Not for human consumption
From Ollywiki
Here is a round-up in no particular order of some of my less disgusting micro-fiction:
No Pubs: There weren’t any pubs in the suburbs where they lived. Hell, it took two years before they even got grass. So they had to watch pub shows on television. There was a German one called ‘Zum Prosit’ and a British one called ‘The Pig and Whistle.’ They weren’t British or German, but still, once a week, they’d make a night of it and watch both shows back-to-back. It felt almost like fun, here in their new home in vastness of the bright New World.
Beautiful Garbage:
The perfect curve of the thrumming pavement. The clicking of the tires. On the turquoise dome of the sky, a jet trails its parallel tangerine lines. A freeway overpass winking at me with its balustrades - light, dark, light, dark. At this time of day, even the garbage is beautiful…
Terrorists:
British housewife terrorists, Japanese Butoh terrorists, Terrorist intellectuals in silver pants who clone themselves at will. After all, they have to feed their families, so they can breed more terrorists. Terrorists dressed as teddy bears conspicuously flaunting disposable diapers. Terrorist farmers waving handmade sausages and unpasteurized cheeses. Terrorist turtles hiding in mud for hundreds of years just waiting for the chance to snap at someone’s toes. Terrorist trees surreptitiously rotting without asking the appropriate municipal authorities. The street lamps flickering in the dead of night sending their secret terrorist messages. That man, alone in his car, crying and unmedicated - he is probably a terrorist. So are the people who breathe too shallowly in the post office line up. While we’re wasting our time discussing this, hundreds of toddlers all over the country are swallowing rubber bands, destroying the evidence of their terrorist conspiracy. Haul them all in I tell you. We haven’t got time to waste!
OK Tire:
I’m at the OK Tire store and there is a video playing on the flat screen television showing two comely OK Tire girls squirting thread-locking compound onto a chrome-plated wheel bolt. It’s pretty sexy, I’d have to admit. “Smart like chicken,” says the guy in the chrome and naugahyde chair beside me, addressing no one in particular, and then - “Monte Christo cigars are Seventy-Five bucks a pop!” “I know, I smoke ‘em all the time,” says the fat guy behind the counter. After that, a long and uncomfortable silence.
Two English ladies in a shop:
“She told me she caught Paratyphoid B from India!” “How exciting,” “She’s always does such interesting things!”
California:
Diplodocus cranes silhouetted against a burned out ‘Rainbo Bread’ sign. A blue cheese sky. The ragged petticoats of palm trees rustling in the back draft of a long haul transport truck. A limp windsock. A breast-shaped mound of gravel at the end of a conveyor belt. In the murky distance across the bay, the sea lightning, flashing like it did at the beginning of time. Clusters of oleander flowers quivering in the spume of a Denny’s ventilator. Another overpass, only this time with some burst-open garbage bags beneath it, coated in the type of dust that has never experienced rain. A book on wound management open on my lap. The strobing tail light of a descending plane. For hours now, the lungs of its passengers have been filling with formaldehyde from the off-gassing seat cushions. Something to do with the air pressure and the cosmic rays. Unseen metastasis already starting, though death might be years away. In the hotels near the airport, a myriad clock radios turn off and on in sequence. Nobody has yet noticed, but they are forming an interconnected super-organism and this is their secret language. In a Mini-Mart on the service road, a quiet old woman in worn-out clothes unseals every yogurt and dips in her finger. The linoleum near the dairy cooler smells strongly of disinfectant.
Canada
Looking out at the parking lot through the backward ‘Air Conditioned’ decal of a donut shop window. A red and white Canadian flag flaps jauntily over the industrial park where lengths of black, white and turquoise plastic pipe are arrayed on a rusty steel rack. A U-Haul, truck is parked on the street in front of it with some kind of needle-toothed, bioluminescent fish painted on the side of it. A glossy black crow pushes a dessiccated apple cruller across the oil stain next to the dumpster, as he tries, stalwartly, to pick it up in his beak. A couple of other U-Haul trucks pass by, each with its own informative tableau of some meteorite impact crater or Mid-Western American frog-jumping contest, decorating the sides of its cargo box. It occurs to me that if I sat here long enough, I would learn a lot about these things. In the distance, the shimmering of weedy trees through the heat haze of a gravel rooftop. Perhaps this is the gateway to heaven.
Tiny Ghettos:
He leads me into a long, vaulted corridor with a polished concrete floor. “This is our ghetto museum,” he says with a flourish of his right hand, indicating an array of vitrines set into the walls like the habitat dioramas of a high end zoo. “Each environment is precisely controlled with state-of-the-art electronics,” he continues, “Microprocessors consistently adjust the temperature, humidity and illumination to correspond to conditions in the actual ghetto locations. He continues with the technical details but my eyes drift across his shoulder to the display window behind him, where I can just make out a pair of glossy rats, grooming themselves, side-by-side at the top edge of an artfully canted slab of broken concrete. Tussocks of ragweed and foxtail grass festoon the rubble around them and the ground is replete with crumpled Macdonald’s wrappers, shivering in the simulated breeze, as well as some smashed malt liquor bottles and a bloodied hypodermic syringe. The painted backdrop depicts Detroit’s skyline, complete with the abandoned hulk of its Michigan Central Railway Station, the smashed windows of its Beaux Arts facade, beautifully rendered in trompe l’oeil fashion. Looking at his watch he indicates we are running out of time and he hurries me down the hallway to where the meeting is going to take place. We rush by several other ghetto displays, one of which disturbs me, particularly. It seems to replicate some South American favela. As we hustle past, I glimpse a couple of dirt-encrusted, toddlers, actors maybe, dressed in rags and cowering on a patch of terra cotta dust, at which they are half-heartedly scratching with a long shard of glass. Three greasy-looking black vultures squabble on a nearby mound of garbage, spooling the glistening intestines from the bloated, blue carcass of a dog. The coarse croaking is muffled by the thickness of the plate glass, unsettling me even more. I enter the conference room and feel somehow comforted by the white noise whoosh of the climate-controlled air coursing through a labyrinth of invisible ducts. I settle into my leather chair and prepare to discuss the business at hand. The meeting ends and I am quickly ushered out a service door. I hail a cab and disappear into the mist of the night. I never see the museum again and I wonder from time-to-time if my visit there actually happened.
Still Closed
The blue black sky with its afterthought of puffy clouds. The swish of distant traffic. A dust devil whipping across the gravel parking lot, picking up an empty bag of Cheezies and dropping it, over and over. The hollow sound of some styrofoam cups rolling into each other in an oily pot hole. Over and over.
Dr. Zhivago (1966)
The blue vinyl expanse of the Buick’s bench seat. The drive-in theatre, somewhere near the airport. The setting sun flashing orange off the skins of planes, banking wide across the flatlands. The sooty exhaust plumes melding into the topaz industrial sky. Kids in pajamas playing on a rusty swing set as they wait for the cartoons to start. Dad in the driver’s seat, the smell of the styrene factory still seeping from his pores. He’s smoking an Old Port, “wine dipped” cigar with a white plastic filter on the end of it. The shuddering of the car as the 707 passes over and sinks pregnantly behind the big white screen. The landing lights strobing from its dirty aluminum underbelly. The array of rubber wheels, prone and ready for impact. The silhouettes of passengers framed in their lozenge-shaped windows. The Balalaika music from the speaker hanging in the window cuts out in a crackle of radio interference. The molecules of air themselves are tormented. A distant rumbling. Another plane, or incoming thunder? My cheek settling against the cool automotive glass. The smell of the nighttime summer dust.
Poems about the Future:
A pile of exoskeletons withering in the dust of the corner. All those little lives!
In the future Supervolcanoes will cover the earth with their silly grey powder. The sky will always be black.
The call of the red-winged blackbird brings to mind the sound of a dial-up modem. In the future, I wonder if anyone will ever remember that dial-up modem sound?
I will remember a summer’s day, a long time ago, when the rats leapt like impalas in the tall, dead grass.
How do they survive? Those little moths who flit among the bare trees of winter. The gnats who dance on the crusts of morning snow?
