soft maroon of distant paint and layers of erosion and granite and sandstone and graffiti, and a slight feathery fur of scarlet in some of the areas worn away.
The raven with the bright orange object in its beak took off flying the way the gargoyle monkeys had in the Wizard of Oz, Martin pointed out to Ambry. It first hopped along, skipping its way upwards into the sky as it hopped higher until it was flying off with great intent.
Yes, definitely, Ambry could tell his glasses were way off kilter. She kept noticing it, and it was hard not to smile. Everything he said was just slightly more like Martin than ever before.
On the other side of the taller wall they were walking past, the cat which had been grasping on the lower wall at the tiny yellow mysterious mushrooms had ricocheted off the hole in the wall and onto the fence, up over a well dusted doll stuck on it in a small wooden chair that jutted out over the sidewalk and rocked in the wind, and in this case, quite wildly, swinging suddenly against the push of the cats feet, as it leaped into the window across from the hole in the lower wall, gliding behind the heads of the couple, and landing with a sound they both turned too late to identify. It was the third sound in a row they had heard lately that they couldn't identify, or even where it came from, and they looked at each other and started laughing, both looking up this way and that, slightly exaggeratedly, rolling their eyes a little.
The cat made it through the house and scratched wildly again, this time at the chicken in the kitchen, which had been pecking at the cat's food for too long. The cat looked at the chicken with one eye on a slant, the eyebrow drawn down, the front of its body down on the ground, its back arched, the fur extended outwards. The chicken scuttled towards the wall while lifting up in the air a bit, like a cloud lifting.
The cat stayed there energetically charged, and then leaped off out the small window inside the painted window, and up a tree in the yard. The tall young man started laughing, and followed the persimmon colored cat into the yard, turning his face up to the bit of sunshine coming through the whiteness of the sky. The tree had a swing hanging down from it and the swing itself was a rocking horse, nice porcelain, the layers of color worn off from many hands from the past and the erosion of the foggy sea air always blowing in.
The tree had no ladder, but if you looked up from below it, you would see an aged tree house at a slant, shaded with the heavy foliage. On the underneath side of the tree house an oil painting in a weathered wood frame was hanging, facing downward. The painting was a depiction of a railroad track going without much mention into the sea, the rocks going every which on the edge, obscuring some of the broken up pieces of the old track.
The landlady herself walked out, naked, a well exercised seventy four years old, wearing a sun hat with a complex pink scarf holding it on, her hair dyed a very bright shade of red. "It's time for rent money," the landlady said. She bent down and petted the chicken distractedly and it bounced slightly down towards the ground with her touch, up and down with each pet.
She suddenly kicked over the cat food bag that had been obviously gouged by very sharp, fierce claws. "Damn raccoons! Bastards. Don't tell the girls on the second floor, but one day, I'm going to blow them away, blow them away." She looked at him with her eyes open wide as if they couldn't hold themselves back any more, as she exclaimed, her chin tucked into her scarf so it all faded in together, lost in the periphery of the crimson of her lipstick against her very tan skin, with a hint of orange to it.
Her tan, though an odd color, was well earned. She went swimming in the ocean for an hour almost every day nude, often in the heavy fog, knew where she could get away with that. The surfers wore wetsuits and scanned the undertow carefully from the top of the sand dunes, sizing them up with each other before venturing down. Only her perpetually vivacious son would go in the water with her for the long swim, a very enthusiastic man who sang in a hearing- impaired vocal choir. The renters in the household would go with her on Sunday trips to other coastal spots, but would only go in for a second in the extreme temperature of the water.
Her hat was off at an angle after her outburst as she looked at the tall young renter. He sweetly gave her the rent check, happy to be renting a largish closet in her many leveled house. The previous closet-renter had made the window in his wall, letting in the light from the ocean sunsets.
When looking out his window for the first time, he had immediately realized he could now regularly see the Columbian man, around the landlady's age, who documented the sunset with his camera, twilight after twilight. The man was very short, stood on the highest point of the wall, looking down on the people walking past him on the wide concrete walkway along the beach.
"I changed this beach," he had once said to the tall young man. "I made this wall what it is today. It used to be different gangs each owned the different sets of steps doing down from the walkway to the beach. Each break in the wall was territory for kids who knifed each other if they went down the wrong steps. It was terrible. I put a stop to it. Your landlady, she's..."he cocked his head a little, briefly, his eyes bulging out but only at a politely mild level, "....OK..." and he straightened his head. "But she was on the other side of it all. She went against me on it." He almost whispered it gently, not wanting to make too much of it.
The tall young man had been too cold that evening to wait and see just how that was, as much as he had been enjoying himself. "I'm sorry," he had told him, "I really need to get going. I'm fighting off this cold." This was the fourth time he had said something to him along those lines and finally he was able to finish the conversation up with hugs, and compliments, and he had gone back into the house with the wall painted like another house.
When he had gotten inside that day, the landlady had been lying on her bed in the kitchen, in a nearly neon green shirt and paisley pants, trim, and vigorous.
His eye had been attracted meanwhile by the stuffed monkey dangling with its arms off the back of the bedstead, wearing a top hat and a cape she had obviously put on it. He was still seeing new things, the house and yard were so packed with so many well placed, fascinating objects. It was this kind of a place: it was a good while before he had noticed a chicken sitting next to her in the bed. "Isn't it GREAT?" she'd said, cocking her head and raising her eyes upwards to the side, swinging her head around almost imperceptably, jerking up slightly and all-encompassingly.
Tantra Bensko's "Opposites Day" appears regularly in Unlikely 2.0. Check out her bio page.