Small Town Grievances 41: Say a prayer for the frogs and send them to hell
Small Town Grievances 41: Say a prayer for the frogs and send them to hell
The mall that never seems to be open at the normal hours has welcomed a new business for the first time in years: Eternity of Photography, which will be taking over the storefront left after the collapse of the Jumping Castle Alliance. Many may remember new owner Glenn W., who used to run the after-hours veterinary clinic that wasn’t licensed but was also pretty honest about it. Glenn W. says his store will specialise in doing those computer pictures that show you what your baby will look like if it gets a job in the sun, as soon as he can convince his live-in girlfriend Linda T. to stay up later than 6pm and teach him how to use the software before she goes to bed.
Bad news: Mayor has invoked emergency powers to pull sponsorship for the Heaven’s Private Refreshment Water Taste Awards, which were supposed to take place this weekend, after he forgot about the event until yesterday and freaked out about not having enough time to prepare a perfect glass of water to enter into competition. The emergency powers are intended to be used only if the town is invaded by a foreign power with a minimum technology level of flushing toilets, but council doesn’t seem to mind the overstep. They’ve been trying to get the HPRWTAs cancelled for years. They believe that everyone running their taps endlessly for weeks in the lead up to the event is “Hiroshima-ing our puny water infrastructure” and that each year town hall is forced to either drain the moat at the public library and increase the likelihood of a siege or draw water from the marsh and risk the salamander advocacy groups detonating another car bomb.
An old report commissioned by council is once again being circulated, stoking fears that town’s obsession with drinking water contests — The Heaven’s Private Refreshment Water Taste Awards, Dr. Sandy Johanesburg’s Ultra-Hyrdration Fortnight, The Wet Boy Regionals (defunct) — is continuing to concentrate town’s profound local bacteria to dangerous levels of near-sentience, and that if we do not change course we will enter a new dark age of public health wherein something called the “Facial Discharge Economy” looms darkly. But this report is many years old and we do not allow ourselves to fear its prophecy. Few of us can even remember a time when the more prominent microbes in our water were not plainly visible on any day where the sun is bright and the wind is still. We know that if we get nervous we can always just leave the glass of water next to an extremely loud speaker and leave the room for a few minutes, though what this does is anyone’s guess. Nobody knows whether it kills the bacteria or renders it inert, puts it to sleep, reshapes it, creates something new of it entirely. Nobody knows the ways in which we have changed.
A lot of excitement surrounding a boy at the big school who claims he can open any lock if given a moment alone in a dark room with it. Difficult to lend this kind of thing credence most of the time, but there you go. The big school carts out one of these miracle kids every time it misses the funding submission window and needs to raise money to get the classrooms de-veined or to smoke out the redundant teachers living in the big rolled-up gym mats or to have the wheels on the team bus converted into 3D. Much of these claims are overblown or uninventive. Last year they had a girl who could predict which businesses were about to have sales, and another who could name different paint tones on sight with an accuracy close to the paint-mixing robot they used to have at Hardware Victory before it had to be destroyed after learning how to open a bank account over the telephone.
Pearl R. said she witnessed the act of the lock boy when she was at the big school picking up the ungifted one of her daughters for lunchtime doctor tests, and that we would do well not to dismiss his power so quickly. The speed with which the boy had emerged having coaxed open a jammed-up bike chain was apparently extraordinary, impressing even the front office ladies, who say themselves they’d headlock Christ the Lamb if he came in with a tone.
The big school decided to host an open day to showcase the miracle and even with our misgivings most of town ended up turning out for it, despite it being basically in the middle of a working Tuesday and so soon after a long weekend. It was a very fine day. They had food stalls selling all kinds of skewers, and the school band performed for many hours, though the only song they seemed to know was that one played at soldier’s funerals and before long some of the veterans in attendance needed hydralites.
Most of us were dozy and agreeable and sleeping on our feet when school staff finally led us to a utility shed and brought out the boy, who was willowy but looked interesting enough in his black drama-club cape. Then they put in his hands a huge grey flaking lock of the type you might see in a movie about an unethical prison and ushered him inside the utility shed and closed the door behind him. They bade us wait, silent and bowed, though if we’d bought refreshments we were welcome to enjoy them quietly.
Forgive me. Some of us couldn’t wait. Some of us had to see. It was easy to crouch through the crowd of sleepers and round the utility shed and, basically without even craning, peer through the high skylight to witness the ritual inside.
And there we saw the boy amid his miracle, sprawled out and weeping with the lock on the concrete beside him. A very bitter scene. He was mumbling, begging quietly for guidance from, I believe, Tall Seargent Long, a kind of military superhero giraffe from a popular cartoon mostly occupied with counter-insurgency narratives, though I could not be sure if this was his plea exactly.
If he was crying for the predicament he’d created or if it was simply part of the process was unclear to us, but none of us felt well standing there and watching it unfold. It wasn’t easy to see a child like that, so alone and obviously very young despite, not even at the unofficial smoking age, dying like a bird under a weighted blanket. After enough time had passed, someone whispered if we should help him. And when nobody answered, I was the one who eventually spoke. No, I said. Let him see. Let him learn what happens.
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