The Future of Terror / 5

If there were gamebirds in our gables, shouldn’t we shoot them ourselves? Thus we went glass-faced into glory. We had our hearts set on staying here, so our steps seemed more hesitation waltz than straight-ahead tango. We danced the hokey pokey on holy days— put your left arm in heaven, your right leg in hell and in the hubbub of shake-it-all-about, we didn’t hear the hoofbeats. The illuminati spoke to us over the intercom via interpreters. Meanwhile we had iodine dribbling from our wounds and itch mites in our blankets. Ours was not a job to joke about. In the lantern-light, the lawn speckled with lead looked lovely. We would live this down by living it up. My pile of looseleaf was getting smaller—I wrote in margins, through marmalade stains, on the backs of maps. I put a piece of mica in the microwave and before the explosion it made the mirage I’d imagined. I was hoping for a noticeable increase in nutmeats or a one night stand in the oubliette. I outwept everyone at the pageant, even the children from the poorhouse playing possum. We studied the protocol for astronaut removal the minute we saw his spit hit planet earth on the spaceship window. But though the scandal reverberated round-the-clock, we had to let it slide. He was up there turning somersaults while we spun ever-so-slowly below.