"GALAXY DOOR" by Ryan Bry

If I had known that my doordasher was going to have to leave the galaxy in order to pick up my Korean street chicken I would have just boiled some canned soup. There’s a lot of trouble you can save people by boiling canned soup. I saw the unfantastic car icon escape Earth like a woman leaving bed and attaching herself to something distant that was all around you. Something I can tell is that all doordashers have wives, even the girls—so how could I let him come back and lie in his queen sized which was supposed to feel like carrying a cafeteria tray full of flagrant dispatch around your best friends with a head full of seditious stars instead. I decided in one of those minutes I had to myself that I was going to follow him—notifying the appropriate avenues that I had an interval coming up in Andromeda—and that my role in tagging along with his shadow through a foreign galaxy was to make sure his journey was memorable somehow without revealing one thing: that I’m Chalky Lockwaits who will be forever famous in my own mind for the time a poem page I was reading to a group of college students turned into pure water and left an impression on the podium, my shoes, and the rug, for as long as water usually does. Otherwise, I wrote a book on the healing properties of frog sperm but since I fictionalized it it was only popular with a select group of practicing individuals and not the scientific community at large.

The reason I couldn’t let anyone know my identity on this interstellar jaunt—I had a pseudonym for dash, Wicky: a pretty common name I guess—was that one of my books was told from a stalker’s perspective and I wouldn’t want people thinking that was the summation of my identity if this ever got out and the book was actually read—you see I have waves of bright compassion that make me feel Asian, and bounces of classic that put me in the timeless of romantic condition; I like talkative candy. In fact, in the book that I wrote the stalker left the galaxy as well in order to track down the girl that blew him a kiss when he was 12 at a Compasses game where the batter hit an outside the park home run into the neighbor’s birdbath that killed a pigeon and cured the neighbor’s bedrid—the Compasses lost that game. Something you could say about me is that I seek a different kind of balance—something that does not always reside on Earth, and I looked forward to seeking out this equilibrium in places that made an unaverage sense. I suspected that Pedro was not of a similar incline. Pedro was my doordasher.

The most taxing thing about the trek was seeing all the ambrosial eateries posted like a free butterfly behind asteroid clouds and sticking out of somber moons. I knew that another thing I had to do was save my hunger for the Korean street chicken that I ordered 1 galaxy ago. But I did stop into a Cupple Bites for a blackish brew. Space can make one really tired. And besides, I had noticed that my dasher had parked somewhere as well, probably to wash his space infused eyes in the zen tranquility of some cosmic strippers.

“Rash me the hoarder’s delight and a gold fuzz!!! Drop all the gulp in the snug.” The mud bulbs were fuming junk sight. A child surrounded by more of them with an unlucky miasma clucking at his skin sank his teeth into some slipping gilled cheese. The drinks were borrowing space politely.

“Yeah,” I seated, “can you trickle me some freshness?” I said carefully because the last time I had coffee drink I spilled it all over my soul. “Tap it with a squish of milk thank you.” Their heads emulsed weak pillow light as I tried to steal my cup out of the smiling crash. I threw them more than they were expecting in trash bits and attacked my walk to the sulky engine.

The crumbs of a space rock parted against the soft arrival of my vehicle like motes who had never heard a story. The bash of neon read “LAST RODEO” and I jumbled through the entrance at premium convenience. Some aloner with talking molecules tried to sell me stains right there but I already had them. I made out who Pedro was by his defeated president look and the fact that he was the only Mexican in the Groombridge system, though I knew that’s not the farthest a Mexican has ever gone.

“Are those real?” he buttered from a place within.

“What, my tits? Of course they are, I’ve had them since that Beatle got stabbed. They always talk about the one that got shot and no one knows one of them got stabbed.”

“No the drinks on the table, are they real?”

“I guess it’s 'cause that’s not how he died but that’s still really life—of course they’re not real! Only my tits are real.”

“How bout we see them then?”

“Get lost somewhere vast and unforgiving my friend, I’m outta here.”

“Hey,” I said, “do I know you from somewhere?”

“This your friend? He—”

“I’m not talking to you—are you the actor who plays that Machete character in those movies?”

“You know those? They only have those where I come from. Hah that’s not me man, but thank you. It feels good that someone knows what movies are out here man,” Pedro said.

“Hey I know what movies are; that’s how they make babies on your planet, right?” missy said.

“We’re not talking to you anymore. I made a new friend.”

“I bet his tits are fake,” she said as she sailed away on a cloud of snide.

I sat and then looked diagonally through the kind bustle into Pedro’s eyes and said, “What’s bringing you to a place like this?” 

“Ugh it’s this thing called doordash—wait you’re from Earth. So you know.”

“I left Earth a long time ago, partner.”

“Oh so it’s this thing, you dial food in from your phone—”

“Yeah, I was there for that.”

“Well they made up this new thing where you can order from basically anywhere around you with a guy who will pick up your stuff.”

“Oh yeah? Doesn’t sound that complicated.”

“Well I’m a dasher, okay, a doordasher. And this time it sent me all the way out here [looks around with arms out] to Andromeda [and laughs].”

“Well I’m sure whoever it is—”

“WHAT color is the FISHING MOON tonight it’s BLUEBERRY that means folks it’s TIME for the BLUEBERRY whale WRANGLE!!!” a cowboy with zombie focus said.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Oh they do this thing, I tried to tell them we have blue whales on Earth they’re the biggest animal on Earth, and they say no, blue whales are the biggest animals ever, they call them blueberry whales here. Except, look around, no ocean so they fish them out of atmosphere and turn them into homes where you can just eat the walls for decades. It’s not a beautiful way of life I’ve extracted,” Pedro said.

“You wanna go or skip it?”

“Eh, see what happens,” he said.

~~~

Some people looked off of the deck like they were seeing the most exciting painting ever put to canvas and some just stood there incensing their lungs gravely with harm leaf. I tried to settle my juke condescension in order to approach a behemoth that was a lot more things than literal.

The sand from the stars was raining in fluent wisps upon everyone’s shoulders and mine too. “To get him [he took a step and spit] all you gotta do is think you gottem: that’s what the blueberry whale wrangle is,” the cowboy guy spoke. “Now, one of you is gonna get him, and when you get him he’s gonna be got and that’s that.”

We became gel with the mind of fluid sky for a long time. It was better than most stuff on Earth. A little girl at my feet became happily disturbed by something. I looked over the rail.

“when we can no longer swallow the souring sand

that is not the kind of death i tried to show you

the liquid was born in a star

and you have mattered into the stuff of names—what is yours?"

"Chalky," I said to the whale.

“Wait you’re Chalky, Chalky Lockwaits, author of Star Follow? That was the only book my daughter would read,” Pedro said. Then the whale swallowed me and I was surrounded by pulsating blueberry guts for miles.

“you have learned in your mind that stars can have a dark side

it may feel like you are inside of something massive

but it is not as large as what is within the breath of love

I will keep you here until yours becomes larger than the television”

I woke up covered by birth next to my TV set with Korean street chicken in a take-out container next to me on the rug and Pedro and Lullaby sitting on a couch watching me crawl food. “We were waiting forever for you to come out of there,” Pedro said, “you good? I brought your food man.”

“I—"

“Don’t talk sweetie, it’s okay,” Lullaby said. “You’re here again.”

“I’m hungry,” I said.

________

Ryan Bry is a machine made out of flowers and fish scales. His first book took wings at Expat Press (Information Blossoms). His upcoming book will be a D.F.L. release entitled The New Organics for the Flickering World. You can hear him in music in the bands Penis Grenade and The Photogenic Memories. He hopes you will reach some conclusive love about the soul you belong to today or tomorrow.

You can find him tweeting away his soul at @ryan_bry__tweet