Free They Had Goat Heads by D. Harlan Wilson Page A

place now.”
   The trap door in the ceiling scraped open. We looked at it. It scraped closed.
   I handed the manager the key to P.O. Box 455. The postal clerk tried to snatch it from him. He fended her off and gave me a free book of stamps. I thanked him.
   As I left the post office, I entered the post office. There was a line. I took out my wallet and searched it. No money inside. No credit cards or I.D. Only a key. I removed it, inspected it.
   At the front of the line, a gust of stampflakes shot into the air . . .

 
    HOVERCRAFT
     
    Dad stole a hovercraft and parked it outside the motel. Then he left us.
   There was a note on the door when we got back from the supermarket. It read: “G’bye!”
   Mom dropped the groceries in her arms and clapped her hands together. She dashed over to the hovercraft and hopped into the cockpit. The aft fans roared to life.
   Tossing the motel key at me, mom pulled out of the parking lot and veered onto the highway.
   I picked up the groceries and went inside.
   The TV didn’t work. I ate some cottage cheese with a plastic spork.
   The next morning dad came back. “I was kidding!” he announced. He nodded at me and began to inspect the air conditioner.
   I put on my clothes and went outside.
   Another hovercraft was in the parking lot. I looked in the cockpit. Mom wasn’t there.
   The owner of the motel came out. A freckled, withered man wearing a sandpaper suit, he asked what was going on.
   “Hovercraft,” I said.
   Suspicious, the owner approached the vehicle, leaned into its rubber underside, and began to scrape up and down. His pace quickened. Soon he had sanded a hole in the hovercraft. It deflated.
   I started to cry.
   “I know,” said the owner. He squeezed my shoulder and went into our room. There was a gunshot.
   Dad walked out. He told me he had changed his mind again. He frowned at the hovercraft, hotwired a station wagon, and drove away . . .
   I went inside. The motel owner sat on the edge of the bed, clutching his stomach. Blood dribbled onto crinkled brown legs. He said he cut himself shaving. He stood. He fainted. He stood.
   He staggered out of the room.
   I crawled onto the bed and fell asleep. When I awoke the TV still didn’t work. I followed the trail of blood outside.
   The hovercraft was gone. In its place was an old Mazda RX-7. An anvil had fallen on its hood and smashed it into a calamitous U-shape.
   The blood led across the parking lot to a cliff that fell into the sea. In the distance, a hovercraft jumped waves and did spinouts. The sun felt hot.

 
    GIRAFFE
     
    She had stuffed the shoulders of her periwinkle blouse with socks. She said she never wore socks anyway so what’s the difference?
   I found myself on the street, lying beneath a double-decker bus, staring at a rusty gasket set against an ominous canvas of fiberoptics. I blinked. I crawled out from underneath the bus, hailed a taxi, and told the driver to take me home.
   “Where’s home?” said the driver.
   “Home. Home.”
   “Home,” he reiterated.
   At home, she tried to eat pasta without boiling it. She rested the long, hard strings of linguine onto a plate and stabbed them with a fork. “It’s not working,” she complained. “I can’t pick it up.” She stabbed the pasta with increasing angst until it had been broken into small enough pieces to nibble. “It doesn’t taste the same,” she noted.
   I found myself on a rooftop looking across the landscape of the city. Spires, steeples, mirrored skyscrapers surrounded me in every direction. The sky was blue. On an adjacent rooftop, a giraffe stared at me. Its long, spotted neck buckled in the wind. But its gaze never wavered.
   I jumped off the rooftop and pulled the string on my parachute just in time, although I skinned a knee, and I had to dive out of the way of oncoming traffic. On the sidewalk,