PDF

The Underlying Order


by Smiley McGrouchpants, Jr-Esq-III


    The old neighborhood was nearly unrecognizable.  The shrubbery was overgrown, the hedges untrimmed, the lawns a cacophony of wild weeds and crabgrass overruling the bare patches of green that peeked through, if they got a chance.
    It had come to this.

    Thomas had foreseen this: “It starts with a crack, a fissure,” he explained, between tokes on his church-bell like bong, dusting a few stray hairs from the sensimilla off his Roky Erickson t-shirt like it was nothing, synchronous, even part of the plan . . . Thomas was an adjustor.
    He adjusted to things, shall we say, constantly.
    Let me explain:

    This was a long way away from where we had first started.  Our numbers fewer, there was little left to do, but resort to . . . resorting.
    But resort, itself.

    “Choices overwhelmed us,” Thomas continued, years later, “like waves crashing.”
    By then, we had gotten out: abandoned the swingsets, the detritus of friends, like suburbanite zombies, half-awake but unable to extricate themselves — choices tied to other choices, like strings tied in knots, and already, how much time was there to look back at who you weren't anymore (using thought-perspectives that, themselves, had changed and dulled) when it was already almost time to go pick up the kids?

    So when the meteor hit and ruptured natural entropic processes, driving greenery into a sort of aggressive long-dormant and unsurmised by biologists ravenous state, we let the lawn eat our former friends, no fun at parties anyway, with nary a qualm.  They hardly noticed.

                                                    THE END
Endcap