A Ten Second Replica of the Universe

An old newspaper clipping

- Article 42 -

The fake ID’s looked realer than we expected. I held them up to the moonlight like someone completely ill-prepared to assume a role of power and thanked a Russian that plugged his nose whenever he said ‘economy.’ The Russian didn’t fit the prototype. None of us did.

I found myself waiting for my friend in front of the Festival with a tray of shrimp on my lap. The foreign vernacular that came from inside the walls painted motifs on my eardrums with earwax and digital vowels. Would it matter? After all, what’s said is not necessarily what is done.

My heart held its breath when I showed the fake ID to the greeter. I couldn’t tell you how nervous I was or how society has to break a person’s will without them being aware of it but I made it into the Festival. My friend Mads did too. She looked back longer than she should have though.

Besides threat of punishment, the Festival had a lot going for it. Not even twenty steps did we have to walk before trees priced at wholesale told us to shed our complications and go back to nature. What a beautiful theory killed by an ugly fact. I had thought it but Mads said it outright. I recently learned that these trees priced at wholesale had been sold three days later to a man in Graz, Austria as props in his independent films. We expected it to be a cakewalk from here but it wasn’t. None of it was.

The patterns on the floor were childish and none of the ceiling was being taken into account. Our first ounce of skepticism came when the intercom spoke in a French accent. Was there really a bakery that sold fresh muffins here or were we alone in thinking that? The plastic tree house painted to look like wood didn’t help either. Mads suggested trial and error but the knocks weren’t believable. In all honesty, what was expected differed from what was happening.

The next five minutes were occupied by an individual’s conversation with someone who accidentally locked themselves in a gun safe. The specifics of that dialogue could only be described as feeding seeds to fish hatchlings. I couldn’t tell you exactly when we saw the numbers with combed hair or when those describing poverty have never been poor but they laughed like nobody’s business. Their words meandered between interpretations of dreams and songs of unfinished roads.

I recently learned that the Festival is an order of operations that pulls personality traits from a hat. If we had known that at the time, the glass jars of embellished vinegar wouldn’t have come as such a shock to us. Mads was right. It wasn’t what they said but how they said it. None of them forgot.

By this point it became a story of excuses. One giant blame game where things live to succeed rather than succeed in living. Mads wondered if a syndication of nouns had managed to erase the bakery entirely. I rejected the idea without a second thought. Were we looking for a commodity or an agent of socialization? It was like having to spot the differences between courage and doubt.

Our steps felt like the rungs of a ladder when we found the bakery. The muffins had local flavors and the fresher ones were near the bottom. Discontinuity between bites made it hard to interpret.

The fake ID’s claimed to have been fighter pilots in WWII but you couldn’t sell that night again. I recently learned that I’m just a victim of my time period. Mads and I met with the Russian three days later to purchase fake EGO’s and SUPEREGO’s. They looked realer than we expected.

Signed,

A member of the Cardboard City

 

Author's Note

Influenced by true events

Reviews

[Rana]

Reassessing, they seem to be seeking commodities together perhaps for a project of the nature of Freud's films and trees and muffins belong to a common listing and I thought there were references to three books and to mark time periods. "pulls personality traits from a hat" hat might be metaphor for the subconscious.
"Discontinuity between bites made it hard to interpret."
"One giant blame game where things live to succeed rather than succeed in living."