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Many Heads Were Taken that Day

            “When was that day exactly?” Maxton asked the Aluminum Oxida once the punch had been exhausted and the crowd had moved on to the little cakes.

            “That was Abstract Expressionist Day 1997,” the Oxida recalled.  He looked up at the ceiling of the atrium.  The recollection was displayed across its bronze-colored surface like a lens flare about Robert Redford’s baseball godhead.  “I remember it specifically because of that: May 11, 1997.”

            “What is Abstract Expressionist Day?” Maxton inquired.  He had taken a couple of little cakes, but no punch.  He had never liked punch.  It tasted too harsh.

            “Abstract Expressionist Day is one of those unofficial holidays like Talk Like a Pirate Day or Cardboard Applicator Day that some wiseass cooks up to be cute, but it actually had a serious message behind it: it celebrates the fact that anyone can, and, in fact many people did, paint their own abstract expressionist masterpieces.”

            “Because the whole movement was fraudulent?” Maxton suggested.  Each little cake was adorned with either sugary crumbles or real icing (not that foamy, oily shit that grocery store bakeries put on their cakes) in fanciful depictions of current celebrities.  Mr. Trumpoline, the cartoon character, had half his haircut bitten off before Maxton realized that he was standing in the middle of a giant box.

            “Funny to think that one day the lid will be removed and something will reach in here and select one of us.”  This was the popular theory, although Mr. Trumpoline championed an alternate one involving a giant hat.

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Lemmy Kilmister

Well, he kept going right up until the end.

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Bath Tabulation Done By a Citric Saint

            As a saint, Mr. Debonari was able to endure anything with his equanimity intact.  He imagined that the bank’s parking lot, abutting the narrow, oak-lined patch of grass where the annual city festival used to be held, was somehow equivalent to the area in his uncle’s barn where the horses were fed.  The conflation was certainly mysterious, but hardly unendurable, especially given that Mr. Debonari was rarely reminded of either place.

            “When were you last at that bank or that barn?” a reporter with WORF radio asked Mr. Debonari during an Old Homestead rally.

            “When were you last at WKRP?” Mr. Debonari returned with typically cryptic sainthood.

            The reporter, smiling in confused appreciation of the riddle, was washed away by the crowd pressing the saint on to the dais and left to solitary contemplation by the corndog trailer.  He smiled as he thought about the real-life Dr. Johnny Fever, an amalgam of easy-going seventies types devoted to the last vestiges of freeform radio.  The corndog man stared at him for a long time before asking if he wanted a corndog.

            “Our would-be WKRP had narrow hallways, wood paneling, posters worth a fortune on today’s market, a large potted fern,” the reported concluded his thoughts with a smile.  He was transported to those wood-paneled hallways; looking down, he saw the cheap, matted carpet; its color was deadened gold.

            “I had forgotten the carpet,” he remarked aloud, looking up to see the saint himself standing before him.

            “This station has no bathing facilities,” the latter noted.

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Liver Spotted Leaves

            Of course that means the tree was old.

            “It’s a metaphor kind of,” little Elaine remarked.  She was playful and fun in those days, dreaming of the man she would marry and knowing nothing of fox squirrels and what her brother would do to them if he ever found them on his land.  Pecan trees, however, were welcome, ugly as they were, because they could be a source of revenue after everyone else moved away.  Sad to think how one can end up, where one’s life can take you, or leave you.

            “Leave you!” barked one of the jokers on the Council for Foreign Relations, old fat guys’ division.

            The coded message required the services of a team of college kids and nearly three months of marijuana consumption to obscure beyond the point of concern.  Among the piles of empty pizza boxes and other clichéd ephemera were the new, fresh, baby leaves, tender and bright green.  They would make a refreshing tea.

            “Tell us, great old tree, what is the riddle of existence?”

            The tree, whose name was Organizer, was fitted with special movement facilitator bands about its trunk to enable it to access the speech rectifier unit on Percy’s back.  “Yay!” thought Elaine, “Percy can carry that and my Teenage Fantasy doll too!”

            “May your dreams come true,” Organizer croaked with suitably arboreal depth.  His roots extended into the surrounding subdivision, penetrating basements and secret pipes.  If he could only prolong the answering ceremony long enough, his control over this environment would be assured.  It was a good thing he was an evergreen.

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Feign the Large Harvester’s Running Water Gag

            For some reason her boots obscured just how, well, I hesitate to call her “fat” because that would probably plant a vision of a rolling landscape of obesity in your mind.  Perhaps “stout” best describes her condition.  As she climbed down from her tractor I noticed that her boots were adorned with round, silver studs along the sides.  I’m sure that she had added these to the boots to give them extra diversionary power.

            “Did you use some kind of clamp?” I asked her later over a selection of items grown in that very field (a rolling landscape of unity threatening to engulf our tiny planet).

            The tractor was new.  By fixating on it I was able to reason through the drug’s lies.

            “You’re ruining the trip,” she said.

            After all, if the tractor hadn’t been here before, this scene, this moment, could not be the same one, the same one that threatened to engulf me before.

            “I’ll take off my boots,” she… threatened?  Offered?  Tempted?  She was attractive in some inexplicable, stout way.  I liked her better when she was wearing her glasses, however.  They reminded me of those octagonal ones that the creepy doll on A Family Affair used to wear.  I don’t know if you remember, but Sebastian Cabot’s character, Mr. Belvedere, and the doll, Mrs. Beasley (played by Hairy Hotstuff in her unmarried state), ran off together and started a farm.  They raised a crop of one giant fungus that connected everything in a horrible, inescapable web of timelessness.

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