Small Town Grievances 38: Say goodnight to the common welt
Small Town Grievances 38: Say goodnight to the common welt
Uh oh: The big school is in hot water after another one of its traditional classroom spittoons was stolen by unknown parties over the weekend. The roiling DNA contained within it has likely already been used to synthesise the perfect compound of every eighth grader who’d ever grunted tobacco into it, to be grown en-masse for export to foreign labour markets as zero-empathy dogwalkers and single-use assassins and other trying vocations that people usually have to study a long time and own special shoes for.
Big school spokesperson Bradley T., who still works there after all this time, said the spittoons must stay despite the risk of further theft. Within their black depths ebbs a link to a more vigorous age, which he says we would do well to recall, a time when children were born steaming with bibles in their hands, and either way a bio-crime every now and again is a small price to pay for keeping the school floors free of christless slime.This month’s new additions to the Hall of Adulterers: Charlie F. with his medically wandering eyes; Tony T. whose wife found him sneaking out to press his lips against the unfinished mermaid mosaic adorning the pool they couldn’t even pay for due to their carpet cleaning business’ consistently poor reviews; Kirsty K., previously of the Homeschoolers Guild, who fell in love with one of those long-necked professional knife men you would see in town during the Trebuchet Convention those years before it was cancelled due to siege fatigue. Kirsty K. now lives far down the highway but drives into town each day to continue teaching her children. She looks sleepless and distressed on the commute, but is likely happy for the first time since god spat his ocean across the sandy earth.
Medium lunchtime riot outside Town Hall calling for restrictions on Mayor’s use of the new town metal detector, which was paid for with money saved after defunding the Chronic Welt Centre, plus some birthday cash Mayor had left over. The metal detector is much bigger than anyone expected, and in operation sounds like the final moments of a black box flight recorder tragedy. Tony P. gave a moving speech about how proximity to the metal detector is causing his pacemaker to act like a tap dancer trying to fight his way out of death row, and that if it’s all the same we could also say the detector is why the groundwater has always tasted how it does.
Each day Mayor’s pockets droop obscenely with deadly collected shrapnel and we are tired of seeing his disintegrating hands, which look like hotdogs thrown into one of those air tunnels they use to test cruise missiles. Council is calling for calm, claiming that the metal detector is likely useless. The harrowing noise we hear is identical to any Mayor might make while concentrating on a task, they say, and the shrapnel he finds is famously abundant in our soil thanks to town’s history as a premiere target for orbital space station disintegration events.Rumours persist of a student at the little school whose spit sizzles and hardens on the ground like metal cooling on a foundry floor, and that by staring into the reflective byproduct the children may see incredible scenes of the lives ahead of them. Little school vice principal Annelise P. says the trend is nothing more than a symptom of delirium stemming from the culture of “ultra detention” the school is trialling in an attempt to get featured on one of those reality shows about public schools that go bananas on their students in the hope of making them civic berserkers.
Stressful: Town is being targeted by a trio of tight-knit boys from the city who march up and down Main St in ultra-tight shoulder-to-shoulder formation. In their high snivelling voices the boys dare locals to try and pass a slip of paper through the space between their bodies — if such a space can be found by our nervous rat fingers, which, they assure us, it wont. They promise to disband if we can best them, and until then claim the right to walk into any building in town, be it business or private home, and demand to eat for free, even during non-standard meal times or unchristian snacking hours. You can imagine the shame being experienced on the daily as their shadows fall upon our doors. The boys make horrible circus noises and insult us as we try to vanquish them. They called Peter R. “President Elect of the Squirt Society” and an “active-status turd”, and said Rodey K., who is a veteran of some kind I’ll remind you, looks like “one of those suits scientists wear when they’re poking around in volcanos”.
After only a few days the tight-knit boys seem invincible to us, otherworldly. But I know their weakness. They love each other too dearly, of course. You can see in their eyes how they worry for each other, pray for their continued happiness, hope they will be together forever. This would be their downfall, as is the way of all true love. But I tell nobody. It has been too long since town was graced by a villain. We have become light-boned and easy in our ways, unafraid of the sunset and the unlicensed TV programming that takes place following it. We have forgotten what it is to face a predator, like that stomach worm everyone contracted after eating vending machine salmon, the one which had us laid up for weeks, dreaming in a different language, emerging to a different world.
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Author’s Note: Why I have not written to you in some time (circle any that apply):
Cornering a rat.
Cornered by a rat.
Wretched morale after wasting my fortune on pinball because I thought it was gambling.
Dazzled on cross-country bus by reflection of sleeping stranger’s giant brass belt buckle and now need special surgery about it.
Rat is offering me a chance to amend my ways or continue on this path and risk losing myself utterly.
Internet privileges temporarily limited after spreading rumour that disk drive will begin to bleed if computer is given too many files.
Internet privileges temporarily limited after spreading rumour that reflections in our dark computer monitors in the moments after we power them on is a nasty version of us trapped in hell who will do anything to make life ungovernable in this reality, e.g. forward many thousands of shameful organ medicine emails to and from my address each day.
I am a cylinder in God’s great combustion engine and am too Freaked Out by the thrum to turn to pleasures such as these.
By way of penitence, I resolve to (circle one):
Turn to the Bible, at such speed that I can catch sight of what it looks like when nobody is thought to be watching.
Undertake a heavy cleanse by drinking from full power hose for one month or until they release a study about how that’s bad for you if it is.
Donate my body to science, but one of the fields that probably doesn’t get many bodies (maths?).
Experience constant and profound change in the manner of a person emerging from a long movie into the cherishing foyer light, in those moments before they can recall who they are but understand they are in mortal bathroom peril.
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