Life in a Walk-In Freezer……..

……. is cold and dark and vacuous, until someone opens the door and brings light and warmth with them.  If they see you frozen on your shelf, they may invite you to exit with them, and you may, or may not be able to move your frozen limbs and climb down off the place of storage and waiting.  If they do not see you, eventually they leave you to what you know, but perhaps wondering, what that all had been about as they take memory of warmth with them and the light extinguishes.  But while all this deep freeze isolation is very interesting, lets return to the story of Joshua’s first  encounter with Gladys. You see, at that time, Joshua was not yet immobilized in Augustus' waxy catatonia. In those days, for the most part, Joshua was a real boy, living his in-out life in real fantasies of knights, dragons and serial killers. The day Gladys found him, or the day he invented her if you prefer, was a day like any other so far in his short and crossmodaly short-circuted life. The goddess Isis, his biological mother, had put him out with the trash as usual, after which she and his father Al Pacino had their regular roundhouse argument about whether or not it was raining, and if it was, would they ever have children. Joshua found a third class seat on his building’s stoop and began to hum the frequency that cancelled out the one Chronos, his biological father tried to pin him to the pavement with. Humming to himself and crossing his eyes to block the sweet sour smell of swing music rising from the sidewalk,  Joshua invited Gladys to join him by locking the doors that keep her out.