the dead body

It wasn’t that he meant to find a dead body but he had always wanted to find a dead body and he was surprised that he finally did even though he wasn’t actually looking for a dead body in that moment when he found it.  His next surprise was his realization that he had never thought beyond his initial hope to find a dead body.  He had only thought about finding one but never considered what to do with one once he found one and now that he had come upon a dead body he realized that he was going to have to think fast to come up with an idea of what to do with it.  His first idea was to kick it and when he did he understood what dead weight meant and he felt a little bad but he wasn’t sure why.  Then he thought about conducting experiments on it but he figured the experiments might make him feel even worse than kicking it did.  He went through a few more ideas in his head but none of them felt like they would satisfy the unexplainable curiosity he had about the dead body.  Feeling frustrated he said aloud to the body, “I wish I knew why I even wanted to find a dead body”, which unexplainably made him feel a little closer to figuring out what to do with the dead body.  He said a few more things to the body and more and more he felt like he was on the edge of discovering what it was he really wanted to find.  Eventually he began talking to the body and carrying on entirely one sided conversations with it and forgetting he had even wanted to figure out what to do with it.  He began to tell the dead body things he had never told anyone else and upon peeling off those layers he went further down and told the body things he had never even told himself until eventually he was exploring the deepest darkest corners of his inner workings and telling them all to the dead body, grappling with understandings and working them out in the open while the dead body patiently listened.  The day went on and the sun got ready to set reflecting golden light off the dead body.  It seemed to him as if the body was glowing in the cool evening and it all looked rather beautiful to him causing him to grow quiet and reflective.  He wondered who the dead body had been and what kind of life it had led and how it came to be where he found it that day.  It was beginning to get dark and he thought he should move on, so he bid the dead body farewell and left it behind feeling thankful for what a good listener it was. 

all the weird little children

She was a contemplative little girl and being as contemplative as she was, she spent much of her time staring up at the sky admiring white clouds against blues skies while contemplating the questions she had about life, the world and the nature of reality.  Amongst all her contemplations, she wondered most about what happened to all the weird little children.  She knew that society was wholly dominated by normal people and that weird people were seldom seen amongst polite folk with manners characterizable within a very narrow range of acceptability.  They were the people that she understood everyone else was expected to be like but she figured that not all the weird children would ever be able to act like the normal people or acquire such finely tuned manners like the normal people had.  And if the weird children weren’t able to be like the normal people, what happened to the weird children when they grew up?  Her questions set her on a course that guided her through much of her childhood and into early adulthood when one day it came time for her to step into the life of a normal person.  She peered through the doorway that led to normality and observed the face of what normality looked like and found that it was largely boring and dumb looking so she closed the door and went on her own way.  Later on that day she gathered her thoughts and reflected on the choice she made and felt very satisfied and excited about her better understand of what happens to all the weird little children.

Broken

Once upon a time a little boy went to a ska concert where he really got into the music and jumped up and down, skanked around and roughed it up in the mosh pit along with everyone else.  Everyone’s elbows were flying and their heads bobbing as they danced and jumped around, bumping into each other and even giving and taking a few good shoves now and then, which served more like celebratory handshakes in which a shared exuberance for life was agreed upon and exchanged by the later bruised participants.  In a particularly blissful moment of rapture, the little boy’s glasses unfortuitously levitated from his face as the boy twisted and turned in a tangle of bodies lost to horns and guitars screaming the meaning of life.  Upon their decent, his glasses bounced off of bodies just like the bodies bounced off of bodies but whereas people landed on their feet and kept dancing, the glasses landed on the floor where they were kicked and stepped on without regard.  The little boy kept on dancing and although he lamented the loss of his glasses he figured he wasn’t going to find them amongst so many dancing people.  When the crowd square danced, he figured they were square dancing on his glasses and that there wasn’t much chance they would survive but that maybe he could later find the lenses which he could tape to his face in order to be able to drive to work the next day.  But to his surprise, after the music stopped and the crowd began to clear out, someone found his glasses and offered them to the little boy in communal appreciation.  It took some bending and twisting but he was able to make the glasses fit his face again and the crowd sang as loud as they could to continue the celebration of life set into motion that night by the ska band.  And the little boy sang along too.   

The Perverted Turtle

One day a perverted turtle showed up on the nice family’s lawn doing the most offensive things the young family had ever seen.   The children cried and the mother made exclamations such as “oh my” and “well I never”.   The father recognized his duty to take charge and said to his family, in the deepest most monotone suburban dad voice he could muster, “don’t look family, it’s a perverted turtle”.  They ignored the turtle the rest of the morning and tried to act normal with each other but it was obvious things weren’t normal.  The tension in their house that morning was unbearable and they all just wanted life to go back to normal.  Unfortunately for them, the family dog had also taken notice of the turtle and it being a dog, took great interest in the things the turtle was doing.  Eventually the turtle did leave to carry on its perverted activities in the depths of murky ponds and near large rocks on golf courses but the dog never forgot the things it saw that day and the family’s life was never the same again.

Roast Beef

The roast beef tasted like cold death on a severed tongue.  It was hard to swallow because he didn’t want to have to actually chew and taste it.  The cold lump made its way slowly down his throat followed by regret reflected in night windows.  Out there somewhere there were the stars in the firmament but it didn’t seem to matter anymore.  He was lost in the thoughts of some otherworldly fog dancing illusions through his head as real as anything else surrounding him but more important than attempts of his life.  The absurdity he faced was as difficult to swallow as the roast beef so he inhaled deeply and let go of it all on the out breath since in the end, nothing really mattered at all. 

His Bankrupt Heart

He didn't mean to frivolously spend more love than he had but he had and once he did his heart suffered a bankruptcy that he hadn’t realized but eventually experienced when he was in one of those moments where all you need is love but instead the emptiness of his heart dragged him down and made him feel so heavy.  He willed himself to do what someone with a heart full of love would do but everything he did felt insincere and meaningless because he was simply making the motions, which was difficult because of the heaviness.  Without love he couldn’t sustain the weight of the meaninglessness so eventually he failed much to his own disappointment but which lead him to the suspicion that he might have a bankrupt heart.  He stood in front of the mirror and peeled back the layers of skin and muscle. With a spoon he pried open a wider space between his rips to look through so that he might see what was happening with his heart but he couldn’t actually see inside of his heart to know what was going on.  Part of him didn’t want to look because he didn’t know what he would find but he knew he had to look inside to know for sure if he had a bankrupt heart.  He slowly turned the knob and applied a gentle force to open the door to his heart and braced himself for what he might see.  Once the door was open and he looked inside he simply saw that it was empty, which he thought to himself was what he should have expected to find since he had thought he might have a bankrupt heart.  His suspicions were confirmed and he wondered what to do as he stood there in the mirror looking at his bleeding chest and the door to his heart dangling open, the hinges creaking with each breath, when suddenly a rush of something came from somewhere and swooshed past him, summersaulting into his chest, filling up his empty heart.  Feeling the weight of whatever it was, he instinctually closed the door, removed the spoon and placed two band-aids over the flap of skin that he so recently peeled back for the exploratory procedure he performed on himself.  He considered the new feeling in his chest as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other and smiled realizing how much he really loved everything. 

Space

Just like it’s wrong to say that they aren’t making any more real estate, it’s equally wrong to say that they aren’t making any more space.  Along the edges of the universe, between known existence and unknown somethingness, which could also be nothingness but no one knows for sure, space farmers toil and work planting space seeds, fertilizing and nurturing them until the seeds grow into plants and the plants eventually produce an intriguing black fruit that will ripen becoming so black as to transcend all blackness until it becomes almost reflective, mirroring the vast darkness of the universe with all its planets and stars and mysteries floating throughout.  When the time comes and within a breath of wonderment, the fruit itself will seem to disappear so subtly that it's barely perceptible, as if evaporating from the outside in, shrinking before the very eyes of the space farmers who anticipate the moment but who also know that the fruit is not really disappearing at all but becoming more space just as it was intended to do and leaving behind another space seed to continue the cycle.  It’s hard to tell whether the new space is simply added on to the edges of the universe to extend the universe’s reach out into the unknown somethingness or if the newly harvested space pushes the existing space further towards the center of the universe where it is theorized a black hole converts space into the unknown somethingness that is funneled through worm holes beyond the known universe thereby maintaining an equilibrium of space within the universe.  Either way, there is nothing like the smell of fresh space.