skit #96: what counts

The oldest woman in Burbank remembered how things were before. She tried to explain to me and my sister.

She showed us a slender twig and a tin can. She told us these are two things. Then she counted everything else she could find: melted tires, another brittler twig, a palmful of fine silt, a sign dimpled by stray rocks, the frayed canvas tents of our camp, her, my sister, me, the other survivors.

We asked what counts as a thing. We asked if those count as one twig and another twig, or if they are two twigs. We asked if the berries still count, even if they're inedible and dessicated. We asked if the tires need wheels and if the wheels need a truck and if the truck needs a freeway to count. We asked if the letters each get their own number, and if the letters count, does the word. We asked how many grains are in her pile of silt, and how many people survived outside of the San Fernando Valley. We asked if we're people counting as one, or peoples as a few ones, or persons counting as a bunch ones.

She said she didn't know about our sorts of questions and continued her explanation.

She told us of plastic flora that required no water, of low-calorie strawberry ice cream, of love ballads played over radio waves, of plastic toy farm animals. She told us supermarket coupons, of traffic jams and speeding tickets, of public libraries, of prenuptial agreements, of streak-free dish washing detergents, of cell phone reception and inescapable service contracts, of breaking news alerts, of frequent flyer miles and cash-back rewards.

She repeated the legends we'd heard before.

She told us about how the fluorescent bulbs in every household generated a color that was indistinguishable from how they imagined pure white light to appear. The human eye just couldn't tell a difference. She told us how close they thought they were to perfection.

We were confused, but she said she didn't know about our sorts of questions.

After parted with the oldest woman in Burbank, me and my sister sat quietly on the duneside for a while, considering the beige color of the only landscape we had ever known.