Issue #92

What's A Code For Revolution?, Pigs on Parade, and Jason Derulo

by Justin Goodman (JDG)

What's A Code For Revolution?

Because the president failed the CAPTCHA, the nukes were launching. Where was I? My brother was giving me a mastectomy in his bathtub. As these things do, they set in motion a series of events we called home life. My brother and I had a beautiful wedding in thickets my brother had planted half a century ago outside Salt Lake City when he was a Mormon wife who dug rare birds out of the ground to delicately kiss and convert them. Which is to say we might have stopped the nukes. We were known, like pagan gods, to flirt with turning disaster into baby bonnets. One time I performed a very convincing Flamenco for Francisco Franco. I dropped my last baby teeth in the last well in Utah. My baby adipose tissue I dropped in an envelope that I mailed to the White House. Quietism is a domestic theory to international affairs.

***

Pigs on Parade

"One of us," their pig masks said; screaming was all that was left of the pigs. A sprightly, angry crew of shipwrecked souls. Their signboards had statistics drawn on them nearly identical in handwriting to the Chik-Fil-A overlooking the protest. Between the sympathetic keening and snorts they'd go silent when a particularly mignon segment played from the factory farm footage displaying on the LED monitors hung from their necks. Naturally, they'd played the footage repeatedly to isolate the most poignant squeals, now maudlin echoes of human oinking.

They circled, inasmuch as 4 people could circle, around a ringmaster. She had a vicarious quality to her, dressed in cheap, highly ornamental clothing. Rococo, artful and gauche, and instead of a tawdry whip she whipped her voice. It mixed into the fray with a pinching force, binding the split thread through the eye of the needle. Which is to say they believed in heaven and Chik-Fil-A. However high it was, neither would be there; the ringmaster made the group of be-pigged adults covered in true crime against nature make sense.

Despite being in the center, the ringmaster seemed to also rise above it herself. People who would have otherwise passed by blindly stole a look at this woman who, strange in neither dress nor demeanor, was as conspicuous as cloth billowing on a loom. It was, after all, the 21st century. After all, it was the capital city of the world. All sorts of crazies around here. Would she run for mayor? She was made of the right stuff. She couldn't be worse, anyway. She was standing tall above the protestors, so she had experience organizing and a powerful presence.

It didn't hurt that the protesters had begun to get gradually smaller. There was a soft click in their steps, like high-heels on marble. Their calls became more convincing while the pink of their masks were shinier with a fleshy tinge. The ears began to swivel of their own, which amused young passersby, and a film of ichor coated the scent of the city so that the city, already smelling of festering, of rash, of decayed and poisoned rat, was a corpse flower in bloom. As the protestors became more raucous the LED monitors, still harrowingly violent, became less distinguishable.

They continued to circle the ringmaster never noticing that the data-filled signs were crumpling under their hooves. There was nostalgia for the New York of horse-drawn carriages. At least the skeuomorphs that toured Central Park. The LED monitors scraped across the ground still outnoised the squealing until, exhausted, no longer a priority, they snuffed out, snuffing out whatever it was that had been playing on them. The ringmaster admired the protestors' sense of direction. She had conductor's batons for eyes. Joie de vivre. Groin de vivre.

Having watched in zoetrope in between texting, a pair of cops walked over to shoo the farm out of the street with expressions of personal offense. By then the ringmaster had already texted someone to pick them up, breaking her spell on passersby. She was just someone else with a phone. Not without history. Not wanting to start a fight over something they let happen, the cops directed the ringmaster to the bits of monitor splayed on the walkway with the authority of a manager at closing time. It was too late in the day for giving a damn about work.

And the ringmaster, who now appeared as a stone-cut house deep in the middle of the woods, rounded the protestors into a just arrived van and drove off. It was quickly forgotten amidst the hubbub of recent political scandals and the more attention-demanding celebrity marital controversies whose significance was scried in YouTube soothsayers' plasma globes. Google Maps says there are a dozen butchers isled in Manhattan. Scrolling, we reached the sea shore, weeping and lamenting their fate.

***

Jason Derulo

Jason Derulo keeps falling down the stairs. He's a paper sack full of glass. You can see him in a drunk's hand on city street corners, trying to hide his vulnerability inside his woundable-ness. When people see Jason Derulo they think 'what a pushover' and if he's begging to be one (surely he must be, otherwise why act woundable) why not push him over? And over and over and over... at some point the glass becomes sand again and maybe, when the wind billows Jason Derulo through skyscrapers with body-proof glass and nouveau riche brownstones, he'll become litter where he belongs, sand from his mouth like a beached fish that writhed against oxygen so hard it drank the land that would later be eaten by what it once called home.