Jump cut

Larry stuffed his face cheeks like a bulging squirrel. It tickled him to skip through the dark rain-slicked streets of Brussels, Belgium the same way as the long-toothed rodentry gnawing nuts in the treetops. This vacation was the last of his earnings from the landscaping job he'd had. Since the fall of communism Larry must have sodded, trimmed and mowed 453 golf courses across northern Rhode Island. His father was a bartender, his mother a dancer. In 1968 Larry took his first trip to the zoo and thereafter dealt by aping any animal he saw. He fell short of storing anything for the winter: stackable cans of tin, rice sacks, comedy clips, potable water, flint, steel, pot, lube. Nothing that would get him through it. But while the animals were still in the wild he'd have his way, even if all in the city were pigeons. A stroll along the canal earlier had in fact yielded a hunch-shouldered falling-forward scurry of the river rat. He got excited. Chicks liked it when you're happy. The next leggy Walloon that passed didn't buy it, not with his two front teeth jutting over his lower lip. Discouraged Larry pulled his pieds into the corner cafe, where he failed also to catch the eye of the barrista. A sparrow poked around his table, hoping for scraps. Not the first time an animal aped him. He dabbed his wet brow. Tomorrow I'll take the train to the lowlands, he announced. Find me some weird Eurobeast and make it mine.