Peter Sparks drove to Mexico to film his grandmother praying at the volcano. She died 79 miles south of the border. How expensive it would be to get her embalmed and shipped home; instead, Peter chose driving back across the border with her propped beside him, asleep to Customs. He continued toward California where he knew he had another border check, this time for fruit. In the desert a sickening sweetness flowered and forced Peter to call his mother for advice. Put her in the trunk and find a town to get her pickled. (He should have called his father.) The mortician went to examine the body in the trunk, but the Mercedes was gone--granny, trunk--everything gone.

So Muriel is riding a storm of soap and squeegees, drowning screams of joy. A duck and a bleached Santa ride a china slipper through a gravel lawn. A man with a goatee jogs around a house wrapped in a red bag. A boy serves a tennis ball on a rubber band and it returns. A woman waters her lawn and waits. At a palm on San Vicente Prince Valiant plays harp to a woman holding tinfoil. Lucky Bacchus told Chester Godfrey that D.W. Griffith discovered indirect light of reflection by accident. An ice cream truck plinks.



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