Mrs. Shadow Interviews Betty Boop

By Paul Enea

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I often hear the city vanish in my sleep. Traffic and chatter and raptor cry whisked into a slithering breeze. I’m left standing in a blank space, watching two stick-figures beat each other until both are a pile of sticks. I step back and sink into an inkblot. The briny fume of a squid fills my mind. When I wake, my landlord is breathing behind an eyehole in a portrait of Ma. When I worked as a French poodle, every meaningful sentiment that went unsaid was loose in the world like fireflies or fleas. I had a child before I passed as human. 

Fearless Fred spoke bushido in her sleep. “I’m already dead,” she’d shout, which made me panic and slap her awake. The longer she’s gone, the more vivid she becomes. Bimbo plucked my nerves as if he was fingerpicking a banjo alone in a forest. The sorrow-forming force of his private voice could shatter a sequoia. A lifetime of handling pigeons in place of displaced people and I still want to break my hands. Muscle memory steers me off the rooftop. Every time I fall my body changes her mind. Boop-oop-a-doop. I admire the way animators used to be animators—wild, always on the cusp of evil or epiphany. They assured me my autograph was unnecessary. They fucked me, then unfucked me. The same stark gaze from them all, as if making art is like staring down the moon.  

Ma liked to say negative space is in the eye of the beholder. More grift than grit, Pa would sooner do the jig than shed a tear. When I was an impostor judge, I sentenced slumlords to death by train. Gagged and chained to the tracks, their muffled screams resembled yodeling loons. Afterward, the court served sauerbraten to the crowd. In those days, making good memories was more important than surviving tomorrow. 

Olive Oyl was a better friend to me than I was to her. She’d lose sleep, worried I was missing or angry. She’d endure frigid mornings on the bluff, scanning the horizon for the ideal billow of light and vapor. Her watercolors combine seasickness with wonder in every dab of brush. Brutus was allergic to everyone except Popeye, who was allergic to himself. When I sleepwalk along the shore with Swee’Pea, we’re searching for a permanent radius between ourselves and nothing.

While walking in Al Smith’s shoes, I served as Night Superintendent of the Central Park Menagerie. I’d stroll from cage to cage and talk with any animal in need of a good listener. Big cats complained about tame food while elephants declined to speak. I assumed they read minds by virtue of their barrel-chested brains. Especially Jumbo. He locked eyes like Houdini. I suspect he hypnotized me. When I set him free, he let out a trumpet call that boomed beyond the skyline. His nightmare stampede across the Brooklyn Bridge cost me my job at the zoo. I still can’t tell the difference between parades and riots. 

Once a year, I snap the neck of a swan to pay Leda proper homage. Before I could hold a tune of my own, I invented a mechanical hand that squeezed the song from the beaks of canaries into a star-making elixir. I miss open windows, the seared-tenderloin aroma of the universe wafting through the flat. I often confuse the coeval thoughts of loved ones, dead or alive, with my own.  

Despite his allergies, Popeye put together the most thoughtful picnics. He’d pack honey cakes for Ma, ribs of lamb for Olive, opium for Brutus, spinach for Swee’Pea, and a banjo wrestled from God for Bimbo. 

Losing the last person who loves you is a backward mutation no creature should undergo. You end up formless. You think in a language you cannot speak and dream in a tongue you do not understand. The squid in me seeks a crevice, shelter from the thermals. 

Otherwise, no. I never met Chaplin.

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