Small Town Grievances 37: Weeping for beauty at the endless hole
Small Town Grievances 37: Weeping for beauty at the endless hole
Tyler M. the once-productive farmer is going around town complaining to all who will listen that the animals on his farm no longer seem to be dying naturally in any meaningful sense. Their years have already stretched on longer than any record he can find at the large-print library and they show no signs of slowing down either, and in many cases seem to be only getting more powerful with age. He says he’s now caught in the tender position of either paying a fortune to house the ancient growing things and take whatever misery they’ll one day inflict, or sending them on to meet their gods through means more assertively physical than simply withholding feed for a season, which he had to abandon after road workers complained that the draining cries echoing as far as the government highway made everyone dream darkly.
Not sure what Tyler M. wants us to do about it. He refuses to let police onto his land ever since they shot their way out of his corn maze, and he’s turned down the community college’s offer to send over any grad students who aren’t good enough to get a placement, which even being generous is most of them. Tyler M. says he’d consider it but just got new cement put in and has no way of telling visually if it has dried yet and has no intention of touching it to see, and in the meantime doesn’t want the scientists yelling across it with their packed-snow voices and leaving behind their tiny shoe prints and their chewed-up pen lids, the greasy wrappers from their mini diet meat stick lunches, the countless shells of the sunflower seeds they carry slung in velvet snack pouches from their necks, pulling out unmanageable handfuls, letting it all fall there underfoot to get stuck until Christ returns.
Mayor claims his new investment property, an old two story creaking swampishly over in the eye-watering part of the refinery district, contains an unsettling room that appears differently to each person who finds themselves alone in it. Toni. M of the realtors who facilitated the sale saw in it a deep hole which could show her many parts of history when bidden, and Mayor says he listened through the door for over an hour as she commanded it to show her what she and her sisters looked like as young girls, asking it over and over if they will ever look that way again or feel the way they felt when the wind came off the lake, or display the same aptitude with the loom that had once won them so many scholarships.
Mayor invites us all to take the company bus out to visit the room and enjoy it for ourselves, though many are wary this is simply another ploy to lecture us into the marketing scheme he’s currently entangled in, which involves selling enormous quantities of that kind of burning cream that turns hair the colour of very clean toilet water.
Unpromising launch of Lunchtime 2095, the civic centre’s much-delayed educational exhibition which promises an unparalleled glimpse into the daytime pastes and puddings that townspeople will enjoy in decades to come. Extremely mixed reviews from early guests, who complained that the material of each room is afflicted by a blindingly bright reflective sheen that makes it impossible to tell what’s going on and may in fact be dangerous to the more sensitive veterans, who were as always the honoured guests of the exhibition’s launch event. The actors manning out the displays seem to all be children stress-crying in an immersion-breaking way as they try to catch up on late homework amid the flashing lights and deafening industrial air purifiers of each scene.There was a depressing amount of attention paid to something called The Great Looming Psychic Wars and a small hovering butler drone caught many guests with its sharp rotors and sent Mayor into a frenzy before someone managed to catch it in a damp sheet they’d brought from home to dry on a chair.
Rumours are that this will be the nail in the coffin for civic centre curator Percy H., possibly the most stressed man of the modern era. He has not been seen since his early departure from the launch after realising guests hadn’t worn anything from his designated list of period-appropriate outfits, all of which are one kind of silken half-kimono or another, plus those shoes you don’t see much anymore since the Clubfoot Emporium got looted by mercenaries. Percy H. has lost many allies during his difficult mission to realise fully lunches both past and future. We tire of his constant health complaints, his clockwork bowel syndrome, the fact that he was once handsome but now evokes a videotape used one too many times. His voice has the wet quality of a young tree being felled before it is ready. We know men of pure vision have always been treated with such contempt, and that one day history might turn on us. But still we cannot bring ourselves to love him.
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