A Gentleman's Agreement

This piece uses child’s imagery in away that is both obtuse and highly descriptive.

“To arc and trajectory add the lessons of apogee and descent, the rock descending into a broken glass poke in the eye for the friendly family car,”

A broken glass poke in the eye, it evokes the non-linear connections in a child’s mind, the association of one thing with another that we, as adults, for whom the order of the world is already is set, would consider unreasonable. This blends with the flowing, unending sentences that jump from one thought to another:

“And in the tin-roofed shed the child saw where the goat should have been parked - the goat, the big, yellow fire bike, the marlbe-size knobs on the tire treads, the homemade steel-mesh cages the old man had welded around the chain and the spokes against brush and branches, his father riding the Goat’s back in wild reconnaissance of the fire’s forward lines, and on sundays when the world was not on fire the old man and his disciples drank beer in the backyard and rode the Goat down the washed out driveway fast enough to leap the gully, doing drunken doughnuts and wheelies in the cornfield until somebody’s wife went home mad or until somebody broke his arm and though it was funny.”

This is a hundred and twenty word sentence, and it flows through the information in unending flood, the bike, a description of the bike, its association with his father, his father drinking beer, on and on and on, unfetted by any responsibilities other then to tell what the child wants to tell.