Thursday, June 7, 2007

How Sarah Tunes Her Head

The kneecaps glistened with blind unabashed turbulence. As Sarah looked at her baby-grandmother smiling with arguable retrospect, she could never have suspected that this would be their final kneecap picking tour of southeast Asia. She wasn’t in the least prepared for what her (almost impossibly difficult to play) gaga uber-matriarch was about to relate. Because she didn’t know the future, she wasn’t omniscient. Are you even reading this?

Her high-strung baby-grandmother turned to her and said, “Child, I fear that this will be our final kneecap picking tour of southeastern Asia.” “No No! tiniest of tiny Nana’s! Say it isn’t so!” “It is so, or at least it is so likely that this story is entirely based on the premise. Did you just call me tinny?” “No, tiny” “Oh well, you wouldn’t have been totally wrong to describe me that way if you chose to, what, with this recyclable aluminum hip and a hearing aid that sounds like a gramophone recording of paper being crumpled.”

As the two pushed on through the kneecap fields they chatted away about everything from the alphabet to the other end of the alphabet. When they finished their chattering, they were so tired they decided to set up camp and catch some z’s.

As she drifted off to sleep Sarah’s conscious mind was flooded with the disturbances based on what her youthful progenitor had spoken, while her subconscious mind was obsessed with cataloging, maintaining, and sublimating a lifetime of repressed murders. Tonight these two worlds met as she drifted off to sleepy land.

Wielding her trusty chainsaw (or noggin plucker, as she liked to call it), she severed the head of the always lively - but now dead - genetically beneficent antecessor she had so revered.

The sweet irony of this tale is that Sarah was from this moment on, able to sleep calmly and peacefully every night, but all her waking hours were plagued by the knowledge of the atrocities she had committed over a life of nearly 28 years.

But here is where our story ends, that moment of awakening which scared and dislocated both conscious and subconscious, releasing them forever from their respective prisons and placing them squarely in each others.

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