Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away by Richard Brautigan Read Free Book Online Page B

were trying to stuff the lion into a sloppy little hole.
    The lion as usual took it quite stoically. Having been buried at least fifty times during the last two years, the lion had gotten used to being buried in the back yard.
    I remember the first time they buried him. He didn't know what was happening. He was a younger lion, then, and was frightened and confused, but now he knew what was happening because he was an older lion and had been buried so many times.
    He looked vaguely bored as they folded his front paws across his chest and started throwing dirt in his face.
    It was basically hopeless. The lion would never fit the hole. It had never fit a hole in the back yard before and it never would. They just couldn't dig a hole big enough to bury that lion in.
    "Hello," I said. "The hole's too small."
    "Hello," they said. "No, it isn't."
    This had been our standard greeting now for two years.
    I stood there and watched them for an hour or so struggling desperately to bury the lion, but they were only able to bury ¼ of him before they gave up in disgust and stood around trying to blame each other for not making the hole big enough.
    "Why don't you put a garden in next year?" I said. "This soil looks like it might grow some good carrots."
    They didn't think that was very funny.

The Old Bus
    I do what everybody else does: I live in San Francisco. Sometimes I am forced by Mother Nature to take the bus. Yesterday was an example. I wanted to get some place beyond the duty of my legs, far out on Clay Street, so I waited for a bus.
    It was not a hardship but a nice warm autumn day and fiercely clear. An old woman waited, too. Nothing unusual about that, as they say. She had a large purse and white gloves that fit her hands like the skins of vegetables.
    A Chinese fellow came by on the back of a motorcycle. It startled me. I had just never thought about the Chinese riding motorcycles before. Sometimes reality is an awfully close fit like the vegetable skins on that old woman's hands.
    I was glad when the bus came. There is a certain happiness sighted when your bus comes along. It is of course a small specialized form of happiness and will never be a great thing.
    I let the old woman get on first and trailed behind in classic medieval tradition with castle floors following me onto the bus.
    I dropped in my fifteen cents, got my usual transfer, even though I did not need one. I always get a transfer. It gives me something to do with my hands while I am riding the bus. I
need
activity.
    I sat down and looked the bus over to see who was there, and it took me about a minute to realize that there was something very wrong with that bus, and it took the other people about the same period to realize that there was something very wrong with the bus, and the thing that was wrong was me.
    I was young. Everybody else on the bus, about nineteen of them, were men and women in their sixties, seventies and eighties, and I only in my twenties. They stared at me and I stared at them. We were all embarrassed and uncomfortable.
    How had this happened? Why were we suddenly the players in this cruel fate and could not take our eyes off one another?
    A man about seventy-eight began to clutch desperately at the lapel of his coat. A woman maybe sixty-three began to filter her hands, finger by finger, through a white handkerchief.
    I felt terrible to remind them of their lost youth, their passage through slender years in such a cruel and unusual manner. Why were we tossed this way together as if we were nothing but a weird salad served on the seats of a God-damn bus?
    I got off the bus at the next possibility. Everybody was glad to see me go and none of them were more glad than I.
    I stood there and watched after the bus, its strange cargo now secure, growing distant in the journey of time until the bus was gone from sight.

The Ghost Children of Tacoma
    T HE children of Tacoma, Washington, went to war in December 1941. It seemed like the thing to do,