Ellie called me at six that night and said she needed my help with the chickens because she didn’t have enough time and she’d miss going to her own star party if she didn’t get her chores done. [Insert laugh track laughter.] I’d been napping, so her call annoyed me, but I got up eventually and walked across the road and marveled at the sunset.
Some people think all sunsets are colorful, but they aren’t. Some sunsets are more colorful than others. This one was particularly colorful. It started with the blue sky, changed to green and then purple and then pink and then orange and deep red just over the horizon. It might have been the most colorful sunset I ever saw.
I did not know it would be the last sunset I saw as Max Black the bat.
But maybe that made it what it was.
“How’s Glory?” she asked.
I looked at her. Right through her. “Glory is awesome. How’s Jasmine?”
She seemed surprised at my confidence. “Jasmine is just great,” she said. “But she has to go and unlock the drum shed.”
They had a shed for drums. Surely a nonconsumerist drum shed would be not a drum shed and no drums because they are possessions and all possessions are bad? Maybe I needed to reexamine what nonconsumerist really meant. Or maybe Jasmine did.
When I found Ellie, she was already done cleaning out the chicken house. She laid down wood shavings and mixed a pile of them with straw and then she spread the whole pile out on the floor of the chicken house and sprinkled it with some weird powder that helps chickens not have mites.
Communes. The ripest place in the world for parasites, I guess.
As we walked toward her house I noticed that the star party didn’t even seem to be set up yet—no tables, no stools. Not even a fire.
Ellie and I washed our hands in the outdoor sink and she said she had to go inside for a minute and asked me to wait.
Rick walked up to me as I was drying my hands on my shorts.
“She says she has a boyfriend,” he said. “Jasmine won’t like that.”
“Jasmine? Or you?” I asked.
Then I looked at him. Transmission from Rick: His grandfather was on board the USS Pledge when it hit a mine and then sank in Wonsan Harbor, Korea, in 1950. He and his shipmates were rescued by another boat, but he’d been in the wrong part of the ship when the mine hit and he’d taken a huge chunk of steel into his backside. By the time he was released from the VA hospital back home, he’d gotten the last rites twice, been told he’d lose both legs, and was prepped for a short life in a wheelchair before a certain death from an infection he couldn’t kick. The man would live for seventy-four more years, until he was ninety-three years old. He would love the calzones they made in the food court at the local mall.