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During one of the occasional "What is Art?" threads that crop up on Michael Seidman's "Ask the Editor" board on AOL, one of the participants mentioned that she could really see the main characters from my novels batting the question around.
Not having enough readers that I can afford to disappoint any, I went and wrote it.
"I," Robert Goldstein declared, "am a genius."
A wayward Pacific breeze filtered through the open front door and ruffled a torn paper fringe on the object he was looking at. The object was on the table in front of him. The table was carefully protected with open newspapers.
Martin paused in the application of a starch-soaked strip of classified ads to a tiny balloon. Another balloon, already papier-mached, sat on the table like an eyeball, which is what it was eventually going to be. The empty sockets of a horned minotaur head made of coathanger wire and car dealership ads stared blindly and damply toward the kitchen. "Okay, I'll bite," Martin said. "What is it?"
Robert answered by pointing at it.
"Genius," he whispered, awestruck.
Jason was making a sort of streamlined thing, with a ridge, but he didn't know yet what it was going to be. Maybe a fish. He glanced at Robert's and saw about what he expected to. "While it's true," he said, "that you are a genius, that—" His fingers were starchy, so he indicated the object with his chin. "That is a blob."
"Yes," Robert whispered, flaring his nostrils. "A blob of genius!" He pointed first at Martin's project, then Jason's, then his own. "Monster head; flat football or something; genius."
Martin rolled his eyes at Jason and drew another strip of newspaper through the bowl of bluish laundry starch.
"See?" Robert said. He picked up the object so that it could be properly admired. One of the lumps fell off.
"You know," Martin said, stripping excess starch back into the bowl, "if you put four legs on it, and a tail and a head, it could be some kind of animal. And took off those . . . things."
Robert held it up next to his head and considered it. "It's not an animal."
Jason said, "Or it could be a rocket if you sort of squished it up into a tube and put engines on the bottom. And made it pointy on top."
"And took off those things," Martin agreed.
"It's not a rocket. It's not anything."
"Neither is mine," Jason observed. He'd stuck fins on it and didn't like them, so he didn't think it was a fish. The newspaper hadn't dried yet, so he tried bending it. That was sort of interesting. He reached for another strip.
"Well, mine's a minotaur." Martin put down the soggy ur-eyeball and squinted at the head. "It's missing something."
Jason looked at it. "Nose ring," he said finally.
"Yeah! Where's the rest of the coathanger?"
"In Robert's genius."
"Genius!" Robert shouted. Martin went into Robert's room to get another coathanger. Jason figured his might be a bird.