For the past 1200, the only fitting word can be different.
Dandelions and fungi are bedmates. Morning starts earlier. Absorption of
subatomic particles, particularly the undiscovered ones, occurs at a broken
clock's pace. Seedy free love tenets. Dessicated egos.
All that's a few bytes of locally-sourced pedagogical content of the
philosophical cult here at Island (pronounced iLAND). Which? One of some in the
tangled dragnet solving Lake of the Woods, Minnesota. Upon arriving, I had
removed my blindfold and momentarily canoodled with pitcher black. My pupils
performed their evolution-chiseled subroutines, for their efforts a rotting
wooden sign and its chalky talk revealed themselves. "Truth purveyance and
stasis destruction refuse to mutually exclude." I recalled that they proved
this result in the eighties with modal logic or something.
Who's they, y'ask? They are the unwitting experts we defer to when relating low-
stakes intellectual curios. "They say 90% of the statistics you've heard are
just made up." Yes, I choose to believe it. "They've known for decades that
schizophrenia equals high brain activity plus low thought count." Or was it low
brain activity plus high thought count? Either way it's true and this is why
afflicted souls, once on antipsychotics, are destined for exceptional feats of
manual labor. "They can end uncertainty once and for all."
They write headlines in this way.
***
Last night was my casting call with them. What follows is rough remembrance.
[JUANITA enters the unlit shack. She is clothed, in case you thought otherwise.
The ambience is surreal, hyperreal, some convex combination thereof. Are we
choosing our own adventure? Go to page 17 if...]
[THEY uppercuts an oak desk with a knee. JUANITA flinches. THEY is presumed to
display an ajar orifice, eventually forming words with it.]
THEY: VICE Media Group LLC?
[JUANITA ekes out two unwitnessed affirmative nods.]
THEY: Have a seat, moonbeams.
[A piercing flash of fluorescence envelops JUANITA and the shack interior. She
instinctively flexes her eyelids down then permits them to glide back with
oppressive deliberation, sparing each lash the fate of facial banishment. A
clothed being is behind the oak. THEY gestures JUANITA toward an unfolded steel
chair on her side of the oak. She sits and pushes glasses into her forehead.]
JUANITA: Hello.
[THEY uses eyes to trace the rims of JUANITA's spectacles. She is seriously
uncalm and fails to hide it. THEY completes one orbit.]
THEY: Yo. Words?
[JUANITA remains uncalm. She adrenalizes, launching into a rehearsed couplet.]
JUANITA: I would like to indulge in one inquiry. Is that an allowable
transaction at this time?
[The reply is a solemn nod. JUANITA reaches into her back pocket and produces
ten index cards, each embossed with a question mark. She nervously pushes her
thighs together, maneuvering knots of hair like frisky Velcro inside her polka
dot shorts. A single card is delivered unto THEY.]
JUANITA: How did THEY get so powerful?
[THEY emits a stunted sigh. Perhaps wanting of a probier prompt.]
THEY: Here's a syllogism, however contrived. Let supply be potential and demand
kinetic. We supply answers whereas everyone else demands. Conservation of
energy ensures we can only ever operate at a loss. As such, the strategy of
perceived omnipotence was developed. In the eighties, maybe.
[JUANITA stares past THEY and unpuzzles the proof. A dash of Morse later spells
round two. Another question card is exchanged.]
JUANITA: Is what THEY do justified?
THEY: Yeah.
[Verbal abstinence is reinvoked. JUANITA gets saucy.]
JUANITA: Tell me about--
THEY: Card!
[JUANITA shrinks back.]
JUANITA: Oh, right. I forgot. [The thing happens again.] Tell me... what was
your childhood like?
[Hypotheticals have been invited. THEY supposes themself as younger JUANITA,
buzzing about curiously the barrios of San Marcos, Texas, pretending by way of
divine error she had been delivered instead to Aguascalientes, wrapped in
frazada tigre or with mole de olla substituted for amniotic fluid. JUANITA
blinks twice, numero dos being conscious. Outside the shack is squawking fauna.
A symphony is performed and THEY rediscovers speech.]
THEY: Imaginative. Any more?
[JUANITA is discouraged by the turn for taciturn. Her hand aches with the
geopolitical heft of a hyperinflated currency.]
JUANITA: That is all.
THEY: Excellent! Return your remaining cards, please.
[JUANITA springs into a body position approximating standing. She spills her
hand onto the oak and dashes out the shack into a crushing embrace of star-
spoiled sky. The shack disintegrates, its value having expired.]
***
*My grandmother looked like a bird; this is one of the reasons my grandfather
married her.* It was the last thought JUANITA decided on before facing a
phalanx of REM cycles. Gravity and dirt were her armor. 0800 pass and the
narrative meets the present.