The Prophets
In this world of acid rain and rainbow streams and mud spatters that can chew the embossing off manhole covers, I am, nevertheless, a can invested of the fortune of good timing. Begin at the beginning, and you would know that I was made not to have to endure that lobotomy which had once marked our kind on every parking lot and public beach until someone had had the good sense to bolt down our tab-openers. Yes, for compared to the hard-edged veneer of our forefathers mine is a seamless nature and I have not to fear so much the ravages of rain and wind nor so soon suffer the creakiness of aging. The world has changed. And though it has always been our lot to be cast out, the odds of my ending in a dump are vastly diminished by the profusion of mobile drunks and teenage punks who, unlike their own forefathers, prefer casting out in the literal way. As for me, I came to lie on my spout on a bed of dolomite at the bottom of a wooded hill, where at the top the first house buzzes most nights with the cackles and moans of swinger parties and the next clangs like a bell tower ne’er at ease of the progression of empties over the crest. My only disappointment is that I did not come from a richer lineage, in which case I would have been revered for a fine head and robust character, and perhaps would not have found myself in a ditch.
I am the offspring of alumina and bauxite, made in the likeness of a runt cylinder. Not as esteemed as the nickels and the steels, my top and bottom are nonetheless the shape of halos and my whole still glistens like a star. (Just one generation ago we were still recognized enough for our contribution to be compensated in den collections and on kitchen mantels.) It is the nature of our tribes to be distinguished by our colors, the consequence, it is said, of complexity. As you, I grew to a stature, for we too come in many sizes, the largest tending to wield the greatest influence, or, as it is said, the power to change minds, and the smallest giving moreover to moderation and compromise. Of course there are exceptions, as in certain cases in which the small ones are known to convoke dominion in numbers. I, myself, am a product of the middle masses, being neither biggest, smallest, strongest nor weakest, but dependable and consistent. Our creators would have consumers, investors and others among the devoted believe that these qualities are cloned. Yet I know, as surely as I feel neither shame nor discouragement in the fact that I am a twin, triplet, quadruplet, quintuplet (and so on) to each of my brethren, that I am no more a clone than is a dandelion in the field.
I happened here, as I have already inferred, by a flick, the earnest toss of a tween named Tiffany (if but for her boyfriend Brad’s varsity arm I would have landed in the woods, under that juniper). They and their three other underage couples had been traveling west and I went flying north, and subsequently so had my twenty-three siblings. To have beheld them in their flight was as for a precursor to have witnessed a line of cattle cars purged of their Gypsy surpluses. One by one they looped in the night air like bouffant sacks, some barfing a little of their brief travail, and stopped in nests of thorns. Since then have they been rained on and spun by gales, sprayed by tires and kicked by feet, licked by varmints and parched by the sun — that is, all but two, which pedestrians fetched away for urinals (and I — I waste prayers for a garland of leaves to wash the kiss off my spout!). Not a month later the few that had not become entombed by the neglected grass or embalmed by dirt and tar or doomed to the gutter’s vents were rounded up by a church group. The bags, big and black, damned them to the city heap. Perceived as we are, of our particular chemistry, as having a certain innate limitation, being that we are not immediately conducive to refilling (like plastic water bottles), it is my enduring hope that when my own end comes it shall with some little purpose.
The night I got drunk I had all day felt an encompassing warmth that transcended room temperature. It was a Sunday — the day, ever since the Blue Laws were repealed, that the resplendent refrigerators get deiced and Windexed and the older stocks moved to the front. I had hardly broken into condensation when the derelicts arrived to pick us up. All day I had felt stale. Had my balance teetered on account of a yeast reaction, or the heat of the storeroom lamp the new-hire had forgotten to turn off the night before — or anticipation? I am leery of surprises and the light and I wondered if these played a factor. Three weeks before, on the morning I was packed, two of my shipmates were replaced for defects, and considering the little air they let slit into these boxes one wonders how any of us keep our heads. During the trip to the Quiky Mart our truck had veered to avoid a pigeon and we got so thoroughly knocked about that a week later I was still fizzing. Truth is we are all late-bloomers (our lot had even managed to circumvent refrigeration until the eleventh hour) and personally I dread when changes brew. Yet considering my born-on date that my fledgling existence had as yet to traverse an entire lunar cycle, perhaps I was too sensitive of the circumstances of my slow aging. Even so, the last thing I had needed then was the endless chatter of golf buddies about how “clean” and “pure” I was.
And then I was kissed by Tiffany, and ever since and forevermore shall long for those who wet their whistles. I venture no disrespect when I confess that I am glad I had my first experience with a woman and not a man. Of course, having no direct source of comparison I command no credible platform from which to argue persuasively that women do cans better. But speaking for myself, I cannot imagine a more pleasing, lilting, temperate, succulent exercise than to serve the lolling tongue of a woman in the fully tabbed position. Tiffany not only swooned she swelled. She sent my chill up my spine. I condensed so profusely that I was dripping like a three-hundred-pound weightlifter. As she guzzled me it was as if heaven pierced the bluest cloud and daffodils poured out and we embraced naked and soaked in sudsy ecstasy in a Valhalla lake. All this time she had me by a finger and a thumb and I kept coming as if a dike had burst. And somehow in all this I managed a peek at Brad and in a paradox of revulsion reveled all the more on account of his passionless, tight-lipped imbibe. For indubitably it was she who was mine, it was she, Siren, who bade my attention, and how bold and robust I had become. And then she threw me out. The next morning I was brushed by the interminable breeze of five bicyclists, four joggers, two walkers, ninety-seven automobiles, a skateboarder, and a road-sweeper. By the soft angle of the sun massaging my belly I estimated the time to be half past dawn. I was still pasty from the night before but felt somewhat refreshed thanks to a Cooper’s hawk that, diving to scoop a mole, clipped me enough with a wingtip to spin me off my crown and nearly upright. The action immediately discouraged a brigade of ants that had been sucking me of my remnant hoppiness. In time, if not for a garland, perhaps the sun would be so gracious as to bake away Miss Tiffany’s pout.
Is it any wonder that the night is so bewitching? Its black veil cloaks the revelers and the rowdies alike, the romantic and the lascivious. Twelve hours later the eight louts in their big black SUV were back — ah, but this big black SUV had a sunroof and the castouts were my pale cousins. The earth clanked with the sound of metallic hail and I felt proud of their resilience. However, the consequences of overcrowding are debilitating. What had previously been, besides myself, but a half dozen others within my venue — which I considered to be an area comprised of two basalt rocks at east and west, a Centaurea thistle north, and the gutter’s edge below, about twenty feet square — by morning numbered, upon quick count, seventeen. Still I believed in my altered space that I would remain unimpeded. Yet as our numbers escalated I fell among them finally in their sordid piling and butting. And by then even the varmints had emboldened and they teased us night and day with their long wet tongues and snouts.
Are we complicit in these bad deeds or merely victims? Several nights later the kind of squall that knocks out power grids thrashed its fangs into us, getting the best of the butted ones which it pasted with the roadside gypsum. Of this sudden cement they languished immovable, some at their tab joints, others at their inverted necks, and, the worst off, along their entire sides. Meanwhile black puddles oxidized and became rancid. And the rust followed.
The world is a menacing place. But I had learned too that the frenetic indifference of humans makes it more so.
I felt emptier than I was. More than autonomy, I wished for agility. The world, I had come to fear, is more fearsome for one’s languishing in it. Yet what good would an all-out roll to the other side of the road do but leave me in the same predicament? —For the chance I did not care much to presume. I realized I must cross, and, if cannily possible, in so doing resist every kind of diversion, as birds, feet, snouts, and gusty winds — the first of which might balk partway anyway, such that I would probably fall and get run-over by a well-aimed tire; the second probably to crush me before I even started; the third surely to test my resolve; and the last to play me (as they had all along) as a trifling curiosity.
More days passed. My whole circumference got hotter in the widening heat and humidity. My kicked-in side caused me to resemble the moon when it is a fingernail and seems ever to be curling in upon itself. A trapped yellow jacket gave me such a ringing that my anxiety seemed to redouble. Later a possum pooped so thoroughly on me that I worried the permeating oils and methane would accelerate my fading. A paradox: Empty, I had finally aged.
Now it may surprise you that one as I, having motivation, would also be able to initiate its own locomotion. Yet if the inanimate wind can, why couldn’t I? Or perhaps I should give some of the credit of my vitalization to the juniper branch which, having fallen just so, had levered me up to the gutter’s rim, so that the rest was just rolling. Yet as it happened this was just the start; henceforward my fate was propelled by a tug-o-war. Not even quarterway across, a damn cinder nugget stopped my progress and then a tire waft blew me back, and then just as quickly I was propelled forward again by a salamander. Thereafter for a time I made no progress such that I felt like a baby rocker. On account of my dent I was getting nowhere. Cars, though ever-passing in their parade, passed too far to have any effect. I began praying that something, anything, would produce a good wind. Perched on my spine I discovered it: a black cloud which, with the accompaniment of uppity thatch and grit, soon thereafter produced so much motion that I did not so much roll as hydroplane. Suddenly I felt impelled by a terrible game of dodge can. In my straight shoot it was a miracle the parade missed me. Yet whereas every tire passed without incident, the garland I had wished for to wipe Miss Tiffany’s lipstick from my spout did not. Suddenly from on high it swooped on me — its incumbent branch whisking me all the way across. When the storm had finally passed the road was swathed in papers, box flaps, scraps of old clothes, and the carcasses of bottles and cans.
The next morning the sky shone azure blue and the air was crisp and the sun golden and cool. The clean air flowed in and out of my spout such that I imagined I was breathing. Not far away, where the road abruptly rises, bobbing heads appeared, then canes and wagging yellow bags. Earnestly these humans approached in a united side-by-side gait from which methodically they cleansed the abused road. They were of all ages and thoughtful in their work and never hesitated, and as their yellow bags filled, what each had started emaciated bulged as from a great feast. And it was then, in a shadow of one of these yellow sacks, that I was allowed to partake of this feast. And I felt myself rise up, ecstatic of the promise of my new life.
The End