A Salty Venture

Sauntering along steelrust railroad tracks, kicking shale, my burlap bag slung across my jacketed back, brimming the outskirts of a nameless grey seaside town on a chilly morning. I find myself amid rank weeds and discarded litter in a vacant lot behind a ramshackle garage built from dirty orange bricks. A tiny miniature trailer lies overturned at my feet, like a discarded toy in the grass. Stooping, I retrieve the artifact and shake it slightly like a thermos, curious as to the contents. I strike a match on my denim trouserleg and hold it near the trailer door for a glimpse into its dark interior. A tiny matchbox man leaps out in a panic, his head ablaze. He runs in frantic circles, waving his little stickarms before stumbling over a haphazard leaf. Using the leaf like a fireblanket, he extinguishes his flaming head. He peers up, dazed, his little head like a lightbulb, his eyes like pinwheels.

I'm not clear how he can fit inside the toy trailer, since he is considerably larger in size than it. In a chirping voice he admits sheepishly he doesn't know either. I apologize for my negligence with the match, which he shrugs off without concern. His name is Edison and he climbs onto my shoulder, clutching my ear for stability. I stroll down along a sloping road past empty grey buildings to a seaside cafe overlooking the bay where the air is salty and thick with the odor of cod. My stomach growls a warning, so I enter the cafe with my new passenger and slide into a booth providing us with a pleasant vista of the harbor. Edison clambers onto the table and seats himself on a saltshaker while I peruse the coffeestained menu with eagerness. Glancing about, I notice several dejected waitresses scattered about at separate tables, head-in-hands, staring miserably at heaping trays of dirty dishes before them. The waitress in the tomatostained apron who brings me my clam chowder too seems rather vacant, lost in routine.

Edison suddenly emits an electronic gasp and dives under the table in haste as a greyhatted hachetman lurches through the cafe door. He stands near the entrance, surveying the contents of the restaurant with a wary eye. Edison tugs my pantleg frantically. Understanding that the hachetman is after him, I open my knapsack and he nimbly leaps in, nestling amongst the books and articles of clothing. Then, having finished my soup and leaving a reasonable tip, I rise and pass by the hatchetman's suspicious eye on my way towards the exit.

He follows me outside. From within the bag, Edison makes woeful predictions if we do not elude the hatchetman. Without glancing back, I head for the nearest abandoned house, a madhouse designed by a demented architect. With Edison perched on my shoulder once again, I climb up a flight of crooked Caligari stairs, the hatchetman tailing close behind. I lead him on a dizzying madromp through five-cornered rooms and twisting passages of labyrinthian perplexities. A triangular door opens out onto the rooftop of the madhouse. Here I cling to a crippled weathervane, blinking in muted daylight as clouds whirl overhead.

When I feel the hatchetman has been suitably eluded, I reenter the bizarre structure. I wander down sloping corridors, trying various doors in search of an exit. One room contains several torn disheveled mattresses spilling cotton innards from gashes onto a cement floor. Another door opens to reveal an eerie underwater room, a small grimy window letting in a thin turbid stream of light. A girl crouches in one corner, trussed up with rope, her mouth tightly gagged, bulging eyefright. Strange translucent tubes, swaying and wavering, release poisonous bubbles into the water.

I quickly slam the door shut on this spectacle and continue down the corridor. Finally I discover a doorway which leads us outside, not far from the fisherman's wharf. Edison insists the hatchetman will find us again and we must launch a boat to get away. We climb aboard a stalwart craft and cast off, plowing swiftly through taciturn waters with powerful oarstrokes, as seagulls scream overhead, as though sounding alarm. Passing several other boats engaged in marlin-hunt, our craft glides further away from the coast, across the saltstained waves, sifting in sunshine swirls.

Glancing towards shore we spot the hatchetman pursuing in a vessel of his own. Oaring desperately now, we soon escape the bay, and behind us the coastline vanishes. Then heaven cracks and torrents rise against us, threatening to capsize our modest craft. Valiantly I joust the storm, paddling in seasick circles. Edison clings for dear life until the tempest snatches us up and dumps us in the drink. The ocean, refusing to swallow me, washes me onto a shipwreck island where I collapse in the sand, falling into an obscure sleep. Hours later I revive to discover Edison sprawled dazed beside me, shaking saltwater from his lightbulb head. The hatchetman's boat drifts close to the shore, empty. He must have been pulled under the waves during the squall.

Wading through the surf with Edison perched on my shoulder, I reach the craft and climb aboard. With weary bones, we row back to the mainland where I return my lightbulb-headed friend to the plot of land behind the garage where I first found him. He waves a fond farewell, then leaps back into his miniature trailer and I bound off, bag over shoulder, down the railroad tracks once again.