Our Plastic Apocalypse

I was on a shuttle, returning to Earth with a small group of astronauts.  As we circled the planet, I had the uncanny feeling that we were in a little toy ship in a pitch black room circling a plastic globe with a bright reading lamp shining down on it.  I could even see all the names and borders drawn on all the different countries.  There was a stillness over it all.

We were over the United States when the first mushroom cloud appeared.  It burst like a puff of dirt off the surface of the globe without making a sound, but it did nothing to disturb the glossy surface or the inscriptions or the lines of topography.  It was like witnessing a strategy for ending the world in someone's war room, rather than seeing the actual thing.  Europe rolled away under us, and then on to Russia and the East, the mushroom clouds popping randomly in the landscape ahead of us.  There would be nowhere to land, no home to return to.      

Eventide

Late one evening, as I was walking along a dirt road, I came across a young man sitting under a tree by the wayside.  He sat facing the last flickers of sunlight and in the gathering darkness I could just make out a peaceful smile on his face.  Fireflies lit and then expired randomly in the tree above him, and I could hear the far off sounds of workers laughing as they were coming in from the fields somewhere, a gate unlatched and creaking on its hinges, the wide world opening up on the edge of night.

The young man just sat there taking it all in.  He told me that he had been a prince, but he had left behind his crown and his castle and his jewels.  He had abandoned it all in exchange for what he called "all the treasures of the world" with a sweep of his arm towards the horizon.  He seemed perfectly content to go on sitting there, so I continued on my way as the sky faded to reveal a wealth of stars.  But every now and then I stopped to think of the smile I had seen on the prince's face.         

A Liability Issue

My daughter was still little at the time, maybe around five or six years old.  We were having a birthday party for her.  A bunch of kids from the neighborhood had come, too many for me to count.  The house seemed overrun with them and they were ransacking the place from top to bottom, tearing up couch cushions and putting long gouges in the walls.  The whole thing was starting to give me a bit of a headache.

There was a toy train set up in my daughter’s play room.  It was large enough for kids to ride on and the track was laid out in a simple wedge shape that took up most of the corner of the room.  My daughter wanted to know if she could take everyone for a ride on her train.  I had to tell her no.  My wife started to object, but I pulled her aside and explained that we were responsible for anything that might happen to these kids and that they all seemed a little too rambunctious to handle playing with this train without one of them getting hurt.

My wife reluctantly agreed.  I hated to disappoint my daughter.  I knew how much she wanted to show the other kids her train and have them play with her on it, how much she had thought about it in the weeks leading up to the party, and how much I was letting her down.  I could see it in her face.  But I couldn’t get the idea out of my head of one of those kids putting their hands on the track and the sharp wheels of the train coming along and slicing off their fingers.

Cityscape

I lived in this apartment building.  The mother of the family next door was a rather nervous, quiet, woman.  I met her one night in her dreams.  She said she wanted to show me something.  It was just getting light out and the rest of her family was still asleep, having dreams of their own.  She put a finger to her lips and then brushed aside the clothes hung up in her closet to reveal a secret panel in the wall.

The panel opened onto a passageway that led down several winding flights of stairs.  We passed a room where some old grey-haired accountants seemed to be working.  One of them stared after us sourly with his bottom lip stuck out.  I turned back, out of curiosity, but the woman took my hand and led me on, eager to show me something.  There was a giddiness in her eyes, and something in the way that she was tiptoeing down the stairs in her white nightgown made her seem younger despite her lined face and wrinkled hands.

At the bottom of the stairs we came to a balcony.  The fresh air and the view hit me all at one.  It was a futuristic cityscape, although it seemed as though it were made out of plastic toys.  There were brightly colored gizmos and gyros that seemed to operate everything.  There were all sorts of sleek vehicles and humming electronic and mechanical noises.  It was like a vast living machine or an organism, endlessly interlocking motion and energy.

In the air around us there hung solid blocks of letters forming words that felt like they were attacking us, bearing down threateningly from the sky. Apparently, I wasn't the only who felt this way.  I looked over and noticed the neighbor woman curled up on floor of the balcony.  She was shaking and half-hysterical.   She told me that it absolute torture for her to keep coming here, but somehow she couldn't stop.  She brought me along because she needed someone else to see it.  

My Bad Hair Day

An old boss of mine was cutting my hair.  He had a barber's chair set up in the middle of a store for some reason.  Shoppers stared at me as they went by.  One kid stopped to gawk with his finger in his mouth.  I slipped my hand out from under the cape and gave him a little smile and a wave.  When he was done, my boss removed the cape with a flourish, brushed some powder on my neck, and rang me up on an old cash register that he had sitting off to the side, the kind with the numbered cards that pop up in the window and the lever you crank to ring the bill and open the cash drawer.  He charged me twenty bucks, which seemed a little steep.

I stopped in the restroom to inspect my haircut in the mirror, as I often used to do.  It was awful.  A total mess.  It was all patchy and uneven and not even trimmed close and neat the way I like it, just sparse clumps of hair and some sloppy manipulation with a comb.  I would have been better off trimming it myself with the clippers like I normally do.  I was going to have to do that anyway.  What a disappointment.