WARREN BEATH

He walked to the trashcan at the curb and dumped out the wastebasket from the kitchen.  A paper sleeve of wet coffee grounds was the last to come out as he shook it.  He looked into the can to see the patterns the grounds had made on the other trash, as was his habit.  He could see them but could not understand what they were saying to him.  What on earth?  It was crumpled yellow papers and when he unfolded one he saw it was a story he had written when he was ten years-old.  It was called Thomas Hargrove and the Great White Shark.  He recalled it warmly as he had been told at the time that it was good.  He started to read.  He wondered where he got the name Thomas Hargrove which was stilted and unnatural.  Not the name, but to wonder where he had gotten the name for someone who was not real almost fifty years ago.  Hm, and he wondered who had thrown this away.  He remembered then that he had thrown it away because he had felt that you should throw everything away that is the imperfect product of your inexperience or youth, because what will be left will be the best and that is what should be remembered.  What was left would be “representative.”   Why should he have forgotten that he himself had thrown it away? 

It brought a smile to his lips as he shook himself from this trivial revery and pushed the paper nearer the bottom of the can compacting the garbage as he went.  At this point he noticed he had three hands.  There was a left and a right, and a third that was both left and right.  The fingers seemed rearranged in a way that seemed to try to balance their lengths somewhere between what a left hand and a right hand should look like if they were combined into one hand.  He held them up and was involved in this comparison.  It made him wonder seriously why he should have three hands at all.  What could be the use of a third hand—- though he was sure it must have its uses.  Why was there then only one thumb, and that in the middle?  An examination of the nail of the thumb revealed those intriguing whorling patterns that look like a sun setting or a moon ascending—-  this was his thought.  Had Thomas Hargrove lost a hand to the white shark and could this then be that hand?  Highly unlikely, he thought with the dry laugh that had become his trademark among the people who shambled in and out of the life behind him.  They only spoke behind his back and they made inscrutable movements he could not see because they were all behind him. 

So it had been a funny and alert life,  aware of whispers and not hearing them and seeing the shadows of indecipherable movement which was not there when he turned quickly.  He had ceased to turn at an early age and instead cultivated the eye in the back of his head.  Between obscuring growths of hair he had refined the facility of seeing the traces of movement and the incipient smiles on their faces, only to find they would finish the movement only in the spaces of the blinks—- which is to say the business of the world was transacted entirely during the little blinks of his eye.  In the blinks everything would change and be in different places, and this was a source of amusement and interest to Thomas Hargrove.  He would look down and there would be the shark with its teeth buried deep in his abdomen as it swallowed him from the legs up.  There was no pain involved and the glassy eyes of the shark reflected back at him his own chinlessness.  Hah, that was like the royal family it was none of them had chins. 

He had felt mutilated from an early age by this chinlessness but had grown into acceptance of no chin and what use was a chin anyway.  There was no practical function that he had ever been able to discover for a chin and the strange looks he thought he received as a result built a certain character that had served him well in difficult times.   This character’s name was Thomas Hargrove.  Where might he have got that name at such an early age?  It now seemed a very odd name, odd in its normality.  It was crazy in its normalness.  What did it mean?  There were coffee grounds now between the teeth of the shark swallowing him up to his waist. 

The trashcan pickup was on Thursdays but he set it out a day in advance.  He did not like to wait until the last moment.  And the last moment was approaching.  He had felt that all his life.  Felt it even when he was a kitten suckling at his mother’s teat in a soft box near the door in the washroom.  He was the smallest of kittens and he had no chin and so often was budged out away from the teat by a stronger one.  He had because of this very weakness been the favorite of the sympathetic young boy named Thomas Hargrove who lived in the house and did not go to school because of a crippling disease which caused him to shake uncontrollably.  Why a kitten at one point and at the next a man emptying a wastebasket into a trashcan? 

It was insoluble mysteries like this which had vexed him most of his life,  this Thomas Hargrove with the wastebasket in his hand studying the coffeegrounds in the bottom of the can.  Chinlessness was not the worst thing that could happen to people.  There were other sorts of calamities that had befallen other and better people, and they had been stronger for it.  Or at least taller and that was the truth.  He was used to being surrounded by the tallest of people, people who struggled with tallness all of their lives.  It had been an inspiration to him.  When a shark began to swallow you the worst was the first insertion of the serrated teeth, but the memory of how others had borne their tallness seemed to uplift him.  He liked to think his own shortness was in fact due only to the loss of his legs deep within the shark.  Masticated, they would have been of little use even if withdrawn. 

Withdrawal was in fact one solution to so many of the pitfalls of life—- and he was thinking of the blinking actions of the blank people behind him.   He believed they lived on the blank part of the paper on which he had written his story at age ten.  So the world was divided into a world of characters on the one side and blankness on the other.  And life was an endless navigation between these two worlds with the object of trying not to get sliced on the edge—- in other words a paper cut.  They killed more people these papercuts than many suspected,  actually more than mosquitos and certainly more than sharks.  Hah.  These were empty and idle thoughts and certainly not the subjects that should concern a grown man nor even a young boy.  He left it at that.