Darryl Larry

Darryl Larry is having a pleasant evening. He is drinking whiskey from a transparent plastic cup. It is night. A handful of people have gathered into a small studio apartment in which lives a couple who find Darryl's tendency towards excess amusing, and for this reason they invited him over to drink and listen to music. So far Darryl has spent most of his evening on the balcony. That is where he can be found right now: on the balcony.

The event is a house warming party. Or apartment warming. It doesn't matter really. The reason for the gathering is actually very ambiguous. Darryl sits on a black milk crate. He is comfortable. Beside him sits a dark-haired girl with soft brown eyes. She has squeezed herself onto the milk crate with him. She blows into his ear. She gets him more whiskey. She grazes his neck with her tongue. She leaves.

Eventually everyone leaves. Darryl, always the last to leave, grabs a beer for the road and takes off with nods and even offers up a smile. We follow him out. As he hits the sidewalk, he exhales cigarette smoke into the face of a couple walking by. They are cute and tall and lean and happy until the smoke hits. They cough and appear disgusted. Their disgust is directed at Darryl using their eyes. It is an accident which he does not apologize for, but feels bad about nonetheless. Darryl then feels a good vomit coming on and accelerates his pace past the couple and down the dimly lit sidewalk. He drinks deeply from his beer and the vomit subsides. Then Darryl stops walking. He winces in pain for a moment. Holds it. He then continues on down the sidewalk, each step hitting the pavement firmly.

There are people still out on the street. It's late, but not dead late. Darryl keeps that beer close against the side of his body. He is paranoid. It constricts him and his breath begins to shorten. His forehead glazes over with sweat. The paranoia comes on suddenly, perhaps due to the sobering effect of the cool night air. He looks for an alley to duck down and finds one without much effort. The alley is as narrow as alleys come. Darryl heads down the alley and emerges on the other side. He finds a larger alley. It's lit dimly with orange light. Empty. Darryl walks down that alley still hiding his beer next to his body, eventually ducking down another even-more-narrow alley leading into another alley which isn't narrow at all. This alley is lit with what seems to be a soft violet light. Darryl presses on, deeper into the web of damp and strangely lit alleys, some narrow and some not, continually drinking from the bottle of beer held tightly at his side.

He hears quacking. It breaks Darryl from a spell he did not even know he was under. He finds himself conscious suddenly of his walking, and then he hears quacking again. Looks around. He is in an alley, a wide alley half lit in orange light. There is a dumpster towards the back wall of an apartment building nearby. "Quack, quack, quack!"

Darryl squats down once he's gotten close enough to satisfy his curiosity. The ducks look at him. They quack. Darryl smiles. He bleats like a sheep. The sound startles him. He had meant to make a duck noise, but the wrong one came out of him. The ducks back away, one step at a time. Darryl wants to try quacking again but is afraid of what might come out of his mouth. Instead he just waddles closer, still in a squat. He moves closer to the ducks. They quack a bit more. Their quacks are faster, anxious. Darryl thinks for a second, convinced that were he to apply enough effort he could decipher their duck language at this very instant.

One of the ducks lifts a leg. Darryl smiles and lifts his beer to return the salute of the leg-lifting duck. He drinks twice from his bottle, after which he finds it to be empty. Squatting there, he puts his bottle on the ground next to the dumpster. He then sits with his legs crossed in the orange light of the alley among the ducks, admiring the small murky puddle.

Darryl Larry grew up in a small suburban town. A family town. A growing town. The sort of town that has just built a whole bunch of new schools with air-conditioning and carpeting and several other pseudo-accoutrements which were provided in the cheapest manner possible.

On the fringe of that small suburban town lived the Larry family. Darryl's house was a modest one. What some people called a "starter home." What Mr. and Mrs. Larry came to refer to as a "starter home." Darryl called it his house. So that's what I'll call it too. That's what it was.

Darryl lived with Mr. and Mrs. Larry, but neither paid very much attention to him, aside from the occasional harassment he would receive due to not applying what they considered an adequate amount of effort on activities which they considered worthy of adequate effort. Darryl's childhood is for the most part unimportant. The only important part of Darryl's childhood was his duck pond.

Darryl had a duck pond. Yes he did. A duck pond. It was out past his backyard and past the thick wall of evergreen trees which lined it. And out past the other houses behind them and the evergreens which lined them. And through the pine forest in which the town itself was buried, and out into the nothing which existed still further on. Out further than further and further than that was the duck pond of Darryl Larry.

Not every aspect of the duck pond was beautiful. In fact, most were quite unattractive. Its perimeter was muddy and overgrown with yellowed weeds. In the summer the pond had a rotting smell to it and Darryl frequently found ticks in its grasses. The pond was quite standard in many respects. Its water was tranquil, clean, and painfully cold. Upon its surface floated algae in some areas. It was neither a round pond nor was it a pond one would call large, but it was also neither an abnormally shaped pond nor was it a pond one would call small. The pond had no characteristics that, over the course of its lifespan, had made it seem unique or special to any man, woman, or child up until Darryl stumbled upon it. Darryl, however, had loved the pond immediately as if it were made precisely with him in mind.

Growing up, Darryl visited his duck pond regularly, perched on a small rotten tree stump by the pond's eastern edge. From this vantage Darryl observed the pond and the ducks that frequented it. He imagined arbitrary names for the ducks. Darryl followed their activities so intently that he could identify one duck from another not just based upon its appearance but based upon its behavior. As Darryl returned to the duck pond, and the months and years slowly passed by, the personalities he imagined for the ducks in his pond were embellished.

Ducks came. Ducks went. Different ducks lurked at the duck pond during different times of the day and during different months of the year. Some ducks wouldn't appear at the pond for weeks on end or would vanish suddenly and forever, while others hardly ever left at all. A few ducks were always around. There was constantly something going on at Darryl's duck pond. At night Darryl dreamed about the ducks. He dreamed about the lives of the ducks with their personalities as he'd invented them. Darryl dreamed of himself and some of the ducks going out to a ballgame or camping in Alaska.

Darryl would dream of himself wearing dark sunglasses. Across from him, a duck would be seated in a maple rocking chair and smoking cherry-flavored tobacco from a pipe. Soft distant music would be in the air. On his lap would be a small, white, empty plate which had recently contained a slice of pumpkin pie. Its scent would still be in the air and on his tongue. He and the duck would be seated in a room surrounded by tall clear windows and antique lamps. "Why," Darryl would say, while removing his sunglasses and gently polishing them on the tail of his shirt, "I can't say I agree with you. While that real estate on our pond's east side does, at first, seem a tempting plot of land upon which one could easily and quickly develop a profitable resort-community, I imagine that the swampy summer rains would result in flooding, and you would end up having to invest a far larger sum in construction than initially thought in order to offset these seasonal flaws."

The duck sitting across from Darryl would then take a long slow drag of cherry tobacco from its pipe. Thick smoke would seep from its beak and its nostrils. It would puzzle over Darryl's statement until rising upon its duck feet and saying in an entirely human voice, "Why, Darryl Larry! That is some first-rate logic! Thank heavens I came to you prior to investing any serious money into the endeavor!"

Darryl would then pull a cigarette out of the inside pocket of his jacket and attach it loosely to his lower lip so it would bounce as he spoke. "Not a problem."

The dream would then conclude, as many of Darryl's dreams did, with his waking up under the impression that he was a member of the duck pond. Darryl would wake up, all smiles, until he realized that he had indeed been dreaming. His smile would then contort into a scowl, and that scowl would generally stay with him throughout the remainder of his day, or until he made it to the pond later that evening.

Years went by and Darryl grew older. Eventually he moved away in order to go to college. It was a traumatizing experience being torn away from his duck pond. Darryl did not believe he would survive it. He was only gone for about a year when the property on which his pond stood was drained and paved over. The ducks left and never returned. While on the one hand this made Darryl's absence from his pond much easier to endure, it also drained him and paved him over.

After finishing up at school, Darryl moved immediately into the city, where we now find him in an alley, drunk and squatting among some ducks around a murky puddle. And this is where we will leave him.

There aren't any other people in the alley. And there won't be any until tomorrow when the sun comes out. And eventually, when the puddle is drained, as all puddles are destined to be; when it's over, and there's nothing, and the puddle is gone completely, leaving only the memory of the puddle to flicker, flash, and fade; when even the memory of the puddle is gone, and there's no trace left that it ever even existed – then we can all go home happy, because ours hasn't drained yet.

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