Eddie (Unscathed Version)

Eddie was plucking pecans from the willowy vines. His face was like a poem. Like a whiskey soaked plum. Like a wind-up silver coin. His belly was hiding under the beige sportcoat. Inside the belly was hiding some salad. A super salad. Everything was in there. Everything except a dragon's eye.

The dirty sour dragon and the dirty sour dragon's eyeball. Not in there.

Eddie liked to read fiction. He read it everyday. The last story he read was like reading a pie with a fork. Like erotica in braille. Like a sponge used to clean up a wine spill and then left to mold. The last story he read was good. He picked it up at random: "A Statue of Aphrodite" by Ellen Gilchrist. He tried reading the next story in the book and he couldn't concentrate. So he drank some orange juice and ate some gummy worms. Then he sat under the SAD lamp and whistled the Wiggles theme. He had carpenter ants in his funky attic. He was born to be washed in the sink.

Eddie was plucking pecans from the willowy vines and then he started to eat the pecans as he plucked them instead of dropping them into the pail. They were good fresh and raw. A treat that was hard to beat. Mealy and tongue drying, sure. But he felt like a slot machine and he groaned. This was better than smoking mistletoe or studying the falling rain.