LJ Idol Week 21: Gadgets
He's got a long, too-long nose and deep set, pin-point eyes. Green skin, sick algae soup under not-too-tight cellophane. He smiles up at you from within a candy-stripe suit not washed for years and introduces himself with a Georgia peach smile. Rotten, too sweet, but the sun's all over it.
"Welcome to the Emporium," he drawls. It's a grey room filled with grey stumps, raised geometrical museum displays. It is bright and dark in varying degrees, circles of light and dark hanging over each stump, vibrating with your breath.
"Not touching is prohibited," the guide says. You expect his voice to echo off the endless grey, but it refuses to go anywhere but you.
The ceiling might be sixty feet up or more. It's hard to tell for some reason, even though the fog isn't here. It makes you tired like the eye doctor does. It goes out in front of you almost infinitely, and there is light in the direction of the end. You expect airplanes or tanks around you; you see only the grey stumps and the variated lighting and the goblin-man guide.
On the display closest to you is a ball of light as big as daddy's fist with long, shiny buckles strung around it. The air around it is warm and heavy. If you touch it, it burns cold. You turn to your guide and he smiles all sugar and bees.
"Pleasure," he states, gnarled hands behind his back, soupy skin almost swirling. "It took us a while to get it in that state," he adds lazily, taking a finger toward the ball and dipping a cracked nail into the light. It shudders into darkness, the buckles buckle, and then everything is new again. "The pills helped."
The next display is drenched in black. Getting close, you see a brown horse the size of a chicken wing and twice as delicate prancing in slow motion on a peeled orange. The skin is on the floor. You pick it up.
"The properties of matter dictate that that orange peel is a sin," the guide says, and he grins science. "It has been removed from the eternal workhorse to standardize the process."
You remember your brother's teeth and that orange scent. As your memory grows, your guide wrinkles his long, long, too-long green nose at you.
"Not now," the he says, somewhat agitated. He points at the blackness around the horse, and you notice it beginning to froth white bubbles. The horse rears up and a mouse-noise squirts out of its mouth.
"Not now," he repeats, this time somewhat soothing, and the horse settles back into a treadmill gallop over the tangy sphere. The goblin turns and addresses you formally. "Might I suggest you view this side of the establishment?"
You walk from the second display to a third one by way of a 90 degree angle. Each foot follows perfectly along the other and the buckles on your shoes are itching.
The next display is your shoes. There is sunlight. There are eggshells inside.
"They were whole before you came, miss," the goblin-man says. "We believe that the white matter and the yolk matter separated on contact with the oxygen in the Emporium. I'm sure, had you been here instead of outside at the time you came in, you would agree that the chemical reaction was quite a sight."
His pragmatism reminds you of an omelet. His logic reminds you of your boyfriend's windpipe before your surgery. Not that it fixed anything. Not that it was surgery. There's a toy scalpel in your pocket with your brother's name on it and comma MD after, from the first operation. There's a speculum in your fist.
The display with your shoes sinks into the ground with a steady, high-pitched, clear motor's humming. You stare at it for twenty seconds, hungry. You glance back at the "Pleasure" display and notice the light over it glowing brighter and filling with anger. You remember feeling cheated. You drop the speculum.
Suddenly your shoes are too big and you are as tall as the goblin-man. You don't remember if he was that size before. The display that had your shoes rises out of the ground again, caked in egg. It smells like semen.
"Oh," your guide says excitedly, "Richard forgot to mention this to me. I didn't know it was done, with you being so little. Are you pregnant?" he asks, leaning in towards you.
You shake your head and let him know that you're very confused, and you'd like to move on to the next exhibit. Your shoes fit again and the goblin man is his original size. You don't remember how tall he was before.
You taste bloody oranges for a second.
The next display stump is a plane's length away and you follow the algae-soup green-man from a few feet back. You remember that you have a camera with you, and snap a few pictures of the invisible cracks on the walls. It's a digital; when you review them afterwards, you see your brother's teeth clamped onto an orange peel. You're next to him holding a dead crow up by its feet. Your hair hangs down. Its feathers hang down.
You don't remember photographing that, but you remember it happening.
Finally you get to the fourth display. The light is nondescript and doesn't stand out from your surroundings. Greyness and blankness seem a void around you, but you can feel the pinpricks of the earlier displays in your back from what seems like miles away. You pull a feather out of your mouth and swallow blood.
Through the grey you finally manage to notice a bright red songbird made of glass. There is a plaque beneath him, reading "Hope." You turn to the goblin-man, who smiles.
"There is no easy way to placate religion and science at the same time," he explains, gesturing to the bird, "but to assume that they are both correct in some hand-woven Klein-bottle fashion. Hopefully, this exhibit will enlighten you in some way."
He hands you a campy square remote with a single red button and a foot-long antenna. You turn it over in your hands a few times, and on the third turn you notice the sticker on the back: "I didn't mean to hurt you."
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This is my entry for LJ Idol Week 21, "Gadgets." I decided to reach into the dark and sinister world of symbolism and stilted metaphor, as well as the seldom-tread territory of the 2nd person, or 2nd-3rd person as I like to think of it. I hope you at least get a feeling out of it, if no sense of reality. It is symbolic, and there is a simple story underneath, though I have to emphasize not from my own life. It grew into its own by certain phrases that came up as I tore through a stream of semi-consciousness. This is probably the most-edited piece of writing I've used for LJ Idol so far, which is saying a lot; I don't like editing.
"Welcome to the Emporium," he drawls. It's a grey room filled with grey stumps, raised geometrical museum displays. It is bright and dark in varying degrees, circles of light and dark hanging over each stump, vibrating with your breath.
"Not touching is prohibited," the guide says. You expect his voice to echo off the endless grey, but it refuses to go anywhere but you.
The ceiling might be sixty feet up or more. It's hard to tell for some reason, even though the fog isn't here. It makes you tired like the eye doctor does. It goes out in front of you almost infinitely, and there is light in the direction of the end. You expect airplanes or tanks around you; you see only the grey stumps and the variated lighting and the goblin-man guide.
On the display closest to you is a ball of light as big as daddy's fist with long, shiny buckles strung around it. The air around it is warm and heavy. If you touch it, it burns cold. You turn to your guide and he smiles all sugar and bees.
"Pleasure," he states, gnarled hands behind his back, soupy skin almost swirling. "It took us a while to get it in that state," he adds lazily, taking a finger toward the ball and dipping a cracked nail into the light. It shudders into darkness, the buckles buckle, and then everything is new again. "The pills helped."
The next display is drenched in black. Getting close, you see a brown horse the size of a chicken wing and twice as delicate prancing in slow motion on a peeled orange. The skin is on the floor. You pick it up.
"The properties of matter dictate that that orange peel is a sin," the guide says, and he grins science. "It has been removed from the eternal workhorse to standardize the process."
You remember your brother's teeth and that orange scent. As your memory grows, your guide wrinkles his long, long, too-long green nose at you.
"Not now," the he says, somewhat agitated. He points at the blackness around the horse, and you notice it beginning to froth white bubbles. The horse rears up and a mouse-noise squirts out of its mouth.
"Not now," he repeats, this time somewhat soothing, and the horse settles back into a treadmill gallop over the tangy sphere. The goblin turns and addresses you formally. "Might I suggest you view this side of the establishment?"
You walk from the second display to a third one by way of a 90 degree angle. Each foot follows perfectly along the other and the buckles on your shoes are itching.
The next display is your shoes. There is sunlight. There are eggshells inside.
"They were whole before you came, miss," the goblin-man says. "We believe that the white matter and the yolk matter separated on contact with the oxygen in the Emporium. I'm sure, had you been here instead of outside at the time you came in, you would agree that the chemical reaction was quite a sight."
His pragmatism reminds you of an omelet. His logic reminds you of your boyfriend's windpipe before your surgery. Not that it fixed anything. Not that it was surgery. There's a toy scalpel in your pocket with your brother's name on it and comma MD after, from the first operation. There's a speculum in your fist.
The display with your shoes sinks into the ground with a steady, high-pitched, clear motor's humming. You stare at it for twenty seconds, hungry. You glance back at the "Pleasure" display and notice the light over it glowing brighter and filling with anger. You remember feeling cheated. You drop the speculum.
Suddenly your shoes are too big and you are as tall as the goblin-man. You don't remember if he was that size before. The display that had your shoes rises out of the ground again, caked in egg. It smells like semen.
"Oh," your guide says excitedly, "Richard forgot to mention this to me. I didn't know it was done, with you being so little. Are you pregnant?" he asks, leaning in towards you.
You shake your head and let him know that you're very confused, and you'd like to move on to the next exhibit. Your shoes fit again and the goblin man is his original size. You don't remember how tall he was before.
You taste bloody oranges for a second.
The next display stump is a plane's length away and you follow the algae-soup green-man from a few feet back. You remember that you have a camera with you, and snap a few pictures of the invisible cracks on the walls. It's a digital; when you review them afterwards, you see your brother's teeth clamped onto an orange peel. You're next to him holding a dead crow up by its feet. Your hair hangs down. Its feathers hang down.
You don't remember photographing that, but you remember it happening.
Finally you get to the fourth display. The light is nondescript and doesn't stand out from your surroundings. Greyness and blankness seem a void around you, but you can feel the pinpricks of the earlier displays in your back from what seems like miles away. You pull a feather out of your mouth and swallow blood.
Through the grey you finally manage to notice a bright red songbird made of glass. There is a plaque beneath him, reading "Hope." You turn to the goblin-man, who smiles.
"There is no easy way to placate religion and science at the same time," he explains, gesturing to the bird, "but to assume that they are both correct in some hand-woven Klein-bottle fashion. Hopefully, this exhibit will enlighten you in some way."
He hands you a campy square remote with a single red button and a foot-long antenna. You turn it over in your hands a few times, and on the third turn you notice the sticker on the back: "I didn't mean to hurt you."
--------------------
This is my entry for LJ Idol Week 21, "Gadgets." I decided to reach into the dark and sinister world of symbolism and stilted metaphor, as well as the seldom-tread territory of the 2nd person, or 2nd-3rd person as I like to think of it. I hope you at least get a feeling out of it, if no sense of reality. It is symbolic, and there is a simple story underneath, though I have to emphasize not from my own life. It grew into its own by certain phrases that came up as I tore through a stream of semi-consciousness. This is probably the most-edited piece of writing I've used for LJ Idol so far, which is saying a lot; I don't like editing.