The Rainbow Horizon - A Tale of Goofy Chaos Read online

  * From a Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens. “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…” Anyway, what time is it? Is it time yet? Too soon, too late, or some other time beyond human knowledge, such as Daylight Savings Time?

  …an expensive pursuit, that. For they are you, je! Le Français, not you Jew, you know who! If anyone here has a religion, they are welcome to stray awhile. Until then, please be my friend. But water is still Cheap. Listen to it, rising and falling in the faithful old machines like the breathing of organic life itself. Its timing and symmetry are pricelessly necessary. Prayer to the gods is called on in the event of the most unspeakable tragic loss. Water is. Listen to its ever-present, logical pull, and to the argument surrounding a day’s useful and anticipated calling.

  “I think it’s ME,” spake the Lady Saragina, a thin but hugely feminine voice invading the quietly monotonous slushing. Darkly. “I…am your Heroine, or at least I don’t take black tar, seriously…I don’t. I AM the Night. I’m the Opus of Space, Magnum Champion, half a dozen feet of brown glass bottle and a premier recyclable, hey; the Original and Final Place, AfriHello, Owner-Managee’d, Humously Cool Calm and a nice little Collective, if you’ll believe in one; the Sweetest Archery of Darkness, a Bacchanalian overtone of Yeast, not mine but His on the Cross, your own Absorber de la Lighte. I am…six foot three inches tall. Sometimes. Retro is a sign. It can make me shorter, taller, and goofily chaotic, too. So, I’m good…

  “The Beast! What are you, or could you possibly ever be, next to ME, my dearie-dear?” Sara sniffled, pretending to cry vast streams, losing the lost blue tears of cavernous, sunless dried-up underground rivers, in these other words none. Blue signaling Male, symbolically stiff and exasperating Tall. Shorty?

  “Exactly! Next to you, I am the Truth, and the Way, and most especially the Light. See how they’re always putting the Great Me, who ARE, on the Yeehaw’s Witlesses pamphlet covers? See how they put us on, like we really were our flimsy, spinning clothes?”

  Caza sighed in two poofs, quite knowingly. She was the dyingest, er, dryingest Lady. She had three loads in tonight, having to pick through them carefully as they twisted and turned. Lightly, she brushed lint off a skirt with the back of her southpaw, coffee-colored hand, almost snagging, dreaming of further flatter silver mail-order rings she should buy. That nicely tan hand was loaded for bear already.

  “IF…your blasted bad, sad, plaid, dead, fed, unrelated to Ned and instead unknown family of the boonies is out to kill you, how about handling the next one right off, hmmmm?” She looked down. She…she…he…they.

  “Ah, the foolish ones, they do not know how. They do not know why. They do not know…scuse me, Truthway.” said Sara to Caza, “you Lightweight. I have got to go get my washing into that their grocery-money eater.” And so Sarra-roginno did. It cost them a whole dollar, four quarters. Five or six, soon! A dollar for each stinking, piled-up laaoo-ooaad, saving for several smelly weeks, only to become sufficiently smelly for the smelly old water shortage…

  …she’d been unrudely interpreted. “Maybe,” Caza whispered, “they mean the other mystery Lady of the night, who is Not Never Us, but who is them of, u Around, Ussens. Or, perhaps, they’re simple mean. Or, maybe it’s not too meaningful. Say, o dietary aide person, what’s the best stuff to take for severe leg cramps?”

  “Very short hikes.”

  “Lately,” she continued, “if i so much as hikes to the grocery store, I get Charlie Hosses. These colors of calves don’t win sure. Of course, this is usual for Truly Yours, here. But, I hate Charlie the Horsie. What do I do?”

  Sara-genie, normally a docile happy and reflective sort of person, put her chin, genius superfluous as was the rest of her, which was pointy to the point of Duchess Jabberwocky, and thinly muscular besides, on her 2% milky-choc hand. She was glancing productively inwards. “Calcium is…an asylum. Iron. Take a lot more of those tablets I gave you. You know it was ME, and that you are whole. And…

  “Take ‘em with meals, two or three times a day. And keep going for walks, OK? Also, eat some more red meat, roasted, for animality or something. Or take those B-vitamin supplements and magnesium a ‘that I stole from the Ridge for you. Don’t OD on calcium, but you can’t. And, maybe you should think about less coffee in your life, decaf maybe, and drinking more water. I see you’ve heard it all before.”

  “Yep,” said Caza the fair, Lady of the Limp, who coincidentally walks gently and gingerly and cinnamonfully in the eleven half-tone autumn limnear twilights. But none of her relatives do…. fresh from the funnies. You hear. Caza has a congenital (born to be wahhahaha-hald) heart problem and albuminuria**—so thus is overall the Frail of this hyar modern booque. Caza in the soft diffuse twilight or pastellar, woad, exeestahnce. Sara on t’other hand was most hearty and hale, a tower of strength, full of good advice…

  At that tertiary unsung moment, boldly, another Mystery Lady of the Night walked by the churning and laugh-singing laundromat, a nightless blur passing along the window on the outside sidewalk. She seemed anxious to be home, but was scarcely fearful in her well-kept, deeply composed, and quasi-elegant stride. There were absolutely no clicking noises from her pointy shoes, only a lingering brief swipe of shine against glass of billowing, unfaltering silent motion.

  Caza, unwithstood, saw this, noting the triadic presense, the Hermes Trismagestus reference docking into reality. Nothing Cirrus nor Sirius, only a fave hobby offers this solace. It lives, it breathes, and it…perks. What were 80’s “perks?” Oblique daily forms of the Trinity, watching the spin cycle kaleidoscope clothes—the Tri-Nightie. Is that what I really wanted to think, she moozled, ‘bout job perks?

  And so, the Mystery Ladies of the Night, those two anyway, in an ordinary small-town laundromat and by divine Rule, momentarily became Three: virgin-mother-crone, father-son-and-Old-Man-Spook. A weird age, ‘tis…what IS the third one, really? Lasting, or only futile? And do local nursing homes have anything normal to do with rational sex…? The outside Dark Lady was Gone.

  After Sara finished her two bloomin’ loads, and Caza her reduced last (sans bras), after they swiftly folded into wicker baskets Sara’s filmy crepe dresses and sturdy polyesters, and Caza’s floor-sweeping aquamarine mail-order dresses with the matching blue-green front-hook bras, and half-slips, and after all their towels and sheets and almost matching artificial satin pillowcases were carefully placed on top, they ambled discretely home. Nothing but Stars witnessed their walk. Best friends forever, BFFs or something heartless with no name…’cept sharks.

  And now, for something completely deferent: Caza is happily, passionately in love, living with a Blonde, one Artie Blend, man. He’s a roaring lion in an alcohol cage. Picture him knowing how to help her, but never quite Being Able to do so. Picture her finally deciding to go ahead and lose some weight. Through Prayer, the simple, powerful act of asking for what you can’t do on your own.