Nothing Remotely Comprehensible

Tragedians are people who belong in ramekins but somehow slipped through the net and live on a Godot-like wasteland, without the gnarled tree, but with plenty of tumbleweeds constantly blowing through the landscape.

Discordant bird chatter is constant as well, yet a single bird is never seen — not the bullet sparrows alighting in bushes or hovering hummingbirds flitting about.

Somehow the tragedians are continually bombarded with bird droppings of every kind — green-white blobs here and there, alternating with a hail pellets on occasion — it’s as if they were marooned on an 18th century guano island.

The deluge never ends.

The tragedians speak in tongues, nothing remotely comprehensible is uttered. One of these tragedians is forever wiping the waste off their jacket and making snacks of it.

Another tragedian conducts an imaginary orchestra, acknowledging an invisible audience that claps every so often as a line of phantom performers present themselves on an unseen stage, before commencing another desultory jag conducting the absent orchestra.

The remaining tragedian sits on a large rounded rock holding on to their pith helmet trying to avoid the worst of the bombardment.

As daylight fades there is one full hour of confusion before “The Internationale” plays at varying, and warped, speeds.

Then the jaundiced sun disappears and the world goes dark.

What I’m Reading:

Water becomes water’s shape in the water, inside the machine we become the image of the machine

— Zheng Xiaoqiong / “Water Becomes Water”