Get Off’a My Cloud–working title

On the third day of Autumn, right around Fall equinox, a good-looking fellow creeps around the thick trunk of a gnarled apple tree adorning the grounds of Center Park. The furtive eye he casts left and right is vogue comical, as if he expects a rogue papparazo to snap his tree-hugging moment, and despite the low profile he’s assuming, he’s hoping for it. He is Selfie, after all, the over-exposed and over-protected son of the lauded Whitewash Family, and a distant frenenemy of Poseidon, besides. The God—not the shipwreck. If he isn’t capturing the must-commemorate moment of himself, someone else is, and this would make a hella–if hella inaccurate–photo opp. Selfie goes green…Yeah, he likes the sound of that…He drifts toward the next tree, imagining accolades in the virtually untested market of eco-conscious arena, and completely misses noticing an abandoned rake underfoot until it’s clobbered him smack in the face. A standing ovation, really.

“WTF!” he yells, flinging the implement from him, testing the structure of his proboscis solicitously—nostrils included–relieved the miniature motorcycle chain embedded in his left blowhole hadn’t snagged. Still, a shower of wood shavings has dusted his fine features in splintered grit, and his nose might very well be out of joint, and when has that ever happened before? He ought to have Pops just hack these space-wasters down, is what he ought to do—Pops does have considerable pull with the Powers that Be–and he will, too, just as soon as he returns from this trip to prove his independence.

Kicking the pile of bough clippings into which he’d stumbled, Selfie appends a few choice if lower volume expletives to his yelled proclamation, missing the usual commiseration his personal photographer might have offered like an actor misses his audience, and to take the sting out of his unwitnessed pain, he mugs like a cup, snapping a close-up of his distressed face with a magnificently over-size cell phone.

“Who just leaves leaves lying around?” Selfie mutters, checking the frozen moment of tree love on screen, wishing for the umpteenth time he knew how to access the settings his parents had employed to permanently dim the screen’s contrast. He can barely make out 1 lumpy form.

“Someone worthwhile could really hurt themselves.” he adds, crunching recklessly toward the next tree—an almond tree–instinctively listening for sympathetic response as he ambulates, and he does hear something in the periphery: a hi-pitched echo of his profanity as a woman in his wake encounters the same buried land mine.

“Who’s there!” he shouts, shredding his down-low entirely, and about-facing to no one even so. Selfie considers the leaves wafting near a small pile of orange peelings. Were those there before? Selfie can’t be sure, and he spastically records it all on video, despite a certainty the shot won’t find its way to his profile. It isn’t as if he’s in it, or anything.

“Who’s there?” he repeats, pivoting a slow 360, phone extended like a gun. A bright-red form darting through the sparse cattails edging the banks of a duck pond catches his attention before it pops behind the thrushes, and parroting himself again, he punctuates his query with another juicy selection of four-letter profundity, garnering a reply at last:

“So, what I hear you saying is: who the hell is in the f*cking vicinity…is that about right?” the reedy voice shoots back.

WIP. 🙂