(a breakfast story)
Several years ago I woke up, put some bread in the toaster and began reading the morning paper. I read about bombs in Afghanistan, El Salvador, Beirut and my home town of Los Angeles. I read about poisons in the water, in the air and in our bodies and I read about some guy who’d hung himself inside of his closet because he couldn’t find a job…
My vision to the paper became fogged by smoke. I turned my head and saw that the toast was on fire. I didn’t jump immediately to put it out because the gray clouds billowing silently, twirly and thick from the rectangular toast hole was indeed a beautiful sight.
Fluttering about in the smoke like sperm in semen were two-inch dragonfly people. They had tiny human faces, thin, green caterpillar bodies and buzzing golden wings with blood red spots and silver fringes around the edges. They smiled and hummed Beethoven’s Fifth, which vibrated warm, perfumed wine-massage-vapors through my bones. I eased back into my chair, took a long, easy sip of coffee and watched the thousand pixies orgy around the lightbulb. I smiled.
Those buggies couldn’t stay friendly and sexy, though. They began to dive-bomb at me from the ceiling and to scream,” SILLY WILLY NILLY, CRAZY DAISY BOY, YOU’RE GONNA LOSE YOUR JOB!!!” I felt the pins dig in as they lashed at my bare neck, hands and feet with their fangs and stingers. I sprang up and got the broom.
I pelted them pests to the floor in waves, but they were honest soldiers. They bounced off the floor and came back for more. Realizing that the broom wasn’t going to do the trick, I ran and grabbed a can of Raid bug spray. I dodged the demons emitting clouds of chemical death spray from my fingertip.
The buggies took in the gas and dropped vanishing in a thousand mini-geysers of smoke across the floor. The storm-invasion was finally over. The toaster had filled the kitchen up with so much smoke that I couldn’t see from one side of the room to the other.
My lungs ached and my eyes stung. My nose could hardly tolerate the smell of the chemicals anymore. I, however, was too exhausted to go outside. I sat on the floor gasping with my back slumped against the wall.
One dragonfly remained and it resumed humming the symphony while hovering above the toaster from which licked and flashed several orange tongues of flame. I chuckled to myself, “Heh, heh, heh. To think them psychologists wanted to pump me full of lithium when all I needed was a can of Raid to exterminate my psychosis!”
My laughter turned to howls and tears came to my eyes when the ambulances and fire trucks pulled into the driveway and I guess that explains the white robe that I have on at this very moment, too.
Just when you were finding out the chord changes to “Birdland.” Just when the orange meridian split the sky open like some great beetle spreading her wings to fly. You turn opalescent eyes up onto her glittering underplates and see there a crimson hourglass. Your life and others tumbles out of control in a formless void.
Ric:
You’re quadriplegic, baby.
