I Believe In That Man Below

Once in a while a sound travels a greater distance that it thought it could. At that moment of arrival a small new world becomes available. The whole understanding of what can be accomplished on a single impulse revolts. The small new world becomes a work. The work begins, slowly, to grow. Spare change can be felt in its cushions. It learns to count three. Waste removal grows in importance in direct correlation to the size of ideas produced. A prehistoric ancestor of the Mako Shark is found alive and hungry. The work generates ancillary projects like travel to nearby works in progress. The word is given to begin landing sequence operations. Respirating moss, pitted components of metal torture implements and a Theremin are found. The next day a light rain washes the billboards and they gleam in the sun. Soon, with a bit more growth, there will be people to remember these things inaccurately.

Many people live in their memories like those old explorers did. Nowadays there isn’t any time to amble along a lane of strange fences with strange things in the shadows behind them like arms or gardening tools or pruned branches or something unidentifiable but somehow comforting. Oh, and you had a small branch in your hand. Down a ways an old woman told stories of the many lovers she had had and had had to tell to go in the morning after a light breakfast. This whole idea spoke directly to the problems of insufficient production relative to the size of the workforce. Good help was hard to find in those days. Old women now sit and wait for you to walk past on your way home from school. Across the lane a sound has just arrived, panting and nearly dehydrated. The old woman’s eyes grew kind. Then they grew hot and narrowed until she fell from her wheelchair. Silence replaced the old noise. A hard new work has begun.

Last November there was no calendar, no name for any individual, no bellows for the bread ovens and sometimes the people lost the point of the story they were telling themselves while staying at home under the influence reading this book of a former judge’s memoirs. This book told of the exploits of men on farms, men from distant work projects, many old women bound for the chutes and ovens at the backs of the factory compounds. Whoever it was that first heard a sound arriving along the assembly line was given a bonus and shown the door. None of them were ever seen around here again. The right to relate things that you’d read and thought were important was made manifest in the cafeteria. The cafeteria was off limits. Soon they said they would build a new cafeteria. It opened this month but the food is so so. What was the point of talking about that again? No one remembers the night the school collapsed.

Now the days have names. Each man no matter how small is considered a man worth looking away from. Everyone says they were there the day the shots were fired. It’s hard to imagine being a sound and not knowing when you’ll stop, much less what you’ll transform into heavy gauge mesh used to crush the growth of unwanted creepers in the gardening industry. The whole blueprint is available at the library. A library will be built next November, you will be able to read things like crazy. Things like the sequel to that book by the former judge about how he wrote the first book and nearly died when a sound traveled to within inches of his ear before finally stopping and becoming a dandelion. They never rebuilt the school. Sex is a beast only known as a character from another project. No pre-release photos have been circulated. An act of kindness was performed there, it lasted until the feet came in contact with the cracked body.

History tells us nothing. But by next December at the latest, they promise. Before history came the air conditioning and the envy of the ne’er-do-well. Into each doorway a little thing must crawl then up the wall, take notes, out the window and back to local headquarters. It’s the little things that matter most. Like why we need three seas just to be surrounded and left with only one escape route to the north. The collaring is complete, at least we have that going for us. New collars will be issued when they work out the bugs in the live culture decals that still come off in a light rain. Her collar was nailed on and she called it her source of mighty super powers. They cemented her into the chair this time. She swears she hears something new roughly every sixteen seconds, the length of time it takes to achieve orgasm along with a simultaneous bee sting and allergic reaction. A book is coming out on it soon. Probably May of last year.

It doesn’t happen often, but once in a great while a sound reaches beyond its limits and becomes the cries of, presumably, a woman having a series of orgasms. Possibly having a child. On their days off most people read those stories set in the distant lands of mystery, where Chandu the Magician and Roxor battled for the future of something, illusions multiplied “even unto a gathering of twelve times twelve.” A woman having twelve illusions of climax consecutively, with “twelve times twelve” mysterious strangers, then leaving a living city growing in her wake. The travel of sound no longer necessary. Sound can take a well earned day off. Back in those early years no one heard anything they did until it was proven right by someone else in a large protected vehicle. The names came later. There was talk of a newspaper devoted to stories about the life between sound and work.
It was quashed by a hooded stranger.

This is why I believe in that man above.