Spurious Endeavors or Ugh! Ew!! Holy Fuck!! What’s in that Bowl?!??! Part Seven

Part Seven.

I was still beaming even as The Little Man eerily and portentously shifted his gaze downward to meet my eyeline – a big absentee occurrence in this vast, glimmering room – while all others persistently ignored the face people wore and instead focused on their captivating hats. A blameless act, as they all inadvertently competed for most outlandish headwear. As far as I’m concerned they all earned equal high-tier ribbons and medals.

Take Okra’s magnificent medusa-like doodad where live snakes were each other’s snacks until they slithered out the bottoms of each other, repeating this formation in a hypnotic display.

Or how about Cotton’s cannon poking through her afro of shimmery pink fluff? On the other side of the cannon barrel, a fuse was lit and sizzling with a spark that dwindled toward a destination surely to ignite the firing of some bulbous ball. This I predicted as I noticed that no one communed to her right where the gaping mouth of the cannon had been aimed.

Or the man called Baobob, with a thick block of wood strapped to his head; the one upon which his doppelganger, Boboab, tap danced.

I took special fancy to the cavernous ice caves that Hollyhocks so expertly balanced over her billowing curls. Her hand was as warm and squishy as a mound of melted blacktop-bound butter when I was privileged enough to shake it. “Burrr!” I said, lamely. If she had betrayed the forbidden code by which these hat-wearers and hat-lookers-at seemed to follow so adamantly, she may have stopped smiling and scowled at the side of my facial front, and made some effort to remove herself from my slight and painfully insignificant presence among these wonders of human flesh encasements. But she didn’t. She must have liked my bouncy balls.

For a brief but tense moment I found myself on the floor, rubble raining all around me. A hole had been blasted through one of the walls but it seemed not to perturb any one but the guy Kapok helped back to his feet, and patting the pale dust off his blue jeans.

“Oh, that’s just Cotton,” he said. I noticed wisps of smoke escaping the cannon barrel jammed through Cotton’s pink ‘fro as she held a hand to her mouth and made an “oops” face. The little girl with the alligator head on her own head shuffled by with one of those violet boxes and gathered as many bits of the aftermath as she could stuff inside. “That’s how she sprouts,” said Kapok.

Upon being left without a guide, I made the thoughtless and potentially hazardous mistake of finding that Little Man with the sunflowers blossoming from his hat (who I had overheard being referred to as Zick) and asked a question one may never consider to be so offensive as he had.

“Where might I find the bathroom?” I asked, causing his eyes to creep downward from my hat to my eyeline and I was chilled to witness within them a word flashing by as if on one of those distracting cable news tickers: “IMPOSTER!”

The word may have scurried by loudly, but he kept his lips glued shut and only reacted when a bit of sunlight burnt his cheek and he jolted to the side. “FIZZ! FACE THE WINDOW!”

“I am!” she yelped back, freeing more champagne onto the juddering floor. She knelt down and held the rim of her empty glass against the edge of the puddle. She wafted the air over it until every last droplet re-joined the respective prisons of her glass, her mouth and finally her stomach where, presumably, the champagne and all other fluids would remain until a toilet revealed its never- so-elusive self somewhere beyond the barred castledoor.

Then a mystifying and disturbing thought attacked the brain hiding beneath my decorated dunce cap. What a tantalizing tangle of threads this thought neglected to weave. “What if,” I would never dream of saying aloud, “these people never, ever use the bathroom?”

It was the sun, the actual one, and not Fizz’s headdress that had peeved Zick. He had run off to an adjacent room where I found him squatting over a wheel suctioned to the floor. He let out a grunt as he gave it a grip and tugged until it turned. He noticed me inching closer and threw up his palm.

“No, no, that’s quite all right,” he said hastily. “I know what you’re going to say, and the answer is going to be ‘no.’”

“I was only going to offer my help,” I said. “Because you’re breathing pretty heavily, and you’re sweating like a mule.”

“That’s not sweat,” he said, flustered. “It’s… it’s reproductive fluid. Haven’t you ever seen that before?”

“Not on a man’s forehead,” I said, earnestly.

The Little Man rolled his eyes. “From the flowers, Imposter.”

I felt the need to correct him. “My name is O…”

“Your name is a trifle now.”

Kapok put his hand on my shoulder again to interrupt.

“It is?” I asked. “That’s fantastic!”

Kapok hollered down at The Little Man still straddling the wheel on the floor. “We should allow the seedling to truly experience initiation, don’t you think?” The Little Man rose to his feet — and Kapok’s shins.  He spoke through clenched teeth.

“Do you really think that’s wise?”

“I do,” Kapok nodded. His arms and hat ribbons crossed. There was a silent gap into which tension leaked in droves. All the attendees had gathered around us and awaited approval from under Zick’s stagnant sunflowers.

He spoke ominously but I could tell the only person in the room he made nervous was the one whose eyes he scowled into throughout, even if he never addressed a single syllable to me personally.

“Don’t forget how all this began, Kapok. Don’t forget the murky conditions in which you were granted entry through that door. This is where all that matters and will ever matter is meant to thrive and grow into something even greater. Something unfathomable to those outside that door. You were given privilege. You were given sanctuary. Do not think for a second you can abuse what I have so willfully blessed you with. Because I can take it back in an atto. Do not forget that. I haven’t.”
The Little Man broke his stare with my eyes and stomped away, over the wheel on the floor and between the velvet curtains. We all watched as he disappeared finally into a thriving garden of soaring topiary.

“Wow,” I said. “I think I just sprouted a brick.”

“Tell him!” someone shouted and set off a chain reaction of “Tell him!”s and “Now!”s and one “Get on with it!” Kapok whirled around to face my hat again with that off-putting look on his face that I would later learn has been referred to throughout history as a “smyle.”

“Each night,” he said, eyes profulgent, “the Mallows convene in the Cortex to produce good will and cheer.  It is imperative we keep the presentation of elation at its absolute crest because the more positivity mustered, the healthier the sprouts. As sprouts abound inside the foyer, Madia gathers them up in their own individual boxes which she then places there, upon the mantle over the fireplace. This continues until dawn, when we each take a box in hand and walk together, ever so mindfully, down to the Taro where we feed our sprouts one-by-one to the Eudicot Cycloner.  After all the sprouts are devoured, the Eudicot Cycloner gives us a reading which hopefully indicates how much longer the Mallows are required to wait until the beginning stages of The Inundation are underway.”

I’m not sure how much time had passed before Kapok spoke again.

“What?” he said. “What part didn’t you understand?”

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