“And you find magic from your God
And we find magic everywhere
So the Christians and the Pagans sat together at the table
Finding faith in common ground the best that they were able.
Where does magic come from?
I think magic’s in the learning…”
-Dar Williams, “The Christians and the Pagans,” Mortal City, Razor
&Tie Entertainment/Burning Field Music c.1996
Suicide suddenly seems very attractive.
Guns are for psychos; hanging and wrist slashing for halfhearted gestures. I’ve always been terrified of heights and there’s no way on Goddess’s green Earth I’m spending my last seconds watching a sidewalk or ocean rushing up on me. I’ve gotten plenty of that in cold-sweat nightmares.
It feels good to walk out of prison, even after only an hour. Bad vibe doesn’t begin to describe it. Penitentiaries, are, after all, the closest thing to Hell which actually exist.
“John Barth,” I insist. “We talked about fucking metafiction when we read fucking Lost in the Fuck-I mean, Funhouse. Metafiction. Who can tell me what it means?!”
Stephen King? More like Salman Rushdie. “Thank you, Trombone, that was…interesting.” Seditious? Libelous? Paranoid? A good way to get yourself permanently silenced?
The people of Murica were duly outraged. They took to the streets and demanded the heads of Assume Ibeen Plottin’ and Madman Insane. Evidence emerged that these shadowy figures with the strange names had masterminded a plot in which everyone in or from Rug Country was implicated, except, of course, the Hash-fiends who had actually done the deed at Mr. Pink’s behest.
Shrub nodded, emerging from his daze. His father had made a humiliating gaffe once, in referring to the anniversary of that infamous attack, which had brought Murica into Double-U Double-U Eye-Eye; it would be good to supplant the event in the public memory. “But how do we get Juhpan to bomb us again? They sells us so many flying carpets these days.”
“You need a war,” Mr. Pink stated, sinking comfortably into the red- cushioned plushness of the Throne.
“I call this ‘Murican Pie’.” He drains another voice-cracking tendril of phlegm from his gullet.
The program, brainchild of Warden Cleevenhoff, is the only one of its kind, as my course is the sole offering of Sunny Oak’s continuing education curriculum, and is not attached to any attempt at a degree.