(estimated reading time: 13 minutes)

The Pick-Knows

by

Blaine Arcade

I had a bad morning guys, even though I everytasked as goodly as the other mornings in my collection. First thing out of the matchbox and quilt I cut the iron filings with coffee grounds to really wake up the magnets, angled the solar coins to bounce crystal clear sparkles to the costume glass and gold-painted links, beat the stickers to free the hairs, checked the electric frog battery for tangy white creep, and oiled the swatter so it misses the flies so I don’t miss the joke of the huge-mans missing the flies.

But the morning was still bad. Had to be somebody else’s fault. They made 6 AM sharp, 7:11 sticky, 8 a bad breakfast, 9 lives long, and 10:04 no good buddy. All my stuff looked goldy-oldy at a glance. Then I amble up the right-by and it catches my surprise (that I didn’t even leave out to stale) by doing some pose of the possible that benefits me leastways.

For example, take (but don’t) my vintage bubblegum floss dispenser that might go between my teeth once I find some that aren’t the fairy’s loose change. It sits stately and capitally between the eraser peeler and the fishing yarn (organized on a scale of ease to make lassoability out of) in the HVAC crawl where you always hear that birdsong that goes gotta-get-that-fixt! Gotta-get-that-fixt!

On the A-side normal the gum comes out of it tidy; that morning it was a spider’s sticky, which I saw and felt slow, nearly pulling it out of its place and uncozying the whole collected pyramid. A fret like that could lose my cool. Thankful me was prepared with backup generating collections in the false plant pot, the attic’s attic, the fuse box they think belongs to the bees, the home of the lost rake (the one that gets sworn at still), the aquarium only I swim in now, and behind the wall that rings a false solid when knocked (fools the stud finder too).

All in all not so badly a haul and hoard for a Pick-Knows of muddle-class locality. Do you knows what we are? I imagine you haven’t and are only a little about to. We and I are called a Pick-Knows because we and I knows what to pick. You huge-mans make most of it, but don’t knows the half of it, eyes all rough and no diamond. Then you toss it out and we and I come along to about forty-six degrees of being real to sort the one man’s treasure out of the everyman’s trash.

Your grubs call us fairies and greblins and gomlins to blame us for what they lose nocked between cushions, kicked under fridge cracks, summiting fences, and pooltesting before waterproofing. A Pick-Knows is probably invisible (I’m too fast and my reflexes too shy to test); if we weren’t I would say we look like an elephant’s head around the volume and magnitude of a baseball in a wet bucket.

Except we hover, keeps the squeaky out of the boards. And also except our ears and trunk look like luscious grapes, the kind too pretty to pop for mere mouthing. They’re painting grapes, if we could sit still-life long enough for coloring brush to comb canvas. And addendum to that excepting also, you might find a Pick-Knows who’s so fat they’ve gone orbular. They’re the strongest and the fastest and the prettiest, not like me, who am the collectoriest kind.

A goodly collection, bested by every additional added, keeps our degrees less acute to the real; you just have to be careful not to go obtuse, then you’re still not the real’s deal and you might get caught spilling the goods on a floor you’ve never even touched on account of the hovering.

Lumping my goods packs you a grocery list too incredible to edible: dollhouse peepholes, spray bottle triggers, rotten egg timers, toothpicks with cellophane scarves (socks?), dice for date night, 25 cent statues, belt buckles under the weight of board game cash, mummified markers, punched holes, exhibitionist card sleeves, expired capsules never time-released, an artificially unlucky rabbit’s foot, cheese puff and fish flake concretions, billiards chalk, cereal toys, xylophone lollipops, lost marbles, snuffers so fresh they’re still hot, pizza box ottomans, green army recruits, costumes shed by Halloween candy, poetic price tags, pet rocks groomed and adopted, clinking arcade tender, finger puppet divas, long shot toenails, clarinet reeds, an amputated ear’s muff, thimbles, burnt out light bulb rattlesnakes, bookmarks, the 471st piece of a 500 neighborhood puzzle, bottle caps, paper clips, vampire thumb tacks, tossed junk drawer salad with extra stamps, duster feathers, shark teeth, concrete fossils, knives that can only carve initials, keyless locks, lockless keys, a garage door kill switch, political buttons of remote control, crystallized root beer, mixed breed dust bunny multiplicatives, forgotten memory cards, hotel soap from a clean getaway, money clips, coasters (check the rings for age), eye droppers, shoelace knots, rolling film, bone-shaped treatise on doggy’s satisfaction, and 17,889 glitters.

That’s just the plant pot out back, by where my home’s Mr. Huge-man mourns his dead and departed Rosemary (the murder smelling minty like the serialized rest).

Anywho (me and you) are hearing myself inked on the matter of my collection’s mischaracter and its somewho cause. But whowho? Thinking a surveyor might’ve ogled a culprit coldhanded, I went to chatter with a tree ornament hanging out the attic’s attic’s back window, where he’s been hung for a handful of his holidays. While he’s not alive to you huge-mans he’s alive enough for chatter with me and he’s got eyes painted all over our house’s shadowyard. If anything shady wasn’t his regular shady he would’ve spotted it.

After poking him with pointed question marks he relented friendly and expense-listed the cost of his watching the business outdoors, with several suspicious charges: squirrely dealings by the bird feeder, shooting star parked in a firefly zone, recyclables in the black instead of the green, no lifeguard for the falling leaves (ten acorns drowned already), and an unscheduled stop from the head of the HOA constrictor.

That finishing touch was the cause, I knews right away. The head of the HOA constrictor’s all mouth, and she kisses the front door not the shady backside. Nowhere to put venom back there, pool’s already full and Davy Jones’s acorns aren’t oaking any spoonful soon.

And nothing else my holiday helper nametagged could spread gloom and mischaracter like the HOA. The length of it spoke all through the mouth, then everything soured, my collections included. Such constricting speech makes huge-mans lose things sadder, angrier, less funnily enough. Downgrades my stash in the long tally. So the head had probably whined like a hingey rust about my house’s huge-mans and their more blatant placement of things they mislaid. When that didn’t get her what she wanted she had spyglassed right up the backside to look for violation of the constrictor code, which might bring punishments both banishing and bland to my stockyards.

Not in my pocket watch. Luckily the head didn’t live on the body; she had a house where she decapitated restoratively, right next to mine in factoid. The huge-mans of my residential couldn’t be addressed, only informed later by these inked footprints (grapeprints) so they couldn’t disorganize my collections in misguide-led property disputes. That left the whole mess kit and its instructions to me.

I mounted an expeditionary and forced my way out through the cool cat’s slam poetry door, its rhythm flapping stanzas behind as I raced unflagged into the yard’s grass-stained cheeks where I keep my decentralized collection for use in pinning my focus across the map. Landmarks by me pointed out every hairpin and curve ball to the HOA head’s house by way of:

sandboxing shovel, s’more smithereens on the rocks, overworked sparkler, ice pop lumber, an owl’s hair purse of bone, pamphlet selling Sundays, the 113th puzzle piece, dehydrated macaroni, the lonely queen of hearts, water balloons with long detonated leaks, a pen with three different colors of blood, plastic codependent monkeys hooked on each other, launched shuttlecocks from the separation racket, ouroboros tape, flightless water wings, nose plugs, one goggle and its conjoined twin, pool noodle tissue sample, SPF 150, drink umbrellas, decompressed juice boxes, croquet boulders, a hungry hole that eats the same chipmunk over and over again, a hamster’s grave (chronic cuddle syndrome, love saturated the heart), some checkers but no balancers, the even lonelier queen of chess, googly eyes googled about the aforementioned upon faces, a slide whistle, a bubble wand missing its liquid magic, pouches of silica insistent they not be stored in the mouth, loose screws stranded without their drivers, and rhinestones red, white, and blue.

By their endings I was afterwording not just near the HOA’s house, but digested in its girdling. Then up through the floorsticks. Into the heart of the matter. Huge-mans (on my wager) witness wipe and clean in there; to a Pick-Knows it’s a wastedungeon. Clean, sure, and barren too, all polish and no spit. I saw big shiny black walls, windows to scare away the light, towers of yawning imprisonment, and an allabouts policy of hospitalities closed to guests.

The HOA was about, somewhat sinister no doubt, unable to spy me any more than she could grill-mark smoke or smear her reflection. Caring and full observation, with nothing to collect all the while mind you, lectured me on where the HOA gets down to her brass tacks while recuperating from being disemdisembodied: the computing mail calculator.

I waited for the browser to clear out of history and then approached it myselfwise. If the head had a weakness it was liable for internal storage most electrical. Typing and clicking aren’t my forte, not even my pillow forte, so I had to doodled my pressings extra randomly to make anything happen between the four corners.

And I didn’t get what I wanted. Some Click-Brat showed up flat and brighty on the screen and entered us into a staring contest. You don’t knows Click-Brats either, but they’re not hard to notionize for you dumpster-brains with weekly pickups. A Click-Brat is a Pick-Knows, but only in the mail calculator and the talk-wallet. This one looked like handlebars on an ice cream sandwich, minus the crumbs, plus everloading eyes, multiplied by a negative outlook, and divided by conquered icons engraved in desktop cemetery.

Whereas we collect to right the angle of our realness, Click-Brats gave up on realness and do it to compile, hoping no huge-man can properly decompile, which gets them an overload for their trouble; the resulting heavyweight goes obsolete and gets discarded. That makes a Click-Brat safe in their impenetrable black box for much longer than a Pick-Knows could ever hope to live. I think they’re yellow-bellied newts, and I scalded him such. All he could counter-argue was his own cache of… forgive and forget my pronunciation…

coding errors, catfish communiques, dead pixels, pop-up businesses, administrator permissions, time-turning hourglasses, custom cursors, a private chat, frozen listicles in the wayback, jail-broken cards out of solitaire confinement, swept mines, three bars, death threats, unread trash, rejected but perfectly tasty cookies, maleware, risqueware, leisureware, a VPN (very personal nowhere), Trojan ponies, misinformed memes, Silicon Valley data mines, NFTs (nerdy failure traps), managed tasks, dial-uppers, incorrect autocorrections, ghosting ellipses, discreet packets, a personal shopper bot, a Nigerian prince, FAQs (faulty answer quakes), provocative thumbnails, an emptied cart, a ban-hammer, a pile of single-usernames, compromised passwords counting on their tails, and one fatal error going blue in the screen.

I couldn’t learn anymore than that, because it’s boring. A whole collection going to the wastebasket since not a degree of it rights toward realness. Me and the Click-Brat traded barbs, but not truly, like off a wire fence, since he was a dummy, a real sock puppet, who couldn’t do anything by way of air and land and see.

He didn’t tell me on one piece of his lots howsoever, one that I plainly seesawed in his open bookkeeping. So I asked. Filth, he tells me. Never seen a Click-Brat so steamed in his banks. He tells me the HOA head is always online, under the pseudo-name Cancelabra, scraping filth on her bottom lip, zipping it into files that can’t contain the bulging beauties she wants to beau.

It’s video on her demands. It’s contextual fiction. It’s role playing, but no games. Altogether, smugm, as the Click-Brat calls it out. I see the potential energy. A little tic for tac, and a bit of tow was all it would take. I offer to rid him of the smugm filthing up his repository, but he shuts me down, says there’s no port in the storm where he can do a hand-off and on with some prime realness estate such as my nosy self. Said all that smugm was at least two hand jobs.

There’s always an answer to collect; I fell off that position and searched his calculator’s imprisment for options. Well below was another computer box, much older, not turned lit since the mouse abandoned his pad. On its flat face I found a tray, something the Brat called a disk drive even though driving wheels stand instead of lay flat. Whatever. Blah blah this, bore bore that, he said the smugm could come out through there if I lit a fire in her old box. So I pushed her buttons.

The big bad boy chugged as any hog; the Click-Brat made a swift and dirty deed of push-brooming the smugm out of his collection and down to the drive. It popped open and belched steam. I had a looksy once it cleared, and it looksied like luncheon meat while whiffing like olives not to everyone’s taste. Next I extracted the floppy pink disc and ran off with it before Cancelabra could smell what was cooking, too soon for that.

Every house has its most hidden spot. You knows it, it’s the last place you’d look, duh. There, among the dark the spiders haven’t found, where the ghosts are scared to haunt, I hid the smugm. Folded it I did, into an effigy, a little meaty maiden who would spoil for attention. The resulting stink would fill the house, and then my trap was sprung.

Cancelabra would know only shame. She couldn’t very well invite the constrictor body over for any tea parties with a stink like that elephanting every room. Reconnecting to the spine of power would become so difficult that she would trouble my house and my huge-mans no more. That’s what the Pick-Knows.

I returned triumphant, retired to my collections. All their missed character quickly redeemed, proportional to my victory over Cancelabra, so total. So total, in factoid, that an expansion was in order.

The rooms opened up, breathed, spit new stuff my way. The latest additionals are a paper fortune teller, hybridized brown clay, pressed flowers, spent pistachio shells, a sugar ration, a novel’s cropped dog ears, the crusts cut off, a baker’s dozen dandruff, a jarred air hockey breath, a fuzzy sticker of some who-knows-what animal, a funny pages punchline, a rehabilitated crazy straw, a doorstop, a shoehorn, an unrequited valentine, a whisker for each of the cat’s lives, the lost flavor of the gum under the coffee table (righteous raz-cherry), runs from the rug, ticket stubs, farmhand ants, a fidget helm, detergent pods…