A Day in the Life of Glycerol and Potosi

Let me close the door. There, I don't think anyone will be able to hear us. Shitty lock doesn't work, you know? Doesn't matter. They only bother me when I'm in the bathroom. "What are you doing?" "What the fuck do you think I'm doing?"

Here's the plan: you hide in the cellar with the large knife, and I'll be in the kitchen boiling water. A few weeks ago, I created a trap-door that opens up into my closet. At precisely 5:56, come through the trap-door, holding the knife in your mouth. If someone walks in while you're coming through, I'll have the boiling water ready to throw at their face. We can bust out through the window get away in my red wagon.

***

"You are one twisted fuck, you know that? Where the hell did you come up with this shit?" If one couldn't hear Potosi's voice, they would have seen a young man pointing leisurely at a gray microperforated steno notepad. It was multi-liquid stained and was actually no longer a single bound unit but a heap of random papers held together by tape that had lost its magic long ago. Potosi was used to this, one could see it in his body, his movements, his gestures. The voice was a show.

"It's my experimental method. I've been working on it for months. Don't laugh. Stop! You've only read element q2 of matrix 12. It will be a new way of reading. It will read itself. Sentience has nothing to do with the existence of this work. I'm just a catalyst." He was sweating. This added more liquid stains to the pad before the two young men.

"Volatile horrors! Look out the window!" It was open and the screen was missing. House flies, horsefiles, junebugs, clack beetles, bees, wasps, dobson flies, and dragonflies had all managed at some point during this and all past summers, to fly in and about Glycerol's studio (he never seemed to notice their presence) and die somewhere right before they would have flown out the window and died in a more convenient space. But presently, it was not the exoskeleton carnage that had caught Potosi's attention, it was just beyond that about 45 centimeters to be precise: a man hovering (the studio was on the third floor of a converted nunnery) just beyond where the screen should or would have been had Glycerol not found it necessary to do the majority of his writing on the ledge of the building...he was dressed in a unitard of the fashion that had come and gone some 12 summers ago. It was purple. He wore glasses; the left lens was triangular, the right lens was a hypercube. Potosi walked rather stiffly to the window. When he saw that everything was exactly as it was described above (nothing more, nothing less) he fainted. His direction of collapse, however, was quite an inconvenience to the bean-bag chair which was no longer a bean-bag chair but rather a collection a gray duct tape and styrofoam pellets. One could make analogies between this and Glycerol's steno pad. It convulsed shortly before sputtering and exploding.

From Glycerol's perpective (he had not blinked) the image was so profound he immediately taped another piece of gray paper to his steno pad and began writing: "snow snow snow hypercube of sorts vision. snow artificial snow of the future man of the future of fashion past et cetera &c QED..." He went on like this for two and a half pages before the styrofoam storm settled and a dog barked outside presumably because the man dressed in a purple unitard was presently tossing little biscuits at it. Most dogs would have liked this, of course, but according to the formula -g/2(t^2)+tv+h (which is an approximation of the parabolic paths of the biscuits), the treats were apparently hitting the dog with quite some force. It was stupid, however, like the house flies, horsefiles, junebugs, clack beetles, bees, wasps, dobson flies, and dragonflies that had died before dying in a more convenient location, and so it didn't move but barked very loudly.

The man in the purple unitard waved and smiled pleasantly and dissolved quickly into the surrounding atmosphere. Just as quickly, Glycerol wrote this down, and then documented the coming-to of his friend Potosi who stood up and quickly looked out the window. He was greeted by a barrage of small biscuits. Shielding his face, he looked down to the moving-sidewalk where an older woman wearing a hilariously large yellow sun-hat was walking in the opposite direction of the moving-sidewalk, the dog running along with her, eating the biscuits as they fell back from the fifth floor window as quickly as she snatched them up and threw them with great precision. "Do YOU enjoy that? Huh? Huh?" she said over and over again. Potosi made a face and threw a penny at her for precisely the reason it is advised that you do not throw a penny from the top of the Space Needle. After hearing "Ow!" he closed the window. Bong! Bong! went the biscuits as they struck the plate-glass, presumably because there was no screen in front of it.

"She has a wonderful arm, no?" said Glycerol absently as he continued to transcribe every detail into his steno pad.

"This has happened before?"

Glycerol laughed and capped his fountain-pen. "I'm hungry. Thai?"

FIN

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