(continued from 11/25/19)

31 pieces of the auto-sedition quilt

(xxvi – xxvii)

On the last day of the month, on the news:

Miners discover a baby 700 feet below ground with a Sun Ra tattoo on its back.  No one inspects it to note its sex — had they checked they would have found that it was the baby who fell to earth.  Truly sexless.  There was a skronk of improvisational horns and syncopated percussion and rapid fire snares.  One miner pictured himself mating with the hydra and producing this child.  The foreman miner imagined this being his and Medusa’s love child.  While yet another thought it his own immaculate conception.  

But the baby was a blatherskite — its senseless volubility, a logorrhea without words, shaking the earth to its core.  There was one full minute of confusion while a horn sounded, and the miners ran pell mell leaving the child to its own devices — which were very specific and well-calibrated devices: Geiger counters and magnetometers dating back to 1973.  

“Space Is The Place” played on a continuous loop for 114 hours, until the fissure that split the earth sent the stereo console and the baby flying off into the murk.

***

Post-mortem:

There is no story — only peonage and pauperism.  But there is a moral here.  

I once dreamt I was eleven and elevated onto the precipice of a tall building.  I was asked to carefully look over the edge at the street, 62 floors below.  Why I was asked to do this and not just thrown over beats me, because whomever was asking touched me ever so gently, just tenderly enough for me to lose my balance when I was looking over the edge.  

Why’d you ask me to look, I thought, as I passed the 48th floor.  What were all the histrionics about?  Just do what you gotta do and push.  But now what I had to do was find a way out of smashing my skull open on the street below.  I quickly angled my body to the right, but that only caused me to tumble head over feet past the 26th floor — oh, jeez, control yourself because you ain’t got that much time or space left, boy.  

This was all so surreal, as if I fell into that Frida Kahlo painting on the same subject — you know the one, you’ve seen it: The Suicide of Dorothy Hale —  except there’s not even the slightest hint of cerulean or cumuli in the sky — above, it’s all a leaden gray mass smeared with charcoal gray corrugations.  

I flap and flap again, and lo, I flutter up a few feet and arrest the fall briefly.  I’m surprised, and then I’m falling again, down by the 5th floor.  Flap flap flap.  Hey, this works.  Flap flap flap flap flap flap flap, and I smash through The Plymouth Assurance and Annuity, LLP., office window on the 9th floor.  Glass, typing paper, an upended typewriter and phone all discombobulated on the floor.  I landed on top of this pile.  The lady that was at the desk is now on her back spread eagle beyond me and the pile of her work.  The boss man peaks his head out of his office and says: “Ms. Haversham, please clean up that mess, and show our guest to the claims forms and pray, tell us the moral to this.” 

“Is there one?”

  Just then cheering is heard from the street below.  It started to snow for the first time this year.

***

(“Hey?!  There are four pieces of the auto-sedition quilt missing!”

“Ay, I’an sorry con ‘escuse me.”

That’s it for this one.

The End.)