Context – at work

I didn’t know it was possible to fall up the stairs until I met Margaret, who seemed as inconsequential as she did effervescent.  The room seemed bigger and smaller at the same time whenever she entered, for her boundless sense of possibility was only tethered to her mortal coil.  After five years at a community college, Margaret disappeared from the state of Wyoming and was thought to have been kidnapped or murdered, although who would kidnap a forty-five year old woman with mis-matched eyebrows remains a mystery to this day.

It is widely believed that the El Camino has the largest trunk of any mid-sized sedan, but Margaret knew that the El Camino is actually a small-scale pick-up truck that has no value outside of college towns populated by hicks permanently stuck in the 1980’s.  And while we all admit that fashion and taste is on a cyclical scale of roughly every twenty years or so, somehow the world doesn’t ever seem to be re-interested in the El Camino.

When she sleeps Margaret is usually standing up, a habit she developed teaching school children to do the macarena at inappropriate times–a practice that comes up way more than you’d think and has a much higher demand than is ever necessary, especially in recession years.  She dreams only of watercolor butterflies dancing for their choice of the planet’s seven moons.  Most people consider the seven moons to be a myth but after years of careful study (and skipping Starbucks to save enough money to build a rocket ship) Margaret had visited five of the seven.  Those who don’t believe Margaret was kidnapped or murdered believe with earnest ferocity that she is visiting moons 6 and 7 for her book, expected to be the definitive volume on the subject.

After awaking from her standing sleep in an empty classroom, Margaret arbitrarily decides she hasn’t eaten in four days and is in immediate need of a reuben.   The bartender is the first person to smile at her in as long as she hasn’t eaten, and knows there and then that she will marry this man as soon as she can be sure he feels the same about her.  The bartender inquires about instruments she’s never heard of before, Margaret imagines his naked body writhing on her own to music she cannot fathom let alone place in the context of the scene before her.

Around the corner, our heroes Cedric and Omar listen to Margaret’s fantasies through a clever mix of police scanners, LSD, and a dance their grandparents taught them to use only in times of great emergency–the skies would eat the fire of their passions but in their wake would be the truth: they could understand the soundtrack of Margaret’s perversions.

Our heroes make haste to find the nearest Sam Goody and purchase one of everything, not knowing the tools they would require to transcribe these celestial undulations.   After four attempts, one for each day of Margaret’s fast, Cedric and Omar finally manage to recreate 87% of the aetherwaves they had spied during the storms of their earliest memories together.  For nothing can exist without creation, and creation cannot exist without inspiration.  It therefore stands to reason that Omar and Cedric were beings of another dimension prior to their coalescence in Margaret’s imagination.  Their output speaks for itself, even if in a language not even they understand.