There Not There

(A cock-robin pushed across the crossways, head bobbing, its tiny legs ribbed with veins. It kicked across the sideways across from the Waymart across from the aqueduct across from the Jewish bakery). ‘This thought’, thought the man in the hat ‘is silly, silly indeed’. ‘I haven’t seen hide nor hair of a cock-robin in well near 27½ years, so seeing one now seems, well, strange, strange indeed’. Sometimes the man in the hat saw birds, cock-robins and moorhens, quails and wrens, camels with three or more humps that weren’t there, weren’t there at all. They were there, there in his head, in his thoughts, yes, but not there, not really there.