There was a hoopless barrel that threatened to open like a fan at the merest whim of wind.  The fenced yard also contained disused items of machinery: mutant toasters becoming mangled back into shape; gas stoves as hutches for robot rabbits; fridges beckoning with mouldy tongues; once crashed computers now come back to life without operators, without even the electricity to have booted them up.  

This was the yard of lost hope in having regained it.  If a scrapyard could itself be derelict, this was it.  Damage unlimitation.  Detritus squared by it own will to live, to live again. Dogmuck cubed. Rubbish re-rubbished by glimmerings of unintended re-use.

A man entered the yard: chief scavenger of hopeless hope. 

“Eeeh, this is growin’ messier, I hoop it bleedin’rains,” he muttered to himself, tucking hankies back into pocket-areas of his garb that he had forgotten he had areas in.  His face was grizzled with (as he put it): “cooping with fings.”  His lot in life was a ‘boot’ on solid metal seas.  He was happy and rich, by being neither.

The rain, for which he ‘hooped’, would acid-lick the rusty roots of the yard’s gantries, and keep the dogs happy.  Dog-tongues were dry-cleaning devices; dog-tongues also scared off the pesky kids, but the dogs themselves unfortunately gnawed the gantry roots and even carved teeth-marks into the finest regrowth of fridge or dish-washer.  A mixed blessing – dogs.  A mixed blessing, too – kids.  Kids had the ability to tempt and shape the stretching metal stanchions of the new machines that nobody had ever seen before.  New but dirty.

But not all dirt was filth.  The man prided himself on living with himself, despite himself.  He picked up a loose hoop and fitted it back around the near-ruined barrel.  With rain often came wind.  And wind was the direst element of all.  He’d pooped himself.  The Pontiff of the Yard.

Grinning, grinding detritus became a giant face as part of the google-configured yard, watching him grub around in his own back pocket.  A mixed blessing – hoopless men like him.  Men who opened like a fan at the focused whim of their own ability to fertilise.