Willard and His Bowling Trophies by Richard Brautigan

of bread. “Where were you?” he said.
    “I was in the front room,” she said.
    “Oh,” he said.
    There was a green container of Kraft Parmesan cheese on the table beside his plate, but there was no cheese on his spaghetti sauce bread. He had forgotten to use it.
    He felt a little better looking at Constance now because the rope marks on her wrists were gone. Now he wouldn’t look away in embarrassment when she was around him.
    She went over to the stove and put some water on for tea.
    “What are you doing?” he asked.
    “I’m putting some water on for tea,” Constance said. “I feel like a cup of tea.”
    “That sounds good,” he said, eating a bite of red bread.
    She went over to the table and sat down in a chair beside him. “You look tired,” she said, softly.
    “That’s funny. I don’t feel tired,” Bob said.
    How would you know? Constance thought. How would you ever know?

Matthew Brady
    Patricia and John were busy making immortal love in the bedroom. She had really turned John on by pretending to be a bowling trophy. After a while she had gotten him laughing and for some reason or another sometimes it sexually aroused him and they were really going at love now.
    Unbeknownst to them the ghost of Matthew Brady slipped supernaturally into the house and took a photograph of Willard and his bowling trophies. Matthew Brady posed them in such a way that Willard looked like Abraham Lincoln and the bowling trophies looked like his generals during the Civil War. There was a battlefield nearby but you couldn’t see it.
    Willard was very serious in the photograph and so were the bowling trophies. They all played out their parts perfectly.
    Matthew Brady left the apartment just about the time Patricia and John finished making famous love in the bedroom. They never saw him.
    He disappeared back into the swirls of ghostly time, taking with him a photographic impression of Willard and his bowling trophies to be joined visually with the rest of American history because it is very important for Willard and his bowling trophies to be a part of everything that has ever happened to this land of America.

Marble to flesh
    The marble hand of the Logan brother beside the telephone suddenly became living flesh and he picked up the telephone.
    “Hello,” he said.
    The other two brothers stared at the sound of the word hello as if it were a bolt of lightning in the air.
    “NO!” he said, his face instantaneously flushing with anger. “This is not Jack’s Bar and Grill and I’m not Jack, you son-of-a-bitch. YOU BASTARD!” He started banging the receiver of the telephone on the table and the table fell over and the telephone made a huge ringing noise when it hit the floor.
    The Logan brother was still sitting there, shouting “BASTARD! BASTARD!” at the receiver in his hand. He was making a lot of noise because he had just gone mad.
    The other two Logan brothers threw themselves on him and held him down on the bed until he came to his senses. The comic-book-reading Logan hung up the telephone. Obviously, it was a wrong number. The person was still on the other end of the line, “Hello, Jack? Is that you, Jack? Don’t be mad, Jack. I’ll pay you back the five I owe you, Jack. Jack? Are you there, Jack? It’s only five—”
    click

Three long years ago
    The cows stopped eating to look at the Logan brothers.
    Now one of them was stark raving mad in a cheap hotel room in San Francisco. His two brothers held him on the bed, trying to quiet him down.
    “What are we going to do now?” one of the Logan brothers said, staring back at a cow.
    It was just spring in Colorado and the day, though warm, had a slight crispness to it. The sky was clear and blue. The little town of Middle Fork was in a small valley and mountains towered up around it.
    “I don’t know,” was one reply.
    “Find the bowling trophies,” was the other reply. It was a very stern reply. It had come from the brother who was now being held down on