The Assemblagist

All I wanted to do was drink some seri­ous cof­fee and occupy a Barcalounger as I spent a cou­ple hours read­ing Cart Snap­pers, Lil­ian Flambo’s lat­est romance novel about a hap­less gro­cery store clerk and her illicit affair with the pro­duce man. Every bit of me ached with cold as I’d just spent the last cou­ple hours dri­ving from Howdy to Lit­tle Rock through freez­ing rain and sleet in a 1956 Ford Fair­lane with a limp­ing crip­pled heater. And it wasn’t just the tem­per­a­ture. The wind­shield wipers on the car scraaaaam­bleeeeched at increas­ingly high deci­bels each time they swooped across the glass, soud­nig every bit like a mutant buz­zard on a ram­page, and the flap­ping piece of worn-​off rub­ber looked like the bird’s bro­ken wing. The steel arm of the blade gouged a big arc where the bare metal blade swept across the already pocked windshield.

Never went any­where with that one. But it did remind me, as I rewrote it just now. that the word for the Art House Coop 10,000 Peo­ple Project could be illus­trated with a Barcalounger. Shh­h­hhh, don’t tell any­one the word, if you fig­ured it out.

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