the jury

 

Wake up!

Wake up!

What?

Wake up!

OK, I’m awake. Why are you waking me up?

Get up! Get out of bed! Go to work!

Where am I going?

This isn’t the time for questions. This is the time for action!

Ok Ok. What am I doing?

No questions! This isn’t the time for navel gazing. Get outside and go to work before it’s too late!

Let me get dressed!

No time! 

But I’m naked! 

No time! You shouldn’t sleep in the nude. You shouldn’t sleep at all! You should be watching and ready at your post! GO!

I’m outside. I’m naked. I don’t know where I am. The world changed overnight. Maybe — how long was I asleep? Hello? Who told me to wake up? Where are they now?

A sudden loud roar of an engine. I slip and fall face down on the icy concrete as a giant bulldozer rolls by nearly missing me. There are many more bulldozers nearby flattening people, cars, trees, houses, Flattening everything. There is no stopping them and I’m stuck to the pavement like a forgotten Kool Pop in back of a freezer.

I don’t know what happened. The Higher Power scraped me off the ground with a holy pancake turner and tossed me back into the reality of a J train headed to Broad Street and I went to work, of course.

The Statue still stands on her little island. Liberty Enlightening the World. Any day now the South African cybernazi or his little friend who sits at The Resolute Desk will have the Army Corps of Engineers move her to an underground cell on Riker’s Island and charged with disseminating DEI. Emma Lazarus’s poem will be declared a thought crime. A hardbound edition of the US Constitution is a popular item at our store and pilgrim tourists from all over the world buy copies. The Constitution is loaded with DEI, though, and will no longer be available. Ellis Island will also have to be shuttered.

Everyday the world gets stranger and more menacing. Bombs and bulldozers drive people from their homeland to make way for real estate schemes of condos and golf courses and casinos on the renamed American Strip. The decaying of the empire is well underway. America stinks.

Oligarchs and cybernazis crawling on the world like roaches on the kitchen floor. I have no tolerance left and wish I could pick up a broom and sweep them away. 

I am having difficulty tolerating anything. I’m on edge.

Today I had an altercation with a pigeon. The pigeons have been a problem at the store. They can get in through the doors of the cafe next door. The cafe can’t keep them all from getting through their doors. I saw a man on their staff chasing some out with a broom but he can’t stand guard all day. The store’s space is divided from the cafe’s by various display fixtures over which the pigeons fly back and forth. Lately a gang of them has been hanging out. They sit in their balcony seating along the shade of the lighting fixture. The spectators are backlit by flourescent lights dramatically casting a greenish glow on the ceiling behind them. Twelve silhouettes of seated pigeons were watching over us like a grand jury. They sit and wait and take turns raiding the cafe, flying over the merchandise displays to the bus trays and dropped crumbs and returning to the balcony. In the morning when we come in there is bird shit everywhere. So we were covering the books and boardgames and Junior Ranger hats and hoodies with plastic sheets. Finally someone from the gift store put up a decorative barrier that effectively kept the pigeons out until today when one walked in through a gap in the barricade, sauntering in and looking all entitled and shit like we are the intruders and I didn’t care for his attitude. I recognized him as the one we called Joe. He has two little white feathers sticking out of his head and seemed to be the gang leader. I uttered a profanity and we made hostile gestures at each other, me waving my hands and Joe flapping his wings, and diving toward my head and I was ready to grab a broom and take a swing at him and kill him. I wanted to kill Joe the pigeon. 

I’m sure I’d be in trouble with the National Park Service.

When Joe left his balcony and walked to the cafe for another pizza crumb run we covered the gap so he couldn’t come back.

The little jerk.