51: Knotted

Lizards scarpered over a landscape baked like the inside of an oven. Flapping paper hanging from a billboard told me to ‘Cover the young with happiness,’ “Is that a message or an order?” I called out A voice? Voices? An echo. Is it children? Are children young? I set my chair back under the static caravans tarpaulin lean to and start typing. Scenario 1: His wife is a wallet by nightfall, an influencer’s robot living with dark valley eye sockets, portraits that begin to infect Tuttergram’s algorithms, until so many people see them they lose any interest they had in anything ending up packing themselves away in gold leafed latrines to be fired into an electric sunset. “Hm. That needs an explanatory footnote.” Footnote: a heavy daybreak. Squashed people found ingesting too much spoiled rootbeer. They’d made a brief search of an unassuming prisoner, his face a wafer with sticker earrings; must be someone’s little mother-father? I lent back and sighed pulling the page out from platen and fed in my long overdue children’s book pitch instead: An author’s itinerary to Booby the dinosaur, ah geez, make a note: it can’t be called Booby, anyway: Synopsis: an archaeologist doing a TED talk to actors, writers, creators, financiers, the cream of the 1%, a secret character in a dark corner with the silhouette of a triceratops becomes quieter at the mention of fossils, a self consciousness born from too many late night pizza dinners. The sounds come out again from the tannoy, all of them at once: the wife, the husband, the chickens in their coup calling out the last cluck of a T-Rex. Hourglass sand in its death throe drone. We followed it’s sound, crossing over perfectly, Teddy in his cardboard box stegosaurus costume and me dressed half maitre d, half waitress. Wind guffed over the dunes as you’d expect living at the rim of the Earth’s rectum, but luckily no follow through this time. On waking, I found I’d slumped down into my irrigation trench, a tortoise parting my lips to snatch a wilted spinach leaf from my mouth. “Ok Rambo, tell the others daddy’s back, and he’s getting dinner.” Unguarded folk questionnaires, in alphabetical piles, fall off the table like a cataract. We were, we chewed, rumbled, blasted complicit patter, the true kernel within the laughing sound.