Albert Grey was a Pretzel-stick. Much as I want you to like him, I can't lie to you about who Al was. I don't want to deceive you on that point. He was a true-to-life, hits-close-to-home, close-as-you-can-get-to-a-hundred per cent Pretzel-stick and he always stood upright against his front stoop, one leg bent behind the other, a cigar in his hand, up where he lived, below the icy Canadian states.
Now if you were to call an Atlanta man a Pretzel-stick he will more than likely snap you like one. If you call a Raleigh man a Pretzel-stick more often than not he'll give you a smile and ask you if you can spare a nickel for the dusty juke box in the corner. But the place from which this particular Pretzel-stick sprouted is somewhere in between the two-- a little town between two bigger towns that has sat with its eyes half open for a hundred years or so in Traveler's Rest, sometimes shifting in its rocking chair and murmuring something about a limb thats fallen asleep and the blazin' heat that seems hotter than yesterday. It is in this town, one that was named for rest and where the people barely rest from resting, that my protagonist hails from.
Al was born in the trailer on the far side of a big barren lot. It had a mailbox out front, with shells that had been glued to it years ago when his father had taken him out to the sea as a boy. Years ago, this land had been paved and busy, the parking lot of a Wal-Mart but that was so long ago that no one remembered it as they drove past, on their way to the new store in Greenville. But after the concrete was broken up and the grass grew in, Al's mother moved in, raising him within those aluminum walls.
He became thirteen, finished middle-school, wore his hair short, and was afraid of girls. He hated his home where the grass grew high around his front steps and the heat was unbearable as it rose in tiny waves from off the ground, strangling even the earthworms who wriggled free from the dry cracking earth. Sometimes some of the parents of the children in town offered to give him a ride home but it always pained him to direct them into the long broken concrete driveway of the old Wal-Mart, down to where his house sat, slightly slanted into the creek behind it. So he stood instead in that interminable heat waiting for the big green bus to take him home. Occasionally he was even invited to the birthday parties of other children but he found himself with a stomachache whenever he ate birthday cake. After the forth birthday party spoiled by his uneasy stomach, Al spent his weekends teaching himself to identify the constellations, spending every night in an old lawn chair, gazing upwards, letting the sky engulf him.
He became eighteen. The University of Charleston established an astrophysics program and Al applied, finding himself accepted. Fully paid for by the government which had always given his mother so little, he studied hard and well until he found himself an educated man.
After his graduation he came home. He was twenty-one, his small glasses cutting deep red lines into his large face and his suits too small, the buttons constantly sliding from out of their button holes. His tie was an alarming hybrid of glittering satellites and glowing stars, the milky way smearing its way from his bellybutton towards his head in what looked like a yellow-white stain.
In the twilight of one warm April evening after the sun had disappeared over the tallest trees and the day's heat had made everything in the town warm to the touch, he was a plump figure leaning against the shell-covered mailbox, whistling and gazing to the familiar stars above him, recognizing Hydra with her long body snaking across the sky. His mind was working persistently on a problem that had held his attention for an hour. The Pretzel-stick had been invited to a party.
