Storytime: Slightly Used.

March 9th, 2016

I walked out my door and into a man. Good thing I was planning on walking; if I’d had my car keys out, he’d have speared himself on them. Not that he was moving very quickly, or at all. He was just one of those people who seemed to be hurrying in place.
“Hey hi there nicetameetcha howzitgoing heyyoulivehere nicehousehowaboutthathuh heyyyyy…” he gargled out and then paused for breath.
“Uh-” I managed.
“SO! Want to buy a World War Two-era battleship?”
“I want to get some milk from down the street,” I said.
“Right, right, right. Good stuff milk full of calcaratilagenoucerouscarcharadoncherrycumulu-cumulo… Calcium! Right, calcium. Good for strong bones! But buddy c’mere and check this out what I’ve got is so good you won’t WANT bones you’ll have steel and iron old ironsides ahahahahahahhaha ANYWAYS it’s only five dollars.”
“Five what?”
“Five dollars.”
My head was hurting at this point. “Five…million?”
“No!”
“Five thousand?”
“NO! Five. Five hundred pennies, a hundred nickles, fifty dimes, twenty quarters, FIVE DOLLARS. NOW YOURS! For four dollars.”
Now my eyes hurt too. Mostly from squinting. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Wrong? Wrong?! Nothing’s wrong with it! It’s a part of history, it’s a piece of the action, and it’s YOURS, YOURS, YOURS for three dollars fifty cents. Two dollars fifty cents.”
My ears hurt, the sun was starting to sting my shoulders, and the man’s shoulders were vibrating in a sickly way that offended me. So I shoved half my milk change in his fist, mumbled “thank you,” and left as quickly as I could.
I didn’t really need more than a litre that day anyways.

When I came back, I had a battleship moored in my driveway.
It was about two hundred and sixty metres long, according to careful use of about thirty measuring tapes. It probably displaced something like forty thousand tons. It was equipped with four 16-inch rotating turrets that could fire multi-thousand-pound shells. And it was the rustiest thing I’d ever seen in my life; caked red and brown and grey and mouldering faster than last fall’s leaves. It sighed when I walked by it and groaned when I walked on it. The smell was somewhere between an oil slick and a lake of blood, and everything I ate tasted like dead metal the moment it went in my mouth. My dog ran away from home, the neighbour’s dog ran away from home, the whole block’s dogs ran away from home. I expected complaints, but heard none, although that could’ve been because the battleship’s hull looming over my house was ruining my cell reception.
There was no name on its hull, only rust. So I called it Earl.

I was locking up Earl for the night that Thursday when I practically ran into another man, who looked absolutely nothing like the first one I’d practically run into. The pace was the same though. He was vibrating.
“Hey hi there nicetameetcha WANT A TANK?!” he gasped into my face. His jowls were really alarming things, somewhere between barbels and basset hound lips. They quivered at rest, and I was filled with fear that he would dart his head forward and swallow me whole.
“Yes sure whatever you say bye!” I said, and then I was off and away, scampering like a rat down the street and cutting corners until I felt myself comfortably out of sight, mind, and sanity. I had a brief lunch of junk food and waste liquid to fortify myself, then returned to find a genuine Mark I tank parked over half my lawn and most of my front stoop, not even remotely as fresh and shiny as it had been the day it had been abandoned in a flooded bomb crater in the Somme. Mud dripped from its gullet, bird-nests filled its interior, there was a raccoon inside the right six-pounder and a macerated stray cat in its treads.
I crawled over it to reach the door, went inside, and drank for four days.

The next day I woke up brushed my teeth walked outside checked my mail and found that my mailbox was full of aged, decrepit firearms and expired grenades. Also, my mailbox was now made of concrete, some twenty feet across, fitted with firing slits, and was a pillbox. A small note in a neurotic hand attached to its front with scotch tape charged me forty cents for the privilege, all for labour costs.
I left fifty and went to bed again in the hope that the world would make more sense the next time I woke up, or at least be less flecked with rotted steel and grime.

It didn’t. The first thing I saw was a set of yellowed, half-ground teeth. The second thing I saw was that their owner was sitting on my chest, whimpering and begging and pleading in an endless stream that was probably more at everyone than it was anyone.
“C’mon pal,” he muttered through a moustache that had slid into a goatee, “don’t leave me hanging. Just give me a chance. I’ve got a lot of stock to clear out and the boss’s coming back soon and I need to show him proof it’s not my fault, it’s not my fault. You get it, right, that it’s not my fault c’mon give me a hand don’t do this to me. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s nobody’s fault. Just help me, give me a few minutes, I just gotta get rid of this stuff-”
I stuck my head under the pillow and hummed for three hours until I passed out from lack of oxygen. When I took it off again he was gone, but there was an entire set of extremely used gothic plate next to my bed, complete with the large, rust-eaten dirk that had been jammed through its eyeslits.

The next day I went outdoors, the sky had changed. Someone had parked an aircraft carrier of unknown make (it was covered in sixty years of corals and sponges) next to my house, then dumped aircraft on it until they ran out of deck and had to use my roof. A derelict Boeing B-52 Superfortress had slid off at a funny angle and squashed my backyard flat. Helicopters lay splayed across the street like flies in midwinter, rotors at random and mostly disconnected.
I went to work and hoped it’d all be over when I came home, spent my shift searching the internet for answers and not even finding questions, and when I drove back I found that my backdoor was blocked by a heap of long-expired “Fat Man” atomic bombs, my front door was somewhere inside a thicket of discarded and broken pikes, guisarmes, glaives, halberds, and fauchards, and my windows were blocked from the inside by a complex array of disassembled ballistas, catapults, and trebuchets.
I slept in the street. At some point I woke up to water dripping and someone had parked a small siege tower on top of me; rain was running down its guts and onto my nose. I crawled out from underneath it and hurried over to Earl, who was still the only one of my acquisitions to have a name.
Earl was many things inside, but, against all odds, one of those things was ‘dry.’ It would’ve sunk in seconds if there’d been a body of water large enough to hold it within twelve hundred miles, but the bridge’s roof was intact. Mostly. I poked at bits and pieces of who-knew-what and pulled dead levers. There was a moth-eaten hat under the desk, which I did not put on.
At some point it was dawn, but with the rain, who could tell? I sat in my ship and watched the water rise up, bubbling and babbling and eating up all the broken airplanes and burnt-out Humvees and shell-shredded Jeeps and who-knew-whats. There were skeletons down there – warhorses? Some of them could be elephants. They smiled at me from under the rippling downpour. It was strange to see biological decay, next to all that rust.
There was a gurgle. One of the phones on the bridge was trying to say something. I picked it up and shook it.
“Thanks you’re a pal you’re a pal and a half take it now the stuff’s still good as new, go on it’s yours, you’re like a part of the family you’re a good customer. Listen, I’ve got to go, right? I’ve got to go right now. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do be a sport see ya.”
Click.
Deeper under the deck, something else went click. The waters had risen and the engines were moaning their way to unlife. We were off the street and floating on our own wreckage.
I looked through the bridge window as Earl started to move, wondering where we were headed, but all I could see was haze.

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