Order and Chaos

Three blind mice, see how they run.
They all ran after the farmer's wife, who
Cut off their tails with a carving knife.
Have you ever seen such a sight in your life?
Those three blind mice...

Invited it on a date to get to know you better

As soon as I saw the white flash light in my periphery, I stood up and spun up against the corner of the wall and dumpster, so as to maximize my range of vision and cut the angles of possible approach to a thin 90 degrees, on reflex. I swept my dagger and my gaze (sharp as a dagger) around for 2 minutes of absolute silence. There was a garbage bag by me, so I threw it up against the wall opposite me, hoping to fish out anyone with an itchy trigger finger. It just smashed against the wall and broke, which was gross, but safe. Only then did I cautiously peek around the dumpster to the alley's only entrance point. Nothing. Like me.

Only then did I step on out, slowly, slightly crouched, and dagger at the ready. I spit on the ground. This physical form was mostly a liability, and, having actually failed to kill Mary, I wondered why I was still so stubbornly tethered to it. Though I allowed my mind to temporarily wander into this consideration, I was snapped back to the matter at hand when an unearthly high-pitched whine emitted from... somewhere. It just kept getting louder, and louder, and louder. I couldn't stand it. I lost my grip on my knife. I collapsed to my knees in the burst trash, covering my ears, and looked to the skies. Birds were frozen in flight. I really was going to go deaf in the land of the blind.

Finally, though, the pitch dipped, glid, to a more tolerable level, then warbled around, and found a melody. I stood up and dusted the trash off my bare knees. A heavenly chorus of horns joined in, heralding the arrival of... something. The sky grew bright through where the overcast clouds parted. A bass line slipped and slapped in. I picked my dagger off the ground and kept watching the skies.

An all-white chariot, pulled by two white pegasi, galloped down through the air from where the clouds had parted. As it descended into position in front of the alleyway, a choir of voices accompanied the music:

Swing down, sweet chariot, stop, and
Let me ride.
Swing down, sweet chariot, stop, and
Let me ride.

The luxuriously-upholstered chariot landed. The pilot was a man dressed in all-white, from his shoes, to his flared, polyester approximation of a suit, to his cape, to his wide-brimmed hat, to his mask, which had an enormous, floppy tube of a nose attached.

"Alright!" he said. The music stopped. "Oh, it seems I have blown my cover." He put his hand to where his mouth should be in sarcastic coyness. "Eh-ha. Let's put an end to this game of cat and mouse, ah? Let's talk."

"Who are you!?" I demanded, thrusting my dagger at him.

"Call me the Subliminal Seducer," he said.

"Doesn't roll off the tongue. Give me a name."

"I am," he said, summoning up all his gravitas in one inhalation, "Sir Nose."

I laughed once.

"Yes... that's the silly part of my name," he said. "And you're Mary Lee."

"No," said I. "I've got it all figured out."

"Oh, do you?" said Sir Nose, who rolled over onto his tummy and rested his chin in his hands.

"Yes. I am Nothing. I take lives."

Now Sir Nose laughed once. "Really? Why don't we put it to the test?"

"How?" I said.

"Well, surely, water would cut through your facade like butter?"

His logic was unassailable. If I was right, that would be how it worked, certainly. I nodded.

"Hit it!" he cried to behind me.

I turned around, but it was too late — the three blind mice were, adorably, operating a fire hydrant in tandem with a monkey wrench.

Three blind mice, see how they run.
They all ran after the farmer's wife,
Turned on the fun with the water pipe.
Have you ever seen such a sight in your life?
Those blind three mice...

"Oh, I love those meeses to pieces," Sir Nose said.

I was head-to-toe soaked, and still quite human, only now looking quite a bit more indecent in my white shift. I was now very glad in retrospect I had forgotten to go fetch the rocks from the pond.

"Ugh," I said. "Do you got something else I can put on?"

"Is a white shift good with you?" he smiled, rolling onto his back.

I glared daggers at him. It was the best I could do now that my literal dagger had transcombombumorgrified into my recorder.

"In the trunk, by the serious funk," he said. "I won't look! Eh-ha. Much. Now put a dip in your hip, a glide in your stride, and come on down to the Mothership."

The door to the chariot swung open by itself, inviting me. Tentatively, I climbed aboard, and soon, I was racing yards above the city even as I tried to change into another dress.

"Now let me give you the low down," said Sir Nose, eyes on the road, as it were. "Baby, can you slow down?" The pegasi downshifted, jerking me nearly off my seat. Pity seatbelts haven't been invented yet. "I once had a life, or rather, life had me. I was one among many, or at least I seemed to be. I would never dance. I couldn't swim. But you and I, we have been blessed with the irresistible gift of Funkentelechy: the ability to be in more than one person, at a time."

We flew over a scene I recognized and gawked at: There I was, frozen before the ground, holding the smoking gun over the ambassador — who was also me. Then we began a steep ascent into the sky, where white was all I could see in any direction.

"Haven't you ever wondered why your hair grew in white, like mine? Why you decided to wear white this morning? Why you decided to learn an instrument, and spare those meeses? The funk is calling you, and you can either fight it, or get off your ass and jam. I was once like you. I fought for the forces of unfunkitude. But eventually, I got over the hump and swore grooveallegiance."

It was all so much to be dropped on me at once, and I didn't know how much I could trust this "Sir Nose" — that probably wasn't even his real name. I squirmed. I looked to my left, then to my right — white all around. Nothing to orient me.

"For our petty international conflicts ain't no thang; we are truly one nation under a groove. I'm taking you to the Parliament aboard the Mothership, where you will meet with none other than the one and only Starchild, and get conscripted into Uncle Jam's Army, where you will be trained to be totally funkatized. Maybe one day you can be one of the Brides of Dr. Funkenstein! So what do you say?"

I shivered. I was very cold. I had had enough of hovering over the joint with indecision, and abruptly plunged the knife in with both hands, sliding through flesh like it were butter until I got hung up on bone and froze. I felt nothing. Blood splatter dyed the nice white snow all around and got in my mouth. It tasted like the iron of the blade. I cried while Hank screamed and screamed.

"I'm so sorry," I sobbed.

"THE FUCKING ONLY FUCKING THING YOU FUCKING HAVE TO BE FUCKING SORRY FOR IS STOPPING FUCKIN' HALFWAY THROUGH! SHIT!" yelled Hank. "YOU FUCKIN' THINK THAT'LL — THAT'LL STOP FROSTBITE, YOU FUCK?"

"Avalanche!" I said. "Avalanche," I whispered. I grasped around on the ground for the stick-and-rag he had spit out with one hand.

"FUCK AN AVALANCHE! MY FUCKIN' GODS, WASN'T YOUR MOTHER A MEDIC? FUCK, YOU'D THINK SHE'D TEACH HOW TO DO THE SIMPLEST FUCKING..."

"Shh! Shh! Shh... shut up!" I plunged the knife in deeper, and with a crunch, I was more than halfway through. He meant my adoptive mom. I'd never met my birth parents. That's why I was going over the mountain pass and then through the desert to Cordonia with him. With no fanfare, his hand loosely flopped off his forearm, hanging by the skin, which I had to awkwardly slice off in multiple clumsy hacks. I had never seen more blood in my life, and for the first time in my adult life, I wished I was blind too. Hank seemed awful calm, though, as he impaled a bandage on his hook and wound it around his stump. "Did it stop hurting?" I said.

"No! Fuck no!" he said. "But it's not my first time around this racehorse. And after the pain stops being new, it's like... it's not even real. You transcend. You get closer to the gods." I nodded, wiping tears off on my gloved hand. "It'll hurt like a motherfuck later though." He laughed. Somehow he found it within himself to laugh. Hank was surly, but he was surely a greater person than I could ever hope to be.

"You'll never play music again," I said. My mother had said this before, in almost the exact same situation 20 years earlier.

"I could put a bow on the stump and play the violin!" a more youthful and exuberant Hank had said. "And I can sing!" He belted out with perfect pitch:

I'll wait,
For she'll be coming back.
You know her head went out to play...
But she'll get over that.
And knowin' my reward
When she returns
Keeps me hanging on...
I'll wait.

They drank the night away. I know, because I was there.

But now, he just looked into the blood on the snow with eyes like ice. "Music is for the young," he said with a heavy sigh and a heavy swig of beer (stabbed through with his hook, which didn't matter so much when the bottom half was frozen.) "Ambassadoring is a young man's game too. Can't keep making this journey forever. I've run out of hands to lose."

ate many bananas, many bananas...

I unpeeled a banana for Hank and impaled it on his hook, then set to work on one for my own self.

"Thanks," he said, then turned to me. "I want you to be the new ambassador to Cordonia."

"What, me?"

"Sure, why not? It's your home, isn't it? You've already made the trip twice. So what do you say?"

So, what do I say?