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The CityPlex was dense with movie-goers. BEING and Music queued for soda, snacks.

free young memory impinged upon by memory she will fly away from green-thumbs graduated ROTC Air Force paid for school now six years due The Nation six years she will fly beyond her memories over The Nation over The City
trees, birds, flowers all things green living destiny blue sky not that she does not like plants or Life as Plantwoman it’s a job a summer gig until her “papers” come from Central Command her orders and she leaps from gray-black asphalt to azure sky

Women history The City.
At the Museum of Women Plantman saw: The “Clothing Collection”: Silk and satin traces.  Centuries-old skirts and dresses; Summer frocks of decades past. Wardrobes. Fashion. Chic aged to antique.
Pinned to every skirt dress blouse a brief descriptive card: Year, value. Year, value.
Clothing once alive with women, once women-animated clothes. Once women of The City. Anticipating nights, inhaling cricket air of parks and gardens. Exhale. City engine of oblivion. Gone lithe beauties;  gone buxom matrons cherished secrets of their own.

The Hall of Sports presented colorful, uniformed wax figures in traditional protective masks painted with fiery stripes and cryptic glyphs.  The Guide, dressed like a sports Hero himself, led our tour group — mostly fathers and young sons — through The Hall of Sports, easily the most popular attraction in The City Museum Complex—among male Citizens, at any rate.

“Welcome to Indian Museum, where villains, Viral Deviants (VD’S) and Terrorists of the past are preserved for your enlightenment,” said The Guide.
The Guide, tall, serious, had silver hair; his gray eyes gleamed like sun-lit steel.  He wore the deep blue uniform of Indian Museum,  fashioned after the uniforms worn by soldiers of The Nation more than a century ago, when The West was won.

Plantman took a brief but necessary vacation, or personal day — as if the rest of his days were property of Topiary Techniques — to visit the world-famous City Museum Complex.
The plaque outside The Hall of Hoaxes read, “Everything The City promised you, but never delivered. Everything The Nation promised you, but never delivered.”
Hyperbole, true, but what can one expect from The Hall of Hoaxes?

Novelty Manufacturer’s son dead in The War.
I bore condolense: a spider plant, courtesy Topiary Techniques.
The Novelty Manufacturer sold jokes, baubles, erotic novelties to The Citizens of The City.
Office receptionist in black mourning.
“The Plant guy’s here. He brought a gift,” she said to the machine.
“Plantman! Yes. Of course. Please, send him in,” voice of The Manufacturer.

Fire Bush. Dark, but no Indian. Surely. Obvious. Called himself Indian, claimed “The Assistants” were Indians too.
The Assistants: Chicken Killer, elderly in denim; floppy hat pierced with an old, dusty feather; weathered skin; faded illegible tattoos.
White Buffalo Woman, or “Buffalo Gal,” almost young and almost beautiful; white suede dress and moccasins; hip-length black hair; weary eyes.
The two (Missing?) Young; seventeen and sixteen; male and female;  Smashed Deer and Fidelity Desire.

Dusty manual typewriter;  messy desk.  The Solitary Novelist reclined greasy on his musty couch, meandering mildew of regret.
“Who buys me?  Who reads me? What matters if I give away my work?”
Solitary eyes.
“I heard it was, after all, just talk,” he said. “Pursuit of pure talk.”
Solitary thought.
“My life missed in this room.  Women, sunlit moments, strolling The Big Park…”
Patient Novelist.
“Occasionally someone is right about something, but EVERYONE is ALWAYS wrong about EVERYTHING.”
Cigarettes, bourbon, tropes, clichés.

The Furniture was confused.  It had done no wrong, as far as it could tell, and did not see why it should be punished.  We refer to The Furniture as a single unit, of course, for The Sofa, wisest, oldest piece in the room, naturally served as duly elected representative and spokes-piece for all The Furniture in The Parlor.
The stalwart, comfortable old Sofa had hosted human buttocks since the early nineteenth century.
“George Washington slept here,” she often boasted jokingly of the length and breadth of her immense self.