The colors are sappy and the perspective is all wrong. She smells the burnt coffee and wonders how a place can keep customers coming back with crap like that. Looks into her own mug and a drowning fly doesn’t notice. Flags down the waitress and orders a replacement…noting the lipstick on the rim, just in case they try to give her the same cup again. Flies, dirty things. She returns her gaze to the wall and smiles. Noting her hand on Simon’s head, remembering the feel of his unwashed hair between her fingers. Getting angry at him (even now) for not keeping himself clean. Pulling the hair sharply, jerking his head, his silent wince, water at his eyes. Her warning glance. The soft gasp of the vendor. Not caring. A dirty kid is a dirty kid. He should know better. The goddamned vendor frowned, but sold her the apples. She remembers THAT. Made the best damned apple pie in the world that night. She stares at the mural, and wonders who the artist is. He caught her on a good day - her apple pie was a fucking hit.

Yogi Bear, Wally Gator and Tennessee Tuxedo and That Walrus that hangs out with Tennessee are on this big raft going through the jungle. Creepers, shoots, lianas and flowering tubers erupt and pustulate all round the frolicsome group as they roll downstream around elbows in the tributary and whitewater features replete with jumping packs of piranha chattering their choppers and flashing mirror-like scales. Smoke swirls around the volcano.

Yogi looks first at Wally, then to Tennessee, then to Atom Ant who he didn’t know was on the boat until this moment and says to no one in particular, but not the walrus whom he disdains for no reason he can put his finger on, maybe a simple lack of formal introduction never enacted by the hatted penguin, “Hey, Boo Boo, do you hear something?”

As a lost dog on the edge of a sidewalk timidly approaches first one passerby and then another, uncertain of what to ask for, taking a few embarrassed steps in one direction and then suddenly veering to another before being able to ascertain what reception her mute entreaty might have met with, puzzled, lost, miserable, ready to slink back into her inner confusion at the first brush with the outside world , so your aspirations my soul on this busy thoroughfare that is life. What do you think to gain by merely standing there looking worried, while the tide of humanity sweeps ever onward, toward some goal it gives every sign of being as intimately acquainted with as you are with the sharp-edged problems that beset you from every angle? Do you really think that if you succeed in looking pathetic enough some kindly stranger your name and address and then steer you safely to your door?
And there is no use trying to tell them trying to tell them that the touching melancholy of your stare is the product not of self-pity but of a lucid attempt to find out just where you stand in the fast moving stream of traffic that flows endlessly from horizon to horizon like a dark river. I know that the pose could be some other one, joyous or haughty, or whatever. It is only that you happened to be wearing this look as you arrived at the end of your perusal of the way left open to you, and it “froze” on you, just as your mother had warned you it would when you were little . And now it’s the face you show the world…


(Child Roland approaching the dark tower and every energy concentrated toward the encounter)