Neither of us have left her room for some days. Pneumonia incapacitates her. Worry immobilizes me. My breath trails hers warily, as her last leads my last.
Calamity Jane coughs violently, and though she never liked pretty things, she inadvertantly decorates her bedsheets with the floral pattern of a portentous funerary bouquet: verdurous phlegm flecked with crimson buds. The brutess does not notice, continues to cough until empty, then spits. To her violence, I flinch and squeal and wail, just as her ongoing regimens of daily abuse had conditioned me to react. My histrionics, which normally elicits her boastful guffaw, fail to fruit even a smirk. She slips into a defeated sleep, and I contemplate the brief life that may await me without her protection.
Nervously, I watch through the window slats. Her illness advertises an opportunity to all the prairie's marauders: the coyotes and the desperados. Now Calamity Jane cannot protect Deadwood or, more selfishly, me. With its heroine fallen, they come to exact retribution upon all which abides by that very society which shuns them. Man and beast alike run Main Street amok, gobbling the vittles off still-clucking chickens, urinating to claim property like conquistadors, nipping up skirts at feminine softnesses, howling with the seductive madness that makes one join in; But I resist their call. How they meet my eyes through the window slats, I know they know I am a gentleman, and so I too shall bear retribution.
Two years ago, Marsh & Coe, Co. declared their intent to establish the first and only bank in Deadwood, South Dakota. As an apprentice, the firm paid me a meager stipend, affording me scarcely enough to rent the lowliest flat in all Dorchester. Like a peacock among pigeons, I failed to blend in with Dorchester's denizens. No one likes an outsider. Daily, I drudged through the mires of Dorchester's worst. And every day I arrived, my suit disheveled, my complexion bruised blue, my pockets picked. So every day Marsh & Coe, Co. found the degraded gentleman that remained of me. Of their staff, the executive management estimated me to be their rowdiest employee. They shuttled me off to orchestrate the construction of their bank, the First Deadwood Bank.
I arrived and Deadwood knew. One posse procured my luggage set; another posse procured Marsh & Coe Co.'s realty payment; a third posse procured my accouterments momentarily; Calamity Jane procured me as her chattel, clobbered the thieves, reclaimed the clothing that was now hers (by extension of me), left me undressed and sinful, and checked us into a single room with a matrimonial bed at the Loose Dove's Roost.
No one disturbed Calamity Jane or her belongings. Though she slew many men during our courtship, she remained a sensitive lover. But as a partner, she lacked the eloquence needed to garner my respect, so she domesticated me by whip. Once I thought I might grow old with Calamity Jane, forever: she, my man, and I, her dude. But our romance best suited brevity. All her sweet nothings smell of sour mash. She wears other men's blood like mascara and other men's sweat like perfume; She does not disclose how she becomes stained so. She has reprimanded the impudence of my mouth so many times my words wear the swollen drawl of one who fears speech.
Now I see the First Deadwood Bank, its scaffolded skeleton, half-built, without a blueprint or plan, unsound.
Now I see my beloved Calamity Jane, half-dead, half-loved, her eyes on her bottle and her gun.
I step outside to renounce my life as a gentleman, to become one of the Calamity Johns, to ravage the Dakotas from south to north. But they shoot me. I think hear her muster the strength to guffaw.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
skit #76: nothing unnatural
Reeds waft and mosquitoes croon, ripening us. Many broadcast their midnight sentiments in the lagoon. The barrage of trilling frogsongs sets every amphibian gonad aquiver, either to activity or to anticipation. Their slick vocal sacs balloon and unballoon, seducing us volumetrically. We all wade eye-deep in the very same soup, wanting nothing more than to relieve our bodies of impatient eggs. I find a song for me.
You and I grope one another pheromonally at pond-length through porous skins; Skin has no stomach so we are never sated. As I paddle coyly towards you, my webbing unavoidably swats the jellied eggs and pollywogs that already fill the basin underwater. I may crush some, but we will soon make more. We care not of who, but how.
A carnal mantra truncates all my thoughts. Hormones manage my marionette strings, conducting me masterfully. I am out of control. You, my tiny suitor, clamber atop me like a fertile island. I find an archipelago of conquistador-newfoundlands shuddering about me. The innumerable babies below indent my belly, and I cannot help but expel my eggs into the pond.
We all do. Eggs are everywhere. A reproductive diagram somewhere outlines our life cycle, and we fulfill its prophecy.
As foreign as icebergs in our Mississippi bayou, quality-rejected pills quietly buoy from the pharmaceutical company upstream: anti-depressants, contraceptives, fertility meds. They mandate my exhausted body must copulate again, so I do. Again, so I do, so do we all. Nothing unnatural makes us suspicious. Our amplified hormones bring only clarity. If anything, according to the diagram, we are too alive.
A pickup truck parks at the muddy shore. We cannot and shall not disentangle. Compulsion paralyzes us all. Again, so do we all.
brrrrEEEEEEEEEEP.
Trudy's back depresses the car horn as Micky fumbles unhooking her bra. The highbeams of her pickup truck illuminate the eyes of the mating frogs. Their nictations twinkle cosmically among the black bog-formed firmament. Her FM radio drones love ballads, setting the mood. Trudy finds a song for her.
Things with Micky were going well. They had been going steady for three weeks. Micky had a job and bought her ice cream after school. They neck ineptly, like teething vampires. Her gynecologist had taught her the responsibilities of womanhood. She had showed Trudy pictures of a female ovum and of a male sperm, the latter seeming nothing more than little parasitic tadpoles. The gynecologist then gave Trudy the Pill.
But Trudy still didn't feel ready. Micky's hand got only as far as her breast despite his exaggerated claims. Trudy kept him at bay until week six. Then she ran the first leg through the reproductive cycle, perhaps limping, perhaps sprinting, not yet knowing if it felt natural.
You and I grope one another pheromonally at pond-length through porous skins; Skin has no stomach so we are never sated. As I paddle coyly towards you, my webbing unavoidably swats the jellied eggs and pollywogs that already fill the basin underwater. I may crush some, but we will soon make more. We care not of who, but how.
A carnal mantra truncates all my thoughts. Hormones manage my marionette strings, conducting me masterfully. I am out of control. You, my tiny suitor, clamber atop me like a fertile island. I find an archipelago of conquistador-newfoundlands shuddering about me. The innumerable babies below indent my belly, and I cannot help but expel my eggs into the pond.
We all do. Eggs are everywhere. A reproductive diagram somewhere outlines our life cycle, and we fulfill its prophecy.
As foreign as icebergs in our Mississippi bayou, quality-rejected pills quietly buoy from the pharmaceutical company upstream: anti-depressants, contraceptives, fertility meds. They mandate my exhausted body must copulate again, so I do. Again, so I do, so do we all. Nothing unnatural makes us suspicious. Our amplified hormones bring only clarity. If anything, according to the diagram, we are too alive.
A pickup truck parks at the muddy shore. We cannot and shall not disentangle. Compulsion paralyzes us all. Again, so do we all.
brrrrEEEEEEEEEEP.
Trudy's back depresses the car horn as Micky fumbles unhooking her bra. The highbeams of her pickup truck illuminate the eyes of the mating frogs. Their nictations twinkle cosmically among the black bog-formed firmament. Her FM radio drones love ballads, setting the mood. Trudy finds a song for her.
Things with Micky were going well. They had been going steady for three weeks. Micky had a job and bought her ice cream after school. They neck ineptly, like teething vampires. Her gynecologist had taught her the responsibilities of womanhood. She had showed Trudy pictures of a female ovum and of a male sperm, the latter seeming nothing more than little parasitic tadpoles. The gynecologist then gave Trudy the Pill.
But Trudy still didn't feel ready. Micky's hand got only as far as her breast despite his exaggerated claims. Trudy kept him at bay until week six. Then she ran the first leg through the reproductive cycle, perhaps limping, perhaps sprinting, not yet knowing if it felt natural.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
skit #75: whatever he respired
Percy's personal moon wasted no time on the in-betweens: always full, a shoulder-width aperture to uncontained skies; or new, the covered manhole; or eclipsed, the downtown traffic racing over his subterranean kingdom. The Sanitation Department did not doubt Percy's self-proclaimed passion for sewage treatment, nor did they refuse his volunteered time. At the end of some workdays, he would return above ground and wait for public transit to deliver him to the discomfort of his apartment where he spent the evening resenting the moon's regular faces under which continent men slept.
But most nights he slept in the sewers, swaddled in his municipally-provided uniform. He could leave whenever he wanted to -- the sewer or the job or Manhattan or anything else. He was free from everything except his bowels. He thought these thoughts as he delayed dreaming, his head heavy against the concrete precipice. The fetid stench of sewer muck wafted from the river, burbling with what New York's stomachs could not use; The handkerchief he held to his nose was doused with his auntie's perfume, a scent so dense nothing noisome could penetrate it.
Percy peeked over his handkerchief. He held the tincture of his auntie's perfume against the utility lights. He rotated it between his forefinger and thumb and in each facet it appeared equally pale, where his history remained imprisoned behind a millimeter of brittle glass. Deeper he looked into the perfume and deeper he huffed his handkerchief. Olfactory memories whisked him away.
His mother and her sister clucked as they made way through garden, trimming hedges into pleasing geometries and weeding anything ugly. They gossiped and sipped beers. He was old enough, maybe twelve years, and he had accidentally shat himself again. But he knew this time wasn't his fault. The rose thorns hooked his overalls. He bleated for help for hours, but the adults had left for indoors long ago. A little one slipped out as he wept -- just one little one. But his mother's pittance of patience had been spent. She walloped him. Then she sent him to a behaviorist. Then she sent him to disciplinary school. His auntie was the one who wept as she saw him off.
His mother wore the same scent as his auntie. Or maybe his auntie wore the same scent as his mother. Yet they smelled differently: sometimes the perfume smelled like composting soil, like bleach, like suffocating shame; and sometimes it smelled like baby wipes, like bubble baths, like bedtime stories; but always like roses.
Remembrance left Percy too bleary to see the tincture any longer. He watched the sewage come only to go inconsequentially. It drifted freely throughout the labyrinths of the sewer. He goes where ever he likes and his mother will never know. Between the velvety must of the rose perfume and the blighted tunnel air, whatever he respired sickened him.
The Central Office transmitted Percy's orders over the walkie-talkie: SEPTIC BLOCKAGE, ROUTE 44-7JW-B. But they weren't paying him so Percy ignored them. It was six in the morning. He stood beneath his mother's apartmental facilities, listening. He can hear her squeak meekly and moments later the plumbing produced her stool. He smiled forgivingly like a good son could.
His personal moon reflected on the sewage. Though his mother does not watch the same moon, she may witness the same reflection.
But most nights he slept in the sewers, swaddled in his municipally-provided uniform. He could leave whenever he wanted to -- the sewer or the job or Manhattan or anything else. He was free from everything except his bowels. He thought these thoughts as he delayed dreaming, his head heavy against the concrete precipice. The fetid stench of sewer muck wafted from the river, burbling with what New York's stomachs could not use; The handkerchief he held to his nose was doused with his auntie's perfume, a scent so dense nothing noisome could penetrate it.
Percy peeked over his handkerchief. He held the tincture of his auntie's perfume against the utility lights. He rotated it between his forefinger and thumb and in each facet it appeared equally pale, where his history remained imprisoned behind a millimeter of brittle glass. Deeper he looked into the perfume and deeper he huffed his handkerchief. Olfactory memories whisked him away.
His mother and her sister clucked as they made way through garden, trimming hedges into pleasing geometries and weeding anything ugly. They gossiped and sipped beers. He was old enough, maybe twelve years, and he had accidentally shat himself again. But he knew this time wasn't his fault. The rose thorns hooked his overalls. He bleated for help for hours, but the adults had left for indoors long ago. A little one slipped out as he wept -- just one little one. But his mother's pittance of patience had been spent. She walloped him. Then she sent him to a behaviorist. Then she sent him to disciplinary school. His auntie was the one who wept as she saw him off.
His mother wore the same scent as his auntie. Or maybe his auntie wore the same scent as his mother. Yet they smelled differently: sometimes the perfume smelled like composting soil, like bleach, like suffocating shame; and sometimes it smelled like baby wipes, like bubble baths, like bedtime stories; but always like roses.
Remembrance left Percy too bleary to see the tincture any longer. He watched the sewage come only to go inconsequentially. It drifted freely throughout the labyrinths of the sewer. He goes where ever he likes and his mother will never know. Between the velvety must of the rose perfume and the blighted tunnel air, whatever he respired sickened him.
The Central Office transmitted Percy's orders over the walkie-talkie: SEPTIC BLOCKAGE, ROUTE 44-7JW-B. But they weren't paying him so Percy ignored them. It was six in the morning. He stood beneath his mother's apartmental facilities, listening. He can hear her squeak meekly and moments later the plumbing produced her stool. He smiled forgivingly like a good son could.
His personal moon reflected on the sewage. Though his mother does not watch the same moon, she may witness the same reflection.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, April 6, 2009
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
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.
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.
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