skit #98: someone else

The country boy reclined against the roots of the wise elm. He chewed the sweetness from the length of the final piece of field straw and gazed distantly. He gazed past the baled hay which accumulated over many months of days of hours of toil, past the very same space that occupied last year's harvest, only to find no familiar distances.

The work year ended. With the rest of the retiring country boys, he swaggered down to the autumn festivals. They celebrated what they had with what they had: pie-eating contests, ferris wheels, games of nominal chance, drag races, indiscretion, blue and red and white ribbons for exemplary domesticates, displays of machismo, saloons, muddy tractors, square dancing, plump lovers, plump wallets, youth under the unending night of the harvest moon. And since the night never ends, there is never another harvest.

The country boy writhes against the trunk of the forgetful elm. He gnashes some bitter grass into pulp and gazes desperately to find something he anticipates upon the horizon. But he can only find himself where he is. The unbaled timothy hay twitches anxiously like whiskers acutely receptive to an obscure present.

As he begins this harvest's work, he watches his fellow laborers thresh hay, fill silos, paint barns maroon, tune carburetors, play their fiddles at sunset, develop adolescent angsts, burn hay, slaughter milkless goats, father illegitimate children, elope to the theatre districts of various cities, forget arithmetics, obsess over dreams, obsess over lovers, drift to adjacent socioeconomic strata, consider ultimate questions of being, indulge, suffer, age, rest, and bale hay. Alongside these country boys, he works. Of all he does, some boys do the same, some do not.

The country boy will scurry among the boughs of the prescient elm. He will dine upon on the clovers, alfalfa, and rye of the known countryside, but never sate himself. He will scout the hummocked countryside from his treetop on the horizon and observe himself upon a former horizon, reclining against the roots of the wise elm, chewing the final field straw, gazing distantly; writhing against the forgetful elm, scurrying atop a prescient elm, inscribing upon the mute elm, deceiving the senile elm, deflowering the coy elm, pledging to the arbitrary elm; gazing towards horizons in all respective manners. In this countryside, every hill has its own horizon, and on each horizon is an elm from which he shall scout, and for each him atop other elms there expand other countrysides and elms and hims the country boy cannot see.

His eyes meet the eyes of another him and of someone else.

It was now spring. The seasons had begun to plant a new crop. He raised the hoe and struck it into the fecund countryside.

skit #97: timeliness

The steam engine sibilantly evokes progression and progression as it whisks down its uncompromising tracks past all the rural towns deemed too small to warrant their own railroad stations. Long monotonies separate changes in scenery: a limpid brook, some healthy livestock, a gap-toothed windmill. Dirt backroads reticulate throughout the empty in-betweens like capillaries sustaining vestigial tissues. The train passengers cannot fathom what purpose they serves, but provincials trek along the paths.

Stray farmers rarely encounter any one else upon these backroads. Without each other, they would quite appear lonely. An amber sunlight coats the farmers and their mules, encasing them in an anachronistic resin. They move slowly to stillness. A snapped axle upsets a rickety mule cart, flinging loose apples into the air. The farmers are frantic but frozen. The apples just hang, poised to enact their Newtonian schtick. The train travels by so quickly that nothing changes in the spectacle of that moment, leaving its passengers blind to whether the farmers laugh or weep at their misfortune.

Ms Stutz rides in a first class cabin. She meets Mr and Mrs Estoppey, her cabinmates, both of whom were very personable, though slightly fatigued; they have been traveling for as long as they can recall. Their banter turns solemn as their journey lengthens and as their conversation deepens to topics of dreams, values, loves, and fears. Wine reddens their words. The train travels through the void of night and soon none can locate precisely where they are.

When the train arrives in Berlin, Ms Stutz enjoys coffee with Mr and Mrs Estoppey before parting ways. She will forever remember their company, though her memories of their faces and words become familiar inventions by the end of her life. She spends the next two days with her sister before returning home to Basel, first class. She meets more characters with whom she enjoys an approximately unique intimacy.

Nearing Basel, she finds the farmers still preserved in the formaldehyde of dusk. The locomotive's speed affords her only one glimpse into the diorama, as they were and may always be, the farmers frantic, their mule carts collapsed, their apple crop suspended midair, the faces stern yet to laugh or weep.

Ms Stutz remarks on the invention of the telephone, that soon one needn't ride for days by train to see one's sister, that all communication shall become practically effortless, that an era of international communication and harmony shall ensue, that imaginations shall no longer starve for audiences, that the freedom of ideas shall accelerate progress, and so on she went with her puerile idealism. Her cabinmates gave no rise, still sleeping in the red wake of last night.

Very soon, a jetliner flies far overhead. Window passengers curiously peer through their portals. Below, a series of parallel stitches mend the interminable scar of timeliness of which the planet shall never heal.

Thereafter, teleportation folds intricate origami of the spatial dimensions, enveloping everything indiscriminately, making every possible point a destination.