SMILEY

I never told de la Fe. I unbuttoned my shirt, shaking it until all the bits of sky were emptied from its pockets. At night, from my porch I could see the gap in the sky. The unpatched hole, twinkling as the light from Saturn's bedroom was turned on and off.

"Smiley, do you think Saturn is gone?" Froggy asked.

"It is just sad," I said.

"Planets cannot be sad," he said.

"What about Pluto?" I asked.

"Yes, but that is a very small planet."

Froggy was of the belief, grounded in ancient philosophy, that after a certain amount of accumulated mass, sadness ends. And so he cited:

Saint Nicholas

Don Ho

Winston Churchill

Sir John Falstaff

All fat and jolly people. Though jolliness was the saddest form of happiness, it was a happiness nonetheless.

But Froggy did not mention the nights when Don Ho wept on Hawaiian sands, not rising until long after the tiki lamps had been extinguished. or the hours Saint Nicholas spent pulling splinters from his fingers and sniffing turpentine. He never even mentioned the sadness of the Elder Elvis. Or the saddest of them all: Don Francisco, always tangled in velvet with hired women while commercial jingles played in the background, ditties for soap and mops. The women were not the prettiest, but they all resembled his first love, and he asked them if they would not mind very much if he could call them "Porfedia."

from The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia, p. 151