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Stimuli

There was a moment when he doubted himself. Placing the flyers in their hands, the garbagecan was doing some overflowing, and the self-employed within the poster laden video store was eyeing Jants with glass eyes, wondering why the old piece of Antarctica had to hover so near the Open sign. There was snow on the ground and people, and the laundry was finally closed, instead of the glass doors open, so the ones splurging for quarters on the dryers could feel a good shot of static cling from the grinding tumblers. Women in religious frocks sequestered around the dull ring of the RC machine to keep away from the crack of the back door that gave quick spurts of frost to the ancient Olympics mat. Jants could see the little party girls with their hair up and tight cut-off jeans dumping fabric softeners into Maytag barrel-like creations. The flyers were done but Tyui McRuthal wasn't going to be back from the politicking campaign to pay him off until well after sunset, and Jants still had a good 29 cubic feet of snow and dirt to consolidate into a perfect back of shopping center receiving area.

The 3 toes he was missing were from the nearest war to now. Wasn't anything all that exciting or romantic, he woke up one morning 5 boring nights after an important defensive to find them gone, and it enraged the bugler so much with spitting laughter, he couldn't play the call to breakfast properly. He didn't suspect the musician; they were all laughing at his carelessness by then. He didn't keep very well in touch with them, but then neither did they, so they had a kind of mutual communication going in that respect. Some parts of the feet felt like the nagging complaint of red ant bites minutes after you didn't know they were there in the first place, especially when the cold got up his leg and somehow crawled back down into his sock with snow like it was doing now. He thought about how he'd spend the extra money, wondered if the shoe place was going to generate enough business from the flyers to support this man, and the printing costs, and if doing it on blue paper meant anything. "Just makes it harder to read," he admitted to himself, finding a particularly prolific bit of nothing, empty space in which to scour the dirty slush his shovel broom was producing.

The sun was nodding off behind the constant layer of snow clouds, and Jants pushed through the leaving Fay's Drugs employees who were sighing grievances to one another, heading for the sandwich shop, stopping off first to grab his daily old newspaper from the garbage, crumpled blue papers knocked to the puddly floor left and right. He came in past the recycling bin, took the last booth from the cold of the door and sat with his back to the rushing people, glad for a little reasoning with simple non-fiction.

On the sportspage somebody had spit up, but basketball was relatively phlegm free, and then Family Circle, and then the front page looked different than it did yesterday. Yet. He got the distinct impression he'd read this before. The woman making the sandwiches, yelling something to a Jr. who was scrapping the crap from a huge chocolate chip mint ice cream barrel, washed her hands and put on gloves to dry them. The young woman yelled at Jants, "You going to get our boxes, then? Been on the floor in there for.." She didn't know how long but she wasn't about to admit her failure to the underachieved grandpa.

He looked up. Right in the middle of a murder. Might as well use the time.

He'd have to do it tomorrow. The boxes were cold-freezer cardboard boxes that once contained thick sausage rolls, beef patties of 30% pure something, parrot bird seed bars (for the answer to this please see someone who knows), and the fresh box of parsley, still damp and a great smell. 5 in all, all scattered about the place in no named order. Hands to his hips in a strictly manly fashion, Jants sized up the situation, tried to build his own feelings from it, tried to look on it as a task to be settled with, not as the challenge it truly was.

The way he saw it, there was more than one way he could go. Sausage, seed bars, beef patty (2 here), parsley - no, that wouldn't work. Seed bars would have to go on top. They'd just have to. Too small. Put them on the bottom, the balance would knock anything sitting on it right off. No, he'd have to think about it.

Out into the snow, he didn't hear the man come into the sandwich place and ask about Jants. Put the money on the counter, the change clanging in the business sized envelope. Jants'd kicked the boxes out. The trash dumpster, the big one, was so far away. He couldn't kick them all that way, could he? No, he was going to have to pick them up. And soon.

He hated it when people ignored the lines. Jants did his best to keep the parking lot immaculate to the point of seeing yellow lines wherever you went, but now it was becoming his fault people were doing what they always did in the snow, ignoring the boundaries of blacktop's nature, and he couldn't live with himself for much longer in this kind of weather. He'd stack the boxes in order of importance. Sweep the falling snow from the handicap signs, off the wooden bench in front of the drug store, spit clean the windows of the branch of bank, look at the boxes, empty the trash from the backs of the stores, choke on the diapers' vapors that seemed to get into each and every one, quit for the day, take up the usual papers, read the usual murders with the different class of killers, think on the boxes. It wasn't until the third day, the one before the big snowdrift, when the sleet was supposed to be Sears buildings thick, that he discovered the connection.

He stacked the boxes with the parsley one On The Bottom, there were more knifings than shootings. If the parrot seed box went as The One In The Very Middle one day, a woman would give herself an abortion rather than have a prominent football player commit suicide. Somehow they all evened out. Papers didn't lie.

Jants began to grow whiskers in places few knew he still had in him. The replies he gave were curt and to the point, and it was when the pay packets began to pile up in the outbox at the shopping center offices that several respected money-grubbers began to worry about having so much liquid cash on hand. But the guy with the broom couldn't be bothered. He was on to something. Knew it. It was that second week, when just out of sheer desperation, like a sick kid who's lost his combination, gives it one last try. He did it. It was in the paper that very night. The sausage was on top, the hamburger box next to it; somehow it all seemed right and fitting, all the meats being there next to each other. The front page was bloodless. They had to fill up the print with meaningless weather reports and political dogma. The killings weren't there. He knew. Jants pumped up to the sandwich counter with a smile trying to come out. He still had a dollar.

"'Nother b.l.t.," he told the old crow. He deserved it.

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