SWEET CHILD OF MINE

~

Enter the Infidel

With the speed and economy of a shuttle service that had sveltely handled those extraordinary emergencies that come up one in a million trips well over ten thousand times, the transport was landed, unloaded of passengers and cargo, received a bit of fuel –by "bit" to mean within a single barrel, or hair's breadth, from that which will barely allow god's graces and the combustability of fumes to get the thing from A to B—and was off again, with a blast and a blur the wind was left behind, and men were left pointing fingers in the air and whispering.

A vast ape of a being violently shoved the back-turned form of his arch-nemesis, spilling the long twig of explosively powerful sinew up and over, in an extraordinary spectacle of flexibility, several personal baggages, a forklift, half a dozen empty barrels of fuel, and a crackhead asleep in their midst (who remained sleeping). While the two port employees performed their favorite game, actors playing out their own hatreds, their fellows anonymously made their way about tossing bags to the passengers. It was fragile work done with the grace of a sledge hammer. And the people, of course, did nor said nor thought absolutely nothing: mum was the word for words already spoken: the excuse was probably something having to do with scheduling difficulties (but not too tight a calendar to stop the two brawlers), the fact they couldn't stop every breakage anyway (irreverant that they were obliged to try at all), union work agreements didn't allow the passengers to paw for their own gear in the unloading pile (ignoring the whole vast complication that was the phrase "personal property"), and besides, ran the thought-stopping cliché, which was left unspoken unless any of the passengers should take action for his own sake: "they're just doing their job." Was there not a Cool Hand Luke among them? No, as a matter of fact, there wasn't. Ninety-nine-and-several-thousand-score-of-nines percent of the time, there wasn't; this current civilization was a bit too aged for that, and in time, who knows how much further that drear decimal should peal? But there was always a remnant, and even in the middle of every Dark Age, they can yet be heard, screaming and shaking their fists and shaking the towers and the counsels of the Great.

So one fellow stood out from the crowd, walking slowly, with a confidence that was perceived as arrogance and elitism, on healthy legs and with a strong back that antithesized the "proper" way that was now, with psychosocial repurcussions that boggled the mind, "cool" to walk (!). Immediately, as he had violated the thought/action-control mechanisms in their embryonic minds, the cruelest and most violent of the waiting passengers immediately began yelling those slogans and cliches that they used to deceive their own minds and stop their own thoughts. "They're just doing their job," as was mentioned previously, being chief among such slogans, the tall, offensively handsome humanoid looked over his shoulder with a face so tired as to infect with melancholy; he knew their hearts, that only volumne and violence mattered to these, as much as the more pathetic, more silent mass about them. So he paid them no mind, as yet; though they lived by the law of pain, they both loved and feared violence, and so he was in no danger –yet. But now he had approached the pile –and his few things—where the union workers were slaving away destroying everything fragile any fool had packed. The shock of his insolence, the stench of his foreign cologne and the proximity to which they could now smell it, the odasity the ignorance the stupidity the… maybe he was retarded, one of the workers ventured, in a whiny female soprano that increased in volumne through the entire mouthful, so that if she had the skill of making sentences longer than seven words her voice could have stared in an opera. But their words other than these, which were many; and the complications of their shadowy minds, which were many and simple; are far too vast a list to be recalled anywere but the very Akashic records themselves.

And yet he paid them no mind. He did not care about blundering through a minefield of social incumerabces: rather, he was intentionally jumping from mine to mine, to follow the metaphore. A thin, gentle hand, white as death and almost blue, deliberately travelled from his immediate vicinity to one of his only two bags. The nearest voice –that damned harpsicord female one—tore even higher in the long throat from which it came, bulging, rheumatic eyes so wide he almost smiled thinking they would never be shut again: she stared as if she might bore into his head, the head of an infidel, a defiler, an apostate, a wrecker of the social System, an invading party, a violator of The Way It Works. It was with a religious zeal that she, and her summoned accomplices, swarmed up and about him with battery on their minds; a thing unmatched since the Catholic church swarmed against Galileo once he, no longer just an impertinent in forums of debate, dared to PUBLISH  a book of heresy: no longer a mere eccentric, he had become a heretic. So it was that these same dark passions were now aimed at the tall, gentle invader. But he was soon surrounded, and such was a bit of an hairy situation, for it was that the mob tore to pieces the wrong Cicero in the play. Letum ubique, indeed, but only if he was a normal man, and that, without firearms; but no normal man would have, literally, crossed so many lines. They had not the strength.

With a dispassionate face, but concentrated mind, our man grabbed his two bags, and made his way out of the crowd that, to a man, though screaming in his ears, subconsciously stayed at least three feet away: he stalked the middle of a bubble within a surrounding riot, ignoring the thunderstorm of accusations and venom and spit, marching to his observatory.

HIS observatory! The feeling brought a thin but infectiously warm though almost childish smile to his face, just as Judas remembered to make them all not be able to recall a single feature of his face.