This isn’t anywhere I haven’t been before. I’ve given up. In words muffled with exhaustion I whisper a prayer for my heart to stop.
You, the predead, you must hate hearing this. You hate a backslider, but I am. I’m shirking my life. Not living up to my full potential, I quit.
If there is a grand plan, I surrender to it. I give up to my fate.
Subjected to such a violent skirmish, even the Beagle book begins to disintegrate. Coming apart, the pages dissemble, sentence by sentence. Fluttering down upon me are scraps of paper. Penciled words. Of these falling shreds, one appears to be on fire. An edge of the torn page in question flickers with bright orange light. It’s Festus, wee Festus escorting the scrap of paper. His golden hummingbird wings fluttering wildly, he hovers, holding it within my view.
There, scribbled in childish blue pen, is written, Set yourself a goal so difficult that death will seem like a welcome reprieve….
Here, Gentle Tweeter, my failing brain issues a final inspired belch. Perhaps this… this violent engagement is the battle against evil for which my family and generations of telemarketers have been grooming me.
Here is the trial which Leonard has so long foretold.
Survival of the fittest versus survival of the nicest.
To stem this hail of blows I lift my twisted hands to grip the volume. My wasted fingers hold fast, and my trembling arms wrestle for possession of Mr. Darwin’s cruel travelogue. Please take note. A magic reversal has occurred: Once again a dying cadaver-man is engaged in a dark tug-of-war with a gamine child.
With a great cry of anguish I seize control of the book. The weapon is mine.
Once more swinging the blood-and-sperm-saturated memoirs of C. Darwin, that disillusioned theologian, I invest the last of my dwindling strength in a great swat that connects with the crown of my adversary’s comely noggin. This crippling smack-down drives her backward, stunning her for the moment. That same impact dislodges a final shower of desiccated violets and pansies from between the book’s sodden pages.
Likewise do more fragments of the paper detach and cling to my attacker. The castle of Mr. Darwin’s mind crumbles brick by brick. A dissolving inventory of the natural world. Blasting my foe is this buckshot of memes: bifurcation… crustacean… flocculent, and Diodon. They papier-mâché her like a piñata. Wollaston… wigwag… Fuegians and scurvy. These smother my foe. Her perfect not-nearsighted eyes, they’re invaded by a stinging grit of facts and details. All of Mr. Darwin’s lizards and thistles. My mom and my nana’s long-archived flowery specimens.
The beautiful not-Madison screams in frustrated rage, her peepers pasted over. She’s blinded.
In the next instant the smoldering wick of my pigtail flogs her much-combustible paper coating. She’s set ablaze as the disgorged words and blossoms attack her with their immolating heat. No longer assaulting me, instead she’s beating at her own flanks, swatting to subdue her flaming loins. Even as she struggles to quell the fire, she’s clawing away great softened handfuls of herself. Tearing herself to pieces.
At the same time, she’s screaming. She capers. Her banshee wails distort her features even as the temperature of burning paper melts and buckles her feet, her knees, her annoyingly slender thighs.
Continuing to clutch the yuck-infused chambray shirt and the flaking book, I cower on the nearby ground. Babbling wildly now, as bloodied and nude as the newborn me in the birthing video, I sob, “I’m sorry I was such a self-righteous coward….”
At this humiliating admission, the impossible takes place.
It happens, on rare occasion, that supernatural phenomena occur for which we’ve no ready explanation. Two hands come forward to cup the sides of my misshapen head. My mother’s soft, perfumed palms and much-bejeweled fingers lift my ravaged face until I’m looking up, into her eyes. Her arms cradle my shattered body, creating a not-unsentimental pietà, and she asks, “Maddy? Dewdrop, is that really you?” My father stoops to embrace the two of us.
I am seen. Finally, I am recognized.
My parents and I, our little family, is, in that moment, reunited.
It’s at this juncture that the impossible, inhuman doll of a girl, she raises her melting gaze to the sky. In a gurgling, liquid voice, the not-Madison croaks, “Heed my words….” Even now, sinking to become a bubbling, smoking puddle, she commands, “Honor me, my followers, with a vast, communal ‘Hail, Maddy.’”
DECEMBER 21, 2:38 P.M. HAST
Detonated!
Gentle Tweeter,
As you can imagine, a dense crowd of people expelling pent-up intestinal gas in the presence of an open flame, surrounded by ostentatious, highly flammable architecture, this is a not-happy turn of events. In a flash, the mountaintop cathedral is wildly ablaze. Toga-clad, sandal-shod Boorites run pell-mell in every direction with their extremities exuberantly on fire. The heat softens the underlying peak, and ominous bubbling landslides of molten plastic begin to ooze down the flanks of the precipice.
Smoke blots out the setting sun, plunging this once-pristine world into a darkness illuminated by only the raging orange inferno. On the plains far below jagged fissures crack open, and the ocean begins to seep upward. Even as it burns, the entire continent of Madlantis is slowly sinking. It’s the fall of Pompeii. It’s the destruction of Sodom. The searing updrafts of wind carry gobs of smoldering, spitting ash, depositing them amid distant artificial forests and combustible palaces, until the world appears to be igniting in every direction.
Blinded and terrified, the Boorites stampede over one another. They stumble and topple into pools of boiling slime. Their screams fall silent only when superheated gases sear their lungs.
Mr. K’s emaciated corpus is fully dead, fully involved in flame, and I find myself evicted. Again, I’m a me-shaped bubble of blue ectoplasm. The filthy blue chambray shirt and frayed Beagle book must not be wholly of the physical world, because I find my ghost hands still holding them.
Observing the Ctrl+Alt+Chaos, angel Festus comes to my side. He grips the edge of my ghost ear in his golden fingers and says sarcastically, “Excellent work.”
For my part, Gentle Tweeter, I’m searching the hectic scene, trying to locate my parents. I’m terrified that my folks are going to be killed, and despite the fact that they’re nonviolent, peace-loving, Pentagon-levitating progressives, they’re going to give me a centuries-long time-out. We’ll be estranged forever.
These theoretical punishments choke my ghost mind when a familiar voice says, “Golly, Sponge Cake, ain’t this an awful pickle?”
I turn and see… my Nana Minnie. Holding a ghost cigarette in her ghost hand, she leans over to light it off the flaming pigtail of Mr. K’s burning corpse. As if this fiery Armageddon couldn’t get any worse, beside her is, ye gods, my Papadaddy Ben.
DECEMBER 21, 2:41 P.M. HAST
A Dark Episode Revisited—At Last
Gentle Tweeter,
The last time I saw Papadaddy Ben was Halloween night, the night Nana Minnie died. His scarecrow ghost walked up to our porch in tedious upstate. Now, here he stands. He and Nana Minnie. Surely my education in Swiss etiquette would dictate a casual, easygoing way to inquire about the health of his book-squished, semidetached wing-wang, but I’m uncharacteristically without words.
It’s strange how the currently conflagrating Styrofoam volcano echoes the not-happy circumstances of our last fatal encounter. The furious release of polycarbon gases suggests the reek of that long-ago upstate comfort station. The heat of this searing plastic cataclysm recalls the scorching temperature of that summer afternoon.