Sense Abilities...

 The refrigerated forest was on its best behavior.  Elves, overnight, had carefully poured fresh baking soda in shifty pyramids between the exposed toes of the trees, in doughy piles beneath dusky mushroom canopies, and in tiny transient beaches around each puddle left by the midnight rain�" leaving the air gently scoured, softly spiced, charismatically chilled, fashionably thin.  This was the sort of air which looked killer in its underwear. 

It was here amidst the birch, the ash, and the sparse pine stubble, through the silicates, minerals, and insectile detritus which, in a most impolite fashion, jutted a pipe.  This pipe happened to be 22 beetle wings in diameter, and the portion currently preoccupied with protuberation plumbed to an altitude equal to that of the beak of a very alert Branta canadensis squatting on the distant beach of a puddle, who in a similar spirit of glorified incongruity, relentlessly thrust her honk into the afternoon�" an irredeemable aesthetic assassination.  

            The pipe’s monotonous gray appearance had become recently peppered with brown flecks, its particular inanimate approximation of senescence.  Constituted primarily of steel, brass, and iron, in fleeting moments of vanity, it could be excused for the occasional copper yen; green being the color of more than simply patina.  If darkness were a more accurate doppelganger, this pipe’s aphotic ray would periodically bisect the sun, and blight any more distant star which crossed its abyssal path.  As things stood, however, the pipe could be no more defiant than holding rank, rainwater and all.  But, as was more or less bound to happen, even this ostensibly modest modus was challenged by and by, by a child.  This is what happens when the main meets its maker, the pipe peeves the piper, the tube challenges the dude.

            Simian footsteps in these woods are a rarity, but are never missed; they can be distinguished by their unmannerly cloddishness and their fiendishly inadvertent rhythm.  The pipe could never differentiate their relentless, penetrating crunch from that of someone very small chewing dry cold cereal sitting on its rim while it tried to read the morning paper.  Never mind that the pipe couldn’t read the paper at all.  Pipes don’t read.  The woodland animals might have been startled by their sound if they hadn’t smelled the intruder seconds before and hunkered down, waiting for the garbed one to pass on.  With this attitude the pipe concurred.  The waiting, that is, not the hunkering.  Pipes don’t hunker.  Pipes jut. 

            The proximate cause of the meager march, was approximately a man.  More specifically, it was a boy.  Commonly, wildlife does not make a distinction, and pipes don’t discern.  Boys, however, are built for it.  The lonely artifact stuck out like the sore thumb of the earth, like smoke on the horizon of the home stretch, like the proverbial stick in the proverbial mud.  The pattern seeking sponge abruptly brought about its bipedal accoutrement, as the gravitas of novelty sucked another sucker into its precarious perigee.

            The boy approached the conspicuous conduit with the tender apprehension of an apprentice entomologist, toting a collection of internalized butterflies.  A thorough visual survey was methodically conducted of every rood of the subject as well as its immediate vicinity.  Curious critters ogled the quirky perusal from their environmental ensconcements, as the mesmerized moppet circled the pipe with what the aborigines considered undue diligence.  Having mastered the edges, the time came when a deeper inspection became necessary.  The boy approached the tube and peeked inside. 

            The distinguishing characteristic of youth being the gratuitous intensity of experience brought on by a lack of contextual perspective�" looking into that cryptic cipher we know of as the hole at the top of the tube, the boy felt the very pulsing heart of the planet, sensually dampened by the doughy muliebrity of the mantle, it was nonetheless amplified by the pipe’s solemn rigidity to a partially perceptible whisper, giving the reputedly taciturn aperture a positively Delphic profundity�" puffing at his face an igneous incense which proclaimed to contain the secret of the earth’s birth unburdened by the devastating dogma of mortality.  Though we may know this as nothing more than the inevitable consequence of aspiration, air pressure, and the corporeal characteristics of metal pipes; for the boy this was the beginning of a long and beautiful enmity.  The pipe did not share this sentiment.  Pipes are not hostile.

            Over time the boy came to view the tube with the peculiar duality of freshly long-term lovers, of stilled rabbits with one eye on the fox: alternating bouts of reverence and suspicion.  It was, arguably, the only piece of scenery more out of place than himself.  The boy had no more explanation for the pipe’s position than the trees, who had a head-start on the puzzle.  His second impulse, swiftly replacing the curious awe of initial discovery was to remove the problem, by removing the pipe.  The trees had to give him credit, they’d never thought of that. 

            He wrapped his little hands around the pipe, their stunted diminution a stark contrast to their ambition as their muggy embrace oppugned our elemental apostate.  He planted his feet, allowing them to root while he took a deep breath and envisioned the satisfying crumble of the soil’s release.  He pulled. 

            The pipe didn’t budge.  Neither did the hidden panoply of animals who surreptitiously surveilled the scene, giving the human brain a run for its money for the  title of Mother Nature’s Central Intelligence Agency.  Pushing accomplished nothing more than to scrape the green from the grass below his sneakers.  Nor even the strategic implementation of bodily momentum served to dislodge his fixed foe, as the boy swung himself around the pole like a human tether-ball, an apish astronaut.  These strenuous exertions in vain, they merely served to give rise in him the childish triumvirate of exhaustion, frustration, and submission.  The inability to shift his adversary did not, however, eliminate the option of altering his own perceptions of the situation, another simple sleight of mind performed effortlessly by the young, which gives their elders the impression of their arcane magic.  Without altering its somatic position one iota, the pipe was thaumaturgically converted from a task to a tool, as the boy lay upon the besieged grass and with the trusting intimacy of the voodoo urchin, snuggled the pipe into the hollow between his shoulder and his throat and spent the remainder of the afternoon working his boyish savagery on passing geese, sighting down the pipe one eye closed, with imagination, onomatopoeia, and spittle.

            Impatience gradually overcame trepidation and the woodland creatures made their appearance, one by one they discovered their relative safety was in more danger from other things than this obnoxious odiferous stranger.  Before long, evening slipped down its scrim as the trees donned their black robes, fading from similarity into equivalence at the speed of the slothful dusk.  The boy stiffly assumed his upright orientation and relegated himself reluctantly to the aspect of the diurnal, committing himself to a subdued shuffle back from whence he came.  The ability to construct a home away from home being a contractual Hercules whose demands accumulate even as our vigor evaporates into the night, to borne a phenomenal morning dew. 

            When the boy returned the very next day, shaking the silver boulders from the grass and leaves, he returned to remind the pipe of his strength.  He sported not the muscles of the great bear, not afflicted was his person with the ferocity of the badger; he was possessed of no wolven claws, nor owlish talons, nor adorned was his skull with the horns of the stag.  His teeth were but a blunted battalion on permanent hiatus, armored but unarmed�" pulled awkwardly into his flat face, rendered impotent but for the spoon.  That was his reminder that day, he was a Homo sapiens sapiens; the Spoonmaster, and let none forget it, least of all a petulant metallurgical protuberation. 

As the boy walked up that day, the boy walked up with a shovel. 

            The boy watched closely, but he was not granted the satisfaction of ostensible fear from his enemy.  Pipes don’t quiver.  There was likewise no quailing, desperate dispensation of rationalistic argument as to why the boy should not go through with his dastardly plan.  Pipes don’t quibble.  As the boy dug in the dirt alone bent to his will, he might as well have begged the pipe for change.  Pipes give no quarter.  The boy chose to imagine the dewy beads on its edges as a cold sweat.  This gave him confidence.  He smirked as he drove the sharpest part of the spade into the dirt, tearing countless roots, impressing an army of ants, and interrupting the tunnel of one very startled earthworm.  Shift and repeat. 

            Digging is a task which swiftly eschews its charms.  Though the boy had entered the battle with the intent to excavate China if need be, after burrowing a toilsome three feet down, he tossed the trowel aside and resumed the thrust of his earlier ministrations: shoving, tugging, prying, and otherwise badgering the stoic snorkel.  Feeling no success, fearing no progress, the boy inspected.  Holmes himself could not have discerned a soupcon of stoop in the tube’s affect.  As the boy threw himself, with a dramatic grandeur appreciated by means of applause from the breeze-blown branches, upon the effortlessly bendable grass, the pipe savored its triumph.  Though even this was less satisfying than it would have liked�" when you’re a pipe, all your victories are hollow.

The predictable fluctuation of pulling, pushing, resting, swinging and kicking gave way, at the speed of boredom, to more creative applications throughout the afternoon.  The mound displaced by the half-moon hole became a mountain, cleaved to monstrous proportions by the titanic clash of imagination and reality.  The epic to the inchworm is but the footnote to the fox, and the chipmunk twilight is the possum dawn; nevertheless the choice remains for man and plumbing alike, shall we exchange fact for fiction to achieve that tempting upgrade from trash to treasure?

The depression itself became populated by a grand civilization of ancient underworld Dwarves who had built the pipe as a combination scope and canon, alternately ingesting information and dispensing their patented brand of miniaturized fury.  The boy warred with the Dwarves for hours, finally winning out, despite taking severe conceptual casualties, due perhaps to the distinct advantage of having the opposing army outnumbered by one substantial party.  But even in temporary annihilation, their prized artifact remained, punctuating the overworld with an eternal reminder of the eventual inevitability of the conquest of the unconscious.

As he trudged home, exhausted as he was fulfilled, the boy remembered his earlier inventions.  He smiled.

 The pipe spent the night jutting�" no rest for the stick’ed.  The trees sheltered the mice below from the owls they supported above, Plantae a state of staunch neutrality in the war of all against all, the green a complement all those red teeth and claws.  The pile of dirt shrunk slightly, and became proportionally denser.  The moon cruised through its low noon, right on time, keeping a cool cyclopean vigil on its busy sister.  The air and the ground, greedy capitalists, raced to suck the puddles into their exclusive empires.  Everything went according to plan. 

The day was as dark gray as the head of the sledgehammer which hung heavily from the boy’s outstretched arm, as he approached�" an unwieldy champion with an inept malice.  The hammer made abundantly clear its indiscriminating desire to embrace the earth, which in turn made the boy’s pores make good on their name, dramatically increasing the relative humidity in their immediate vicinity and giving the clothes which were along for the ride a saltwater submersion.  Playtime is over.  Today the time has come to show this shaft he meant business, in the form of an up close and personal interview with the business end of a sledge. 

Evidenced by its meditative lifestyle and hermetic environmental choices; this pipe was a rebel.  As such it did not appreciate authority.  Its independent style clashed with the slavish romanticism of the hammerhead in a provincially epic existential argument whose echo rang in the trees for seconds.  Predictably, this alternate means of manual labor with heavy machinery and in the end the Spartan patience of the pipe won the day as the boy discovered it was more interesting to be an Olympian than a Hoplite.  Each time the boy whirled about, enjoying the tugging sensation of the centrifugal force, the hammer didn’t mind as its silent wish was soon to be granted, as a short flight was followed by a dirty rendezvous.  After scoring a direct hit with a particularly beautiful toss, the boy inspected the surrounding ground to find not a lunula of hope.  He inspected the angle to find not a stitch of imperfection.  His posterior joined his latest weapon in subtle contemplation of the ground from whence they came as he gawked at the utter intransigence of his adversary.  The pipe did not condescend a concern. 

The boy’s studies did not so much conclude as dissolve slowly into his ubiquitous urge to play, until the hanker for knowledge became no more than a bluish tinge to the solution of his childish ego, a cognitive concoction of tiny indigo molecules suspended amidst the red heartbeat, white respiration, translucent curiosity, and the bold black dominance of childhood’s underlying creativity. 

This afternoon, the pipe became an alien landing pad, drilled into place by ancient natives as incentive to attract the Martians, apparently unaware of the intrinsic desire of aliens to conquer.  The airport artisans now await the arrival of their extraterrestrial deities from ironically interterrestrial positions, leaving the boy the lone witness to their fiery arrival and the sole defender of the forest and the earth from their very space-age laser-poison-electric-acid-ray weaponry.  He communicated with them in the traditional old ways, presumably the natives would have applauded his methods, applying violence in a dose conservative in neither scope nor efficacy, the boy piled the little green guys in numbers as vast as they were incorporeal.  Dodging in and out of the tree branches around the little clearing of the pipe, the young body allowed its natural drive to practice bodily coordination and tone its muscles, his partially formed consciousness along for the exciting ride as he shot them down, one by one and two by two, thumbs up, index fingers out. 

His virtually boundless energy barely dented, it was not exhaustion which truncated his fun that afternoon.  An uninterrupted intelligent child at play, he certainly had not fatigued of his own entertainment, it was not boredom which caused the cessation.  It was not the invisible hand of guilt and control asserted by vicarious authority figures which so spoiled the day, there was no mother calling him to chores.  It was that nasty brute, Shock and his bosom buddy, Fear. 

As the boy carelessly caroused about the vicinity of his recent chummy acquisition, he stumbled quite literally upon one of the woodsy companions of whose presence he had heretofore neglected to take notice.  As the alien attackers spewed from the ship in a relentlessly foolish military strategy one might have assumed beneath those who could master interstellar travel, the left foot of our hero stepped down and did not come back up in the manner expected by the system as a whole.  Instead it’s foremost phalanges became superceded by a very solid obstruction, causing the catastrophic collapse of the entire enterprise. 

The boy had stumbled upon the other unusual object in the vicinity, lying there with the quiet, wounded glory of a rusty, t-boned Buick lay a very large, very old skeleton of a bull moose.  The dried bones had long ago been supped of their meat, their organic charge, their transient transport, their sluice and sinews, their ale of marrow: by an ecosystem as miniscule in magnitude as momentous in influence.  Bleached white and stained brown years ago, painted from afar by Phoebus, and subsumed slightly into the earth allowing the prison of the ribs, liberated of their busy contents, to ensconce a new inmate: the twisted left foot of a young boy.  Lying in needles, haphazard grasses, tiny orbs of stone, in pain from the first of many sprained ankles, the boy looked up and saw antlers�" tilting at the treetops, scraping the sky.  The skull gripped its implements with a ferocity that defied death itself, and the pride of the old fellow pulled the penetrating sunlight into its con-cave with a quiet congeniality.  And somehow, even now, they conveyed a sense of offended surprise that an exception, after all, wasn’t made in their case. 

As the boy came to his senses, he carefully extricated his foot from the cage of carnage and scuttled back from the source of his misfortune.  First to return after sight, was his hearing, as a very agitated finch tweeted its offense�" a radical translation.  Equilibrium flooded back into place with a stilling slosh.  As the clarity of curiosity began to push out the jungle-green of fear, he approached the cause of his instinctual disgust.  The insistent finch proved to be not without validity in its protest, as the boy noticed, within the still cup of one massive antler, a sensible nest in which reposed four small speckled eggs, in which dozed four small speckled birds. 

The boy did not visit the pipe again.  He hobbled off, chasing the sunset at the speed of an injured child.  Leaving the pipe behind to reflect upon its time as a cosmic quay, a gnomic telescope, a goose bazooka.  Leaving the finch to squat upon its potential progeny.  Leaving the trees to fart the air full of life-giving gases, to contemplate the small bubble of earth next to the black moon, somnolent beneath its skeletal-tinted silent celestial partner�" not alone in the wonder: Will its light disappear in a blink, a wink, or a softly practiced sink?