Grade a Girl*

On a break from her secretary job, Pince climbed the hill behind her office. She saw a tall cedar tree with a million silver and gold paperclips and keys hanging from its branches. She stuck her granola bar in her back pocket and began to climb.

Up through the limbs, into the smell of closets and boxes of secrets and forgotten memories, each bough rustling and chiming as she pulled herself up. She looked at the forest spreading out before her. The cherry trees had blossoms of carbon copy paper, there were spruce trees of staples, and in the corn field beyond black binder crows were pecking at the stalks with their three ring toes.

"Would you believe they're only ten days old?"

Pince looked around and found a six foot tall squirrel on a branch near her. "Who's only ten days old?"

"Why those crows! They're born full of papers called spreadsheets but they molt them on day three and what a boring mess it makes. Luckily it's good mulch for the roses."

"Oh!" gasped Pince for she now noticed the rows of roses beneath the trees. They were the varying shades of a legal pad, something she found rather mournful.

"Are you a wall or a door?" asked the squirrel.

"What?"

"Are you a wall or a door?"

"I'm neither! I'm...a lady. A human. A human lady."

"That's not helpful. If you were a wall we could build a silver castle and if you were a door we'd at least know to box you up in some of this cedar, but a human lady? What do you do with one of those?"

"Listen, Do you have any paint?"

"Paint!" huffed the squirrel, "I'm trying to learn what to do with you and you ask about paint! I've only got red, I recently moved from a redwood forest to a staple spruce over yonder and I missed the red grain...only, painting it doesn't work. I've ten cans just sitting, collecting dust."

"I know what to do!"

So the squirrel and Pince hauled out the pails of paint into the midst of the rose bushes. Pince pried open a pail with a petrified business envelope Squirrel found.

"We're painting the roses red," sang Pince softly and she giggled. "We're painting the roses red!" she sang out.

"We're painting the roses red!" repeated Squirrel.





*There's a band, The HiFis, I just found which seems for all I can muster to be a largely forgotten Brit pop/psych group from the 60s which released only one LP, Snakes and HiFis. There's a song about "a grade A secretary" but for some reason the title is written just like this: "Grade a Girl," which seems a bit different don't you think? I listen to the song a lot although I'm nothing like the secretary in the song. My job description is to field questions I to which I never know the answer.