skit #74: like the rest of the animals

Pappy worked twelve-hour days, six days a week. He would get all kinds of money. One day he bought something and he called it his baby. He let it sleep underneath a blanket in the big red barn in a stable like the rest of the animals. Alby said its probably a newborn elephant.

Before she went to bed, Mammy opened the bedroom windows for summertime. Me and Alby had contests to see who could stay up latest and after ten o'clock we could see and hear Pappy over in the barn. He talked to his baby and his baby talked back. It talked like chittering sounds and low grumbling sounds. Alby is smarter than me and she thought it was how a humpback whale talks. But it made angry sounds or maybe hungry sounds. Alby said some animals are basically monsters.

Once me and Alby were up real late and we snuck into the big red barn. Pappy dint know of it and we dint want him to know of it so we were quiet and in the dark. There was his baby but it was awake. It was out from its blanket. Me an Alby seen lots of animals before being both farm childs, but Alby knew more from books. But Pappy's baby wernt like any cows or dogs. Alby thought it looked more like an anglerfish but they breathe water. It had a face with too many shapes on it and all the shapes were in wrong places.

It stayed still like when the cats wait for mice so we dint get too close to it. We knew it was watching us because it had two big eyes. They dint blink not once the whole time. We dint see how many claws it had or how fast it was and we dint see if the mouth had fangs or maybe it was a beak or where it could eat something. It was real dark. Alby said maybe an kodiak bear or a komodo dragon but she said they dont live near big cities like Topeka so probably not either one.

Pappy's baby was being so quiet, so we got scared.

Quicker than Alby could stop me, I picked up a rock and threw it to make sure Pappy's baby knew we wernt for eating, that it knew we were Pappy's kin. The rock hit its shell and it went PANG! then it made a low moan. Alby said maybe it sleeps with its eyes open like great white sharks do. We thought about this a few seconds and hoped it would blink but then we got scared even more and ran.

Pappy must have knew what we did, but he never scolded us or whupped us for it. He just put a lock on the doors. That was the only time we saw his baby. Alby thought it was definitely a monster that wanted revenge and Pappy begged for mercy on us as long as we make sure we never bothered it again. Mammy heard Alby and said all sweetly that we were such imaginative little children. Mammy said she thought it was some kind of milk machine but me and Alby knew better.

Summertime was gone and Mammy dint open the windows anymore before bed. We couldnt hear Pappy anymore but we could see his tracks when we woke up. Winter got real cold. Pappy was working more hours and Alby said she saw the barn lights on all night. We only saw him when we all at breakfast but he dint want to talk to me and Alby and Mammy.

There was one Sunday where we came out in the morning. The barn doors were open. Mammy was crying because Pappy was nowhere. Alby says she saw when Pappy went in to feed his baby last night. There was a fight and his baby went and ate Pappy up whole. There were Pappy's footprints going in and his baby's slither tracks coming out, two tracks side- by-side like wagon wheels. Alby thinks it was probably two gigantic snakes, like anacondas or maybe boa constrictors.

skit #73: His select reserve

Sunshine happens upon the world in halves, and none know whether days precede or follow twilight. Each eve in Bordeaux, nocturnal pitch pours down alleyways, varnishing the city with the venereal film peculiar to sinfulness. Sticky seepage trickles out into boulevards where lamps light the filth for all to see; Everyone sees the muck and simply steps over it. Schoolboys play hopscotch and policemen walk beats.

Cardinal Mourlot walks his ingrained diurnal walk down these alleyways after every evening mass. Uneven cobblestones make his steps falter, and he exerts himself to maintain his balance and poise, grunting low among the fornicators; Their sordid chorus bellows from quarter-hourly hotel rooms. Groping for the palpable comfort spirituality lacks, the cardinal fidgets with his rosary beads. Safely tethered to his trusty anchor, he whiffs deeply the curious musts: the smell of his congregates conjugating; and he hears the solicitations of sirens: sweet Virginia de Clugny-Twat selling herself by the pound like ham hocks.

After one of her brief arrests for prostitution, Virginia confessed to Mourlot how God speaks to her. His recollection went so:

God confided in Virginia that a great flood would wash over Man, not unlike the Great Flood. It was Man's dabbling in penicillin and pasteurization that would wage such carnage. So Man would survive, which was satisfactory, but God's most esteemed creature would perish. God had bestowed upon Virginia the honor to serve as a sanctuary for His select reserve: the animalcules by His ridiculous naming. Everything else on the planet was, as He put it, 'superfluous in number and complexity.' God's cargo had migrated to Noah; God asked Virginia to obtain the cargo herself, for traveling distances was difficult for His bitty animalcules.

She swore on God's ordination to infect herself with all of His favored children. Last month she had inducted consumption, the clap, and a zoo of stomach flora. She was collecting French disease when Mourlot finds her.

The two holy folks judge each other in so many ways. A few:

He approaches her, and she knows he never used his body: the cardinal's black robe is utterly negated by the darkness, so Mourlot appears disembodied, as nothing but the pale grimace of a scarlet-capped cherub.

He approaches her, and he knows she has fallen from grace: the lips that fouled the cardinal's ring, the lips that slobbered over the Eucharist, the lips that lied in confessional, decorated with resplendent ruby sores.

He approaches her, and she knows he is but a man underneath that costume: sweat wets his temples, his pupils keen as predators' do, the smoothness of his cardinal robe is betrayed by a bulge.

He approaches her, and he knows she is clean under her grime: the little girl he baptised as Virginia, frocked with a patina of unwarranted abuse, her innocence salvageable by his abundant piety.

'I can rescue you from this farce you live,' both say in awkward simultaneity.

skit #72: something blue and useless

That era's great blue planet modeled asphalt oceans, automobiles grazing in lush pastures, cellular antennae groves, mountains of unrecycled post-consumer waste, badlands of monotonous habitations. That modern mankind did not live in dystopia, only its present. When its present passed, some new texture would clothe earth's curves, some new scar would scab earth's skin. The eternal Spring to which modern man acclimated eventually unsprung.

Doomsday evangelists and Mayan calendars enjoyed brief vindication prior to the indiscriminate mayhem ends-of-epochs tend to usher. Cereal crops withered under droughts. Oil reserves depleted. Natural disasters raged perniciously over unnatural landscapes. Wanton warring left the earth scorched and the winters nuclear. The common cold cashed its chips, making its abrupt exit along with billions of its hosts. Catastrophes erased all life between between Sydney and Calgary like a broad stripe of primer, turning everything earthly dead and gray.

Her people were once confident cities would stand again, eventually acquiescing to the reality of their bleak frontier. Refugees have been displaced from their homeland; Nomads have no homeland.

An ultraviolet dawn invisibly smiled upon Lucy, sweetly gracing her cheek with a cancerous kiss. She awoke, yawned through her pantyhose gas mask, and enjoyed her morning stretches. Hungry, she left her tent for the jetty to fish for breakfast.

Never did she expect to snag salmon, perhaps a fish stick or hot dog if lucky. She baited her line optimistically, jacketing a bent screw with the tantalizingly fluorescent nib of a yellow highlighter. She cast her spool of telephone wire as far as her atrophied arms would allow.

Viscous with crud and gunk, the river slipped over its unknown contents, like greasy fingers through unkempt purse: its morsels, its treasures, its trash. The yellow nib plumbed bravely into the river, into the opaque toxins in which even fluorescence could hide.

Lucy listened to the burbling river's muddy wisdom. She remembered shopping for bargains in the supermarket long ago with her mother. But now, she had no choices. The hook and river would agree upon what she deserved.

She reeled and found something: something too lustrous for a shell fragment or fishscale, something too ornate for biproduct from the ancient cosmetics factory decaying upstream, something too fragile to have survived river's toxicity and turbulence by its own, something unedible, something impractical, something improbable, something blue and useless. She placed it in her pocket. Of the things she found and kept were those she wanted not needed.

She would eat tomorrow. Today, she adored the bauble's absurdity.

skit #71: an error corrected in seven steps

After long hours, he finally looked up.

1.038 and 1.000.
1.038. But then 1.000.
1.038. 1.000.

Triple-checking changed nothing. The readout looked wrong and felt wrong. The discrepancy did not seem trivial.

'Errrrr, huh...' he reasoned then conceded, '... ... ... murhhhh.'

Mr Vibler breathed shallowly, then not at all. His fellow clerks shuffled documents with rote assiduity, and none noticed him grow so very reticent and so very remote. Everything paused, everything nullified. His heart pumped no blood and his wiles contrived no excuses. He remained transfixed and tacit long enough to dupe a mortician, as brittle and still as frost-frocked grass. The error and its father lapsed into the moment; the moment distended into an eternity; the eternity afforded Mr Vibler ages to wallow in the comprehension of his folly.

It felt as much like absence as anything can.

Over years of crusades and alms-collection, the Vatican accrued the unwieldy and superfluous affluence as was pre-ordained by the Divine Will, giving the nation a preliminary taste of its due heavenly riches. Even the Vatican had water bills to pay and stock portfolios to play. Its financial bureau operated under gaggle of meticulous treasury stewards, maintaining its tidy fortune. Every task of its stewardship laid predicated in the infallible recipes of procedural manuals. All the stewards, including Mr Vibler, concurred errors arose only when one deviated from the steps; all errors were accidental or intentional. The same dreary work which sedated Mr Vibler wholly preoccupied his coworkers, so when he lapsed in to a guilt-ridden stasis, none noticed. Even he did not know whether he deviated accidentally or intentionally.

Here is how he went about his correction.

And Mr Vibler printed a copy of the Employee's Handbook. He furtively thumbed through APPENDIX 4C-05: MISHAP MITIGATION. Company policy transformed his error into a manageable liability. The Handbook illuminated the corporate ethics of what was right and and what was wrong, as easily understood as day and night.

And Mr Vibler sobbed. Tears blurred his sight, obfuscating the text's from inanely bureaucratic to utterly unintelligible. Staging a diversion, he ruffled papers meaninglessly until he regained composure. Between his welled eyes and the bewept linoleum, Mr Vibler read through the consequences to be executed by the managerial staff with highly professional stoicism, sniffling only inaudibly.

And Mr Vibler made a great mound of APPENDIX 4C-05 upon his desk. His puddled tears were behind him, and he was ready to comply with the Steward's Code. He completed form after form, populating all the fallow fields with admissions of guilt in green ink, signing a pointed thicket of signatures, completing every leaf of paper flawlessly.

And Mr Vibler reflected on how insignificant his error seemed, a mere difference of 0.038. While the Vatican was powerful, it was neither the only religion nor the only business. Among all the figures all the world's accountants considered each day, how little 0.038 mattered. But the very economy that eclipsed Mr Vibler's piddling 0.038 was itself made of such 0.038s. And precisely its contribution to this summation obligated Mr Vibler to represent the 0.038 he brought into this world.

And Mr Vibler floated through the sea of stewards whom he, though a steward himself for so long, hardly recognized, nor they him. Their cold hearts mustered lukewarm adieus and their glassy eyes indifferently watched him drift away into a blue distance. Something abstractly amniotic about salaried positions attracted both the thoroughly bland and the timidly eccentric. Cradled by the ebb and flow of corporate finance, most stewards were happy as clams. Others suffocated in its monotonous tides.

And Mr Vibler trod through the Vatican's corridors, the 4C-05 tucked under his musky armpit. He trod past the groundskeepers suffering great burdens, past the chittering of idle receptionists, past the braying of middle management, past a plethora of unmet persons with unknown purposes, past couriers, chefs, comptrollers, security, past unending diversities. Of all the multifarious departments, only one could properly address his 4C-05. He slipped the manila folder into the mailslot of HR. In his explication, from one human being to another, he begged for sympathy.

And Mr Vibler was released from his duties later that evening by a unanimous executive vote. The Vatican went on without him. To today, Mr Vibler wished he had kept the error to himself.