7/28/1997 g.g.Ashbrook
Standing in the third row back and peeking over the shoulders of his parents he could just about make of the lines of that majestic astral cat that was being launch into space that morning. Somehow the government had found that cats are the most streamlined of all animals commonly found in space, and that a giant cat should be elected to pull the next crew of astronauts along on a hemp chord, and that way space would become a simple and none-threatening domain in the eyes of media viewers. Why what could be more common place and comforting, they thought, then to see a few jolly men and women astronauts waving as big old fluffy with her chrome dander pulled them off toward Zeta Reticuli?
Zemble began to spin around, in a slow hop and skip, and the small preliminary rockets began launching off and breaking apart in the air and falling crushing parts of the viewing crowd which the rest of the crowd seemed not to notice. The urge to dance in spirals seemed overwhelming, and soon the sea of people were all swirling, and producing small rabbits or buoyant trees with their voices that floated off toward the cat. The cat began to hover in the air. With it’s great pollyalloy mouth twelve feel from tip to tip of smile, it pulled out a jet-black top-hat and placed it on it’s head while bowing, and motioning for the audience to rise up into the air, which only a few managed. The cat was turning and slowing pantomiming as a dictator might to applauding mindless millions but it also had the feel of a conductors movements, that it was trying to make something of the applause. Then it began to snake up into the air, letting propulsionary waves run through its body, sending it further up into the air, now its legs were strait as it spiraled toward the heavens, letting a little silt of disappointment and commonplace resentment fall along excited people with hands moving. Zemble watched until that glimmer of golden cat disappeared in a flash of spinning orange beach umbrella’s, which then disappeared after drifting down and radiating out a few hundred feet.
The people around him were all looking at eachother’s feet, and taking off everyone else’s shoes just as a great smoky train rocketed through the air above them, waving it’s arms in fair away travels, and then zipping up and hopping over clouds with triumphant trumpets of torque and wheel-spin, then it disappeared into a dark storm cloud along with all it’s rumbling. Bare foot the people walked out of the park. Zemble had been taking the shoes off of a near-by governor while a girl his age was taking off his, and while a great long beaked bird was untying hers.
There seemed to be gates scattered everywhere, and there seemed to be people leaving in every direction, and just as many walking through a gate in one direction as the other. And sometimes when you went in one gate, you would come out another somewhere else on the field, and there was no way of knowing which one. The field was long and stretched out as they walked, revealing thousands more miles of sky, and at least a dozen more suns. The girl who’d taken his shoes off, was now walking beside him, and the big white bird had flown away and the governor was trying to stick his head under a moderately sized rock-in-the-ground on the other side of the field.
The two took up holding hands, and skipping across the grass. The girl had on a yellow dress with blue flowers on it, and Zemble had orange overalls and sometimes they would all of a sudden have switched outfits or the colors of the girls dress or hair would change. And so the two of them went on getting slightly older and younger on their way to the edge of the field.
There still seemed to be many miles of field left to go, but as they were both smiling it didn’t seem that it would be a worry. Insect helicopters that had news reporters riding on saddles were coveraging the event, many of these were majestic dragon flies. And it seemed to be getting darker, and the people moving slower, and their feet were slowly getting harder to lift.
The girl bellowed out an odd sound, and pointed to a few people who were floating up and off the field on umbrellas. Then Zemble saw ahead of them a great big black umbrella stuck into the ground. They ran over to it, and opened it up and stopped for a moment to glance at eachother. Then once they each felt like they’d got a good look they stuck it up in the air and it burst out and they two of them clung to the question mark handle and to eachother. When up in the air, they could see how the field seemed to stretch out forever, and how the people were fading into it.
And when they were in the air up high, it began to get very windy, and they both sometimes wished they could just be on a couch or something, and it just got windier and the air howled in their ears until they couldn’t hear themselves think, or feel eachother’s limbs all wrapped around and holding on for dear not fall. The air seemed to be crushing them, as if they were nowhere, and that there was nothing, and then all of a sudden, right after it all seemed to be really too much, all the howling turned into a gentle blue indirect lighting, as if that had always been what it was just that they had to slip into something else to know it. They were somehow surrounded by happy windows that they could not see but that were reassuring them. They weren’t windows into anything, just window frames here and there minding their own business. Zemble felt like singing out, he felt like saying something simple, something about food he’d eaten when he was a young child, or about tying his shoes. And when he tired to say something from deep inside this weird thing started to come out of his mouth, and before he had a chance to think, he realized that he’d turned himself inside out. But not so that his stomach was on the outside (ug!) but so that his mind and feelings and reactions were now his arms and legs, and hair, and his eyes were like great fiery lenses. And his mouth would produce bubbles inside which were what he wanted to say. A flock of houses fluttered by on wings of bread and butter, and the sun was setting on them even though there wasn’t any sun in this place. The girl seemed to be trying to figure out how to turn herself inside out too, and so Zemble gave her a kiss on the cheek and when she went to try to kiss him back she spilled out all over and then appeared as a great mosaic of sickles and plow blades and fruit stems and silhouettes while there being nothing it was a silhouette of. They both began to march, and as they marched, his legs became large bending beams or cones that seemed quite long. When she moved her hair which had been in pigtails glided one after the other in great procession.
In front of them they saw a tree, and began a mad dash for it. And before they knew it they were back in something like their old bodies and they were running after the tree. They both seemed to be colored blue, but shrugged it off as it was a nice color, and laid down under the tree. There they both seemed to be both very large and very small. It was one of those sunny days. But instead of a sun that was beating down on the grass through the air it was lot of little periods that had been taken from the ends of undeserving sentences. They rained down like a black snow but were much smaller then snow and very evenly spaced and didn’t accumulate when they landed, but when Zemble stuck his hand out of the shade, it sure felt like sunlight.
The girl said her name began with a "b" but she couldn’t remember what it was. He said that his name was Zemble, and they hugged and shook hands and "how do you do"’d.
The field stretched out a long ways. At a distance in the field they saw an old farmer who was being pulled by a team of sled-oxen. He was waving a whip around in the air, but couldn’t ever get it to snap. As the team got closer B and Zemble they noticed that the farmer was made like a clock, of countless little gears and belts and big gears and spinning rods and balls of luminescent something and he stopped the sled in front of them. All of the oxen each seem to have a strange resemblance to a U.S. president. He motioned them to sit on his sled, and they did.
He brought them to a great castle and in through gate after gate, and arch after arch, but soon they came to the castle itself. It was all made of legos, and giant dolls were guarding the towers and the drawbridge which was made of tied together crayons. The farmer said in a very excited voice, "I’m sorry but I’ve no time to show your around, as the place your going it right up in there," and his pointed with a werrrring finger up at a window on the wall. The sled pulled into the courtyard which resembled a big living room and there were stuffy looking people everywhere that were part bird or animal or fish, many of whom bore monocles, and they were all smoking long sticks and seemed to be discussing important sounding things. The farmer took them both softy by the hand and leapt up energetically and lead them up red velveted stares and down a wide hall littered with musical instruments neither Zemble nor "B" had ever seen before, and he thrust open a door and flung them both in telling them to remember to mention that "the carrot had brung them,"
The door shut behind them, and all of a sudden they were standing on a cold metal platform, and all around them was space with it’s scattered dust of suns and plants, and they were in front of two guards who looked quite motionless. They were in the light of two torches, but instead of the torches having a flame, they had little screens that showed "B" and Zemble doing whatever it was they were doing. And the platform was just spinning around and didn’t seem to be going anywhere, and the guards with there staves didn’t look like they were guarding anything. They sat down and huddled for keeping the cold out and looked around, and desided that it was a wonderfully tranquil place to spend some time. They laid back and began naming the stars one by one. And pointing out new constellation that hadn’t been seen before. There was once that looked like a butterfly, and another that looked like a magnifying glass, and one that B thought looked like a Mastiff but Zemble didn’t see it. And one that looked faintly of a bridge over water, and one that looked quaintly like a mushroom.
Every once in a while a sun would zoom by, or a stage that was putting on some or other complicated play, but they went by so fast that if you weren’t looking right at it by chance you wouldn’t even have noticed it at all, and only a strobe image was gotten if any. Then they noticed something getting closer that was right above them, and they didn’t know what it was, and when it got really close they noticed it was the cat they had seen at the launching. The astronauts were gone and instead there was a hammock, that had a little sign that read, "for Bem and Zemble" and they jumped off the platform and floated over to the hammock and got inside. Then the cat bounded off into space, and the guards waved from the away-station as they left, and they waved back to the guards.
They seemed to be going quite fast. And they just went faster, and the net around them seemed to get tangled in whatever they had to say, and the cat was throwing back things like, "don’t worry," and "It always starts like this," and then they broke through.