MOOSE STORY

I hit a moose one day. There it was standing on the side of the Interstate 405 trying to hitch a ride and I hit it. I didn't mean to. I was actually going to give it a lift, but it was such a big animal that when I pulled over I ran it down before even realising it had gotten close.

I mean, this was a big moose. And I was driving a big truck. Five trailers with twenty-four wheels each. I mean a big truck. I had to sit on books to reach the driver's wheel which anyways was too big for me to turn, so I used ropes tied to the wheel to turn it.

Things are big all over Texas. The sun is so big and hot that it fills up half the sky, and there is not enough room for all the clouds, and you bump into them as you drive along the highway.

That also may have been why I did not see the moose. Too many clouds, the sun, this big moon hanging around with its cratery face in the way, dropping moon dust into my oil barrel full of coffee. It takes me a week to finish that coffee, but that's okay because with the distances here, it takes an entire month to drive one mile. Big place Texas.

But I like it. I smiled a smile so big that its ends stretched right around my head and met at the back. It was tough hitting that moose. I stopped smiling for a moment to watch it bounce around the Texas landscape. Big, big bounces, each one taking it higher and higher, until that moose went past the face of the moon, and in fact went right over it.

This is where you get the nursery rhyme of the moose jumping over the moon. Moose come from the moon, originally, which is where they get the name moose, like people from Ontario being called Ontarians. It's the same thing. Great herds of moose move across the moon, mooing and mooning, sharpening their antlers on stray meteorites.

My moose instead went over the moon, which is a new move for a moose, but like I said it was a big Texas moose and a big Texas moon and they were so big they couldn't avoid running into each other some time, just like I ran into the moose with my big one hundred-and-twenty-wheeler truck (did I say it was that big? It was big truck).

And so the moose got back to the moon and I got back to my journey, trying to figure out a way of steering the truck and drinking my coffee without falling into the barrel.