MISSING: ONE PAIR OF UNICORNED-DOLPHINS UNDERWEAR

(I live one very short block from my Monday to Friday job of teaching English as a Second Language. There’s a coffee shop midway between work and home which provides me with the essentials. Today on my block-walk home from work I saw a missing animal notice which brought to mind the following idea: MISSING MULTIPLE-PERSONALITIED CAT: ANSWERS TO THE NAMES OF FELIX, MAX, SONNY, CHARLES THE SECOND, KARL VON WHAT’S HIS FACE, PACK-PACK PAPIN AND YONI.

Ideas pop up in little spaces like my daily commute.

As I sit down in my cranky swivel chair to write this, however, another idea has popped up.

Pop, pop, pop, pop. That’s my brain for you. A little pop-corn machine that runs on coffee.)

MISSING: ONE PAIR OF UNICORNED-DOLPHINS UNDERWEAR

“I mean they’re great people to hang out with but they do fight every so often like meow-meows and whoof-whoofs.” Animal talk. She never uses animal names but replaces them with quack-quacks and moo-moos. This always gets on his nerves.

“People are animals too,” he says stretching a line of clear tape atop a piece of paper: MAN-SLAVE MISSING: 5 ft 10, leather mask, grunts, and begs for pain. Call Juliet at 604-34-smile. The black felted words stand out on the white paper, which in turn stands out against the black wall. Perfect. He smiles.

“What do you mean ?” she asks, no-nonsense style.

“People are animals.” He rifles through a stack of papers in his shoulder-bag.

“Yeah, so ?” Her eyes scan the street looking for virgin surfaces.

“You won’t say the name of animals but you say people but people are animals. You shouldn’t be saying people, you should say yap-yaps or blab-blabbers or something.”

He’s picking a fight like a kid picks his nose. Habit.

She spots clear terrain on the side of a mailbox and alerts him to this with the raising of eyebrows. He continues to search through a sheaf of papers as they cross the street.

Her pursed lips hold back words finding their order, words that come out like this: “Where do you get off legislating language ?!”

“I’m just pointing out the obvious. If you’re gonna be all meow-meow and woof-woof why arbitrarily stop there ? People should be yap-yaps or you’ll come across as pretentious.” He pulls out a MISSING: ONE CONTACT LENS, fell out on bus #10. Contact 604-536-3333. She snaps it out of his hands and tapes it up on the side of the mailbox.

“Fuck you.”

This is their weekly routine when they go out to poster the city in their pranks. The fighting fuels the fucking at the end of the day. The fucking keeps them together to create ideas. The ideas keep their project of putting up fake missing signs alive. Nothing is missing from their routine. Nothing.

They will fight their way to fame.