today's progress: pretend you're innocent

Kubert piled the contents of Aesop’s drawer on top of the desk: bottle caps from Mexican sodas; a thick stack of bus transfers held together with a rubber band; two worn John D. MacDonald paperbacks (A Tan and Sandy Silence and The Green Ripper), each with a bus transfer sticking out of the top, no more than 25 pages in on either one; a 75g bag of Creamy Dill chips; a flip phone in two pieces; a cartoonish map of downtown Vancouver sponsored by a less-famous hot dog cart; a creased print-out of Charles Willeford’s letter to his nephew on the importance of owning books by Kafka in college; a type-written letter from the pseudonymous mystery novelist K.C. Constantine, still in its original envelope, postmarked two years earlier; an opened bag of Hawkins Cheezies; a plane ticket from YQR to YVR, dated August, 2006; a Moleskine notebook filled with grocery lists and amateurish sketches of Batman, mostly in profile; a veritable wreath of USB cords; the March, 2009 issue of The Walrus; Geist 76, folded open to a George Bowering piece called “Still a Writer”; a pack of eight AA batteries with one removed; a receipt from Nuba; a cheap spiral-bound notebook filled with grocery lists and amateurish sketches of Green Lantern, mostly in flight; a pen and pencil set bearing the logo of a Saskatchewan daily newspaper; take-out menus from a pizza place, a Vietnamese place, and a sushi place; and finally, a dot-matrix printout bearing the seal of the Instituto de Aprendizaje Hijos del Peublo declaring, in Spanish, the completion by Aesop Mosley of Estudios del Investigador Privado, dated January 23rd of this year.
“Whadda ya know?” Kubert said, folded the diploma several times and then tucked it away in that enigmatic inside pocket of his 80s cop show sports coat.