Similar to Madonna's 1 888 2 CONFESS hotline.
ICICLES MELT, ICICLES FREEZE
Icicles melt; Icicles refreeze. Then they rethaw. This is normal, but Feez Leemo knew what everyone was starting to realize this winter: it wasn't going to happen. This winter is colder. After just three days of reports from the weather bureau, saying that three consecutive coldness records had been absolutely surpassed, as compared to those days in past centuries, even the Committee on Emergencies and Atrocities began to hold session. But after fourteen record days, it was simply all anyone talked about. It seemed to be a case of global cooling. It might be because of ionospheric inverse-induction, indirectly related to heavy usage of cellular phones, satellite broadcasts, and the Internet. Feez just knew he had to get more fleece, more wool, more layers. It was just damn cold.
Some heating systems that had been known to work seemed to get a bit clunky in the new situation. And death tolls began to accumulate: homeless people freezing, people without heating systems freezing, sour weather attitudes accumulating and leading to stress-related psychiatric mishaps.
Feez just kept wiping his windows off; they had frozen with layers of hard condensation. He pried his mailbox open, no longer able to access it each day like before. Why? Why was this winter so much colder? He needed to know. No one was doing anything to remedy the situation; they were all just analyzing it. Sure there were Red Cross shelters set up and community "plans of action" launched, supposedly, but Feez sensed that the authorities were missing the boat. They hadnt pinpointed the source of this coldness. He was sick of their myriad theories.
So he ventured out to the woods behind his house. He could feel frostbite begin to harden his left eye, his only exposed surface. He walked by the old rusted tractor, which had been left for generations. He stepped over crisped shrubberies, trampled on some letters that someone had thrown out, gazed at distant water towers, climbed a hill, pushed aside frozen pine branches, climbed a steeper hill, and walked toward a bedrock plateau. He had heard of this vista, but had never been there himself. He started to focus that eye on distant towns, church steeples in the valley. He thought about the people in those buildings, all avoiding this tremendous shiver. He wondered what it would take to bring any warmth. Slowly his pondering body shifted and sunk in the sharp white snow, and he felt sleepier and sleepier sitting there, and as his eye changed its focus and almost closed, he realized his vision was being filled from left to right, from top to bottom, with a tiny clover right in front of him. Out from the icy surface it peered. And, he couldn't believe this part, it was a four-leaf clover. At this point his hand and arm were frostbitten, utterly incapacitated. He felt himself being mummified like the clover itself, and a gust of wind caused his body to sink another notch. It was a final, impossible gesture, a tiny speck of faith, which empowered Feez to rotate his jaw and reach it around toward the clover allowing his cracked, frozen lips to squeak closed around its stem, and his teeth, in one tiny motion, split that stem, allowing the clover to fall into his breast pocket.
As you can imagine, there was a crack in the clouds where a simply symmetrical ray of sunlight finally peaked through. In the distance, smoke could be seen coming from the factories. Cars beeped their distant horns. And the frost encasing Feez's body modestly released its death-grip.
MY CORNER
"Let's see, Istanbul is the capitol of Pakistan..." Junior High science was pretty easy today, but I have five minutes to make it to history and take a test. "No, Persia, not Pakistan." Ahead of me two greasy computer people with button down oxfords rolled at the cuff are discussing insectoid luncheon meat as they walk toward this corridor from a leftward perpendicular hallway. In back of me, I hear blunt voices coming closer behind my ears.
"Yeah, I kicked his ass. I said, 'Hey, Fitzie, you wrecked my bike,' and then I kicked his ass." I turned my head - it was three rats, two with ripped army jackets, and the biggest one in black leather. Up ahead, by the glass swinging doors, a small circle of perfect looking popular jock girls are discussing their hair. The black leather rat is now right behind me and towering one foot above me. I feel his breath. Suddenly, my thoughts are interrupted. "Hey, you. I hate your face!" and before I have a chance to feel hurt, he punches me hard in the jaw.
So I'm just standing there, frozen, holding my face. The jock girls are giggling, and the three musketeers are walking away through the glass doors. Suddenly an inner rage boils upward from my stomach, and I walk over to the side wall of orange lockers. I carefully stack the six notebooks I've been cradling by the end corner of a locker row, figuring that no one will take or kick them in the next five minutes. Then I run ahead, past the computer tutors and the devilish dolls, and around and in front of the three rugged rats and arm's length from the oversized ass kicker. Hallway life pauses for a moment. A second goes by, and then part of the next second, and then I wind back my hand, never been wound, and send it deep into his thick stomach. Now I hear clapping, laughing and rejoicing. It's like a score has been settled for all. The prepubescent programmers are high-fiving, and everyone else is circling around rooting. I'm on the floor at this point with a leather hiking boot coming towards my tooth, but I'm still laughing and smiling and feeling more joyful than I ever have before. There's blood on my face, and I'm seeing stars, and sideways I can see the cheerleading bimbos leading a cheer and BANG, another kick, but I stand up and clock the guy again and he grabs my collar and pins me high up on a locker and now the principal is here and it's all over.
Actually it didn't happen like that at all, but it is my Corner.
SCUDGE FRISK
I didn't sit down to write about Scudge Frisk the biker who sits with his friends in a dank bar at noon drinking Jim Beam. Nor do I care about Scudge Frisk the bear of a man who wrapped his greasy elbow around the neck of bartender Willy, who had suggested Scudge's vehicle was of foreign make. It's the Frisk that no one knew - the Frisk that hobbled on home and threw his leather vest over a banister only to begin working on designs for doilies.
He especially loved a doily that looks precious under a centerpiece vase. But let's just say he shot out from antiquity when he introduced that new line. The new ones weren't perforated or white, they were tinted and often geometric. "These," thought Scudge, "would even appeal to some of my pals back at the bar.
Most folks know that sound is linked to emotions. Bikers know, for example, that the deep roar of a Harley is a resonance that makes babies feel sentimental when it seeps from roadside to crib. But Scudge Frisk discovered a new elicitor. One day when staring at a newly-dyed doily, the combination of its "deep-fog-green" center and a "winter cyan" edge made him feel raging hatred. "I hate this doily," thought the mean biker. "Its colors make me want to kill." Further experimentation yielded other emotions.
Months of refining led to the ultimate color combo. He dyed squares of silk the appropriate selection of hues, sewed them into doilies, shoved some samples into his vest pocket and rocketed on down to the bar. Before Tiny Rockalon or Rodney Kark could squeak a barstool, their drinks had been placed upon multicolored silk pads. This new color pattern, they would learn, caused ultimate happiness. Rockalon, Rodney and the rest looked over and found themselves to be happy as larks. "No longer," exclaimed one of them, "will we need to bicker over meaningless trifles." They were so happy that they all left their dingy watering pit to go running daintily through a grassy field. Two young girls in pink Sunday dresses sat on a nearby lawn overhauling the engine of their minibike when they noticed the huge men in jeans and leather strolling like playful kittens.
The girls heard one biker yell back to the other, "I feel summery and succinct, like a sleeveless linen dress."