Category: Morning Glory

Reckoning

Lt. “Mr.” Gorgonsen alighted from the wreckage of his exploded enemy with the lightest foot he knew, but it was no match for a disgruntled, panicked, violently confused group of American soldiers. Guns were going off everywhere. Birds were falling from the sky. He could feel something at his heels, something closing down from above.

Gasping, gagging on sand or fright, he began to strip off his clothes as he ran. He abandoned his jacket, his trousers, his underclothes, his socks, even his body armor. He ran naked through the hot strobe of the desert, terrified to his toenails, unable to stop. He dodged the falling bodies of pigeons like they were ghosts of the grenades he had thrown, aiming to take him down with the decisive blow of instant karma. He fled the thought of the dark dogs chasing behind him, cursing the footprints left in his wake, daring them to explode upon contact, no matter what contact it might be. He felt the darkness shudder and swell, threatening to swallow him forever in the mistake of a lifetime.

The crazed Lt. Mr. had no idea what he had done, only that it felt disastrous. He had no respect nor concept for intuition, but somehow he ran on in the certitude that he had done something wrong and the wrong one had died as a result. He made his escape in naked anguish, growing smaller and more frightened with each step, despite relative distance gained.

The cloud above him would not go away no matter how far from the base he got. It would not stop its roiling, horrible motion. It seemed to follow him through miles and miles of impossibly unchanging desert.

His legs hardly worked by the time he found it. A half-destroyed, smoldering shell of a car over in the ditch of something that could hardly be called a road. The front end was completely blown off and the blackened seats inside were curled to nubbins and the killing felt fresh enough to taste, but Mr. was unable to feel anything but his fear and so he went into the still-intact back side of the thing, where the remains of a trunk held some boxes of food and clothes. He hastily donned the long, traditional robes of some deceased stranger, took a carton of dates, and continued on his way, running in stagger-spurts like an open wound.

Five steps into his sprint, the skies opened to a distressing spaciousness, a lack of bird mass which defied logic and threatened the terrified man’s already-taxed sense of reality. Looking up wildly searching the sky for information, Mr. stumbled bleary-eyed toward the dubious promise of a life in exile that somehow didn’t end with a million birds of doom raining feverishly upon his head.

And then, there it was, and there they were. A dragon, soaring its numinous serpentine omen across the whites of the atmospheric eye. It roared deafening silence and breathed the fire of feathered soot. Too heavy for flight and too light for gravity.

Mr. dropped to his knees and threw up in his date container.

The dragon coiled a dark figure eight and spun back on itself in layer after nauseating layer. The dance in the sky meant many things to many people in that very moment, but to Lt. Mr. Gorgonsen, it meant one thing: the End Was Near. And, more importantly, he had started it.

There was nowhere to hide, but he would keep running until he found hiding people among whom to be anonymous.

There was no atonement, but he would continue fleeing its wrath through his every move.

There was no Apocalypse, as it turned out, but he would continue to live in it for as long as he could see.

 

-**

Secrets

Glory’s dream journal was not a book. It was not a stack of pages or an album of pictures. It was an unfathomable diorama, a pop-up jigsaw puzzle of storyboards and film reels, a textured landscape of living textiles and the tentacled offspring of machine-made seeds. It looked like a pile of art scraps when it lay on her special bedside table; a deconstructed muppet head, still twitching with bad jokes and good magic. To an ignorant bystander, it would seem completely unremarkable in its inert form, except for one thing: it glowed. Actually glowed. When the lights went out at night, no matter what phase the moon was in, a silvery light cast its gentle spectrum off the deranged bundle so its shape was the only vision in the room. In the day, despite the visual offset of daylight, the feeling of the glow remained present enough to draw the eye.

This is how Dennis came to endanger the life of his curious cat.

He had caught sight of it many times before, simply by grace of its invisible glow and irregular shape. Dennis was always sincerely interested in his daughter’s creative exploits, and this one seemed a labyrinth of continual development. He had no interest in rushing her to share; he knew she had the timing and impulse of a bear cub tempered with the patience and wisdom of a ninety-year-old whittler. She was learning to create with care and offer with responsibility. He had no doubt that she would change the world, when she was ready. He had gotten used to waiting. He was good at waiting. Almost always.

In the warm sunshine of a wintry afternoon, in the small handful of “downtime” hours he was afforded per week, Dennis was bringing a stack of laundry to Glory’s bed when he was struck by a staring spell. He stared at that dream pile for several minutes, the folded clothes heavy in his hands, socks dangling off his forearms. Finally, he shook off the blankness of reverie and put the laundry down. With no thought nor reason, he walked over to the thing and carefully flipped open to a “page” in the middle.

There was a shape, a purple shape, and a swirl of pink dust in its cracks. Inside the shape were thousands—really, thousands—of delicate little black threads, waving every which way, curling in thick clumps toward the edges, dispersing in flimsy couplets toward the center. Contained in unimaginable depth were the long, thin lines of two figures in the middle, touching just barely at the waist, limbs and heads stretching out beyond the page in tapering pipecleaner twists. There were only eight words on the page, and it was hard to tell where they were written: “What happened to you happened to me.”

There was a slam at the front door. The man froze on the spot. Glory’s home, said his Observer. Holy Mother of God!!! said his Reactor. Frantic clomps up the steps. No time passed. There she was.

Glory was mad, spitting mad. She didn’t even know why, but didn’t need to. She came roaring through the door, clawing the thing from his hands before she even set foot in the room. He dropped it on the bed, guilty as a kid caught shoplifting.

“I’m sorry, MG,” he stammered sincerely. “I didn’t—”

“You can’t do this! Get out of here! What if you’ve scared them?! How could you? Don’t you know what will HAPPEN if you mess this up?!” she shrieked. “Get out of here! Out! Out! Out!”

She had never before spoken this way to the man she called father. She was fuming, eyes rolling, smoke spilling out her pores. He blinked at her, sadder than he’d ever looked.

“Glory,” he said quietly, “please forgive your father.”

She shot him a look he had never seen on the face of a human. “I’m. Trying.”

He couldn’t be sure, because at that moment he was sure of nothing, including the sanity of the young lady before him, but he had a feeling in his gut that she wasn’t talking about him.

Suddenly wide-eyed with paranoia, terrified that his mind was not a private affair but the clear lens of a projector shooting his truth every which way, Dennis backed out of the room.

Visibly calming, claiming her space like a hunting tiger, she paced after him. “Do you have any idea how important this is to me?”

He nodded. He didn’t. “I’m sorry,” he frowned.

She grew several years older to say, “I know. I have to be alone now.” Then she closed the door.

 

-**

Training

“Did you know there are silkworms that can build a shirt in one piece?”

“Why would they do that?” Marma was making the face.

“Because they’re artists! They can do whatever they want.” That seemed to suffice. Morning Glory continued, “But that’s not the point. The point, dude. Silk.”

“The point is that silkworms can make whatever they want? Into silk.”

“Right. So they could make anything, anything we make right now in itchy polyester and shitty cotton.” Glory felt the usual internal glee that came with letting out a Mature word. Her glee was immediately doused:

“What do you have that’s polyester?”

“You know what I mean. The point, for real is: they’re smarter than us. Don’t you see? They can make something with their bodies–” she paused and inhaled dramatically, used the Bug-Eyed Serious face and said “–they can make something with their bodies, that we cannot make. There are creatures that make silk, Marma! And honey. And webs. And houses–”

“My dad makes houses!”

“MARMA! Not my point! Does he cut the wood with his teeth?”

Marma stared up into the space between her eyebrows. For a bit too long. Finally: “No. But that would be weird.”

“You see. Exactly. And it’d be weird if I could weave a sparkly web with long sticky threads coming outta my butt! Dancing in some kinda aerial math-and-gravity-enthusiast’s dream–“

“I have that dream, Glory. I’m an enthusiast.”

“Marma!” Morning Glory almost cried. She could not fathom why, but she was spiritually serious right now in a way that required acknowledgement, and Marma did not seem to be catching on. She sat for a moment fuming in the timespace marathon that language required, trying not to be disappointed that ESP was not more openly accepted as valid communication, when suddenly Marma broke her sulk:

“Glory. You know what would be great? Being silked into a warm tube.” She looked so dreamy that MG burst out a giggle. Marma turned with undaunted solemnity in her direction. “By the silkworms.”

Glory thought for a moment. Then her eyes slowly lit into Marma’s with joy. “YES.” Marma totally got it. She wanted to find out, too. MG beamed a white rabbit of light straight into the holes of Marma’s irises, watched the bunny tail disappear, then looked both ways and leapt into the open tunnel.

“Yes. We have to learn! Let’s learn from them. So then we can come out new like the butterflies and moths do. So we can bust outta crackly back skin like cicadas & creepy silverfish. So we can evolve, Marma. On purpose.” She’d dropped her voice, spinning a little wind storm with her words. Leaves swirled wildly by the tree where they crouched, exactly when Glory inhaled. Marma noticed silently. Marma noticed everything. “And Marms: you start by learning how to hold very still for a long time. So you can hear how they do what they do. They’ll tell you…” Glory was glowing, practicing holding very still already, “If you hold very still.”

Marma nodded. “I’m good at that.”

Glory snorted, shoving her friend with one paw. “No you’re not! You’re awful.” Marma gaped. She had been serious. No matter. “But so am I!” laughed Glory. “Terrible. No good at all, really. We have to train. Seriously. Like ninjas.”

Marma shook her head. “Like Sikhs. Ninjas move around a whole lot.”

“Oh, you’re right. Okay. Let’s start. Our first training… Can’t be silkworms, cause we don’t know any.”

Marma was taking out a notebook and pen. Good, MG thought, we’re on board. Worth documenting, like all good adventures. It’s official. She closed her eyes for a moment, relishing the drumroll of anticipation. Wait for it.[1]  She inhaled deeply and spoke through fluttering eyelids:

“We go lay in the grass next recess and let the ants crawl on us.”

There was a pause. A long pause. A long, pregnant pause. Glory wondered if Marma was breathing. She opened her eyes. Marma was staring at something invisible, inches from her face. Glory tried to get in the shot. She blinked a lot and raised her eyebrows, trying to make obscenicons squiggle from her face. Marma didn’t notice, but as soon as MG gave up, there was a joyful squeal from inside the far-off reverie. Morning Glory knew that noise. Marma was in.

“Yes! Glory. Let’s do this. We’re going to get so good.”

“Yaaaaasssss!” MG kicked her legs. Marma’s choices were always a good surprise either way they came out. Worth the wait.

Another good surprise: the bell rang just then, shepherding the two inside with the rest of the sheep-training crew, but therefore pressing pause on exactly that moment in time, destining them to think about it for another couple of hours before actually lying down in the ants.

By the time they were getting on the bus that afternoon, they were buzzing with chatter, planning for the next experiments. They had laid on the grass playing Anthill for at least 30 minutes in all, separated only by giggles and classes. It was exhilirating. Terrifying. Tempting. There were so many more ways to play this game. Perching cross-legged in the bus seat, Marma was saying,

“So I think silkworms take like 3 or 4 days to finish. And they would cost money to have as pets. So we have to work out in a step-wise function toward that goal.” Marma was so good at these things. She relished showing it. A real silkworm in her trade. [2] “So we need to try for a whole hour next time. Then two.”

“Yeah, I think so too. But with something else. Not ants again. Something…” Glory frowned. “More like silk. Actual silk. But we don’t have much of it at my house. Hmm. Oh! Marma! Do you have any duct tape?”

“We have tons of duct tape. Tons.” Marma twiddled her fingers. “You know who my mom is? Tons.”

“Sweet. Well good thing it’s my night to come over. Dad’s gonna pick me up after bedtime. Let’s do this, Secret Ninja Marmalade.”

“Shh! Don’t call me that!”

“It sounds really good with ‘Secret Ninja’ before it. Don’t you think?”

“Well, yeah. But you can’t say that in public.[3] Every single one of those words is secret. We have to be more careful now.”

Glory was dumbstruck for a moment. “You’re right, you’re right. What was I thinking.” She shook her head disapprovingly, then brightened. “Whoa, see? This is really good training! Those ants, Marma. Those ants worked miracles already.”

Marma grinned. “Good at what they do.”

“You said it.” She plucked one off Marma’s hairline and put it on the windowsill. Its tiny antennae waved just moments before it was sucked out into the autumn breeze. “Hope it’s okay!” Glory whipped her head out the window after it.

“Don’t worry,” Marma chortled. “It’s a ninja.”

The two little birds exploded into twitters, which progressed into frenzied belly laughs, which continued until they descended down the bus stairs toward the Vouvray residence.

It was going to be a good night.

 

**

1. Antici………..

2. Her trade being patterning and organizing things. Any things. All things.

3. For clarification: Marma would allow very few humans to use her full name, for reasons that made perfect sense in her cosmology. For a taste of said cosmology, that of a future-master-patterner: Marmalade Camembert Vouvray has the initials MCV, which according to the Romans stands for 1105, which, numerologically reduced in conjunction with the Major Arcana of the Tarot, equals the Chariot: meditation of total commitment, the internal stillness required for fruitful motion. (High math: Lust + Fool + Hierophant = Chariot… or Magus + Fortune + Hierophant = Chariot… or 2 Magi, a Fool, and Hiero = Fucken Chariot any way you slice it.) This concludes your glimpse into the invisible Doozer crew of Marma’s inner workings.

Science!

The week after the public schools of Everett released the emergency slept-over children, there was an inservice day for teachers [1], and Marma was allowed to come over for a whole day (a whole day!) of no-school shenanigans. There were cookies in the works, because Mrs. Hanson had specifically two cookie sheets’ worth of time before her soaps started.

“Thank you, Marma!” Mrs. Hanson glowed as the somber child handed her a pair of oven mitts.

“You’re welcome,” murmured Marma while casting a wide eye in Glory’s direction. Glory, never one to mind the “don’t eat the ingredients” cooking rule, was squeezing the tube of blue icing she dangled over her mouth.

“Want some?” Glory mumbled through emulsifiers and food coloring.

Marma shook her head fast as the adult cried, “Ooh! Dennis! You’ve got to see what this child just did!” Dennis, now past forty and ashamed of his gummy-bears-with-chocolate-syrup days, sought a hard line on this arbitrary rule, if only to remind himself that he could now afford to supply the vehicle for those toppings so he need not pretend they were sufficient. [2]

Lucky for Glory, the only response was a muffled “Can’t look now!” coming from inside a closet, a sweater, or a combination thereof. Statistically-speaking, it was safe for Dennis to assume the invitation to “look at something Glory did” was a summons to witness some kind of metaphysical artwork or a new scientific discovery rather than something that was irrevocably despoiled, and this assumption ruled the day, at least by a wide enough margin to pass a hypothetical congress [3]. One pant leg at a time, Dennis prepared his nervous system for another day sustaining his position in an economy that upheld hastily-approximated long-since-appropriated pseudo-Mexican cuisine.

Back in the kitchen, Morning Glory had been successfully encouraged to use her grip on the icing tube to adorn a plate of cookies as she saw fit. At her request, the cookies had been made planet-shaped, that is, generally round and lumpy. She made them all blue planets, affirming the capacity for each delicious microcosmic orb to sustain life, even if that life would be eaten in full by a creature many times its size. She gave Marma the task of selecting appropriate tube nozzles for the other colors, such that realistic geographical compositions could be rendered.

Mrs. Hanson smiled indulgently at the pair, sipping coffee and devouring her one apportioned frostingless celestial body. (“But it won’t be able to host multi-cellular complex organisms!” had been the protest. “I am just fine with eating the dud planet, thank you very much,” was the reply.) Her long nails drilled distractedly on the countertop as she watched, waiting for her entertainment to change from youthful interpretations of geographical evolution via baked goods to heavily-backlit, amateurly-acted, dramatically-scored manipulation and intrigue via corporate-sponsored programming.

A timer went off. Glory and Marma looked up from their masterpieces, wondering passingly if a secret batch of additional planets was coming their way. Nope. Mrs. Hanson was already halfway out the room, calling “Okay, gotta go! Enjoy yourselves! We’ll clean up later!” as she beelined for her TV spot.

“Excellent.” Morning Glory grinned over the inert solar system. “We’ll only eat some of the planets.”

“Right.” Marma was fashioning impressive cumulo-nimbus skyscapes on one particularly active cookie atmosphere. “Some means most.”

“No, for real,” insisted Glory, amid careful erection of metamorphic chocolate mountains. “Gotta save a few for my dad.”

“Save me at least half.” Dennis said as he grabbed his coat, giving a quick squeeze to the geologist baker and an honorific nod to the dulcified meteorologist. Eyeing the gooey mess, he assured himself his request was merely parental, and that he would in no way indulge in the consumption of a saccharin mound of astronomical overkill when he returned from work tired and spent and easily swayed by the sight of food that in no way resembled tacos. “A third.”

“Bye, Dad!” Glory wheeled back to her mountains with renewed vigor, while Marma paused to check the milk provisions.

“We only have enough milk for a glass each.” Marma shook her head. “We’ll have to ration carefully.”

Ration they did. An hour later, the house was down 100% of its milk and 75% of its sanity [4]. The kids retreated to the bedroom, howling like loons, eyes shining like a disco-lit psychonaut’s dreamreel. The galactic dessert course had hurled the collective blood sugar past event horizon. The day was as good as glitterbombed.

“Make sure you wash those hands!” was the only call from adulthood as they’d scrambled up the stairs.

Hands washed, yet stained in blue blotches nonetheless, the two squealers spun around Glory’s room, taking turns seeing if they could fall into the bed without looking. This progressed into tracking the spin-fall success ratio from different points in the room, adding interfering or supporting variables, scrawling charts in Glory’s journal. (Being pelted with socks, for example, seemed to deter the spinner from the bed, whereas singing Santigold at the top of lungs from a stationary position in the room seemed to improve results dramatically.)

“Okay, so echolocation is a thing.” Glory scribbled wildly across the page while Marma carefully placed gold stars on her face to benumber achievements. “Now let’s try silent telepathy.”

Marma agreed, closing her eyes and whirling in place three times to start the round. Morning Glory sat still in the middle of the bed in the middle of the room, concentrating on calling Marma towards her with all her might. The sham-Sufi spun madly into a dizzied shriek, then leapt. Both had closed their eyes for the experiment, so their scientific findings were heralded with a loud, decisive bonking of heads as Marma flew directly into the centerpoint of Glory’s rumination.

“Ow!”

“Oaahhhhhh. Marma!” Glory rolled into a little ball while Marma found pillows in which to bury her head. “Well. That worked.” Moans turned to giggles and kicking feet. From inside the pillow asylum:

“I thought you’d keep your eyes open.”

“What would that have helped?” Glory held her forehead, squirming up next to Marma’s sanctuary. “Just woulda meant I’d watch the impending doom and probably freak out and move, then we’d have skewed results and have to do it again.”

“We have to do it again anyway, for science.” Muffled reason from beneath the pillowy refuge.

“Okay, true. But let’s let this one settle first, hey?” Morning Glory sent one hand round the bed in search of her journal. “I think we got some pretty clear first results.”

“That was the best one yet for sure!” Marma’s nose came animalling its way out of the cushioned cave, aware of safety and sustenance. “I felt like I was in a rocket launcher.”

“Ooh, yeah! Tell me your subjective awareness.” Glory began a new page and wrote “rocket launcher” along the top.

Marma came out from the pillows in full, roused by the hope that her pain served a greater purpose. “Well it felt less like I was in control, or like I even had to figure out my aim.”

“K…”

“Actually it felt like I couldn’t aim, not like before. Or like I wasn’t doing it myself.”

“Well yeah, because you weren’t.” Glory kept scribbling. “Could you feel my wiggles?”

“Uh… whaddya mean?”

“Wait, wait, that’s not good science. I’ll tell you later. Ahem. What did you feel from me?”

“Uhhh…” Marma settled back for a moment and closed her eyes. “I felt like you were spinning in me and I was sitting on the bed.”

“Really?” Morning Glory dropped her pen and grabbed Marma’s feet in excitement. An unprecedented move, since Marma preferred never to be touched without express permission. “Oh, sorry. Just, yeah, me too!”

“It’s okay.” Marma acceded. “I actually was gonna ask you to touch my feet.”

“Wait, really?”

“Yeah, they felt kinda faraway and I wanted to feel if they were still there.”

“Huh. Okay.” Glory took hold of Marma’s feet once more, with thoughtful curiosity. “You feel em?”

“Yes. Thanks.”

“Marms.” Glory’s tone was solemn, wallowing in the sweet mud of significance and maturity. “I think we turned something on. I think we’re still psychic.”

“You think so?” Marma sat up, gingerly patting her forehad. “That’s gonna take a lot more science to confirm.”

“True.” Glory shifted so she could sit cross-legged in front of her friend. “So let’s start. How bout you grab my feet too. And we’ll see what that does.”

“Okay.”

The two sat still for several moments, producing the first quiet the house had held since dawn. Mrs. Hanson snoozed on the couch downstairs. Birds tweeting on the crabtree outside were the loudest thing in the air. At last Glory spoke:

“I can feel our blood pumping.”

“Yeah me too.”

“Any psychicness?”

“No. Well, I don’t know.” Marma drew her eyebrows together.

“Were you thinking about cats?”

“Naw.” Marma let out a breath. “I was thinking about electromagnetic resonance.”

“Okay, okay, wait!” Glory wriggled. “For a minute there, I was thinking about Schrödenger’s cat! For real. That’s close, right? I just said ‘cats’ because then it was lots of cats. And rainbows.”

Marma pondered for a moment while Morning Glory took notes. “I think we need way, way, way more evidence.”

“Yeah, me too.” Glory put the book down and resumed her station at Marma’s feet. “Okay, this time let’s put our heads together.”

“Literally?” Marma winced. “Like right where they collided?”

“Exactly!” Morning Glory was resolute. “Look, no accidents, right? There’s probably psychosomatic information that is alive exactly where those tissues made contact.”

Not convinced, Marma made the ‘not convinced’ face at Glory.

“Also… there are ancient healing practices that use touch and attention to bring blood flow to injuries?”

Marma crooked an eyebrow. “We don’t want bloodflow. We want diminishment of goose-eggedness.”

“That’s the medical term, right?” Glory giggled.

“Yes.”

“Okay, so let’s gently put our heads together and direct the blood down to each other’s feet.”

“Like my blood to your feet and yours to mine?”

“No, goofy! I’ll send yours to yours and you send mine to mine.” Glory shook her head, shimmying the idea out. “The other way would be weird. And unsanitary. Probably gross.”

“Right, that’s why I asked.” Marma rolled her eyes. “Like you don’t know who I am. Sanitary. For real.”

“I think it does matter that we do it for one another, though. Otherwise it’s like spinning onto the bed alone. Less accurate. More flaily.”

“Ah. Yes, I see. Agreed.” Marma bent her forehead forward carefully, looking up through crossed eyes to see if the bumps were aligned.

“Just feel it.” Morning Glory closed her eyes. “Not like it’s hard to feel a giant bump pounding on the forehead. Feel my bump with your bump.”

This sent a wave of giggles rolling through the room, and the two were only calm enough to hold still again after throwing and recollecting the pillows several times.

“Okay. We’re going to see if the bumps have anything to tell us.”

“You know, they’re kind of like unicorn horns, where they’re at.”

“Probably not an accident. We’ve been called into our unicornity.”

“Let us learn.”

“Science.”

By the time Dennis returned that evening, he found a strangely quiet house, an empty carton of milk, a nearly-demolished tray of frostinged globes, and two children sitting together in rapt meditation.

Whatever the world was coming to, it included this nonsensical equation.

He sat down next to the sleeping babysitter, turned off the muted television, and licked the swirling atmosphere off one blue planet. Not bad, thought he. Not bad at all.

 

-**

1. One would hope, after all the mayhem, the “inservice” consisted of full-service massage, naps, and take-out, rather than the usual paperwork, hard chairs, and hotdishes. Just sayin.

2. For the record, in Dennis’ well-trod cookbook: Bread, vehicle for butter. Potato, vehicle for butter. Muffin, vehicle for butter. Corn, vehicle for butter. I think we see the pattern here. Food for thought.

3. The internal statistics monitor did not, however, adhere to the bogus-as-fuck standards of the American electoral college. Black folks having been specifically underserved by that invention, Dennis had avoided the implant of said highly-skewed twistings of presumed rational logic. White folks: please continue deconditioning work, Vol. 3, Chapters 7-15.

4. 95, if you include the input from the television.

The Frozen Fogstorm

The bell sounded, sending a sharp shock through the drowsy silence.

Enter autopilot. Kids gathered their things and tromped out of the room. Glory joined them, her head turning involuntarily back out the window, looking for some clue of Nature’s intention. The fog pulsed with nearly invisible lightning.

Of course. Glory’s antennae stood up.

Moments later, another bell sounded, this one akin to the fire alarm she knew so well. It was accompanied by a bright LED strobe flashing down the hallway, illuminating the excitement of the middle school herds. They loved a break from routine. They lived for a disturbance in schedule. They pined for a postponement to that group presentation they hadn’t finished. Whooping and screaming, tearing through the halls, they hardly listened to the voice-over sternly instructing them to make their way to the gym for an immediate, mandatory, emergency all-school assembly.

In the chaotic shepherding adventure that the schoolteachers’ union had failed to get stricken from their job duties, Morning Glory managed to find Marma immediately. They clung together to avoid suffocation and separation, respectively. Once they were seated, there was an Order to maintain, and that Order generally had the Maycomb section well-separated from the Vouvray section, so the two friends needed to hold tight and quietly refuse to budge. Usually, keepers of the Order soon found bigger fish to fry. And so it was, in this as in all school assemblies thus far.

Glory sat next to Marma, narrating everything that was happening, in part because it helped them both understand, in part because it was much more fun with the voice-overs Glory could supply.

“Thah has been a tahhhrible difficulty with the weathahhh,” Glory quacked through her invisible tiny megaphone. Marma was the perfect audience: difficult to impress and impossible to crack. So Glory went for it every time. “We seem to have been eaaaaten.”

“Eaaaaten?” whispered Marma.

“Eeeaaaaaaaaten!” Glory confirmed in Gollum’s shrillest whisper.

Far from cracking, Marma merely turned her whole face down a centimeter and looked at Glory over her glasses.

“We have been eaaaaaaten by a laaaahge cloud, it seems.” Glory switched to Katherine Hepburn. “And this laaaahge cloud is not neeeahly done digesting us, deah gahhhhhd! This laaaahge cloud has only gotten us into its stomach and rrrrrrallied its digestive juices. Unfaaaahtunately, children, we will burn in stomach acids for houwaaahs before we are finally released into a thin paaaaasageway to the foggy duodenum—single file line for the pyloras, make us prouuuud.”

Marma rolled her eyes and turned up her lips in more of a dare than a smile.

Glory just went on, “So we’re going to have to paaaih up aftah this, because some of you ahh to be digested as nutwients! Yes, this means you are etahhhnally bound to cloud-dom for all your days, but at least you’ll be useful…. and the rest of you, oh my deeeeah children, you will be eliminated.”

Marma stared at Glory’s mouth, as was her habit when Glory spoke. This was unnerving to some, but Glory said it made her better at articulation. [1]

“You will be eliminated, some of you as mere liquid waste—heads up, footballahhhs, this is most of you—and some as the solid waste—now, Bwee McDonough, you’ll be wesponsible as captain of the solid waste, do you feel like you can handle this sewious assignment?”

Glory couldn’t tell if Marma was smiling or about to sneeze, so she amped it up a bit.

“Then, of couwse, we have the gaseous waste pwoducts. Casey Twigglew, will you do us the gwand honaaw of employing your mighty tubahhh in sewenading the elimination of the waste pwoduct team? Thank you dahling. Foe that, we’ll put in a good wohd foe you to be utilized in a tenuwed position as a digestive enzyme or one of sevewal billion membews of the intestinal flowa team. Now, wheah wuhh we?”

Marma let out a snort, not because the digestive health lesson was all that luxuriously humorous, but because of the old-school-Barbara-Walters-special going on. Marma watched a lot of news reruns from the early 90s, mostly because her father wrote sociopolitical analyses and had pumped out several books on the early days of the internet.  [2] So there was a fond spot in Marma’s heart for the missing letter “R” and the abundance of “W.”

“Oh yes! We ahh doomed, being eeeaaaaaten and slowly digested by a laaaaahge gwey cloud. And the only one who can save us is… Mahma? Mahma dahling are you there? We need your expahtise. You ahh the only one who knows the cowwect density of gaseous waste. This is the key to our fweedom, the antidote to our doooom! If we can simply genewate enough flatulence for this cloud to blow, we will buhhst out of here in a fwee-wheeling blast: a possibly catastwophic, ultimately life-saving, cehtainly stinky, EXPLOSION! Save us, deahh child! Save us from the clouuuuud!”

It wasn’t Marma that cracked, but the highly fragile young man behind them, Casey Actual Twiggler. He had been fervently listening to the speakers at the front of the room, who had been saying something close enough in tone—if not in actual content—to what Glory’s Gollum-Hepburn-Walters mash-up was inventing. And Casey was terrified, distracted, completely at his wits end about what he was hearing. He grabbed Morning Glory by the shoulders and shouted, “Enough! Enough already! Someone save us! Dear God save us from the cloud!!!”

The whole assembly full of eyes turned and stared, some staring above open mouths of laughter, some staring under knotted eyebrows of disapproval. As the stern eyebrows tried to resume order, Marma stared, too—but not at Casey’s bright red face—at the symphony of lightning flashing outside in the opaque fog. The row of windows lining the ceiling made the gym into a night club she’d never been in. It had become a Fantasia of school-day surprises: first the magnificent mold, now this multicolored flashdance of fog. Marma’s mind was simply bent on the possibilities the Universe was opening up for one who had been an earthling for just over a decade.

When the last twitter of Casey Twiggler’s ridicule at last dissipated, the strobe effect had taken over entirely, and the room fell silent. Not even the know-it-all vice-principle could speak over the pulsing splendor. Even more formidable by the silence it cast, the cloud spoke in waves, pink and blue flashes lighting up every last molecule of the density engulfing the school. No sound could hold a candle to the immensity. When at last the administration made it their job to speak, to make plans, to set guidelines and offer quiet reassurance, the assembly had lost much of its authority structure. It was merely older humbled humans speaking to younger humbled humans.

The news teams would later refer to it as the “Frozen Fogstorm.” Like freezing fog and ice fog, it was an anomalous occurrence that coalesced forces over the long, chilly, wet autumn, the surprise burst of warm wintertime, and the sudden plunge into Real Winter. This brought together unforseen conditions of daily freezing fog and icy thunderstorms. Its heaviest days were at the beginning, which was doubly difficult because it was also the time when townsfolk went the battiest with panic and ill-prepared emergency responses. Over weeks, the opaqueness would ebb and flow and eventually disperse completely. But on that first day, it wielded the power to completely shut down all transportation and most electricity, pinning everyone right where they were. Lucky for many, that meant that some folks were stuck within arms’ reach of cell phones and emergency broadcast systems. Others: lots of coffee and acoustic instruments. Others still: glow-in-the-dark spraypaint. Silver linings all around.

The weather phenomenon had begun as an odd juxtaposition of air currents, pressure systems, and humidity, a bit of rather curious science for meteorologists to bat around cyberspace, until it became popularized as the crisis known as The Frozen Fogstorm. As soon as it turned from a verb to a noun, it became a Problem. It had a kitchy title and thus it could be treated as a Foe, a Top Story, a Fearsome Unknown that people could pretend to know by giving it a clever nickname. [3]

The Frozen Fog made headlines for months in Everett, weeks in Washington state, days in national news, hours in international reports. A blip in the saturated tronzfield of cat memes and politics. But it would make a lifetime impact on the inhabitants of Everett, especially the schoolchildren who were camped out overnight in their gyms and cafeterias.

Glory and Marma huddled in a corner to whisper together well into the night. Gaggles of teenagers giggled and snored, as muted adults shushed and shuffled, and twitchy kids tripped back and forth from the bathrooms all night.

For Marma, the best day of her life was getting better all the time. Science!!!

For her best friend, it was one long syncopated dance step of the Dragon after another, and which side of the story they were on was chosen only in the telling. In the dark disco of the wee hours, the two could barely keep their eyes plastered to the windows. They had been staring for hours at the shapes lit up in the fog. It looked sometimes like rain, sometimes like snow, and sometimes like flocks of birds swooping furiously through the swirling cloud dance. At last the meditation gave way to the hug of sleep.

“Ooh, I can’t wait for my dreams tonight,” Glory spouted out just before her eyes closed in the pulsing darkness.

 

-**

1. Not so much in this case.
2. Back when books were books and the internet merely caused family feuds about the 6 hours tied up on the phone line every night for the sixteen downloaded versions of Freebird, 97% complete.
3. Common tactic.

Middle School

Something goes wonky when we think another person is more powerful than we are. The exalted ones get this big complex about how they’re supposed to be better than they are, and the lowly ones get this big complex about how they’re not good enough. (It’s the exact same complex, mind you, just with different access points and justifications. Wouldn’t wanna give exquisitely talented brains too easy of a Rubik’s cube.)

Morning Glory wasn’t about to play with that boring old game. She’d seen it in her dad’s hands for years, and he’d get all worked up about the square little crapper so he wouldn’t even finish his cereal or look at the cool bird (look! look!) she was pointing out.

Well, it wasn’t gonna be her gig.

Even so, there were several new words that Glory learned when she landed in sixth grade: muffintop, cameltoe, bitchy resting face, etc. None of these were of any use to her at all. Due to the tonality and timing of their delivery by others, she inferred that she was supposed to take offense at them and organize her life so as to avoid them being directed toward her at all costs. The cost, however, was quite obviously wrapped up in the organizing. Glory was uninterested in playing that game. Thus, many people said these words to her. And many people suffered the dissatisfaction of getting no reaction.

She had noticed the same difference in her friend Marma. There was absolutely no reason why people ought to assume they have any idea what’s going on in Marma’s head. This is true about everyone, of course, but in Marma’s case, being moderately autistic and very colorblind, information was being processed on pathways that most of her schoolmates would find about as accessible as a Texas oilfield after dark. And yet, so many kids were working very hard to make Marma into a colored square in their endlessly-shifting cubes.

Marma had no concern for the opinions of others. She was constantly teased, belittled, and mocked, according to the standards and agreements of most of the sixth grade cohort. However, according to her own standards and agreements, it went like this: people made a lot of effort to get her attention, and then when she gave it to them, they got very excited and squealed with laughter. No problem there. People are very interested in expressing connection. Middle school students are no exception; in fact, they are torch-bearers of the rule. Due to an unquenchable desire to experience connection, they tend to try many more approaches than the average adult does. Naturally, they encounter more frequent misunderstandings and maladjustments of the best methods of expressing and experiencing connection. But it’s not that they try to be difficult and obstinate. It’s that their moral values have not congealed into the lifelong molds in which they will try to determine and control their sugary, gelatinous futures. So they mess up a lot, give up a lot, try again a lot. It gets sticky.

Meanwhile, in the process, they’re all co-inventing a rampantly-growing, constantly-rearranging, nebulously-unpredictable culture of clownery. So courageously silly, the lot of them. So many Totally Screamworthy Scenarios and Unbelievable Madness and Big Romantic Ordeals. Not unlike any given channel on the teevee.

On this particular day, the very day The Frozen Fogstorm would hit the little town of Everett, Glory had seen several of her peers have the worst day of their lives, several others have the best day of their lives, and a few of them have one then the other, back to back. Marma, for example, was having the best day of her life.

“Oh Glory. What did I tell you? There was no way, no way that fungus could have formed so fast in my project if I hadn’t used saliva. Do you understand what this means?”

“What, what?” Glory was excited, but unsure whether it was due to her friend’s experiment or her friend’s rare glee.

“It means that life forms evolve more rapidly with the help of other life forms!”

“Wait, what? How does it mean that? You spit in a container of spores. If I were those spores, I might have a problem with that.” She knew better, in fact she had studied agricultural methods of indigenous cultures for her Humanities class last semester, even though the assignment was just supposed to be about the history of corn as a cash crop. But she liked to crack the top of the proverbial crème brulée as much as she liked to tease Marma, sometimes just to see if it went undetected (which it usually did). This time, it elicited a little snort and a wave of the hand.

“Glory! Spit contains DNA, man. Personal life codes! Do you know what kind of gift that is? It’s like giving them a lifelong battery booster. It’s like giving them a treasure map! It’s—”

“How’s the cheese, little mousies?” Bree The Soccer Duchess came by to take her usual handfuls of their lunches. Today she scored trail mix in one hand and dry Cocoa Puffs in the other. Her demeanor was not noticeably squelched by the disappointment. “You little ladies staying out of trouble? I don’t want to have to call your mom’s ass on you, Marmaduke.” Marma’s mother was the principle at the middle school, partially responsible for the excellent specialized education spectrum that spanned every grade and ability level. The kids had no conception of this, nor of the benefit that they derived from it. They did know, however, that the woman had a categorically wide rear end, and that they could, if they wanted to, inform Marma about it all day long.

“Yeah. I wouldn’t want to bother her. She’s working.” Marma wore such a wonderful poker face, one would think she was trying.

“Well…” Bree looked over to her designated slot at the popular-kids table. No help arrived. “You better watch your back, she’s been stomping that booty down the halls all day… we felt it in math class and thought it was an earthquake… maybe a storm brewing… might affect your driving conditions… you might have to camp out here overnight for safety.”

Bree was full of as much shit as usual, flailing around for an upper hand to use in slapping her bored targets awake. She spewed showers of puff cereal as she spoke, unaware, in the way of most Fools, that she was courting a possible future. Like a physician prescribing a drug, one of whose multitude of side-effects happens to actually attend to the matter for which you have come a-calling. Lucky chum. Or highly skilled. Take your pick.

When Bree finally got tired, or full, or both, she recoiled back to the winners’ table, where she bent heads and giggled stupidly with her flock.

“We should give her a little treasure map, eh?” Glory said.

Marma stared through an unflinching glaze.

“You know? Spit on her?”

No change. “Why would we do that? I’m not invested in seeing her particular configuration charging ahead in evolution.”

Beaten by the best, Morning Glory merely rolled her eyes.

“I’ll spit on you, then!” Marma grabbed at Glory’s hand in an unusually frolicksome manner. Unperturbed by their daily shove from the usual contender, Marma was high on scientific possibility. Nerd to the core, Marma continued throughout lunch to pontificate on her theory. She glowed & beamed & scribbled notes through mouthfuls of nuts.

Glory finished her sandwich in a blissful state of gratitude for her choices as a person. Popular kids looked super boring. Meanwhile she had this treasure trove of friendship. Marma was such a great little Squirrel. With no disrespect to rodents of any kind, Morning Glory quite preferred her to the company of Meangirl Rats. Or… wait, Rats are cool. Something more snivelly… like… a mole. Or… a Possum! A stupid Possum.

Hey! Nothing wrong with a Possum, Glory’s inner reporter retorted. Nothing wrong! There’s no shame in Possoming. Funny how much like Dennis her inner reporter sounded.

Glory carefully poured her last bit of milk into the tiny paper bag of cereal. The game was to eat it now before it soaked the paper. And to answer the reporter calmly. It’s just important to be accurate. Bree is a spandexed Possum trying to play fisticuffs. That’s fine for her. And other sporty Possums. Meanwhile, we’re busy, the Squirrel and I, finding out about the building blocks of life.

Morning Glory won the cereal game with flying colors, but Marma was unimpressable and engrossed in her treatise on saving the world one spit at a time. No matter. Glory found herself absorbed in a question she had often entertained: What kind of animal am I? She continued to flip through mental slides of obscure amphibians as the bell rang to usher the herds into the hallways.

Lunchtime was followed by a quick study hall, at which time Glory normally stared out the window and wrote renegade haikus. Today, she was disappointed to find thick clouds obscuring her view of the sky. They were so thick that she couldn’t tell which part was cloud and which was the standard Everett atmosphere of wintry grey. They were so dense she couldn’t get any read on how low they hung. Her depth perception pulsed with vertigo when she tried to see. Thus it became a much more enjoyable game than cleverly arranged syllables. One by one, everyone’s gaze was drawn by the white gleam through the windows, all except for the teacher who droned on with his back turned. The whole room seemed to darken, tick by tick, as the clock inched closer to its noisy celebration of released captives.

The air grew curiously heavy. The untamed creature in Glory sniffed the air carefully, as molecules of her experience “indoors” began to swirl in an eerily familiar pattern that she was used to labeling “outdoors.” The other kids said nothing; however, more than a few had passed out on their desks to drool and dream, youngsters who usually spent their study hall time outrageously amped-up, fighting about pens and squealing about gum. Not surprising. The pressure drop was palpable. Morning Glory imagined her dreaming Dragon out in that dark light, and she was transported to a stillness of time, an awareness of unseen distance. She dizzied in the fluid of air and swam in the amplitude of her lungs. She felt unchanged across time, some kind of echoed birdsong mocking every clock & chalkboard in her mind.

The bell sounded, sending a sharp shock through the drowsy silence.

 

 

-**

The Dreaming Dragon

There are centers of activity which serve the function of preparing the psyche for the marathon of its daily life. Dreamworld is one of these centers [1]. The preparatory function of the Dreamworld is threefold: one, it gives the analytical mind a chalkboard upon which to scrawl out all its wild perceptions and flat webs of causality, its pie charts of value and parabolic graphs of relational exchange; two, it gives the drama queen a stage upon which to explore the meaning of chaos, the symphony of emotion, the gestures and textures of engaged vitality, the delivery and feedback of interactive improvisation; three, it unchains the mind-body pathways so that the freeflow of instant correlation can efficiently inform the organism of its current space in growth and development. Without dreaming sleep, these functions cannot be adequately performed, no matter how fastidious the documentarian, no matter how over-achieving the stagehand, no matter how committed the custodian. Dreamworld is essential to our sanity. And, being insane, humans tend to overlook its value and dismiss its relevance.

Not so for Morning Glory Maycomb.

Regularly, she spent more than an hour of her pre-bus-ride, pre-breakfast, pre-bathroom awareness of daylight paying ample homage to her night life. Often, yes, before even swinging her little feet into the fuzzy slippers and scooting down the hall to relieve her extraordinarily patient bladder, she would sit up in bed writing, drawing, sculpting, singing the senses left to her by her dreams. One result among many results of this was that her room looked like a museum. It was chock full of little figurines and sprawling landscape collages, tall woven tapestries made of knotted sticks and shoelaces and glass beads all dropped about like dew, itty-bitty animal colonies drawn into the hair of a particularly commanding bust in the middle of the dresser, phantasmal tendrils of shredded fabric draping over the pseudo-canopy of her bed, bedposts fashioned out of squashed soda cans and good strong glue.

Often, there was not enough time to act on Glory’s dreams right away in that first morning hour. She would have a doozy of a dream, full of imagery and meaning and impact, but she only had time to capture the fullness of its feeling in blueprint form. So she would sketch its outline as accurately as word and paper could record, and then, after thinking about it all day long, she’d return in the evening and set out to giving the creation its sacred form.

She’d learned this efficient system after one particularly drenched Dreamtime awoke her with a symphony of new world to create. That morning, as the time to prepare for school ticked away, she became increasingly anxious, heart racing, palms and neck sweaty, eyes wild. When her dad yelled down the hall that the bus would be there any minute, she was still elbow-deep in paper mâché, and she knew something had to give. Being very private about her work at the time, she had run out of the room, washed her hands, and gone to meet her father in the hallway just before he reached her door.

The minute he saw her face, his fatherly concern clicked on, naturally asking if she was feeling okay. And the minute he asked if she was feeling okay, she recognized her opportunity to answer, quite truthfully, “No.” Now, the “no” had a certain meaning to a father calling his child in sick for school, and it had a certain meaning for a daughter gifted with the chance to work on fleshing out her dreams all day long. These meanings were completely misaligned, but it didn’t seem that way to Glory, even as she meekly greeted Mrs. Hanson from next door, her nursemaid for a Sick Day of Fine Art [2]. That morning, Glory had simply wished her dad a good day at work (“Eh, yeah. Feel better, MG.”) and accepted a glass of orange juice from Mrs. Hanson, who would promptly zonk out on the couch in front of her soaps (“Oh little one, look at you! Go hop into bed, now, and sleep that red out of your eyes.”).

Morning Glory did not sleep that red out. She poured that red out. She scooped that red out. She splattered it and crushed it and molded it. She morphed it into the smooth scales of a dragon the curve of the Nile and at least half its length. She coiled its body around her little dream station seven times, spiraling out from her bed to the edges of the room where the thing grown-ups call “wallpaper” shielded the thing they call “drywall” over the things they call “studs” leading down to the thing they call the “foundation” of the commonly known “house” sitting squarely in a small cavity of earth. Being a relatively new creature, not yet conditioned in dissociation, Morning Glory could feel the cradle of Earth beneath any structure. She could wiggle her toes in soft dirt even when hovering aloft in a second-story bedroom of a standard duplex in Everett, WA. She could feel the echoes of the heartbeats of the cedar groves that once flourished where her house sat like all the other houses and gravestones sat, memorializing ownership in an ocean of stars. The room dimension itself she called the Limitation, and as challenging as it was to work inside, she relished the joy of finding creative ways to fit her vast visions within it. Forty-foot dragon? Check. Dragon with a head of glass and fire, a head of sharp metal teeth, round gemstone nostrils, and red ping-pong eyes. Check. A beard of copper wire. A crown of broken bottles. Horns covered in jingle bells. Mouth fulla green lamé. Check.

Dragon with eight legs like the Spider, with each leg taking the shape of a different earthling: one bull, one goat, one caterpillar, one catfish, one cat, one beaver, one fox, and one mongoose. Feet were for the ground and below, said her dream: feathers for the sky and above. This is why her Dragon’s tail ended with a fan of feathers, one of each bird she knew on earth and one for the bird of the ethers. Phoenix, eagle, peacock, scua, bluejay, cardinal, owl, hawk, crow, chicken, sparrow, bluebird, starling, piper, pheasant, canary, parrot, crane, turkey, vulture, duck, duck, goose, swan, flamingo, pelican, swallow, chickadee, chucker, quail, heron, spoonbill, falcon, goldfinch, turtledove, grouse, albatross, parakeet, cockatiel, hummingbird, woodpecker, loon, and pigeon.

The back of the Dragon, atop the scales, was host to a strange metropolis that introduced the Jetson family to model train enthusiasts. There were boxy high-rises, weaving rollercoasters of transportation, spiked space needles that put Seattle to shame, tiny bars and firehouses and coffee shops, streets with no cars, cars affixed to thin buoyant springs so that the vehicles quivered in the mystical atmosphere rising from the Dragon’s form. It was all red—fire hydrant red—every last nook and cranny, except for the fire hydrants. The minuscule thumbtack-shaped fire-safety implements were painted a luminous gold, and from them, as if they’d been hit by a tiny bandit with no good sense and no respect for water conservation, flowed a steady gush of glittered gold. It burst gaily in every direction, eventually converging down the Dragon’s back into a golden river that gave way to the trees. The tail was a technicolor forest. Trees with golden trunks rose as tall as the buildings, offering every color of leaf into the air—good thing Dennis had bought the megapack of tempera paint: hot pink, royal purple, chartreuse, teal, lemonade, grenada, goldenrod, bittersweet, apricot, mint green, lima green, spring green, olive green, algae green, cyan, creamsicle, copper, bordeaux, tangerine, turmeric, lavender, black, ivory, smoke, silver. A veritable cacophony for the unruly synesthetic.

Beneath the glitter of the forest floor, where the golden spring gave way to what might, on land, be soft abundant earth, there were tiny scrolls of paper. Each one inscribed differently, the word-vines flowed out in curly-cues which draped over the edges, wound up the trees, and snuggled together in tight ropes. What they said… well, they said what the dream had to say.

Glory worked so hard that she actually did fall asleep at long last, one hand full of paste, stuck to her scratch paper, the other covered in gold sparkle and a few stray jingle bells. This is how Dennis and Mrs. Hanson found her in the afternoon, the late November sunset casting its glow across the landscape of her strange little planet.

Grounded. How ironic. After making a blessed monster that could fly a hundred times the world over and beyond the sun before breakfast.

True to Dennis’ disciplined calling, his sense of honest hard work, and a bit of the wounded pride of a first-time-duped father, he worked out a fair consequence. He made her sleep for a whole Saturday—a whole Saturday!—in exchange for the day she took.

“You can’t just do whatever you want whenever you want to,” he had said. “You know, there is stuff, important stuff, we just need to do. Times to do it. Ways to go about it. It’s time to face facts [3].” She cried herself back to sleep every time she awoke, convinced there was something evil murdering the air between herself and her father. Never before had he been anything but supportive of her artwork. And yeah, maybe she had overdone it with the truancy part, but to sleep away the whole Saturday, that was going too far. Maybe he was growing cold to art. Maybe he was afraid. Maybe he was mad he never got that quilt done. Glory sullenly fretted through these thoughts while receiving her meals in bed, as Denny delivered soup and sandwiches with a measured calm, trying to keep his gaze downcast so she wouldn’t see the twinkle in his eyes. She fell asleep hating him for the first time in her life.

The next morning, sentence complete, Dennis helped her anchor the dragon to the ceiling. The squeal Morning Glory set loose upon seeing him with an armful of tools was enough to clear the atmosphere of grudge. They worked until afternoon, finishing the ceremony with goblets of red fruit juice. She agreed, from then on, to work out her art muscles around the simple structure of mandatory school attendance. Sometimes the reparative acts of family simply require pneumatic tools, gorilla glue, and patience [4].

Now Glory awakes in dragon-dripping brilliance with every sunrise. She feels the gold curls shimmering above as she swiftly scribes the shapes of her dreamscapes, and she flourishes it a deep bow before scurrying off to school where facts are given faces.

 -**

1. Babylawn is another, but that’s a different type of preparation and a different type of service.
2. For a Fine Day of Sick Art: see Museu Picasso. For the Fine Art of the Sick Day: see Ferris Beuller.
3. And other such parental nonsense justifying compliance within the structures of a dubiously unstable society.
4. As well as a heroic feat of willingness to get covered in gold glitter.