in search of legs
[based on a poem from 2001]
It's a fools bet minting pennies on a Gold Standard. Some years, as much as they try to dilute itm the metal's worth more than the coin. Other years, well, it's worth much much less. Somehow, the only way it works is that people lose them. They pluck them into fountains and wish on them, they launch them into the air just to watch them fly or to hear them land, they acquire them and stow them away. A couple of pennies just aren't worth the time. It's impossible to track how many pennies are circulating at any given time. Just like pets and computers, dollar bills have chips in them. Trackers. They're counterfittable; you can do some damage if you start making your own. Not pennies. I've got a theory that you could bankrupt this country if you had all the lost pennies no one was ever going to spend, but it's just a theory.
A few years back, three men were standing over the edge of a ship back East. The whether was fine where they were but shitty where they were going, so they knew that they probably weren't going anywhere that day. You'd be surprised how many days like that you'd get in the Navy, even during wartime. Still, a Sunday is a Sunday, and these guys were half a continent from anything resembling action. So they sat there, trading stories about girls. A big guy named Jerry was going on about these two prostitutes he rolled over in Holland a few years back. He had spiderwebs tattood on his hands that seemed to breathe alive as he gestured. A blonde guy talked about the girls in Japan.
"So we're doing shit-all at the base, right? And we're here for six months, so I ask my Commanding Officer, like, 'Hey can we get some fucking instruments over here?' so he gets like an upright bass, the shittiest drumkit I've ever fucking seen and a saxophone. Me and these other two guys, a black dude and a medic, we form a jazz trio and we're playing all these Yakuza bars around the base and these Japanese girls were tearing each others hair out trying to get backstage. The medic, who was our bass player...he was ugly as shit, face like the ass end of a pit bull but he was American, and he played a mean bass and he had em comin hand over fist."
The third man was a young guy named R.J. who wasn't much for conversation as it was but especially wasn't enjoying the one taking place. He had a sweetheart back home but he didn't want to tell stories like that about her, and was embarassed to say that he hadn't been with too many girls outside of her. He screwed around a little since he shipped out but it never worked out quite right so he just kept his mouth shut and fiddled around in his pocket.
In his pocket he found a pack of matches from a club called The Shadow Room, a few sticks of Wrigleys, a soft box of Marlboro Reds, and exactly forty-three cents in change. As his focus drifted from the back-and-forth sex talk, he extracted the coins from his pocket and peered out over the water. When he squinted he could see the storm far off in the distance. He could see the dimensions of it, how wide it was, how far, he could see the walls of darkness that made up its borders. He could even see above it, where the sky was clear and blue again. One by one he flicked the coins off into the water. One quarter, one nickel, one dime and three pennies. The last coin was a penny.
He had already forgotten how he'd acquired the coins, but he received the penny as change a day earlier when he bought the gum. The penny was minted three years earlier and shipped off to Virginia. As it changed hands, it had been spent on two Playboys and an issue of Stag, a Twinkie, fifteen colas, two bags of groceries, one pack of baseball cards, thirty gumballs, a crossword puzzle book, and a paperback of the Catcher in the Rye. The last person to own the coin before it first got dropped was Natasha Pruit, a tall girl who worked for the phone company. It fell out of her pocket in front of the Aztec Theatre in San Antonio as she looked for her keys. It was picked up by a superstitious gentleman named Harold Kerney who kissed it held it upo to the sun, spun it three times and stuffed it in his pocket. At a poker game that night, he found himself red-eye drunk with three kings in his hand, he put his last bill on the table to Call and reached for the penny to Raise. The house rule in Michael Sharbach's rec room is that when someone puts in their last cent to raise, it constitutes the final bid. Officer Don Gregory fished into a change purse grabbed a penny and matched him. He had three Aces and a hundred new dollars to call his own. He shipped off the next day. The shopkeep was named Adair Al Maleq and made a meager living selling magazines and candy to the men stationed nearby, but his real draw was hash, black and sticky in little red bundles behind the counter. Don never used the stuff in America but as soon as he could see it he could smell it, and he smiled pulling a few bills from a roll of twenties. He shook the mans hand at his wrist as was local custom, smiled, dropped a penny in the Leave-A-Penny, and walked away humming. Adair found the till a bit short when making change for R.J.'s dollar,so he took the penny out and handed it to him.
After a depth of a thousand meters in the ocean, there is no light. Some of the smallest minnows and carp our able to navigate that low, and do regularly, where our lungs would collapse on themselves. Most fish do, in fact,m as a thousand meters makes up for less than one tenth of the ocean's depth. Because of this, most fish don't have eyes, at least not good ones. They navigate through ancient migratory patters, find food and places to meet all through senses of smell. The fish that tend to keep near the surface have eyes. Their senses of smell get a bit lazy and they'll bite at anything that catches their attention. As it sailed aimlessly towards the bottom, a blowfish snatched up the penny and continued its own retreat downward where it was soon eaten. This was the penny's life for the next few years, running through the difestive tracks of uglier and uglier scavengers until it found it's way to the bottom.
No man has ever seen the bottom of the ocean. No vessel has ever made it there alive. At a depth of twenty thousand meters below sealevel you could catch pneumonia in an hour, even in a wetsuit, but at the bottom it was warm. The ground breathed alive with volcanic pockets of earth. Few things lived hear, few things lived anywhere even close. The penny found itself lodged in a piece of primordial mud, twenty miles under a tropical storm. At this depth, the waves were mild, but each one was significant. It was unknown how many lives each one had taken with it, how many ships had been topsized and torn, how many whales had been ripped into the mouths of the creatures that eat the biggest creatures man has ever laid eyes on, but we can take solace in the fact that the whales surely drowned before they got there.
It was four bones that fell onto the penny and into the mud and lava which washed over them for years. Legs are pressed and formed in this primordial soup, in the murky depths off the coast of Africa where all life is derived. And now there are feet, toes, a tail, a kick. It kicks its feet and tail for years. The sun, which it cannot see, is calling it home. Instinctively, it looks for warmth. It finds one in a hydrothermal vent, an underwater geyser that bleaches it as it rides the stream towards light and life.
I don't know what it is about that part of of the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Aden, or the beaches Somalia, that draws creatures from their homes in the water, but it is there, in that gardenless Garden of Eden that all life originates and chooses a path, and there for the first time in generations, that something new has crawled onto the land.
As far as history is concerned, the girl had no name but I assure you it was quite lovely. As you know, there is little responsibility in the life of four year old girls, and their day is given almost entirely to distraction. It was distraction, in the form of a moving glimmer on the beach, that took her from her napping grandfather's lap and brought her skipping to the shore. She wore a stitched and tattered patchwork skirt that floated behind her, and clutched a wooden doll with animal hair. She could have stayed in the sun all day, and hoped her grandfather wouldn't rise from his nap very soon. The salt from the breeze cooled her flush face and neck. The warm tide licked as her toes like a blessing.
She had never seen American coinage before, and was not surprised to see a copper piece with a pair of legs. Even when they started to wiggle and catch into the sand and scuttle, she was not amazed. "Wow," she thought, (or perhaps it was "Hmm") A new type of crab. I hope it doesn't sting me. That's another thing you must remember about being four, almost every day you see a dozen things that are completely new to you. You are rarely amazed and if you are raised right, you know that most of those things can hurt you in one way or another.
The coin rolled over, caking itself with sand, wobbled back and forth and onto its feet again. Then it began to move. Bent at the waist she followed itr. She ignored nautilus and jellyfish she passed, watching this animal that seemed almost as confused as she was, when she heard the booming call of her grandfather's voice. Lacking pockets or other options, she scooped her new find up in her hand and put it in her mouth.
She recognized the tinny, copper taste of blood and assumed she'd been bitten in her mouth, but felt no pain. Her grandfather started dozing off as soon as he saw her head bobbing up over the horizon, and she skipped past him with the penny in her cheeks. Sitting down on the floor where the bed and the wall hid her from anyone who might try to look in, she stuck her tongue out and let the penny crawl onto her hand. Holding it on two sides she examined it. She hadn't learned to read but even if she had sho would not have understood the E PLURIBUS UNUM or IN GOD WE TRUST, she wondered about the carvings like a mans face across his spine, the strange grate on his underbelly. He crawled around for a while before she put him in a box under his bed, where he lived alongside the wooden dolls her mother and grandmother made for her.
Every few leaves she would search for moist leaves and weeds to put in the box. The penny never ate them but seemed no worse for the wear with not eating. It was over thirty now, as the date on its back could attest to, but still learning how to move. It was a long way from Virgina, the US Mint, and even Adair Al Maleq's convenience store of the coast of As Sidrah, and was constantly bumping into things in its small confines. One day, when she was playing with it, her grandfather came in. Though he had seen pennies before, he did not have his glasses on and knew a beetle when he saw one. "Stop playing with that filthy thing!" and she dropped it, instinctively. The impact stunned it, or maybe it was just too stupid not to run when things got too excited but it didn't do anything to guard itself against the bare foot coming towards it. "Ow! Damn thing stung me." Her grandfather yelled, hopping and holding his foot as it ran off under the door. She knew that it hadn't stung him, that its thin shell was too hard to try and smash with a foot, but at four, she also knew better than to argue with her grandfather when he was in pain, so she said nothing.
She never saw it again, no one did, but she did not cry. She was an emotional child but she knew tthat her pet was a bug, and even if she had been told that it wasn't, she knew that it would be pointless to cry that a thing she loved was free.
It's a fools bet minting pennies on a Gold Standard. Some years, as much as they try to dilute itm the metal's worth more than the coin. Other years, well, it's worth much much less. Somehow, the only way it works is that people lose them. They pluck them into fountains and wish on them, they launch them into the air just to watch them fly or to hear them land, they acquire them and stow them away. A couple of pennies just aren't worth the time. It's impossible to track how many pennies are circulating at any given time. Just like pets and computers, dollar bills have chips in them. Trackers. They're counterfittable; you can do some damage if you start making your own. Not pennies. I've got a theory that you could bankrupt this country if you had all the lost pennies no one was ever going to spend, but it's just a theory.
A few years back, three men were standing over the edge of a ship back East. The whether was fine where they were but shitty where they were going, so they knew that they probably weren't going anywhere that day. You'd be surprised how many days like that you'd get in the Navy, even during wartime. Still, a Sunday is a Sunday, and these guys were half a continent from anything resembling action. So they sat there, trading stories about girls. A big guy named Jerry was going on about these two prostitutes he rolled over in Holland a few years back. He had spiderwebs tattood on his hands that seemed to breathe alive as he gestured. A blonde guy talked about the girls in Japan.
"So we're doing shit-all at the base, right? And we're here for six months, so I ask my Commanding Officer, like, 'Hey can we get some fucking instruments over here?' so he gets like an upright bass, the shittiest drumkit I've ever fucking seen and a saxophone. Me and these other two guys, a black dude and a medic, we form a jazz trio and we're playing all these Yakuza bars around the base and these Japanese girls were tearing each others hair out trying to get backstage. The medic, who was our bass player...he was ugly as shit, face like the ass end of a pit bull but he was American, and he played a mean bass and he had em comin hand over fist."
The third man was a young guy named R.J. who wasn't much for conversation as it was but especially wasn't enjoying the one taking place. He had a sweetheart back home but he didn't want to tell stories like that about her, and was embarassed to say that he hadn't been with too many girls outside of her. He screwed around a little since he shipped out but it never worked out quite right so he just kept his mouth shut and fiddled around in his pocket.
In his pocket he found a pack of matches from a club called The Shadow Room, a few sticks of Wrigleys, a soft box of Marlboro Reds, and exactly forty-three cents in change. As his focus drifted from the back-and-forth sex talk, he extracted the coins from his pocket and peered out over the water. When he squinted he could see the storm far off in the distance. He could see the dimensions of it, how wide it was, how far, he could see the walls of darkness that made up its borders. He could even see above it, where the sky was clear and blue again. One by one he flicked the coins off into the water. One quarter, one nickel, one dime and three pennies. The last coin was a penny.
He had already forgotten how he'd acquired the coins, but he received the penny as change a day earlier when he bought the gum. The penny was minted three years earlier and shipped off to Virginia. As it changed hands, it had been spent on two Playboys and an issue of Stag, a Twinkie, fifteen colas, two bags of groceries, one pack of baseball cards, thirty gumballs, a crossword puzzle book, and a paperback of the Catcher in the Rye. The last person to own the coin before it first got dropped was Natasha Pruit, a tall girl who worked for the phone company. It fell out of her pocket in front of the Aztec Theatre in San Antonio as she looked for her keys. It was picked up by a superstitious gentleman named Harold Kerney who kissed it held it upo to the sun, spun it three times and stuffed it in his pocket. At a poker game that night, he found himself red-eye drunk with three kings in his hand, he put his last bill on the table to Call and reached for the penny to Raise. The house rule in Michael Sharbach's rec room is that when someone puts in their last cent to raise, it constitutes the final bid. Officer Don Gregory fished into a change purse grabbed a penny and matched him. He had three Aces and a hundred new dollars to call his own. He shipped off the next day. The shopkeep was named Adair Al Maleq and made a meager living selling magazines and candy to the men stationed nearby, but his real draw was hash, black and sticky in little red bundles behind the counter. Don never used the stuff in America but as soon as he could see it he could smell it, and he smiled pulling a few bills from a roll of twenties. He shook the mans hand at his wrist as was local custom, smiled, dropped a penny in the Leave-A-Penny, and walked away humming. Adair found the till a bit short when making change for R.J.'s dollar,so he took the penny out and handed it to him.
After a depth of a thousand meters in the ocean, there is no light. Some of the smallest minnows and carp our able to navigate that low, and do regularly, where our lungs would collapse on themselves. Most fish do, in fact,m as a thousand meters makes up for less than one tenth of the ocean's depth. Because of this, most fish don't have eyes, at least not good ones. They navigate through ancient migratory patters, find food and places to meet all through senses of smell. The fish that tend to keep near the surface have eyes. Their senses of smell get a bit lazy and they'll bite at anything that catches their attention. As it sailed aimlessly towards the bottom, a blowfish snatched up the penny and continued its own retreat downward where it was soon eaten. This was the penny's life for the next few years, running through the difestive tracks of uglier and uglier scavengers until it found it's way to the bottom.
No man has ever seen the bottom of the ocean. No vessel has ever made it there alive. At a depth of twenty thousand meters below sealevel you could catch pneumonia in an hour, even in a wetsuit, but at the bottom it was warm. The ground breathed alive with volcanic pockets of earth. Few things lived hear, few things lived anywhere even close. The penny found itself lodged in a piece of primordial mud, twenty miles under a tropical storm. At this depth, the waves were mild, but each one was significant. It was unknown how many lives each one had taken with it, how many ships had been topsized and torn, how many whales had been ripped into the mouths of the creatures that eat the biggest creatures man has ever laid eyes on, but we can take solace in the fact that the whales surely drowned before they got there.
It was four bones that fell onto the penny and into the mud and lava which washed over them for years. Legs are pressed and formed in this primordial soup, in the murky depths off the coast of Africa where all life is derived. And now there are feet, toes, a tail, a kick. It kicks its feet and tail for years. The sun, which it cannot see, is calling it home. Instinctively, it looks for warmth. It finds one in a hydrothermal vent, an underwater geyser that bleaches it as it rides the stream towards light and life.
I don't know what it is about that part of of the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Aden, or the beaches Somalia, that draws creatures from their homes in the water, but it is there, in that gardenless Garden of Eden that all life originates and chooses a path, and there for the first time in generations, that something new has crawled onto the land.
As far as history is concerned, the girl had no name but I assure you it was quite lovely. As you know, there is little responsibility in the life of four year old girls, and their day is given almost entirely to distraction. It was distraction, in the form of a moving glimmer on the beach, that took her from her napping grandfather's lap and brought her skipping to the shore. She wore a stitched and tattered patchwork skirt that floated behind her, and clutched a wooden doll with animal hair. She could have stayed in the sun all day, and hoped her grandfather wouldn't rise from his nap very soon. The salt from the breeze cooled her flush face and neck. The warm tide licked as her toes like a blessing.
She had never seen American coinage before, and was not surprised to see a copper piece with a pair of legs. Even when they started to wiggle and catch into the sand and scuttle, she was not amazed. "Wow," she thought, (or perhaps it was "Hmm") A new type of crab. I hope it doesn't sting me. That's another thing you must remember about being four, almost every day you see a dozen things that are completely new to you. You are rarely amazed and if you are raised right, you know that most of those things can hurt you in one way or another.
The coin rolled over, caking itself with sand, wobbled back and forth and onto its feet again. Then it began to move. Bent at the waist she followed itr. She ignored nautilus and jellyfish she passed, watching this animal that seemed almost as confused as she was, when she heard the booming call of her grandfather's voice. Lacking pockets or other options, she scooped her new find up in her hand and put it in her mouth.
She recognized the tinny, copper taste of blood and assumed she'd been bitten in her mouth, but felt no pain. Her grandfather started dozing off as soon as he saw her head bobbing up over the horizon, and she skipped past him with the penny in her cheeks. Sitting down on the floor where the bed and the wall hid her from anyone who might try to look in, she stuck her tongue out and let the penny crawl onto her hand. Holding it on two sides she examined it. She hadn't learned to read but even if she had sho would not have understood the E PLURIBUS UNUM or IN GOD WE TRUST, she wondered about the carvings like a mans face across his spine, the strange grate on his underbelly. He crawled around for a while before she put him in a box under his bed, where he lived alongside the wooden dolls her mother and grandmother made for her.
Every few leaves she would search for moist leaves and weeds to put in the box. The penny never ate them but seemed no worse for the wear with not eating. It was over thirty now, as the date on its back could attest to, but still learning how to move. It was a long way from Virgina, the US Mint, and even Adair Al Maleq's convenience store of the coast of As Sidrah, and was constantly bumping into things in its small confines. One day, when she was playing with it, her grandfather came in. Though he had seen pennies before, he did not have his glasses on and knew a beetle when he saw one. "Stop playing with that filthy thing!" and she dropped it, instinctively. The impact stunned it, or maybe it was just too stupid not to run when things got too excited but it didn't do anything to guard itself against the bare foot coming towards it. "Ow! Damn thing stung me." Her grandfather yelled, hopping and holding his foot as it ran off under the door. She knew that it hadn't stung him, that its thin shell was too hard to try and smash with a foot, but at four, she also knew better than to argue with her grandfather when he was in pain, so she said nothing.
She never saw it again, no one did, but she did not cry. She was an emotional child but she knew tthat her pet was a bug, and even if she had been told that it wasn't, she knew that it would be pointless to cry that a thing she loved was free.
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