Wax Lake, Minko

WAX LAKE

A slightly attractive young brunette woman with no legs below the knees is crawling up a set of stairs. She is plump and motherly looking. Someone moves her wheelchair up the stairs for her and she hoists herself into it without help. A bus comes down the lane slowly and cannot stop, and turns with great slow turns in the roundabout, eventually losing momentum and crawling with nose pressed gently up against a brick and glass fronted gas station café. Everyone is wearing polyester shorts, hats with foam, Velcro sneakers. The edge of the lake is white. Minerals crust on it, thick, opaque and firm like bacon grease in cold water. It is cold and damp and the air billows with lucid mist. I peek into the bus and a young woman comes down the stairs with a rustling vinyl bag. A live rabbit's head out pokes of the bag, over her shoulder, its big flat eye watching me as she trudges away.




MINKO

A series of 20th Century pickup trucks sleep in a thicket of blinding, diesel-hot sunshine. Dark denimed deliverymen pause for a polite exchange under a silvery, sickle day-moon right above the horizon. They have thick, blond forearms and thoughtful, Mormon delivery. They are tasteless and clean. The gas terminals shimmer under a dark haze—-mosquitoes, and hot exhaust, and the seeping grey mirage of water vapor in the heavy air. The grass is soaking wet. The rain shimmers in the near future like a bell or the train sounding far away. The sun inexorably retreats into a pink smear. Insects take over in the few hours they have left to live before being drowned in the deluge flashing ever closer on the horizon.

THE Greatest Picture of Me Ever Taken

So what do you do for a living, hataz?