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FOLIO is a magazine of strange, comic, and strangely comic words and pictures published from 2006 to 2009. For back issues please contact the_folio@hotmail.com.

Issue No. 9, Strangers - Fragments



In the café, a woman approached a young man writing. “That is so rude,” she said. “You might as well be talking on the phone.”


Unfortunately, I took my daughter to the pier. I stood at the end admiring the view and she did the same, tucked into a ball at my feet. It might have been an itch on her back, or a strong wind, but she rolled to windward and off the pier, dropping that thirty-foot drop, down to where the Mexicans trawled their fish heads. I saw the little splash and the last little bubble. I thought about jumping in after her but quicker thoughts came after – all the way down? in my clothes? is it cold? I couldn’t call anyone because my cell phone was at home and I didn’t want to raise a ruckus with the fishermen. In a panic, I just walked back to the shore, thinking that, maybe, if I just breathed deep and walked steady, the problem would solve itself, like the problem in a clogged toilet that loosens over time.


The boy at the desk beside me pulled a handful of dry pasta from his pocket. He put one spiraled noodle into his mouth and pulled his cheeks into his tongue. A few minutes later he spat it out. It was bigger, rounder. He put it between his teeth and bit it in two. “I get angry,” he said.


I left my life and set out on the road, looking not for the circus, but for a roving band of Jesuit teachers.


The substitue teacher had a photographic memory, onerous when storing the images of small butts pushed up against the windows of passing cars, but handy for remembering license plate numbers.
Round little Sean was picked up for exhibitionism and the poor substitute teacher missed early morning classes, tossing and turning all night from elementary school butt.


Two library books belonging up north were taken and lost on a vacation down south. The signs that tied them to their city, the stamps on each side, the return date, the barcode, were meaningless on the floor of Winn Dixie.


Security laughs at me, but from my post at Crabtree and Evelyn I can see a young man walk back and forth across the garden footbridge in the center of the mall. Every day he comes and with the same distracted, faraway look in his eyes. He paces, stops, and stares down over the railing.


The secret shopper was surprised, surprised and touched, to see a sales clerk so polite. The shopper was hired from an independent firm to weed out the ineffectual workers, those who have the time to lean and use it. But this clerk, oh this dimple of a clerk, he could do no wrong. No machine installed to replace him could be faster, stronger. And the clerk, after all, could smile, a smile that hooked the customer, closed the deal, and warmed the cooler patches of soul left in the poor, retailed sucker. “Let me buy you a drink,” the secret shopper said to the clerk. “I cannot drink on duty,” of course he said. The shopper laughed. “After your shift, son, please, I would never.”


Once, interred at the City Recycling Center, I was to remove from the plastic bottles all the wrappers unwrapped and stuffed inside. Removing them without breaking the bottle in a frustrated fit was a delicate job involving tweezers. The only way I could do it and still retain my sanity was to think that instead of taking the wrappers out I was putting a miniature sailboat in.


The tourist saw a Buddhist monk and shook her head. “That’s no way to live a life,” she told her husband.

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