| Man — a Rag |
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| Fractured Story Telling | |||
| Written by Francis Scudellari | |||
| Tuesday, 02 March 2010 17:06 | |||
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Lucifer's Cardinals are blowing pink smoke again. They've picked their ping-pong pontiff, to the joy of throngs watching patient brick stacks remotely on brightly monitored feeds. The Chosen One, festooned in a make-shift, milk-carton miter plastered with photos of never-lost souls, climbs atop His Coke-can throne to declare, "I'm likable law made flesh!" Then, this dystopic Pope, turning to His scroll wailer, sotto voce warns, "I am a weakish speller, but read it as best you can," and hands her a paper-clipped parchment. Catty smile petting her with purrs of "nice smug me," the tonsil-crowned crier takes it and leaps to heroes glide down where His nonsense cannon of ten misrules is to be revealed. Meanwhile, back up on Earth, Man — a rag doll in hand and aching from the expert prick of voodoo-dabbling God's exactingly pinned scraps, all wincing "Who do you think you are?" — Approaches the coaxial saint who sits in a simulated wood-grain box and beams beacons of haloed pixels phishing for fools in search of non-queasy forgiveness. Man fits to a T-S-A that anesthetic profile. He pulls from his pocket prescriptions slipped to him by back-alley preachers with promises of a tidier healing. For a few coins, he gets his video-dispensed penance: the rosary of disposable beads he'll rub once, toss, then return to that life perpetually stuck on truancy.
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