Balloons as a base

There were others, in bird’s egg blue robes, being led in procession down to the water.

These were the afflicted who lay outside man’s protection. Here they were submerged in the water to come up sputtering. They sometimes came up a length away in the strong current, clawing to raise the river mud. Another man stood ready to help them out.

They had snuck beneath an invisible snag that could only be crossed with a new idea in the mind, a new irrefutable possibility. Each was led away, praising God.

God is the something to whom they owe their allegiance now. The thing that did not exist a moment ago in their minds, but now was revealed real enough, the idea good enough to cast aside doubt for.

I watched their faces as they went vulnerable as children onto the wash near the bridge by the park. I was crouching in the brush across the water. I haven’t shaved in a while. I’d been in the trailer thinking. I was more than a little hungry.

There was food spread on tables beneath the trees on the lawn. There were many plastic tubs that had not been opened yet.

I lay crouched in the weeds and snatched flies from the air and ate them miserably. A fish swam by. I grabbed it and ate it while it wriggled.

They now belonged to each other. They stood together in their underwear to change into dry clothes. It seems to me that if you are so pure and given to each other, you might as well make babies. It seems to me that they wanted to touch each other. They glowed with energies that they wanted to pass around. The old wanted to imprint themselves in the clay of youth. The young were eager for the shape of new promise. They wept and smiled. Strange.

I was eating the legs off a crawfish and crunching its shell for the last twitch of nerve impulse that pressed itself against me. I sucked that life straight out of it and into myself.

I watched the great scene of those people flaring up with life so the whole of them seemed to glow and pulse and slowly wane, like a guttering candle, to a more humane light. They were on course now straight and clear. There was no doubt or confusion in their faces. They were at peace. Believers, for some reason.

I waited until they sorted their tubs and sifted into their metal driving boxes and left. I pulled out the boxes and bags from the trash. I licked the scent of their fingers from the plastic points. I couldn’t help myself. I ate many things of plastic that were hard to pass.

While I was crossing the river in the first full dark, I slipped on the upset stones in the wash and dunked myself, fool that I am. I knew I would do it.

I was not changed. I came up sputtering and unhappy and very much alone.

There are other things in the wires, other juices. One of them is like a flock of birds that each take a kernel of sound and race down through the wire in a jumble to rest again somewhere else, just as they were before. No one can explain it to me. The little birds sing in little boxes and I am told they are born of the air, that sometimes the wires are not needed.

One of the wires carries the vision from the eyes and scatters it to everyone at the same time. There are many fascinating things beneath the ground that carry water, that carry the noxious gases into metal tanks like great boils full of poison.

Sometimes, the sky whirls around so fast it becomes alive. Sky creatures are very strong but rage themselves out quickly. Sky tantrums that come with storms sometimes, crackling, electric, spinning down from the clouds.

Sometimes the metal boils explode and great flames of death race out like vicious ancestors tired of neglect. Sometimes the earth itself shakes inside and everything gets shuffled on its back.

I've been practicing my small lip movements. Most people think I am hard of hearing, a mute. In fact, my hearing is quite keen. Whenever I hear a piece of music, I go into hysterics. But it helps me immensely when people speak slowly and clearly.

I visit the electric man whenever I need to express myself. He is teaching me to write. He thinks I will be able to say important things if I can only learn to juggle these funny boxes that mean sounds. He thinks the little leaves are the best place to speak. He things moving your hand over the strange bud is better than small lip movements.

I am not sure yet. I would like to have more friends than just him. I would like to be able to do and understand more in the cities. I would like to know what there is to see in farther places. I'd like to fly through the air in a great bird box. I would like to drive down the road in a motor box. I am very curious about the desert and what is beyond the big water.

I felt much renewed, sitting in the mended chair, having evacuated all other residents. I sat and stared the way that humans do. I tried to decipher why such a thing is preferable to walking.

There were power lines nearby. I stood beneath the wires and heard their hum. I knew they were full of lightning. I found a great coil of wire in a railroad shack.

I gave myself a mighty jolt and would have fallen from the pole had my pant leg not hooked on a bolt. My spine popped down the line like a shot. I dangled for a long while, upside down, exploring these new sensations.

After I recovered myself and spliced my wires more delicately, I climbed back down.

I ran the coil through the woods to the old man's trailer. The wall holes had no lightning there, but I'd seen where the wires connect.

I wish I had my job still so I might gather many useful boxes around me and watch them work. Take them apart and study all their diodes and capacitors.

I stared at the wall holes and felt the strange flow there, ready to run to some purpose, lapping like a shoreline, unable to race beyond.

I had an old set of keys I'd found while cleaning the trailer. I put them in the wall hole and sat shaking, holding it, feeling all the world race through me, all the juice of creation finding it's way into me again.