The Simplex Perplex Complex

S. spends his last day on earth in this manner…

I’m curious. How did you get here? According to my records you have a Pontiac station wagon with exterior wood panels on the doors, and yet you say God is in your kitchen filching the gas and feeding the mice. That’s not a very Pontiac sort of attitude. You seem more like a Plymouth Duster dude to me. What gives?

Um, how can I say this… I eat junk mail for second breakfast after feasting on broken communion wafers for first.

First?

First breakfast, that is, you should try it—fortified with savior nuggets at the processing plant. Intrinsic. Expensive. Totally formulated with cosmo dust.

A flash and a gash and the trash is ours …

Have you listened to Able Noise, circa 2024, and felt like eviscerating yourself?

Why no? Is it tasty and chock full of aleatoric detritus? Are there tempo changes? Dizzying repetitions rendering one nauseated?

You nauseous?

I mean nautical.

Another flash. The smell of tar presses down on them. They’re unable to take full breaths. They spasm.

A disembodied voice thunders:

WHICH ONE OF YOU DESECRATED THE LEMONADE?

Silence lingers like a damp cramp bandage. The station wagon hums beyond their eyes, hardwood panels warping under theological stress. S. coughs up a receipt. The other one folds into an elbow, murmuring rebate codes in tongues — Old Testament and spam-filtered tongues.

The air throbs with mildew and 8-bit choirs. In the rafters, God’s mouse army patterns the dust into ellipses. Meaning is declared optional.

I just wanted directions to the interstate, S. says, his jaw locked like a psalm. The disembodied voice hisses static, maybe laughter, maybe a dial-up modem dying heroically.

Proceed east until the infomercials thin, it says. Then climb the guardrail and wait for daylight to apologize.

In the corner, a half-eaten communion wafer clicks like a metronome. S. remembers something about Able Noise and nausea and decides to rename his body The Plymouth of Untranslatable Sounds.

S. drives off, or so he thinks, except the road is now an unspooling VHS of his past tense. The sky buzzes like an unplugged amp. Exit signs offer absolution in exchange for mileage.

The Pontiac’s wood panels pulse—sap bleeding backward through grain, memory reversing into arbor. God, or a gas leak impersonating Him, leans from the ashtray to whisper an ambient farewell.

You’ve been misfiled, He says, voice paper-thin. Take comfort. The archive deletes itself nightly.

S. nods, the Duster persona finally shedding like onion skin, and he steers straight into the static, where the mice, bloated with gasoline grace, conduct their tiny masses then disappear.

S. is done. He is now past tense. Past sense. Gone.

What I’m Reading:

I’ve wanted to ask for a long time: what it is like for you on

     that side of war?

it seems it’s so warm there that the snow turns to milk

and a boy with a violin stands there all year in a t-shirt

and doves fly higher than the rainbow

— Anna Malihon / “[I’ve wanted to ask for a long time…]”