flea market

Down at the flea market in the snow, all the vendors were selling body parts. I was pleasantly surprised. I'd always wanted a Frankenstein monster of my own. And they were cheap, too! The heads were only a buck and a quarter.

I was a bit curious as to where all the merchandise was coming from, but the vendors were all grey-skinned grumps with intense dirt under their fingernails, so I didn't ask. The things were only slightly rotted; some had been shellacked to keep the freshness in.

I was amazed by the miscellaneous table, where you could get small unexplainable pieces ... two for a quarter. There were bits of brains, limbs, internal stuff, and things that simply defied location. This vendor was proud, communicative, bragging about the Army chopper that crashed in his backyard the week before.

I had plenty of cash, so I stocked up and tried to innovate. I knew that building just a man wasn't good enough for me. I wanted a freaky Hindu god. So I bought mostly blue-skinned parts and lugged them home.

I sewed and wired and charted and stitched and toiled, while the body parts piled into form. At the end I thought I'd be cute and buy him a lotus flower. That must have been my mistake, because at the final stimulus my pet god woke up and started to insult me.

It complained that it had been perfectly happy in Limbo, that its arm was asleep ... all kinds of minor details.

So I bitched in return that I'd spent so damned much pocket money building him.

He tossed me a couple of useless Indian coins and evaporated in a puddle of sparks.

I went back to the flea market, but it wasn't there.

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Recorded (audio) on "Protothings" tape. 1988.
Published in Museweek (10/95)
Published in Expressions Newsletter (10/2001)