construction work

Mason Goodrich, Second Place 1/2

Like a mole on the face of the previously Perfect pitch-black parking lot of the Perfectly pitched, licorice brick church, it blemished into view, kindly, on an otherwise occluded day.

God dropped us the pile on a good day.

From fence-fort view, we emerged, ready, red, eager, especially, to see beyond the tip of the rain-rashed green steeple, but even more, to borrow and brandish the dumpster’s old Victorian deep crimson couch cushions as shields or sleds where we bled grey-brown instead of red.

And then, wheezed we not! when a stray rock caught up our front flip race and ended in faceplant. God watched and I did not take His name in vain. But

still, the cop car called to play: a maroon and blue beetle that ground the honey horizon to a stub of pollen, molted a new view closer and closer and closer, spread its seizure wings out—and finally blinding !¡!¡!

perverted the asphalt with broken stained glass reflections like it had batoned the chapel until it admitted what it meant to be sacrilegious. And the choir of suburban homes the watching angels in all white during our sole-dragging justice-waltz.

After all, how can you be congealed with boredom in a place like this?

The claw came the next day to put the dirt pile back where it belonged, and God was all out of quarters.