Life Talk With Craig Lounsbrough

Darren and a cheap plastic fish; it was a dollar store bin filler indelibly stamped with “made in China” that bordered on being junk.  There were numerous needs in Darren’s life, so numerous that he himself was lost in them.  They were pathetic and endless, so it seemed anyway. A plastic fish was little more than a cheap toy that momentarily anesthetized a child-like mind trapped in the deterioration of a thirty-five year old body.  It was a mere trinket, a point of focus upon which to forget the realities that had bent him and ultimately broken him.  It served as a pathetic distraction from all that had cut thick furrows across his head and heart far too early and far too prematurely.  It was a cheap, plastic fish. The years had stooped his gait and lined his hair with ever lighter shades of premature gray, cutting deep fissures across his brow and thickening young skin.  His gait had been reduced to a shallow shuffle, dragging thick shoes across coarse pavement.  He wore the soles thin on the outsides edges