North Korea by Night

The Last Audience Member on Earth

Some say she too lives on what’s left of the North Pole.

But that’s of course a fairy tale.

I stopped believing in her long ago, as any reasonable adult should.

But you keep up appearances. For the children.

Sometimes, when I know the children are home drawing pictures or building Lego, I call from work to tell them about her. She makes them so excited.

“One day,” I tell them. “One day, if you’ve drawn a picture or built a Lego fort that’s just extra-ordinarily extra-ordinary, you know who will show up.

They always listen attentively. It’s so nice.

“She arrives in a flying yellow cab. It looks quite like an ordinary cab, but it sounds like a round of applause. Real applause, real time claps. Not those recorded ones you get on television. So you hear a distant applause outside and then comes a jolly, double ding-dong ding-dong from the door bell and there she is: Santa Claudia, the last audience member on earth. She came all this way because she heard about your creation.

Santa Claudia sits down on the floor in front of your Lego fort. She soaks in every detail of it. Then she tells you what she likes about your fort and what’s special about it, compared to every other fort she’s seen. She sits there and listens and listens as you tell her everything about what it was like to build the fort. And all else you are thinking about.

When you’re done, Santa Claudia helps you imagine a future where you can take everything you learned, and make other things. Bigger things. Things that make you happy. Santa Claudia tells you she’s your fan.

But then she leaves. Santa Claudia is a very busy lady.

“Have you ever seen Santa Claudia, Mommy?” My children ask and I say “Yes! Of course!”

But that’s a lie. I don’t think she exists.

Busy?

What an excuse.

She clearly doesn’t exist.

Adults should know:

No one will ever come look at your fort.

Sounds of December

crystals fall from the sky

Originally uploaded by dan paluska

So coarse my fur, so dark my eyes

The beauty of a strike-anywhere match is pretty much revealed by its name: if struck against any sufficiently rough surface, a flame will arise. Arthur, a cigar smoking circus manager, had always preferred this kind. It was convenient not having to keep track of the matchbox and the flames were big and looked cool. This little habit of Arthur’s, would one day lead to his death. This happened, because the end of an elephant’s trunk is as soft and as sensitive as a human fingertip.

The bars of Sheba’s spacious box made marks in her dented forehead as she reached for the ears of Timmy, the Chinese dwarf. Timmy was sleeping on a stack of straw. With the tip of her trunk, Sheba nuzzled his slightly pointy ear. Groggily, Timmy wiped his face with both hands.
“Stupid fly”.
Sheba hovered her trunk over him and flapped her ears, as she lightly tapped Timmy’s shiny head.
“You”. Timmy whipped around and squinted his eyes.
“Odious honk,” Timmy grunted and on skinny legs took off along the stable corridor. A minute later, he came back with a green water hose. Sheba unlocked the door of her cage and followed Timmy onto the washing platform.
“Where I come from, elephant’s feet are a delicacy, you knew this?” Timmy said, as he sprayed her pads with a light stream. “We collect the feet, all four of them, we skin them and bone them and let them soak in water for five hours. Then we cut them in four pieces lengthwise and one across”. Timmy tickled Sheba along the imagined cuts.

“Then simmer for ten hours with two slices of Bayonne ham, four onions, a head of garlic, some Indian spices and half a bottle of Madeira,” Sheba thought as she listlessly trotted around the manége wearing a red tutu and carrying a striped inflated ball. It had been five years now since Arthur fired Timmy.
“Not small enough. What’s the point?” Arthur was from Alabama but spoke with a Russian accent. He had the hanging facial features of a bloodhound and his meaty, oyster colored skin seemed hardened, like folds of wax.
“Dance, Jessica, dance!
“Jessica” was Sheba’s artist name this year.

Arthur cracked his whip (as if Sheba didn’t know exactly what to do anyway) and approached the children on the front row. She reached out her trunk and gave them each a pat on the head.
“Look mommy, the elephant,” said a girl with actual snot running down her nose.
Sheba wished she could roll her eyes like Timmy.
“Say something! said a fleshy, pink-skinned boy. “Mommy, why doesn’t the elephant talk?”
The boy grabbed Sheba’s trunk and squeezed his sticky fingers into her nostrils. He laughed as she gurgled with pain.
“Let go of the elephant, Brad,” the boy’s long-faced mother said, eventually.
Arthur brushed Sheba’s hind-legs with his whip, reminding her that he was there. Sheba continued the patting, thinking of when she and Timmy had performed together: Timmy pouring sugar and flour and apples into a bowl, and she adding eggs, cracking them one by one, against his head. Then she had had to taste the cookie batter, trumpet in dislike, suck the batter into her trunk and spray it over a fleeing Timmy. Poor Timmy.

“Daddydaddy, why is there only one elephant?” cried a little girl. “Elephants aren’t supposed to be alone. They die.”
Sheba halted.
“Had this little girl known Sara and Hugo? she thought. “No. That couldn’t be. This darling little girl couldn’t be more than seven”.
Instead of the pat, Sheba carefully dabbed her trunk on the little girl’s lips. The girl squealed with delight. Sheba continued her routine. New ball, down on your knees, spin twice and play dead on the gunshot. Only the last part came easy today. Sara and Hugo had been the others elephants. Before Arthur had sold Sara and Hugo and kept Sheba, because Sheba was younger.
“You’ve seen one elephant, you’ve seen all of them”, Arthur had said. “Besides, animals are just not animal-like enough anymore”.

Sheba left the manége. Backstage, the fey tightrope walker Alfie swaggered in front of two crew-members.

“Hurry”, Alfie mouthed with his bright red lips.
The crew-men were carrying an enormous cardboard square across the floor. Sheba plodded passed it, but something big and gray in the corner of her eye made her freeze.
“Sara?”
Sheba spun around and found herself eye to eye with another elephant. The men laughed. She pressed her trunk towards the cold, smooth surface. So did the other elephant. They stared at each other, sizing each other up; the sparse, coarse fur, the slimy mouth, the dark hooded eyes. It was her. It was a mirror. Sheba knew about mirrors, they showed a reflection of who ever looked at them. She was the one looking at it, it was her reflection, and she was… she was.. huge.

Sheba roamed her head around, as if fully awake for the first time in years. The horses – smaller. The lions and tigers – smaller. Arthur! Arthur was the smallest of them all! And Sheba, Sheba was as big as Sara and Hugo! Sheba swung back her trunk and ripped off her red tutu, threw it in the air and it singled down over Alfie, who fetched it and joyfully wrapped it around his shoulders like a boa. She squashed the striped ball with her foot. Then she calmed herself. As if nothing had happened, Sheba padded back to her cage, grabbed a trunk-full of hay and spread it around her. She turned out the lights, locked her lock, and waited.

At midnight, which was the time of night inspection, Sheba heard the familiar sound of Arthur’s custom-made platform dress shoes against the stable corridor. As he approached her cage, sucking his fat cigar, and about to – his habit faithful – strike his strike-anywhere match against Sheba’s forehead, Sheba politely removed the match from Arthur’s hand and lit it against the wall of her cage.
“New trick?” said Arthur and tilted his head forward.
“Yes,” Sheba thought as she dropped the match in the hay and rapidly snaked her trunk around Arthur. His face was mushier than she had imagined. Without much effort, Sheba held Arthur against the bars of her cage, barely noticing his desperate kicks and twitches. She closed her eyes. Then simmer for ten hours with two slices of Bayonne ham, four onions, a head of garlic, some Indian spices and half a bottle of Madeira”.

We’ll always have Skype…

What advertisers are really talking about

BRAND
“a mark made by burning with a hot iron to attest manufacture or quality or to designate ownership OR a printed mark made for similar purposes a mark put on criminals with a hot iron”

SLOGAN
“a war cry especially of a Scottish clan”

CAMPAIGN
“a connected series of military operations forming a distinct phase of a war”

Now that’s not just the wind

The night shift

via The Corner Room

“So far, I’ve never had anything untoward happen. I hope it stays that way. My superior told me that one of my colleagues reported once that somebody knocked on the door and when she went to answer, there was nobody there. There was also a mention or two about a presence in the washroom but then again, public toilets are always unsettling at night. That’s why, I told my superior, I don’t go in there after 8 pm. If I need the facilities, I’ll avoid looking at the mirrors because you just don’t want to know if there’s something reflected that doesn’t appear behind you. Same thing with windows. You just don’t want to know if you might see something floating out there.”

The apple that never browned

The smart book that no one read

If you’re smart but boring you’ll never find friends no matter HOW IMPORTANT your parents think you are
so there you are, sitting on the broken swing on the school yard and NO ONE will play with you unless their teacher forces them to.
And you know what more? Maybe you’re not ACTUALLY THAT SMART, maybe that’s just what you tell yourself because everyone has got to have something right? (Oo yeah the world. is. fair.) Cause if you really WERE SMART, you would KNOW HOW TO BE POPULAR WOULDN’T YOU?
(So go rip out some pages and stop taking yourself so seriously, you smart book!)