Short Story: Artist in Residence at Fisher-Price
In which little things size up big things
Artist in Residence at Fisher-Price
It’s a good job. They pay me pretty well. I get a lot of leeway. We get free stuff for the kids all the time. We have so many toys.
The pandemic has been hard though. And the sprouting coup. And all the white supremacy. Those things have also been hard. But we’re doing our best here. We can’t complain. A lot of people have it a lot worse.
They let me work from home. I can write my ten-to-forty-second songs about colors, numbers, and letters from right here in the spare bedroom. Pretty low stakes. I’m not running a hospital. Being home with the kids, there’s that extra inspiration too. They’re always around. All the time. Being kids. They should have the job, really.
I’ve been having trouble focusing the past week or so. I sit at the piano or I sit at the easel. I plunk out some chords or I paint an electric blue bunny holding an American flag.
I’m writing a cartoon show for kids. I've got a pilot ready to go and a few more episodes after that, but I haven't figured out how to wrap up the first season. Fisher-Price doesn't need or want a cartoon show for kids, but that's what I've been spending my time on lately. Mostly that.
It’s called They Nap by Night.
It’s Baby Noir.
Or maybe it’s called Bubble Indemnity.
I don’t know. I go back and forth.
Footy Pajamas and Zelda Bassinet have a dream. Make it big in the milk racket and then settle down in a little blue house upstate, so someday their kids can have a better shot at life than they had. But Rock-a-bye Sam has other ideas.
Sometimes I feel like Footy Pajamas. I too have to deal with gangsters of a sort. We all do these days. I have my own Zelda to think about. The real Zelda. Zelda, my wife, who’s great, and our kids, Io and Stephen, who are also great. We already have a blue house upstate, but it’s not technically blue and it's not as far upstate as we'd like. It’s very nice though. There are trees, and there is a creek where Io finds salamanders and sometimes neat old cans and stuff.
Still, the smoke from the fires can be hard. And the constant threat of floods. Being so close to the woods and the water and all. And what with all the climate disaster and what have you.
Io was our first. She's eleven now, which doesn't seem possible. She came early. Seven weeks early.
The NICU had a Fisher-Price Corn Popper in a toy basket in the family lounge. It had been stocked by the March of Dimes. The toy basket was there to give the siblings of the early babies something to do while their parents stayed awake. Parents who bottled their emotions the best they could. Parents who just sat there with their skins off, nerves exposed to giant, roof-penetrating zap rays from outer space. Parents who microwaved instant coffee and who made sure to always say hello and goodbye and thank you to all the nurses because they knew all their names even though they would someday forget them.
There was a Jean. Or a Jeanie? Wasn’t there?
"Did you work on this one?" Zelda said.
She pulled the Corn Popper out of the toy basket and pushed it around the family lounge. Pop. Pop pop pop. Pop.
"I wish," I said. "Arthur Holt, 1957.”
She nodded.
“The Corn Popper's older than our parents,” I said. “Huge success. You didn’t have a Corn Popper growing up?"
Zelda's parents didn't go in for toys much, bless their hearts, so Zelda wasn’t really a toy person when I met her. She is curious about toys now though, and if she isn’t, she’s awfully nice to pretend. When we first started dating and then when we got married and even further along when we began the work of having a baby, Zelda didn't know much about toys or toy history. Eleven years later she knows a lot.
If our whole family died tomorrow in a fiery flood—knock on wood—you could just write "Toy Museum" on the front of our house and charge admission. Assuming the house wasn’t also destroyed when we died in the fiery flood.
Summoning up my memories of our days and nights at the NICU is more or less unscrambling eggs at this point. A short film about a young couple who falls into a black hole played in reverse in a dark space in a museum gallery.
I remember a few moments well enough though. At least I think I do. I remember I laid my hand on Io's tiny tummy in the keep-the-baby-alive box. Our little rainbow. In a box. I remember Zelda put her hand on my hand through a port on the other side of the box. I looked over the top of the box and into her eyes. I got distracted though when I saw a reflection in her right eyeball of one of the hospital gizmos, all tangled and whirly.
I thought: A-ha!
That's when the Rainbow Reactor came to me. I mean, it's not in the same league as the Corn Popper—no way—but it was a pretty big success in its own right, if you don't mind my saying so.
As far as The Craft of Toys goes, The Craftspeople of History really picked all the low-hanging fruit before I was born.
That’s not an excuse! It's not so easy to make something truly new in this world, but when you manage to snag a tucked-away mango from the top of the mango tree, it's a wonderful feeling you feel. I hope you’ve felt that before. I hope you feel it again someday soon.
The Rainbow Reactor is still a top seller. It got me the job that paid off the student loans—the job that paid for the Honda and half of the blue house that's not really that blue. The not-really-blue house that could be a toy museum with some very minor changes.
The American Dream.
We named our daughter Io after the moon of Jupiter, which is itself named after the character from Greek mythology.
The character from Greek mythology is one of those poor mortal goofs who “gets involved” with Zeus and then, sure as the day you’re born, faces Hera's wrath. Soon enough, someone turns Io into a beautiful white cow—Zeus or Hera does, depending on which version you’re leafing through—and then I don't remember how it ends, but what really sticks is:
Turns her into a beautiful white cow.
!
That's not who our Io is named after, for obvious reasons, but a little while after Io was born, I wrote a thirty-four-second memory bank song for the launch of a new Fisher-Price keyboard. The song didn’t have words, but I called it "Beautiful White Cow". No one else knows it’s called "Beautiful White Cow'' because toy keyboards don't come with liner notes. But I know!
We named her Io after the moon because Io the moon has the highest density of any moon in the solar system. It's constantly being tugged and stretched between Jupiter and the other Galilean moons. The tidal heating from all that friction makes it a volcano bloodbath—literal volcanoes, metaphorical bloodbath. In short, it's incredible and full of energy, and so is our daughter. She’s one tough little moon. Tougher than I ever was.
REDS LAUNCH BABY MOON was a real headline in a real American newspaper in 1957 after the Soviets popped Sputnik into space.
That’s what somebody told me anyway.
Sputnik and the Corn Popper in the same year! You can't really do much better than 1957, can you? Actually, you probably can—not everything that happened in 1957 was good.
It’s nice, everything that we have, but I worry.
Yesterday I painted the word NIHILISM in all caps in acrylic on a canvas roughly three feet by four. NIHILISM was fifty feet tall, adjusted for scale. NIHILISM was 3-D. NIHILISM was made of compacted old fossil fuel engines and plastic water bottles. Here and there you could see the leg or arm of a venture capitalist sticking out. NIHILISM was standing in the otherwise empty parking lot of a Sears. In the back of the Sears, behind a dumpster, I painted an electric blue bunny holding an American flag, looking earnest and sad, but not for any obvious reason. It was just an electric blue bunny looking earnest and sad.
I tore up the painting and threw it away because I didn’t want anyone to see it.
Stephen surprised the heck out of us. We had so many ups and downs trying to get Io out into the world, that we’d really given up any idea of a second child. Stephen was born right on schedule, just this April when the hospitals around here were bursting at the seams. They took our temperatures at the door and gave us masks. Blue masks. The yellow ones were for staff. They told us not to take them.
They wouldn't give Io a mask because they said she wasn't old enough to need one, which doesn’t make any more sense to me now than it did then. We didn't leave Io with a sitter when Zelda went into labor because we thought the hospital would be safer for her. What did we know? At that point in the pandemic, the hospital was only allowing each patient a single companion—me, the father, in our case—but they waved Io through because they felt bad for us. At least I assume that’s why they waved her through.
There were hand sanitizer stations everywhere you looked. Nobody was calling it airborne yet. Only later would we find out that the temperature checks were mostly theater. They made us feel safe at the time, but in hindsight there was an awful lot we didn’t know. Safe or not, we had colorful stickers that told us we were safe. The stickers made us feel like someone who knew what they were doing was in charge.
People started to take the pandemic seriously in March. Some of us did anyway—started taking it seriously in March, which is to say, a lot of people didn’t. Stephen was born in April, right on schedule.
After we passed through the checkpoint and made our way to the delivery ward, everything seemed normal. Stephen was born without any serious complications, so, in some ways, his birth in an overflowing hospital on the crest of a wave in the great pandemic was much closer to anything you could call normal than Io's birth had been.
Io loved Stephen right away.
From the time we arrived at the hospital to the time we left to take Stephen home, we heard a fuzzed out “Don't Stop Believin” blast over the PA more than a dozen times. "That's eight times," Io would say. "Nine now."
All of the staff would cheer every time.
It was only when we were filling out discharge papers that we asked why. It had happened first spontaneously in another hospital. Someone played "Don't Stop Believin" over the PA to boost morale when a patient was pulled off a ventilator. Then they did it again and again. And then somebody posted a video. And then it was The News. Then a lot of other hospitals started to do the same.
I wondered then how long they'd keep it up. Now I wonder if they still play it here and there for old times’ sake. I wonder what the nurses and doctors and hospital staff think when they hear it in a bar or at a wedding reception. I wonder if they'll play it again in twenty years when we're all having A Look Back, rifling and rifling, or if it will be one of those things that gets lost.
Of course, a lot of "Don't Stop Believin" meant a lot of people were pulled off ventilators, but each time it happened we were heavy with the knowledge that many other people would not be pulled off ventilators.
Stephen's middle name is Atlas, which, among other things, is a moon of Saturn. Before that, a Titan who got left to hold up the sky.
I wrote an episode of They Nap by Night called "Goodnight, Moonshine: Part I" where Rock-a-bye Sam needs a favor.
He enters the stock room of the Sleepytown Club from the loading dock door. It's dark in the stockroom but for a single cone of light from a blinky old bulb. He finds Footy Pajamas there, straining to pry open a crate of Genuine American Electric Blue Bunny Milk with a crowbar.
"Footy, ain’t it?" says Rock-a-bye Sam. "I hear you play a little piano."
"A little. Yeah-sure, Boss," Footy says. Footy who—we should take a moment to remember—is a baby, just like everyone else in this universe.
"And I hear you got a nice little wife at home. Ain’t that right?”
"That's right, Boss. Nice. Little,” says Footy.
"Might be nice to have a little extra dough then, wouldn't it Footy? A little extra dough to move outta that apartment and settle down in a nice little house with lots of toys. Start a family?”
"Sounds real nice, Boss. A little blue house. Upstate."
"Sure, blue, whatever color you like, Footy. Now listen. There's a party tomorrow night at the big house on the hill. You know the one?"
"Sure, Boss"
"Well, the big party at the big house on the big hill is going to have some very important people in attendance. Yeah?"
"Yeah, yeah."
"Now that's a good boy, Footy. Let me ask you, what's your tuxedo situation?"
Later that night, Footy comes back home to find Zelda still up, drinking a bottle of Electric Blue Bunny at the kitchen table, reading the extra edition of the paper.
REDS LAUNCH BABY MOON.
Footy hangs his hat on the coat rack and kicks off his booties.
"I’m worried." Zelda says.
"About the Reds?" I say.
"No, dummy, about graduation.”
She looks out the kitchen window and into the window across the alley. There are too many babies to count over there, and the parents are fighting again.
"What if I can't land a gig at the university after I graduate?" she says.
"Then they're fools,” I say.
"But what if I can't?"
"Sam takes care of us. We'll get by until you find a place that appreciates you. No wife of mine is working for some fly-by-night university that doesn't appreciate her."
"You're sweet, Foots. But I don't like this business with Sam. It seemed like it was one kinda thing, but it's starting to become very clear that it's another kinda thing. I don't like it."
"Listen, Zels, I need to tell you about a gig I have tomorrow night at the big house on the hill."
My baby sister was born December 7, 1987 on the eve of The Washington Summit, roughly thirty years after Sputnik, if you're playing along. By the time my sister came home from the hospital to meet me, Gorbechav and Reagan had signed the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty. Gorbechav was on a plane back home.
Reagan threw a paper airplane and it went all the way around the world and hit him in the back of the head. He closed his eyes and listened to the wind.
Mom and Dad named the baby Alice and let me hold her right away even though I remember thinking that wasn’t a good idea.
Hello, Alice.
1987 was the same year that Fisher-Price introduced the Fisher-Price Medical Kit and the Fisher-Price Starscope Set. I know this because a few months before Alice was born, Mom and Dad took me to the toy store to pick out a welcome-to-the-world gift. I agonized over it. Medical Kit or Starscope Set? They were both, perhaps, not the best choice for a baby, which my Dad, gently, let me know. Perhaps a little stuffed animal or a rattle would be best, he kindly suggested. But even at five years old, I knew that if you were going to make it in this world, you needed the right tools.
In the end, I chose the Starscope Set. The telescope was made of red and black plastic and it came with a white plastic tripod you could attach to the bottom. There were slides that you could insert so that when you looked through the eyepiece you’d find the whole universe in there. The moon. The planets. Stars and comets. Everything.
I remember Dad at the checkout counter writing a check. I remember Mom giving me a look when I gave her a look, running my fingers across every Snickers bar in the Snickers bar display. I remember how I felt, sitting in the backseat of the Celica, eating my Snickers bar, studying the words and the pictures on the box of the Starscope Set the whole ride home. I remember the Celica’s brown leather seats and the cigarette smell.
When we got home, I took the Starscope Set up to my room, opened it, tried it out a bit, nodded to myself, put it back in the box, and then slid it under my bed. It stayed there until Alice was old enough to play with it (with a little help from her older brother). Alice would sleep with it, holding it like a teddy bear. This went on for years.
Alice is now a doctor who works in the emergency ward of a hospital. She’s a critical care physician in the ICU. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d gotten her the Fisher-Price Medical Kit instead of the Fisher-Price Starscope Set.
One day this summer, Io rushed into the living room to tell me and Zelda that Dr. Aunt Alice had the virus. She saw a video that Dr. Aunt Alice had posted. Io was scared. We all were.
After the Washington Summit of 1987, I couldn’t say that I understood much of what was going on, but I did understand that it was important to watch the evening news. That’s what my parents did, so it must have been important. I learned to say Perestroika. Nicaragua. Contras. I didn’t know what those words meant back then, but I held on to them, put them under the bed with the Starscope Set so I could give them to Alice someday.
This morning I painted the phrase “We’re updating our Terms of Service” in shock yellow letters over top of a landscape I painted a few years back. As I was sitting there, just looking at it, Io danced her way into my office studio (the spare bedroom) looking for the charger for her laptop. She was missing her virtual math class again. Zelda and I have several unread emails from Mrs. Patel—all with very similar, stern subject lines.
We’re all doing our best here.
“What are you doing?” Io asked.
My best?
“Painting some yellow words over this old painting,” I said.
“No, I know, but what are you doing? What are you doing-doing? Why are you doing it?”
Stephen, the baby, floating five feet in the air, poked his head around the edge of the door jamb and spoke.
"Hi Dad. Hello Io," he said. "What are you two up to?"
"Looking at a painting," Io said. "Trying to figure out what Daddy's doing."
After a moment, Stephen the floating baby said, "Well, if you figure it out, let me know. I'm very curious about that myself. Also, lunch. PBJs. DIY. Mommy has a conference call with the faculty at two. That’s when Daddy needs to watch me. Because I’m a baby. Named Stephen. Actually, more like 1:45 would be great. Love you guys. Yeah?"
“Yeah, yeah. Love you too, Stephen or whoever you are,” Io said.
We heard Stephen the baby walk down the hall and down the stairs. Io and I looked over the painting in silence for a bit.
She said, “Why is there a blue rabbit by the stream? Why is he holding the flag?”
After a while I said, “I don’t know. I think of him as more of an electric blue bunny than a blue rabbit.”
After a while she shrugged and left with her charger.
I wrote an episode of They Nap by Night called "Goodnight, Moonlight: Part II'' where Footy Pajamas plays that piano gig at the big house on the hill. It’s a fundraiser for The Inertia Society.
Conversations and bubbles swirl around the ballroom. The mood is easy. The crowd is elite. The guests are coughing and sweating. There are chandeliers hanging from the chandeliers. A waft of talc and milk. A soupçon of VapoRub. Lest we forget that all of these people are babies.
"Well, well, well, Footy,” says Sam. “You ain’t half bad at that, are you?”
He’s standing at a highboy table beside Footy’s piano. He’s accompanied by a husky pair of associates named Marty Cribs and Binky Robinson. The piano has a giant logo on the lid. “Proudly Sponsored by Genuine American Electric Blue Bunny Milk.”
“What's that song called? I don't know that one,” says Sam.
"It’s one of mine,” says Footy. “It’s called ’Beautiful White Cow‘."
He plays on. He adds a flourish or two.
"Catchy. Catchy. Maybe play it again sometime. But, say, Kid. Maybe play a little ‘Ring Around the Rosey’ right after that? When the mood strikes?”
Sam looks at Marty and Binky. He taps his watch. He winks at Footy.
Suddenly, rattles rattle all over the place. The chandeliers dim and the chandeliers hanging from the chandeliers dim.
Sam shushes Footy. "Take a break, Kid. Listen up. Be ready."
Footy takes his foot off the sustain pedal and wipes the sweat off his brow with a receiving blanket.
One of dozens of servants rotates a spotlight in a dizzying sine wave around the ballroom until it lands on the host, Commander Blocks. Commander Blocks, having never served but always having made much ado about spending his teenage years at a military school, is covered head to toe in military regalia. His belly is such that his bars and medals—which he himself had commissioned—face the ceiling. He commands the attention of everyone in the ballroom. He stands, halfway up a sweeping, gilded staircase, and he raises a glass.
"To money!" he says.
The crowd cheers.
"To America!" he says.
The crowd cheers.
"To American money!" he says.
This gets the biggest cheer of all. He coughs a terrible cough and braces himself on the banister while he catches his breath.
"Friends, when my white grandfather came to this country..."
"Wait, what?" says Footy.
"Shh," says Sam.
He taps his watch.
Commander Blocks goes on and on. His address meanders in and out of scientific racism, prosperity gospel, the invisible hand of the market, and sailing. Bootstraps and so forth. His coughing is outrageous, but so is everyone else’s. Two guests drop dead during the speech and are dragged away by the servants.
“So, in conclusion, God has assured me—we’re very close, God and I, believe me—that The Inertia Society can count on your increased financial support tonight.”
Clap clap clap clap clap.
“Now how about a round of ‘Ring Around the Rosey’ while we pass the baskets?” he says. “Don’t tip the servants with the baskets. We’re not paying them to take handouts.”
Footy mops the sweat off his forehead one last time before easing into ‘Ring Around the Rosey’. He’s a very nervous baby.
The guests, like amoebae swallowing bacteria, start to form something like circles around the servants who are holding the baskets.
Every time Footy hits the Bb below Middle C, hidden gears in the piano churn and clunk. The Electric Blue Bunny logo on the lid begins to glow. Footy stops playing the third time through the melody when he can no longer hear his own playing over the churning of the gears.
“Boss!” he says. “I don’t feel so good!”
“Keep playing that song if you know what’s good for you, Kid. It’s what we’re paying you for.”
In a panic, Footy starts into “Beautiful White Cow,” which, mercifully, never hits the Bb below Middle C.
Sam grabs Footy by the bib.
“I said ‘Ring Around the Rosey,’ Goddamnit! Do your Goddamn job, kid!”
Footy starts to cry like a baby. Like an actual, helpless baby. Because that’s what everyone actually is.
“If you can’t play along, I know a lot of babies ready to take your place.”
Marty Cribs and Binky Robinson crack their fat baby knuckles.
“I’m sorry, Boss,” Footy says through sobs. “It’s just … all these people. They think they’re getting one thing but it’s becoming very clear that they’re going to get another thing. I think I need to talk to my wife.”
Marty Cribs and Binky Robinson open their husky tuxedo jackets to reveal some very professional-looking slingshots.
Footy jumps up from the churning, glowing piano, knocking over the bench as he does. He runs away as fast as he can. Marty Cribs and Binky Robinson are in hot pursuit. Footy clambors through the kitchen, throwing pots and pans behind himself as he goes. He sprints out of the servant’s entrance. Dogs bark. He swims across a pool and then across another pool. He climbs a fence and then a hedgerow and then disappears into the night.
A few weeks ago, Dr. Aunt Alice, who had just gotten an all clear to go back to work, called to tell me that Mom had the virus. Alice was crying and it was hard to understand her. She kept saying that it was her fault. Saying that she’d been checking in on Mom before she had her own worst symptoms because she was worried about her. Making sure she had whatever she needed. Keeping her company. Dad wasn’t around anymore—lymphoma, 1996, the same year Fisher-Price introduced Big Bubble Machine, the same year Dolly the sheep made history as the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell.
Alice said she’d been keeping tabs on Mom's oxygen levels overnight at the hospital and that they weren’t good. They were bad.
Mom was in the ICU on a ventilator for nine days. Funeral services were conducted entirely outside, alongside a new grave next to Dad’s grave. Zelda and Io and baby Stephen and I watched from six feet away. The other mourners were in little family pockets, each six feet away from the other. Mom was in a hole six feet deep. The square root of six squared plus six squared is just shy of eight and a half. I was separated from Mom by an invisible hypotenuse roughly that long. I didn’t want Zelda and Io and Stephen to feel scared, so I tried not to look scared or sad or angry.
I was born in 1982. That was the year Fisher-Price first rolled out the Husky Helper Rescue Rig. Everything your child needs to rush to a make-believe emergency and to rush the wounded to a make-believe hospital. There was a little blue stretcher you could load and unload. I never had the Husky Helper Rescue Rig as a child—I just know that it was available.
1982 was also the year that Fisher-Price introduced the “Over the Rainbow” Tote-o-Tune Music Box Radio. I did have one of those. I had one from the day I was born. I still do. Story goes, it was the first gift Mom ever gave me, and that even before I was born, she knew it was for me. She used to tell me, “I played this for you when you were in my tummy.”
She used to turn the dial and let it play for me while I fell asleep. She said that she used to sing along and that my sister and I, as babies, were the only people she was ever really comfortable singing around.
She said, “When I was little, the choir director stopped a rehearsal to tell me that I was a bluebird and that I should just mouth the words and not sing out so much.”
“Why a bluebird?” I said.
“He told me that bluebirds are pretty but they don’t sing,” she said. “I want you to sing whenever you feel like it, okay?”
I’ve been thinking about that story a lot lately, and it breaks my heart every time. I miss my Mom. Terribly. I am scared and sad and angry.
Also, bluebirds do sing. I looked it up. Some choir directors are real shitheads.
The Tote-o-Tune still works. The colors are fading, but you can still make out the lyrics on the outside of the plastic shell. You can still see the boy and girl holding hands, skipping up the rainbow to a magical castle in the distance. A bluebird guiding the way.
Someday I’ll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far behind me
Where troubles melt like lemon drops
Away among the chimney tops
That’s where
You’ll
Find
Me
The rise of the melody in that bridge—hopping along from major to minor and back to major again—makes me feel like I’m dancing up a set of stairs that you can only see when you’re dead.
Whenever I need to cry, I go somewhere private and give the old Tote-o-Tune a listen. And then I put it back where it’s safe.
Sometimes I wonder how life would be different if Mom had gotten me the Fisher-Price Husky Helper Rescue Rig instead of the Fisher-Price “Over the Rainbow” Tote-o-Tune Music Box Radio.
I try to sing to Io and Stephen whenever I can.
I am writing an episode of They Nap by Night that doesn’t have a title yet, but when it’s finished, you’ll only be able to watch it through a Fisher-Price Starscope Set that, once upon a time, you gave your baby sister.
When you put your eye to the viewfinder, you’ll see stars and comets and Ronald Reagan throwing paper airplanes while paper airplanes hit him in the back of his head.
You’ll see REDS LAUNCH BABY MOON painted in shock yellow on the side of an abandoned Best Buy that is full of raccoons and snakes and birds and bugs. It has trees growing out of it. There’s a twenty-foot tall statue seated on the edge of the Best Buy’s roof with its legs hanging over the ledge. It’s an electric blue bunny holding an American flag, looking earnest and sad, but not for any obvious reason. It’s just an electric blue bunny looking earnest and sad.
You’ll see Poopy Diapers, who is Commander Blocks’ personal attorney, standing at a podium, sweating, dripping crude oil, surrounded by the press.
The press conference is outside in the middle of the parking lot of a random light industrial complex. It’s somewhere between an adults-only novelty store and a crematorium, just off I-95, a little north of Philadelphia.
Why? Well, to lie and to cheat. In the hopes of persuading people to help overturn the results of a fair election that had just ousted Commander Blocks and his goons.
To persuade anyone still listening to hold steady and forge ahead in the ages-old crusade to bilk minorities and the poor out of anything that matters to them or that might matter to them at any point in the future.
To scoff at science and scientists. To look on, seething and reveling, as the death count from the disease that Commander Blocks and his goons had willfully ignored shoots past a quarter of a million people. All in the service of some half-baked Nothingness god.
You’ll see Sputnik and millions of Fisher-Price Corn Poppers leave orbit and get as far away from Earth as they possibly can.
You’ll see street lamps cast their light at oblique angles in the dark night. You’ll see Marty Cribs and Binky Robinson approach Footy and Zelda’s apartment building. They materialize out of the fog. They blow spit bubbles. The wooden shards and metal coils of a broken piano, cold in the wet street, slowly reassemble themselves and float up into the air. The piano rises and enters the building through the shattered sliding glass door of a balcony many floors high. Marty and Binky toddle up the stoop and smash their way into the little lobby.
“Got a message for a baby you may know,” says Marty Cribs to the doorman. “If you should happen to see Footy Pajamas anytime soon, you let him know his Uncle Sam says hello.”
The doorman is an electric blue bunny holding an American flag.
When Io takes the viewfinder away from her eye and asks me if that’s really how it ends, I don’t know what to tell her.