Quinceanera The Last (Part/Slice of tofu-nougat pie)
Overtaken by an unspoken force, I fell to my knees, clawing the cement of the amphitheatre stage with my neatly-clipped fignernails as my transformation began. The moon cast her light upon my smiling philosopher face, and I presently felt my supple skin transform into yellow scales and the spontaneous plethora of blood in my swollen veins turn green like verdent spring wheatgrass shakes. My bones alchemically transformed to metal. Stupendous pain trailed up and down my legs and arms and my other limbs and mighty chest-trunk, and I could hear my thronging admirers murmurring, chanting, and om!ing as they fell to their knees in supplication to their new demi-deity. I screamed through my ears due to the intensity of the process, but then my mouth turned inside out and I could scream no longer. The change was almost complete. I balled myself up in the fetal position, bearing the pain, the growing, the Changing.
I felt my consciousness rising, expanding like a balloon, filling multifarious polycosmic membranes. I touch the intenties and intestines of celestial minds. The wisdom-thoughtKnowledge of eight-quadrillion years of dieties from the vast multiverse casting green tendrils of tomato-mind-spirit into my mind, narrating stories of delicious food from the beginning of timespace, tales of mindpoetry of the chrono-stopped mushroom stars. Clowns both real and imagined flit through my psyche in a plastique of harmony-nightvision molded into the glowering countenance of Jacques Chirac eating home fries. Nightmare images of epochs past, eras foregone, millenia forgot, of green plant creatures devouring their own eyes with stamen-like grinning rictus tentacles, wisps of smoke that recall lost memories of my own life and the easement of the brain for recycled dreamscapes. I see things that I once experienced and can no longer recall, periods repressed, events too troublesome and awful to cogitate upon, upon which the very cerebration invokes intense physical pain. Years stretch into a black pit in which I was not Alvin Stomack, but someone else, a spectre of another soul, another consciousness. What I see terrifies my spleen. I scream again. I scream until I feel my lungs eviscerating themselves from my mouth.
"Yo!" Eolitriol Meddissin shouted.
"What?" I managed to say.
"What you think you doing just laying around like a kid-baby?!" she said irritably.
I looked up to see my good friend and devoted follower Osirus Stowes and most of the Fantastic Trees looking down at me. "Everyone's waiting," he said. "I too am ardently awaiting the transformation, my sweet lord."
I stood up to behold the expectant crowd. A careless whisper of wonder and confusion circulated amongst them. Clearly, I had not grown in size. I inspected my own hands. They were the same. Practically fro(th/st)ing with desperation I grabbed Osirus by the lapels of his greyrobe. "Is there a horn protruding from my head?! Do I have gills?!!"
Osirus shook his head worriedly. "No! And no! You look exactly the same. Nothing's happened." He threw up his hands in sympathetic anguish. "¡Qué lástima!"
Yes. Absolutely nothing had happened: I was no different now from what I was before. Understanding eluded me like a mischievous snowchild. The details of the requirements for the apotheosis transformation of the quinceanera had been transferred with exactitude through the precise oral tradition of the Grandees of Burma for trillions of years. There was no way they could have been wrong!
Maribeth Toilet rushed onto the stage. "Maribeth!" I lamented, as though supplicating her to ameliorate this untimely catastrophe. "It didn't work! I'm no demi-god; I'm just regular old Alvin... "
"I figured out what's wrong," she said with a sigh, pulling out her trusty Lisa Frank rainbow-and-pony themed notebook. "You were born in 1947?"
I nodded, my facial muscles taut. I'm certain a look in the mirror would have revealed that my complexion was ashen like barbecued Dracula.
"And it's 2006 now..." Maribeth muttered. "According to my calculations-" she scribbled on her notebook with her pink hi-lighter- "today you did not, in fact, turn fifty years of age, but rather... ... fifty-five."
I slapped my hand against my fore(head/brain). "How could I be so foolish!" I declaimed. "Why of course! It makes perfect sense! If only I had calculated the mass of the hypotenuse of the trapezoid that transverses the space between my shower and my kelp processing cubicle, I would have determined that it was the measurement of the five years of my young life that I've seemed to have completely forgotten or repressed: this void in my memories that only came to the watery surface of my consciousness just a few moments ago in while I was in the psychosomatic ecstacy of apotheosis expectation. Just what happened in my early forties that I cannot recall? What are these hypnagogia of repressed memory that swim so strugglingly to the surface of my subconscious, only to be once again pulled deep down by the Undertoads, fisherwomen of surfers' lives for millenia to speak of?" I threw off my robes and miter, kicked them away in acute Stomack frustration.
Secretia, having rejoined me, was attempting to comfort me with one of her island-renowned inner nose massages. "What are you talking about, my Alvin?"
"Oh, it doesn't matter!" I spat, sitting on the edge of the stage with my head in my melancholy, sad hands. "All my planning has come to naught! Now I don't even know what to do with my friendly self. My life is enterering uncharted territory, sailing off the edge of the world-plane into ether-oblivion. And how I am to seek guidance from the philosopher fish if I don't even have gills? Is failure the emolument of dreams? Must I perjure all my hopes (and biscuit recipes)? I have a poem for tragedy, and I will recite it here and now:
Suffer fools and orange
Buffer acids and toads
Silently repair the door hinge
Evict the dwarf who goads
Me into more change
And Manwich by loads.
The frost with its hoar singe
Burns me as it corrodes.
Woe! I will not speak with the philosopher bee.
This torrid sorrow: I keep it with me.
...
I keep it with me.
I bowed my head in a moment of silence, then, the emotion flowing through my veins like burning capsaicin, I could stopper my speech no longer: "I only wanted to help islanders and fudge-baking elves make the irresistable journey to Planet Awesome; and now I can't!!" I proclaimed in anguish, tearing out a tuft of my downy chesthair.
"Oh, we wouldn't say that!" Eolitriol Meddesin and sixteen-year-old Franklin Goy sang simultaneously, the toes of their bare feet romantically intwined.
"Yah!" one of Wanda's heads said. "There be more den one way to Planet Awesome."
"And that," Barnabus Pock added, "would be..."
"...leading the Christmas Island Fantastic Trees to glorious end-all fantasy victory in the the upcoming Jai Alai Trifecta League Tourney!!!" Helicon 'Bacteria Pit' Ruiz finished with a mustered smile and a slapping high-five to Barnabus.
"By golly!, you children are right!" I shouted, jumping to my feet with the ecstatic energy of a squirrel who just reached nirvana through a CraskerJax box. "Let's run out to the field and start practicing right away! We'll show those other jai alai teams that when it comes to jai alai fortitude, the Fantastic Trees is TOPS. Why, I say, we'll-" I felt a tug on my suspender.
"Mr. Stomack?"
"Yes?"
It was the eerily familiar girl from earlier that evening, the one in the purple raincoat all a-straddle her wise brown donkey. She intoned: "I've finally worked up the courage to tell you-"
"Courage," I explained, "is the food of mice and pregnant toadstools. Sally forth with derring-do in all things."
"Uh, yes," she said, a bit stammeringly. "What I wants you to know, what I need you to know-"
With a double smile and an encouraging shake of my finger I interjected, "Knowledge is the slug's underbelly, metaphorically vivisected in the cereal bowl of the giants of the earth, seeking morsels of fruitarian analogs of Kentucky Friend chicken menus."
"Okay! But I needs to tell you about something important-"
"Then tell away! For one must needs not stand on ceremony of tea services when speaking to Alvin Stomack, everyone's mentoring friend and amicable mentor. My ears are open like the wings of the winter butterfly, spewing eggs into the soup bowls of happy children-"
Secretia stopped my mouth with her metal-fingered hand. "What do you want to say?" she asked the young girlling.
"I wants to tell him that I'm his daughter, his long-lost child, Ejecta Petchoulli Hashbrown Stomack."
I gasped.
Secretia gasped.
The Fantastic Trees shrieked.
Samuel Smiles belched loudly.