The Whale Belly

I entered from one side of the pedestrian bridge over the lake at the same time as three ducks entered from the other. They waddled in a line formation, their heads stationary above their jiggling flanks, lurching shanks, and rapidly slapping webbed feet, as if they were trying to get to some popular bakery before it ran out of its famous cinnamon rolls. I slowed down and steered a little to the side to let them pass, but as I neared them the center bird lost confidence, turned tail and fled. The others immediately followed, quacking loudly and twitching their wings. They froze for an instant as I passed, watching me with side eyes.

I pushed my bike into the writing center where I work on the first floor of the library. The director was in her office with the librarian. The librarian shouted out to me that I was famous. Apparently the people who took staged pictures of me tutoring a student finally published one of them on the website. I thought the image would be used to say something about the writing center, but the text below it read “REGISTER FOR CLASSES, Enter to win a $100 Gift Card.”

While biking home someone flicked a lit cigarette at me and dogs barked angrily from behind chain-linked fences.

In the evening, my wife and I tried to raise a large cloth sunshade in our backyard. Our plan was to affix it with thin steel cables to the roof of our house and the roof of the shed. But we didn’t have the proper tools to cut the cables, so we hacked at the them with scissors, which ended up damaging the scissors and fraying the cable ends. The fraying of the cable ends made them difficult to fit through the crimping loop sleeves, and we had a million microscopic cuts on our fingertips as a result. Then the hooks we drilled above the gutters kept popping out as we pulled the shade taut. So we left the shade lying in a pile on our outdoor chairs and went inside to count the mosquito bites on our arms and legs.

Before calling it a night, I sprayed nematodes in the grass, in hopes they would eat up the eggs of the fleas that have been torturing us for the past few weeks. They came in a blue sponge in a plastic bag that smelled like jeans that hadn’t been washed for a time. I found a bucket and filled it with water and watched, expecting to see a million little worms begin to grow and reach out and swim happily about. But I didn’t see anything. After ten minutes I filled a sprayer with invisible worms and sprayed them around the yard like prayers. Tomorrow it will rain, and they will find their place in the mud.