Archive for the ‘Series’ Category
The Last Word
Thursday, November 11th, 2010
A pigeon and a cockroach met one day on the wall around Central Park. The pigeon perched on the wall, muttering to itself.
“I hate humans. They’re noisy, they’re everywhere, and they try to kill me whenever they get a chance.”
A cockroach crawled out of a crack in the wall. “I heard your diatribe against humans,” it said, “and I think you’re either hypocritical or stupid. Why, if it wasn’t for humanity, neither of us would be here!”
The pigeon ruffled its feathers and scowled “Speak for yourself, bug,” it replied. “I don’t depend on those nasty things for my well-being.”
“I beg to differ. Look at them out there.” It waved a foreleg at the sidewalk throng. “They pay us no heed, yet I live in their walls, I eat their food, their books, their own cast-off hair. I shelter from the elements and raise my young in their edifices. I even crawl on their sleeping bodies at will. We outnumber them 1,000 to one. It’s OUR city, not theirs.”
“And you! You eat their spilled food, some of them even feed you, (which they never do for me), and you find shelter on their roofs and ledges, protection from predators, and perches everywhere humans live. It’s true they kill a few of us, but as a species we thrive because of them, and so do you. So thank god for humanity, I say.”
The pigeon made no reply, so the cockroach, sensing imminent victory in their debate, opened its mouth to administer a rhetorical coup de grace.
Quick as a flash, the pigeon caught the cockroach in its beak and swallowed it whole.
Moral: There are plenty more where that came from.
end.
Eyes We Dare Not Meet
Tuesday, November 9th, 2010
This is the second in the four-part Hollow Men series. Although this could be appreciated alone, three others have appeared (now revised): part I, part III and part IV.
We could not buy the hollow men ascendant over us the aware, yet clearly we had a blind spot to scrub. We sawed drinking straws to different lengths, and I drew, reluctantly, the short one. We hypnotized me into a deep and dreamless sleep. They heaved me off the cliff.
I did not wake until sometime after I hit. Chills crawled through me–an icy wind that strips heat from your body, yet the air had not stirred. I tilted my head back enough to spy a bleak beacon on a distant hill casting a pair of black beams across the drought-scarred countryside.
I closed my eyes, willing myself back on warm, grassy slopes, soaking in sunlight and considering existence. My eyelids flicked open. Far from the familiar, I had already learned more by leaving.
I dusted myself off and removed shards of clay from my back. Amid the scattered straw and pilled cotton stuffing, the shadowed ground was covered with the baked crockery, crunching under my every step. How many of these former men had I trod upon? Each footfall made my skin feel like the disinclined shifting of continents colliding and tearing apart. A strange dream or notion popped into my head: Assemble these broken crockery into one giant man, healing and annealing the pieces–imagine what one could do. The dream wilted as I pondered its improbability.
The air was dank and full of mildew digging roots into my clay shell. Under the grassy spire, shapes flitted among the darker shadows; tiny claws scratched glass. An iridescently reflective yet empty pair of eyes stopped to gaze at me, sniffed the air, then moved on. The beacon’s bone-cold beams swept through me again and passed on.
A dead man–cracked but not broken–stared sightlessly into the abyss of night sky, clutching a scrap of paper torn from a missing notebook. I fingered my own fissures and winced in sympathy. I bent, pried loose the scrap and read, “I’m dreaming. I dare not meet those eyes.”
Was I dreaming? Were there eyes I dared not meet? I glanced at the bleak beacon on the horizon, lying dead ahead in a fourth direction–a heretofore unseen cardinal point. I cast a longing look at the beckoning grassy spire, then turned in search of eyes.