Toy

The four squeaky pulleys stop their din and the plywood sheet lays still. I hear the transformer hum back to life and I smell the faint sharp electric smell of the dust it’s burning off its coil. One by one, my companions arise from their form-fit plastic crypts. We all now lie in a perfect line and we now are joined once more. I am third from the front today and this is auspicious. You see, this is where I fit best, my linearity and my height show to their very best advantage when I am positioned right here in spot lucky number three.

My five companions show such uniformity and similarity to me, it’s as if we are identical Siamese sextuplets. Our height, our proportion, our length are matched with German precision, we move as one and look as one. When we proceed along our tireless march, we are a breed apart. No marching band formed was ever or shall ever be our equal in precision, march and in-line motion.

I now sit in my auspicious spot like the bunched runner on a track, ready for urges eagerly anticipated to be quenched and my mute vocabulary expanded. And then it starts, a rippling. Below my lidded wheels the thrumming throb of energy begins. I feel it in my ears hearing a whooshing wind already.

The transformer’s hum picks up in pitch now as it must, it always must--and that hum is life. If there is one sound above all others that I am anticipating today, its the metal on metal gleaming rumble of our 12 gimbaled dual-axled matching wheel-quads rolling ever onward. Sussusurate is the verb. I once heard it as an alliterative and soothing word to describe the crashing trains of waves on a moonlit beach and we, my companions and me, we make that verb our own. We are sussusurant and I am replete.

A boy sits at his train set in a bedroom in America...and twiddles the throttle on his transformer one percent farther to the right...the streetlight on the corner flickers silently, to life.