Queen Anne Mall Incident
An attractive young woman is disciplining her child for whining outside a toy store in a busy outdoor mall. She is not gentle, and her son, of about seven, begins wailing. An older female passer by notices this and makes a remark. The mother responds with her own critique of the older lady– a sneering match escalates into a shoving match with the kid caught in between. Earrings and hairdos are tossed aggressively. An older lady shopper, seemingly being attacked by a MILF attracts the attention of a big tattooed muscle man. He righteously steps in to try and defuse the situation with his toughness, but he proves to be no match for the old lady; on the contrary, she is insulted by the implication she needs help from the likes of someone with a spider web on their elbow. Now he’s insulted; and moreover to him this old lady seems drunk (the biker happens to be an AA facilitator).
This flurry of activity outside of Be Beep Handmade Toys draws the attention of a thick-necked young male security guard. The original mother and child have since stepped to the margin and both can be seen talking on cell phones to respective lawyers. The child flicks his mother off defiantly. “I’ll see you in court!” he squeaks. Two security guards appear from both sides of the sidewalk. A late-coming security guard whips out his taser and starts threatening the now wind-milling old woman, asking her to leave the private property of Queen Anne Colonial Centre and calling for other security guards. Two or three young people in ragged clothes and dreadlocks confer for a moment, sit, then lay down in the path in front of the toy store blocking the door. A middle aged female passerby in a suit stops and subtly begins recording the fracas on her Blackberry while talking into a subtly concealed headset. Suddenly the real cops show up, and begin immediately hassling and brutalizing the dreadlocked kids, the old lady, the little boy, a random black dude and an uninvolved interracial couple that was hanging out shopping, and they TASE the tattooed muscle man.
One especially dumb cop notices the woman recording the fight, gets in her face and tries to grab her camera. She shouts, “FBI! Federal agents! Everyone on the ground” then karate flips him and pulls out a gun, while showing her badge which reads “FBI.” A random old man tears off a latex mask and with an electronic megaphone shouts “Federal agents, everybody freeze!”
After two or three heart-pounding seconds of calm, two Federal agents make eye contact. Four dozen silent ninjas in dusk camouflage appear on the roof line, in the trees, from under the eaves and from inside trash cans fold and tumble into place, all but silently, to subdue the police, the security guards, and everyone else. Only the sighing of ninjas and the tweeting of birds can be heard, and the falls far off dropping into the river, and beyond that, the labored breathing of the interstate, miles away, panting in its aluminum corset. Thup-thup-thup-thupTHUPTHUPTHUP the silence is broken by a chopper hovering above the stilled bodies and the cloud of ninjas. A body piercing tone sounds, out of the bottom of the chopper. The tone is infernal. It is penetrating everything, a horrible sound, a grind, a brutal squeal, a combat tone designed to make one feel as though the liver is being pierced with a bamboo skewer through the navel, a weaponized noise that shakes everyone with an urgency like hot soul diarrhea . . .
The vibrations of the tone dissipate gently . . . fading like steam, as the tromp-tromp-tromp of marching boots is heard. Hope drains away from the bodies of everyone still conscious. Distant boots. Fear wraps itself around everyone, rising like a white fog, everyone’s fear rising and stinking the area to a white fug, like a huge terrified fart, the ninjas even, as the TROMP TROMP TROMP sound raises ghost films, white helmets are seen in the distance, then– when feet hove into sight. They’re men, stomping men in formation, fully outfitted in riot gear, with shiny batons and rifles.
A fancy looking general tromps through the fear-fog, to the front of the square, removes his gloves dramatically and slaps them into his palms while shouting in a Belgian accent. The ninjas look around in alarm and raise their hands in surrender while the civilians continue to tremble face first on the sidewalk. They begin taking prisoners. Blinding light is seen in the sky, coming from every store, cascading from every hallway and opening of the mall – everyone is completely blind, the electronics stop working, guns won’t fire. Gutters and sewers vomit out golden light, the cement breaks apart, gently, and the smell of valerian and violets pricks up from the long-dead clay sleeping between the cracks. Vibrations tickle everyone’s quadriceps. Men’s testicles rise in their sacks. Babies kick in wombs.
A harp-like, orchestral sound can be heard and then a sort of “hiiiii-yahhh!” and the padding of bare feet – suddenly, everywhere, everywhere all at once can be seen the smacking hands of costumed figures of the most indescribable array of personality – God the father in his robe, Zeus packing thunderbolts, the Virgin Mary in a diaphanous gown, many armed Shiva, swarthy Jesus Christ with his groovy beard and sandals, Allah, Buddha, Zoroaster, a mass of spaghetti, Santa Claus. They are smacking the everloving shit, out of everyone. Just smacking and spanking asses.
Hephaestus in an anodized copper wheelchair dumps an amphora of oil onto a helicopter and lights it ablaze. It stinks of neem and roses. An explosion of butterflies looses thousands of scrambling, dancing blue and green household gods into the food court. The ceramic warriors of Qin Shi Huang have removed the doors from every storefront and exit and are in the day spa. Fat jumpsuit/“Aloha From Hawaii” Elvis AND young “Jailhouse Rock” Elvis along with Al-Hussein ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib seemed to dispatch the remainder of the armed troops with eerie, kung-fu facility.
George Washington, George Carlin, a lady pirate, and Boudicca have evacuated all the remaining women and children. Then in a slow zombie charge, all the variously broken saints with their variously dissected body parts and exposed guts and bones bobbling and missing smash out all the plate glass. A darling baby bull, with a bell around its neck, has peed on two civilians hiding in the bromeliad planter . . . their eyes a-goggle, and their cheeks red and shining and wet, the golden straw-odor of the heaven’s barnyard piss pressing their unbelieving scalps. The costumed figures chase everyone out of the mall and they literally swat and spank people into their cars, they harass and harangue them until they are literally driven out. When the mall is finally empty of civilians and all the remaining stragglers have died or defected, the immortals high-five and the fun begins.
No One and Nobody
No one protects us in all things. Nobody is watching. No one and nothing is there above us all, with a divine plan, making sure each piece of the puzzle falls exactly into place. Nobody is everywhere, in the toilet bowl, in your eyeball, in your closet at night. No one is inside your body with you, no one is in the back seat of the car waiting when you get in, in the bathroom at work. No one is in the attic. Nobody is under the bed. Nobody is behind the shower curtain in the bathroom. Nobody is in between the cars in the parking garage. No one is outside your window, benignly looking in as you sleep. No one is protecting your astrally projecting dream-soul or your empty body as you dream. No one is hovering at the four posts of the bed with spells and charms. No one set your entire destiny up. Nobody picked out your soulmate. No one gave you your specific, precisely calibrated array of DNA. Nobody examined the lung-like strands of family trees and set your place in them. Nobody gives a shit about you. No one cares. Nobody created you. Nobody is inside you. No one is looking out for you, just around the bend in the road. No one gives you that special feeling when you sense a speed trap on the highway. You are hurling your car at the future, driving along . . . Nobody in the vehicle, around the vehicle. Nobody in the trunk. No one even superimposed over the seat, sitting there actually driving with you, just blindly driving into the future as fast as you can, as hard as you both can. Nobody is waiting for you at the end of the drive. No one is panting in the garage with joy at your arrival. . . No one has prepared closets and cupboards and outbuildings and thick full fields around your house teeming with flowers and vegetation and provisions done up at great expense and trouble. You sink into a cool, soft bed with clean sheets alone at last in a sandwich between No One and Nobody.
