Groucho Marx's Mango Eye
by Tom Dvorske
Someone painted a face on the side of the second-hand toaster, fashioned in the image of Groucho Marx. They colored his glasses a dark green, and his moustache-and all the rest of his face-a bright, cherry red. They'd pasted a sticker for one of his eyes, the kind you find on a mango in the produce section of a large supermarket where fruits and vegetables from all over the world are flown in. We can suppose the painter a painter executing frustration. Perhaps a housewife bored with painting her nails. Or her young boy, for whom consequences are an inchoate rumor. But before I can explain the basis for these suppositions, she blurts, "Throw out that ugly thing?" All my dishes are separated from hers and crammed into one box. I can fit no more. "All right," I say. "But let me get the hammer." I bring down the hammer, metal on metal, shattering the plastic frame inside the toaster. Once I helped a turtle cross the highway but it had already been hit. Its shell was cracked in two places, blood welled up from the cleaves. At the Vet-med clinic, the orderly told me they'd probably have to put it down, but thanked me for the experience. I felt good about what I'd done. After I'd hammered the toaster nearly a dozen times, she implored me to stop. I was surprised at the number of tiny metal parts inside my toaster. I picked up what I could of the remains and dropped them in a trashcan on top of a set of broken dinnerware. Weeks after she'd moved out, I returned to the house to clean up the mess she'd left for me. There in the lawn stared the mango eye of Groucho Marx.
Tom Dvorske's work has appeared in Texas Review, Puerto del Sol, Spork, Terminus, Louisville Review, and other places. His chapbook "What You Know" was winner of the 2002 Taras Schevchenko Award for Writing and published by Lazy Frog Press. He's been a finalist for the University of Utah Poetry Prize and keeps hanging in there. He currently teaches English at the University of West Georgia.