Alan Sincic

          The ice cream man curls up in the back of his ice cream truck and closes his eyes. He is an iceberg steaming out across the North Atlantic. He passes a ship. On the deck of the ship stands the captain in his gold-braided trousers.

         The Captain calls out to the ice cream man: “Yes, yes – that’s it! Over here! Come closer! Our lemonade is too warm, too wet and too lemon and too warm.”

         And so the ice cream man kicks with them brittle blue feet of his, turns into the setting sun, steams straight across the burning swells, nuzzles up to the ship. Musket fire. Sea chanties. Whoops and bells and whistles. The captain scoops up the ice from the ice cream man’s back. What a blistering day! The sun hits the water with a sizzle. As the sailors gather round to sing the lemonade song and to drink their fill of the lemonade and hip-hip-hooray to the ice cream man, the captain curls himself up into a ball, bumps and rolls and bumps the length of the deck, comes to a rest under a lifeboat, stretches and – just for a second – closes his eyes.

         He is a loaf of bread, a loaf of pumpkin bread with raisin spangles, glazed with lemon and hot from the oven.

         “Ye-ouch!” cries the baker. “You should have told me you were so hot!”

         “I would if I could talk,” says the Captain. “But I am a loaf of pumpkin bread, and pumpkin bread does not talk.”

         “Which is just as well,” says the Baker with a hum as he cuts the Cap into slices. “Because the customers would complain.” The Baker sells the slices to the fat lady and then, as the heat of the day presses down around him, he crawls out onto his window ledge for a breath of fresh air. He slips a loaf of pumpernickel under his head and tucks a couple of baguettes beneath his ribs and rolls to his side and then, and just for a second, rests the heavy lids of his eyes.

         He is a hot-air balloon, rising up above the clotheslines and the steeples and the smoke-stacks of the city. A rope dangles from his belly. A pair of women dangle from the rope.

         “Up! Up! Up!” cries the one, the fat one. “We are as light and as fluffy as the pillows in the sky.”

         “Down! Down! Down!” cries the one who clings, who clings tight to the fat woman’s ankle. “We are as thick and as clunky as the cobbles on the street.” Skinny this woman. Clingy is what she is. She crawls up into the fat woman’s purse, folds her lace handkerchief into a tiny triangular pillow, and closes her eyes.

         She is a bear in a cave on the coldest day of the winter. The twenty-one tin fleas on her back sing and dance the tin flea song, slide into the steam at the tip of her nose, tumble onto the board of the black and red squares. They are playing checkers together. It is the bear versus the fleas, and the fleas appear to be winning.

         “Your move,” the lady growls. Her breath is a breeze, a warm bear breeze.

         “You cannot jump us,” say the fleas. “You can never jump us, no, for we are the mighty fleas.” They push their red checker one square over. They clamber up over the brim of the checker, the red rim of the crater and, one by one, tumble into the valley below. They close their eyes – click, click, click – to the warm breeze, the bear breeze, just for a second they close their forty-two tin eyes.

         They are comets in a cluster, in a roller coaster round the red of the sun. Out around the yonder they wheel, into the black and beyond. And then the bend. And then the allemande left. And then –

         “Here they come,” say the Rakers who rake the face of the moon, the scoop-of-vanilla moon, the Packers and the Tampers who spackle the cracks in the face of the moon. “Incoming!”

         How they sing, the comets, how they sizzle! “Make way!” they say. “Man the torpedoes!”

         In a suit of silver the Captain of the Tampers floats. Soft as the puff of a custard he hovers, he sighs, he highs up over the face of the moon. His head and his shoulders the comets they brush.

         “Come join us!” they cry with their tails in a tangle, “Fly!” they say, “Fly!”

         He latches hold of a tail. Off and away, and into the black, and he blinks.

         A dog is what he is, in a gallop across a field of corn in a glisten in the heat of the day. On the hunt for a bone is what he’s about, on the track of a trail, in a sift of the air for the sweat, the smoke, the bitter lime of the aftershave that marks the man who sells the cream, the ice cream, and who starts at the sound of the silvery bell, and who stirs at the touch of the tongue of the dog, who shivers, and stretches, and rises, and wakes.