skit #32: bees, bees, bees

Over nineteen months, all the swarms disbanded. Not just the wild bees, apiaries too. No more honey, true. More importantly, flowers went unfertilized. Bluebells with blueballs died chaste and childless. Honeysuckles pined for the pollen-dusted thighs of their once-mistresses. O! for one last tryst, the chrysanthemums lamented, with those three-bulged hourglasses looped in bangles of gold and black. But the obtuse love rhombus between drone, anther, queen, and pistil had collapsed abruptly and irrecoverably.

The flowers drooped, stems limp, petals flaccid. What once bloomed now withered, aged, and died. The world paled to a monochromatic dystopia. Holiday commerce could not subsist on greeting cards and bonbons alone. Animosity between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and others, all these relationships stoked a conflagration. When misfortune knocked on the cardboard door of modern love, the artifical mise en scene was exposed, then the whole illusion our civilization collapsed. Something was clearly absent.

We tried everything to get them back. Developed pesticides to kill the bee mites, waging genocide. We terminated all the cell phone networks, left to antediluvian landlines and emails. We replanted the blossoms we thought they found so irresistable, but nary a buzz was roused.

We take some comfort that they perhaps found an elm branch to hang their hive over a daised hillock off yonder, a place for their stingers and honey both.

skit #31: another's or perhaps many others'

Another lives in your relinquished home. Some gyrating, caterwauling, avant garde troupe acts in the theatre you so gently graced. Some ambitious junta seizes the dying king's palace, disposing of the vassalage, raping all the maidens. Your stage, your castle! Landmarks fit only for preservation, not residence.

Innocent espionage reveals new blinds, new wallpaper, new toilet seat cozies, new potpourri recommended by a vastly overpaid interior decorator. The new tenants bear vile habits: tobacco stains the ceiling you were conceived in; auspices lay in the cast turkey bones littered about the kitchen floor; the bathroom smells like another's, or perhaps many others', excretions.

Afterwards, you understand your curious and uninvited company. The interlopers rifling through your rubbish, rapeling in through your sky light, squeaking the floorboards with melancholy reminiscense. You understand their look of betrayal, their look of entitlement. You, after all, live in another's relinquished home. Sometimes, you'll awkwardly greet one another, remark on the weather.

Among your stains, your bones, your smells, you realize you don't know your habits, only how others differ. All the ways in which you have never lived in your home, others have and will. You relinquish the house (which you have suddenly determined to be intolerably small) like a hermit crab does a shell.

The larger-than-the-smaller house evokes the same motions of memories, the migration patterns of caribou, the spawning pools full of fertilized roe and expired salmon, the unrest of ephemera. You sense another has lived here before you, and certain someone will afterwards, but that never one will during.

skit #30: the boy could remedy that

An unsteady flame drank the oil of an unwitting whale. Black followed the whiskers of the boy's brush, a shape labeled both Abyssinia and Junglelands. He mapped borders from his father's notes, whose pith helmet saddled the boy down to his chin. His father's notes documented very few roads, but the boy could remedy that. The boy improvised capillaries for the heart of darkness.

The night, the flickering, and his Abyssinia had him baying feral serenades to his dusk-cloaked baboon troop to return him to wilderness. All baboons can tell a boy from one of their own. He loosed long and lonely yowls of no effect, no response.

His father returned, sternly plucking his helmet off his son. The son watched his father pencil in the homestead where mother lived, far away from the teeth of cannibals and baboons. The boy painted a red line from Junglelands to Mama.

'Oh, no, boy. She must stay in Harar with grandma and Isabelle. What have you done?'

The father shook his head as he noticed the revisions his son inserted into the notes. It was all edited with black and red paint: nineteen months of accumulated trade routes, botanical sketches, big game surveys, village censes, weather patterns; nineteen months of distances, inclines, infections, parasites, heartache, agnosticism. The boy had excised anything that separated Junglelands from Mama.

The father turned and saw no one. Twilight dimmed with the boy's lonely yowls and pattering paw steps.

skit #29: right hand goes on the hip

She never lands her double axel, but she looks oh so heavenly in sequins. You could never mention this to her because she'd find another partner to catch her. After practice, a furtive angle cast off your skate blade lets you see up her feathered skirt again. You nervously fumble with your laces when she inquires why your boot is so slow to be shed.

You dropped her earlier today. She spilled like petty change. And all because you thought she wouldn't notice. Oh, but she definitely noticed your hand. You both know right hand goes on the hip. She can barely land an axel as it is, forget off a half-handed throw. You gambled her grace against your lechery.

Instantaneous, maybe. But inexcusably deliberate. The hand never goes there. Then the audacity to attempt the throw with the chaste hand, as to boast your depravity had no technical impact. She pirouetted in tight spirals, each revolution telegraphing her aghast reaction: You. Are. A. Filthy. Filthy. Man.

Her ankle bent all wrong. Her taut scowl dissipated as her body crumpled like snipped marionette. Her face did not merely brush the ice like you think. You gave her a concussion. A concussion. That's why those evasive eyes that must lust for you grew dim. That's why those supple lips her husband pecks held tight. That's why she never once mentioned where your hand was that day. She was sprawled out on the floor, all heavenly in sequins. You looked up her feathered skirt again.

You help her off the rink. She asks to call her husband. After glib attempts to convince her you are he, you reconcile yourself that she's sadly free of amnesia. You insist she rest and recuperate, then shamelessly schedule to meet the next week -- same time, same day, same routine.

skit #28: plopped

All four hundred cadets obediently sat themselves in the lecture hall, not a querulous peep of the foul sweat such heat brings. Cadet Shellings and Cadet Carolli relayed nervous pheromones back and forth and back, lucid even over the noisome traffic of male stink. Midshipman Voght, a boy perhaps a year older than his students, mounted the podium to commence instruction.

The semaphore alphabet was reviewed twice with the cadets before Voght wrote phrases on the board: class, cadet, learn, navy. The cadets' flags waved wildly, saying nothing. Voght continued: humid, stink, zoo, toilet. The astute students' snickering crescendoed as they progressed through the signals. A sly grin curled across the instructor's unmustachable lip as he conducted his crass opera.

After projecting a brief slideshow of the history of semaphore, Midshipman Voght convincingly emphasized its relevance in today's modern Navy. Cadets were dismissed after flagging a few letters of Voght's choosing. Four hundred of four hundred cadets bore certifiable proficiency in semaphore, Cadet Shellings and Cadet Carolli included.

Time proved Midshipman Voght correct. The radio was unresponsive, the fuel reserves dwindled, and the jet was approaching the aircraft carrier runway out of desperation. Ensign Shellings flagged hazily-recalled semaphores to the incoming pilot, his still-handsome Naval Aviator Carolli. They both got it all wrong. The jet hooked, skidded, whipped, and plopped as though the ocean was the intended destination.

Ensign Shellings suffered insomnia for years after the accident. The clock face would speak slowly, sometimes over days. How intently he watched: 1215, 1500, 0315, 0445, 0930, 1745, longer, longer, longer. The hour and minute hands spelled endless and unknown words, never seeming to answer Shellings' questions: of flags, of boys, of stink, of semaphore.

skit #27: sculpted heroes past

Three men occupied the bench, old men, three very old men. Slack lips, slack faces. On the fronts of their heads stretched innocent masks. Innocent like monkeys or children. Never directly asserting ownership, they sat on their bench. Best damned bench on that cement sliver of Cowler Ave if you asked Eddy.

And if you didn't ask, he'd tell you anyways. Some bout of senility or lifelong abrasiveness vested him in cobalt-and-mustard plaid, matching only his discordant harping. Eddy would go on about anything: overripe produce stalls, carbon monoxide, dihydrogen monoxide, inflation, deflation, reflation. Any transient he noticed eavesdropping would soon be railed. Luther thought of him more of a talker than a fighter. As vocally vehement as physically feeble.

Eddy began yammering. This never fazed Mortimer, but little did. Mortimer was born jaded. Age served only to erode any cynicism that may lodge in optimism's absence. This left him with nothing more than a stern face and matters of fact to state.

Luther just about never spoke.

The morning sun of ten AM fueled Eddy's reptilian manners. The wiry cannibal preyed on lonely old men without old men of their own. They walked down the sidewalk, too timid, invisible to the youth of the streets. Eddy unleashed foul salvos of insults with the same tongue and lips that spoke gently to his granddaughters and his dead wife.

It was territorial, not personal. To celebrate the defense of their bench, the three old codgers gentlemanly lit each others' cigarettes. Just like when they were sixteen. Pigeons pecked at the feet of sculpted heroes past.

Mortimer piped up, 'Three of em this time,' pointing across the street. Eddy, Mortimer, and Luther rise. 'Intimidating like lambs,' Eddy scoffed. An unintelligible yet clearly hostile exchange of remarks was garbled over the din of interceding traffic. Luther fumed.

Luther muttered his token words before the rumble, as he always did. Mortimer and Eddy knew it was time to brawl. The feud plateaued at a simmer. Luther lead the assault, chucking his chair at their smug chins. The glass shattered and their foes vanished.

The three old men abandoned their corner, for there were other cafes to commandeer.

skit #26: polysomethings

Chester was no good with words. He was no good at milking the divine machine for miracles, no good at composing epics or operas, held no hope of postulating a plausible grand unification theory. But foremost, Chester never thunk a thought in the terms of words. Well, there certainly exist psalms and rhapsodies and proofs to be composed as Chester would, had he the skill, or approximated in the spirit of Chester by translators. So here is one such transcription of his ineffable thoughts:

The boss says he hasn't seen an eye quite like mine in his twenty years leading the Plastic sorting team. "Sure as hell better than those robotic sensors." Polystyrene, 06. Polyvinyl, 03. Polyethylene -- well, depends -- 01, 02, or 04. I can spot a recycling code fifty feet away. He calls me 'The Judge', says if I keep it up he'll get me a powdered wig and a gavel. He's right. I destroy that which cannot be recycled. So many polysomethings are culled at my whim, sentenced to burial in the landfill, never to feel a consumer's sweet caress.

I'm hoping one day I'll be with Glass. The boss loses all his favorites to Glass. My days spent wallowing waist-deep in packing peanuts, egg cartons, milk jugs; the squeaking-squirking friction; the incontestible correctness of chemical composition categorizations. Working in Plastic is a menial existence.

But Glass! That angelic tintinnabulation of cullet! The way the world is distorted by contour, by tint, by volume, by opacity! No concept of disposal haunts the Glass crew. Bottles are resurrected by recirculation, reincarnated in the melting furnace.

This is all something like poetry. There's no way, though. No way of spelling out the beauty of things. Why, no use in it. What do those words make? All the glass borrowed by us frail tenants will eventually be returned to the earth. But the plastic is contrived and will never rot. Where do words die?

Maybe there is my counterpart, a Lester. A Lester who could speak his thoughts, knows nothing of glasses and plastics, of borrowing and returning. He will have his gerunds, his phonemes, his motifs. He may fumble juggled quips, littering words which biodegrade. We, two complements, could really say something.

Perhaps Chester and his complement (and perhaps Lester and his complement) could return a little glass of their own.

skit #25: no ghost town he knew

Dense snowfall suffocated Chicago. Anything rustling was suppressed with weight. Anything chromatic was simplified to pure white. Anything keen was dulled with pillowtops. Chicago became still, not light.

The break room always had donuts and bogwater coffee. Corey Lewson nibbled at a powdered raspberry-filled. The foremen at Fisk Power Plant dismissed Corey's department around 11:00 am due to a melange of mishaps (fallen powerlines in fourteen distribution grids, broken down service trucks, marooned chief engineers), though no one left.

No one could leave. They were indiscriminately snowed in. The storm did not surgically exempt Fisk Power Plant workers from its mayhem, Corey conceded. Some of the switchboard operators slept in chairs, most stood around ruing they had come to work at all that day, muttering words like purgatory and and whodafiggered and ironic. There was nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. Corey snagged the last chocolate-on-chocolate and took seat by the window.

The flue stacks coughed coal soot into the face of winter. With all those distribution grids disabled, Corey didn't know what use the energy was. Streetlamps tinted distant snow antique colors in stale sepias. It all looked old to Corey. He wondered how long those streetlamps stood and would stand. Or Fisk Power Plant, for that matter. Umbilical power lines stretched deep into the blizzard, feeding the dim apparition of no ghost town he knew.

A flurry granted momentary clarity. He saw two of the service trucks wheel into the parking lot, who knows by what serendipity. Men in gray coveralls disembarked to clumsily march through waist-deep depths. Straining, Corey lost track of their movements, their footprints, their trucks, their presence, their names. He never heard the doors open, just prattling and snoring.

Everything just looked white again. He ate one with rainbow sprinkles. The road would have to thaw eventually.

skit #24: the miracle of life

Five rubber-gloved fingers end the limb of something without hooves. They courteously dock the Bull's member in a rubber sleeve. The Bull -- sire to millions of calves, the Creator, virility incarnate -- snorts rowdily as he ejaculates into a receptacle, unaware the counterfeit is neither bovine nor vaginal. The sentiment of his passion is frozen mid-flagellation, the sperms seized in lipoproteins like gnats in amber.

Five rubber-gloved fingers end the limb of something without hooves. They insert the insemination straw. It sings inside her like a sonnet. Sloughing their torpor, the sperms thaw and resume wriggling. By faith, they have been delivered to the receptacle of original promise. She somehow knows he is out there; She knows how he smells, how his haunches hang, how he moos.

Her stall walls holds her at night. Four cold metal arms hug her four tired legs and four empty stomachs. Her unbutchered flanks hug her uterus. Inside four more tiny legs and four more tiny stomachs, the love Calf of an anonymous Bull she never met.

Five rubber-gloved fingers end the limb of something without hooves. Nozzles siphon milk from her gorged udder as the machine's engine chugs hungrily. She remains docile as she's drained, nourishing innumerable and anonymous Calves. All who drink from Mother's teat are her children. She is poured in babies' bottles, on children's cereals, in senators' lattes, in her Calf's growth formula.

She knows the touch of five rubber-gloved fingers. She knows the embrace of her stall walls. She knows the prick of the insemination straw. The Mother of so much does not know how flesh feels warm.

skit #23: yellow pansies

My brand new shoes are covered in bug guts, brand new Ferragamo loafers. When I go to call the exterminator, my grandfather says, 'No, no, no. Those are Callippe Silverspots. They'll turn to butterflies.'

He was an entomologist for sixty years. After eight or so gins, he'll regretfully admit to breeding belligerence into the West African Killer Bees as weaponry during the War to End All Wars. But in the same breath he'll recognize my marriage, so who knows whether the coot gives a damn about insects.

He alleges the caterpillars are after the yellow pansies in my garden. He can't tell me why they don't care for the tricolors or the magnolias. 'Maybe they just don't like the taste,' the hypocrite supposes.

My driveway rests under a blanket of writhing legs and legs and legs and thoraces and legs and legs. I tip-toe through the orgy Nature conducts, nonjudgemental with etiquette. When I tell him this, my grandfather reminds that larvae are sexually immature, that mating is impossible.

All the pansies have been stripped of flesh. They'll outlive the winter only by digestion by caterpillars, as baby fat and love handles and spare tires. My flowers skeletoned, I doubt my husband will plant more next year. I wonder what will they eat then.

It's begun to snow. Frozen, most of them curl mortally on the cement like misplaced commas. 'None of them formed cocoons,' wondered grandfather. He had me out there with egg cartons, nestling to safety one caterpillar per cup.

It's been a couple of years now. No new caterpillars. The pansy stalks have long withered with no replacements planted. The Callippe Silverspots are so fat they're spherical, like marbles. All of my husband's attempts to contact an exterminator are thwarted by grandfather's guile: hiding the larvae, histrionic distractions, snipping phone lines, whatever it takes. 'They'll turn to butterflies. They'll change.' he repeats.

skit #22: it's more complex than that

Daddy gloated all night of how he weaseled the tickets away from Sedgewick for a mere twenty bucks. Mommy had placated him too subtly and eventually had to interrupt, "Maybe Dad would like to teach Pauly about the rules. Right, Dad?"

Nodding, Daddy deepened his voice to indicate profundity. "Son, are you ready for your first baseball game? Did you learn how to play at school? A little baseball?"

"No, Daddy."

"No? See, what in the hell are they teaching him, Sandra? Sure as hell isn't math or hygiene. Not even baseball. Kindergarbage." Mommy glowered and gritted, quickly steering Daddy back to topic. "Well, Pauly, there are two teams. Whoever gets the most points wins. Now one team throws the ball and the other team hits the ball with a bat. Well, it's more complex than that. But our boys are going to win, no doubt. I have forty bucks riding on it with Turner."

"Daddy, who are our boys?"

"We're the boys in red. We're at bat. Just pay attention."

"Oh."

War chants and merchandise named the boys in red as the Wassleberg Privateers. Pauly watched the screen rather than the stadium. The colors were brighter. The people were bigger.

He watched a batter tousle the waterboy's hair on the television, then looked to home plate to see if it had actually happened. It did. Pauly's hair remained parted quite nicely.

Pauly studied the pirate mascot embroidered on the players' uniforms. "Daddy? If they are pirates, why don't they get swords? Why don't they chop up the bad guys?"

Daddy stopped watching the game and sighed, "See what I mean, Sandra? For chrissake."

skit #21: Form 7780-E

Caseworker Sanchez transcribes her notes, efficiently producing words in the cold mechanical vernacular only ancient keyboards speak. Form 7780-E is not well-suited for her most recent client. CLIENT ID# 004040223 was serially generated, though hardly unique; If it was not a Ms Balmiki, it would have been a Ms Hererra or a Ms Ureole.

BIRTH NAME, unknown, renounced and replaced at a young age. SSN, none, born outside the United States and never naturalized. NATIONALITY, disputed internationally, born in rural Kashmir. DOB, approximate, an estimate between 43 and 45 found no haven in DD/MM/YYYY. ADDRESS, TELEPHONE, CLOSEST OF KIN, blank, blank, blank.

OCCUPATION elicited a contemplative silence from Ms Balmiki, who eventually asserted that everyone must eat and have a bed to sleep in. The mutual understanding that Ms Balmiki knew that Caseworker Sanchez knew that Ms Balmiki prostitutes was clear though tacit. Caseworker Sanchez checks the box advising a gynecological examination.

HISTORY is the first field on 7780-E to permit a response exceeding twenty characters in length. Ms Balmiki was born a child to a farmer whose fathers were farmers who commented, "My daddy wanted me to be just like him, but I could never be a great man." She fled from the labor of the farm to the alleys of Srinagar, never to return. She eked out an urchin's existence on rinds and rupees. At the age of thirteen, a festival-turned-bacchanal rendered her paraplegic under the jubilant dance steps of celebrating feet. Caseworker Sanchez checks the box approving eligibility for disability checks.

Ms Balmiki wistfully reported, "The women of the street took me as mothers do daughters. I knew I would one day be a woman of the street, also. When my age turns to 14, they remove my [genitals]," Caseworker Sanchez edits what must be a mistranslation, as Ms Balmiki is vague and presumably means the clitoris, "in order to become a woman [of the street]. My mothers laugh that paralysis under the hips is a gift from the gods." Caseworker Sanchez notes some evident nuances eluded her limited Hindi. "I took the name of my mother, Bhabani Balmiki." Caseworker Sanchez tentatively marks F under GENDER.

Under SKILLS, Caseworker Sanchez notes Ms Balmiki speaks employable English, though she often appears confused by verbal conjugation and pronoun-referent relationships. Also noted, Ms Balmiki displayed severe dismay that she may not fit in anywhere in Acton, Ohio, "no money, no legs, no [genitals], no children, no lovers." Ms Balmiki concluded "maybe I will one day have money and lovers" with an optimism otherwise absent throughout the interview. Caseworker Sanchez checks the box affirming WILLING TO WORK.

skit #20: loaned bones

Mr Moule dismissed his servants after supper, as he did every night, for a private sip of tea with the Lord. Moule unfurled the schematics he drafted to God's estimates from prior consultations.

Diagram 1, labeled "The Unfortunate Circumstances of Nutrition": A man's midfellow is distended, one may infer with food, much like how Mr Moule's belly bulges. The figure's transparent flesh yields rosy bowels, outlined with an indubitably expensive pink ink. Incipient and established digestive matter is in a mulatto brown. Mr Moule's color key reads: "Pinke: Thee Heavenly Procession; Brown: Depravities & Im-purities".

Diagram 2, labeled "Our Father's Dry Earth Closet": A sturdy oak chair, barring a few details, looks much like what Mr Moule sits on. The sketched chair has no occupant so as to reveal the detail of its utility. An ominous hole resides in the center of the seat, as a pillory reserves a portal to bind the neck. It is presumably a mouthpiece for the devil's lips to speak in sordid tongues. An obsequious bucket remains in utter subservience below deck. Mr Moule neglects to provide any explicit instructions on use.

Diagram 3, labeled "The Resurrection": A servant shovels "Foul & Vile Matters" into trenches four hands deep, a quarter-hour of labor for a boy. Time elapses from winter to spring, from frost to flowers, from left to right. "Triumphant Bounty" grows where malignancies stewed: corn, squash, tomatoes, and other New World imports. A farmer with a distended belly looks suitable to star in Diagram 1.

Diagram 4, labeled "Our Tenancy": A lamb is shorn and shanked by the servant from Diagram 3. The farmer wears woolen long johns, bears what must be mutton-made distension, etc. The servant returns the loaned bones and excrement to "God's Earth". A panel encapsulates two dead men, illustrated as having skulls for heads. One's soul remains in the trench, fettered by sin and shite. The other's ascends from the trenches, gassy, effervescent.

skit #19: draw a straight line when needed

Lao seems a quiet type, but a bit of a pixie's mischief in him, I say. Always drawing a line to cross. Not necessarily bred with the temperment to draw a straight line when needed. Something a bit askew, maybe he was a bit of a medicine man or a poppy sot back home. Part of his charm I suppose. I'm a track layer just the same, so at least he's got a douse of charm over me.

Right, so yesterday, Lao and I are up front spreading out gravel for the road bed, and he yelps, 'I don't see which way. Which way?'

And I think he's putting me on because it's my first week with the Central Pacific team, right? So I says, 'Well, I fancy it'll go straight, but we can check with Mr Mathers.' So I leave to get the foreman.

Mr Mathers was none too happy being disrupted during his libations, all the way back he's berating me, 'There're two ends to a railroad in America, Seamus?' and the like.

We get to Lao and I'm stunned. He laid gravel to hook right around, just like old miser Mathers' crooked cane. Lao explains, 'I'm tired of this work. Transcontinental? Never going to make it to China. I'm pulling the track back around so we can go home in America. Everyone can go home.''

Mathers' fulminations take Lao under aim. I try to subdue the foreman, explaining that Lao has a lively bit of old Puck in him, that Lao is just a guileless Chinaman, anything to get Mathers to calm. But Mathers sees, and I see, that Lao is serious. Lao keeps spreading out that gravel, and the track team was approaching his improvised bend.

The foreman, leaning half his weight on his whiskey and half his weight on his cane, hobbles over and gives Lao a crack to his kidneys. Lao winced a good bit after Mathers left.

It must have gotten the idea out of Lao's head. He joked it off a bit. Gaunt, coughing blood, and worse. But today he seems chipper. He says he's going home faster than I know it. There's no way he's getting out of the railroad union this time of winter. And there's no way Mathers'll let him spin this railroad round again. Lao laughed his pixie laugh.

skit #18: a highly accessible diddy

His song was immensely popular in its heyday. Night and day, all the convertibles and cafes unendingly carried the melody like assembly-line workers assembling casing pre-cut sausage. Subtly dissonant enough for the snobs yet rewardingly whistleable enough for the philistines, frosted with bittersweet lyrics that in flavors from pensive to trite. The charts indicated it as a highly accessible diddy, selling a quazillion copies.

But when she listens to it, she remembers how his mouth moves instead of just the words he once muttered to a microphone. She remembers their conversations, their concessions, their confidences. Between his late night guest appearances and music videos and half-time shows, she saw all the ways his two-dimensional mouth can flatly spew even flatter sentiments.

On the teleprompter, his lyrics only iterated personal events and factoids. She knew he left gaps between verses and words and breath. He now had a nineteen-piece band and a new-found focus on instrumental interchanges, which let him sing so very sparsely. He was more a face than a voice at this point in his career.

She thought how his words would never erode. And she thought how this song is perforated with these holes. And how perhaps he always had this hole for a mouth. And she thought of how his mum ways stung worse than his worst words.

The things she wanted to hear and weren't said are what hurt. She wanted to raze the whole song, leaving the meaning and silence mixed as homogenous rubble. But she knew you can't destroy a song. The song would play on radio stations for generations to come, graduating through the annals of genres: Experimental, Post, Modern, Classic, Soft, Easy, Traditional, Oldies.

skit #17: OTTO

The window washer assumed his throne, dangling beside his sullied doppelganger: a bullhide riveted harness, hundreds of meters high, halfway down the 40 Wall Street building, not a voice to be heard. He hung like a denim angel. An embroidered patch spelling "OTTO" was ironed on to his and his reflection's coveralls.

Otto shaved across the windowface with his squeegee, erasing the patina of city grime -- the clotted residue of cloacal precipitation and palpable misanthropy and combustion engines. Otto cleaned off all the filth. The man with the "OTTO" patch looked nicely polished, so he reasoned the window must too.

The windows themselves aren't interesting much at all. Hundred fifty eight panes. But it's just glass, invisible, you know. You got all these people on the inside looking out. And then on the outside you got this wild world, which is where all the people inside think they are. They're looking out all the time, wishing they was there.

But they got me up here, cleaning off all the slop from that there wild world they're so infatuated with. Once a week. But they sure as hell don't recognize good ol' Otto down in the foyer. I can see them in there under that fluorescent light, all incubating and the like. I recognize each of my little flightless chickadees, watching outwards all starry-eyed, every last one.

Otto slackened his line and sunk one floor down. Inside, the broker behind the desk had been staring outside instead of at his cryptic numbers. From his leather glove Otto extracted his impish hand. In capital letters, his fingertip smudged the letters "OTTO". The stock broker behind the desk became the broker in front of the desk. He smudged in kind with a reciprocal "OTTO".

Inside-Otto unhinged the window, defenestrating outside-Otto's reflection far far far to the pavement below -- quite opaque, quite terminal. Inside-Otto saddled his spoils from the coup, the reflection's harness. Outside-Otto grew fond of his last reflection, but they tend to be disposable. Many vie for the few seats outside. The two Ottos rappelled in reverse, defying the gravity that bound inside-Otto to his desk.

skit #16: all mesmerized like the devil

So the Arkwright fellers. No no no. Over there past the hills. They have a whole lotta cotton fer pickin. Now they cant a fford one a them cotton engines yet and re still running off a the dexterity of the littluns nimble fingers. You know, puttem to work when they re still ripe on mommas vine.

Then all those bales on top a that hill, they re gonna go over aways to the Millassy factry. Little south of the Arkwrights. They ll get all a that cotton turned in a colors you never dreamed of. All wound and spooled and yellers and pinks. And just yesserday those cottons warnt good fer nothing like a lamb without chops. I magine!

So then all these strings and whathaveyou get put on a big grid and the older wimmin get the looms going and they spin it up and you get yerself a nice rug or a tablecloth or maybe a shirt fer yer misses if shes keepin her end a the social contract. The old ladies dont mind if they re all loomin fer food or fer their family or whatever. Theyd do it in their sleep with no motivation this way or that.

Sometimes when I go round there I get all mesmerized like the devil witch doctor from the Fairbank circus, eyes glazed and seein things maybe we arent meant to see. Or maybe things everyone is meant to see but dont get so many opportunities. But these spools are turnin and the thread is dancin and colorful and the wimmins fingers is threshin fast like cattails in summatime.

And I go watchin these colors dance for hours and sometimes think how I think that could be enough for jussa bout anyone, hankys or no hankys. Just the colors and dancin. And I get to thinkin my hanky, and the sweat its wiped up in these factrys and out on those fields, and the color of my dirty face. And I wonder how a little bitta cotton can get pulled so long and thin for the sake of an amenity.

So the four a us sat there for a long ol time and I just dint see what he was talkin bout. An Gawd bless it if it warnt the hottest day all summer. And I dint dare reach fer my hanky even if I dint see what in the Lords name he was off bout. Jussa buncha string.

skit #15: augury had changed

Tiresias slept in until 10:14am, just like he knew she would. He navigated blindly to the bathroom to shave her morning stubble and insert fresh tampon. The plastic applicator laid (as the gods would consider it a gift of life) auspiciously atop a nest of kleenex and pubic hair in the wastebasket. He grimaced at the heavens, just like she knew he would.

One lifetime, what he began with; times seven lifetimes, trampling two amorous snakes outside Athens; minus ninety years, beheading Louis the XVI's pug; divided by three lifetimes, conscripting a golden ass for hard labor during the 1849 Gold Rush; times two lifetimes, feeding the bicycle-riding bear at the Leningrad circus; plus twenty-seven years, buying the singing trout in the bric-a-brac aisle; and so on.

His lifetimes fluctuated wildly beyond her accurate count: a divination from terrible lizard bones, plus one-hundred twenty years; nurtured emerald plants without water or sun or soil, times two lifetimes; a televised words from horse who spoke as a man, divided by twelve lifetimes. Not just his lifetimes, but her gender, too. He, she, he, she, he -- every time a god suspected hubris.

He had the receipts worked out somewhere in her hovel, mostly chickenscratch and erasure skids. All he knew were things were getting worse. Her gut told him she was going to be alive for a long, long time.

Augury had changed. He listened for caws or quacks as he flipped blindly through the more fruitful programming: nature, pet care, historical aviation, sometimes documentaries, sometimes cartoons. She just needed any tweet that sounded like a word from the heavens. Somewhere there hid a prophecy to restore him to the simple and singular lifetime she always wanted.

skit #14: his pouty lips they could not read

KCPX On-The-Minute News televised live footage of a fireman climbing a ladder. It stretched above to some indefinite zenith, revealing no reference how high he'd ascended. Up and up, the camera panned. The ladder's height reached perilous heights seen only in amusement parks. Up and up, to the top of a flaming building, fuming like a matchstick to the landlubbers below. KCPX News-Chopper-3 blades chopped louder than the inferno, louder than his boots marching rung-over-rung, louder than his ingenuous voice, louder than his sweat spattering on the cement sidewalk many floors below. The KCPX news van broadcasted snippets of Firefighter Brandon Bronson's walkie-talkie transmission:

... we got a 10-77 ...
... stairwell engulfed with flames ...
... ladder cause they're stuck ...
... everyone else evacuated ...
... reports received indicate a middle-age woman with child on the ninth floor ...
... no problems resuscitating and evacuating ...

The camera held poor focus on the hero's face, disappointing the concupiscent housewife demographic -- KCPX's most faithful segment in the local broadcast market. Firefighter Brandon Bronson climbed up and up, now just a point on a line. Viewers knew nothing of his brawny muscles they could not adore, his candid words they could not hear, and his pouty lips they could not read.

The cut button was pressed occasionally:

I dunno, Denton. I wish I could pick my own color suit, something red like in the cartoons. And something less itchy, maybe cashmere underoos. My Ma says I look great in those longjohns my Auntie got me. Is that wh-- hey, shut up.

Hang on, Denton.

Man, Denton, yer missing out. This is the life. Two bedrooms, full-range gas stove. The countertop looks like new granite. Very tasteful. She says she pays like $500 a month. And she is gorgeous. Yow, she probably set this ol' shack on fire. You know, because she's so h-- oh, you already got it? The kid is cute too, he's got this whole Dennis the Menace thing going.

One sec, Dent.

Ma'am? Are you alright? Well -- no, ma'am. Well, I had to perform CPR. Sorry about the bra, ma'am. Why, yes, firefighting does keep me in good shape. Here, just wrap your arms around my waist. Yeah, tighter. I can take care of your son, too. Little scamp. Joey, huh?

Say, ma'am -- oh? Say, Irene, do you ever get lonely on the 81st floor all by yourself? At the top of the ladder, I felt so far away from everyone else. It doesn't matter who's rescuing who, sometimes I just need to feel close to someone to feel safe.

Oh, I just thought that -- husband? Yeah, I know there's a fire and everything, it's just that, you know, we were getting to know each other. I-- sorry, Irene. Sorry, ma'am.

An awkard silence ensued for eighty-one floors, nine-hundred-odd rungs, Denton feeling lonely all the while.

skit #13: I can't wait

His hard-earned money bought a house which did not suit his traditionally-rustic-wood-and-shingles neighborhood. He could finally afford everything his visions dictated. In a trance, he drafted blueprints verifying mathematical, architectural and archaeological integrity. Cairo-quarried limestone, equilateral sides, an immense base leaving no space for any chance of a yard or jacuzzi, monolithic. It was built in six hundred and twenty-four days.

He settled in cozily, never marrying or fathering, yet content. After many years, his latent visions awoke and he knew his existence confined to Earth came time to end. He watered his houseplants, deposited his outbound mail, and removed his business casual attire and his underwear. He composed explicit instructions for Rosetta in rudimentary Spanish.

The bathroom contained no evils, only whiteness: the tiles hid no intersticed grout, all pubic hair and other human impurities had been swept, and essence oils purified the smell of foul deeds done. Rosetta was a meticulous keeper of cleanliness. He made note that she be rewarded for her akh-deeds. He entered the sarcophagus, an clawfoot porcelein tub.

Finally. I'm done with all this. These visions are all promise, promise, promise. And now it's time to collect. Just me with all the other pharaohs. Limousines, champagne, harems. No more 9-to-5. I can't wait.

The pill dissolved in the milk, which he and his pussycat drank. The cat's eyes closed first, then the man's.

Though garbled by his poor command of Spanish and jittery manuscript, Rosetta eventually deciphered his macabre instructions: Eliminar todo, pero el corazón. She received Jesus' forgiveness before earning her daily wage. Rosetta broke the bone behind his nose to excavate his cranial marmalade. She sealed the stomach, intestines, liver, and lungs in canopic tupperware and stowed it behind the mayonnaise and to the left of the kosher deli pickles. All other organs were eviscerated and discarded -- except, as instructed, his heart. She piled all his material things on the tile floor, painted him with varnish, and swaddled bedsheets about his still form. Then Rosetta collected her paycheck and left his home for the last time.

His death received a blurb in the Auburn Post obituaries. Respect for the dead and editorial restraint merely insinuated his eccentricity was in fact lunacy. The Auburn Post hoped 'he found the peace he searched so frantically for'. Ra brought him a copy of the newspaper to the Afterlife and they both had a good chuckle.

I'm glad Ra suggested I bring my cat. The pharaohs are alright, they don't talk much. Especially Djedefra. They're stuck with that sort of stoicism only omnipotence brings. Maybe it's the whole language barrier thing. The weather's always balmy, so we're making the same platitudinous conversation every day. Every day for all eternity. But they're always gabbing with Ra, though -- He's the only One worth talking to. But the rest of it gets boring: splashing in the Celestial Nile, watching the crops grow higher and higher, unending bliss.

skit #12: two halves of a whole

A&J's Freezer Co. double-parks and and underpaid day laborer unlatches the rear handle. The door squeals as it retracts, cleaving a two-foot slit. Cloven hooves tumble out the aperture like forbidden roses through a picket fence. A deck of laterally-split pigs is stacked high into the truck's cargo hold until the dim dawn light shows no more.

The laborer slides two half-pigs out of the cargo hold onto the asphalt. There are still too many curly tails and snouts to notice a difference in the scrum. 'Hup!' helps him schlep the half-pigs over his shoulders, wet-side-out. Since the skin has no blood, only that which drips around the division stains his bleach-white butcher's smock, resulting in two crimson auras circumscribing two porcine snow angels.

The two pigsty lovers had rubbed loins briefly before the slaughterhouse. They could die happy. Now they lay side-by-side, two halves of a whole, on butcher hooks.

A shapeless man and shapeless woman are seated perfunctorily at Chez Panisse. The waiter suggests the pork loin, deeming it suitable for their evidently blue collar palates, hoping to earn a tip exceeding the guests' budget. The shapeless man laughs convincingly at her plagiarized jokes which neither of them understand. They drink wine and delight each other, symbiotically seducing each other.

The two suburban lovers had rubbed loins briefly before the economic collapse. They could die happy. Now they lay side-by-side, two halves of a whole, on 1200 thread count Egyptian linens.

Before Apocalypse comes, desperation rules the land. Financial instability induces governmental collapse. Agile revolutionary factions stage a coup here, a coup there; But, even the iron-fistedest tyrannies erode. Juntas, martial law, pogroms, futile pandemic quarantines, and purposeless labor camps seem trivial alongside global crop failures. First soup lines, then bread lines, then grain lines, then no lines. Starvation breeds reports of kidnappings, cannibalism.

The farmer always picks the feistiest or brightest ones first, so as to thwart chances of an insurrection. The man and woman were towards the middle of the list. The farmer takes a chomp out of her thigh and his shoulder. 'Food shortage, my ass.' he belches. He ambles to the captives' pen to add the half-eaten carcasses to the slop.

The livestock lovers had rubbed loins briefly before the harvest. They could die happy. Now they lay side-by-side, two halves of a whole, in the humansty trough.