Beads & Batteries

A little boy went "uuuughhhhh" when he saw the white reverse lights on the van coming toward his little sister in the stroller. Though precocious in one area of common knowledge, he was deficient overall; his mother easily wheeled the stroller up the curb onto the sidewalk (with a few seconds to spare). I mean, the extent of the car's backwards movement didn't even intersect with where she'd been while crossing the street...it was a guttural shriek, one that only a prepubescent little man could muster. Outward from his little lips the air tossed and turned restlessly. It mixed with the grease and grime of the city, alternately savory and disgusting, wonderful and loathsome.

With his family out of the picture, his heart and mind sunk in nostalgia whenever he saw those shiny green and red ceramic tiles. His stomach juices gurgled and popped and touched his heart and mind when he saw the place's menu assembled together in white, rounded characters on the sweaty grease-filled wall. The white numbers after each item related cost - numbers that served as an index, and, when paired with the year and just a little historical data, tells the stories of cities and countries, of countries and civilizations, in the northern hemisphere of Earth.

The air licked the burnt, crispy salt particles off of itself as the scream went by, passing on the exotic seafood and aristocratic baby formula, shoveling it off with a crest at its chest. I tell you, what beats this, what flies like a pig and chomps like a shark? What zooms like a race car and pivots like a row on an abacus? Who can label me in a few premeditated brush strokes! Who can capture my worth in a few succulent thighs, am I so bland! Am I low-sodium! Am I a number and a target, can I defy the numbers if I think hard enough? The pig has wings I saw them with my own eyes!

Right now aaaaaaand go! Go! Oh shit oh shit! Oh shit! Go Go Go! Chug chug chug chug chug hahahaha! Go! Chug! Oh shit! Beady eyes looked on from across the street, there's no street. There's no street if there's no city, and there is definitely not a city here. Athletic prowess flexes and stands over me as I look back cynically yet defeated. I am a piece of fine art - a porcelain vase a masterpiece a showstopper. We have a fan! Look, there he is with the tail and the coat. Now we have a fan and a coat, this climate is no match for us. We can control our destinies because we have the tools necessary to withstand the extremes of our climate.



We are utterly adrift and it has gone to our heads. We look into the distance and our bones are disintegrating. Our hearts and minds throb with the rise and fall of the moonleash. I want a cupcake. Me and my classmates want cupcakes. We want stickers and cupcakes and first honors. I want my number to be called and called and called until I'm looking up at the cheap ceiling tiles three feet above me from the mattress of a plaything - and through the walls, through the cement mixed together by an immigrant and slopped together with Holy Water and a sacred spade - I hear the engine of a way out of here, and it. is. so. gone.