The Allegory of the Falling Sky

The sky was breaking into bite-sized chunks and falling on Panfilo’s front yard.  The pieces fell and accumulated into a forty foot-high pyramid that dwarfed Panfilo’s poor house.  People came from miles around to see the sky in Panfilo’s front yard and a few brave (and doubtless hungry) souls moved forward to try a cerulean chunk or two.

“It’s cool and chewy,” said Monga.

“This speckled white piece is light and fluffy, like a marshmallow,” said a rotund woman in carmine.

“Chucha, you must be chewing on a cloud!”

“Ay dios, it’s so good!” said Chucha.  Chucha kept a pair of magpies at home that constantly shit on her faux Louis XIV settee.  “You know, maybe I should give some to Pepito and Cuca; I have a feeling it might finally constipate them.”

From all around the dying province people came to eat the sky and the clouds in Panfilo’s front yard.  They ate and ate until there was one small stratocumulus nugget left.

Mishu, the feral cat, starving for days, came upon the last curious nugget.  It smelled vaguely familiar, a bit like the tuna, cockroach and catnip farrago Sister Lucrecia put out after Friday vespers.  Mishu pawed the sky chunk about in the yard.

Panfilo turned the corner in his crusty 1971 Trabant as Mishu batted the piece of cloudy sky into the yuca patch that served as the boundary line between Panfilo’s house and Comrade Dr. Sobrenada’s manicured lawn.  As Panfilo pulled into his driveway, from his weekend’s fruitless boar hunt, he caught a glimpse of the cat scurrying out from the yuca patch and over the trash cans with something in its mouth.

“God-damned cat!”

Panfilo was tired and angry – nothing exciting ever happened to him.

“It goes on day and night.  All my life I’ve never stopped thinking.  I think all writing is a disease.  You can’t stop it.”

— William Carlos Williams