haiku 29 May 2018

Each time it’s the same: 
The nerdy guy gets the girl 
And the hot dude hangs 

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

Child Pioneers adulthood ritual

As planned beforehand, the ritual lasted into the early morning hours. The Grigovian Child Pioneers being rotated periodically out of the Circle of Judgement so as to be allowed to catch their breath noticed fewer and fewer lights shining in the shimmering cities dotting the valley below. While in the circle, they carried heavy weights and tried to dodge thick ropes dangling from wooden structures overhead that were being swung at them by their instructors. The day before, they had been on the move for nearly the entire period of daylight, stopping only for a short lunch during the hottest part of the day. The day before that, they had learned skills of archery, knife-fighting, and some hand-to-hand grappling and striking moves.

Before they knew it, the hands of the clock had passed two after midnight, at which moment they were ordered to get in line and shut their eyes. Instructors then tied blindfolds to their faces before leading each young person, one by one, into a large tent erected nearby. Once all of them were seated on blankets inside, the instructors started banging on drums and chanting in an ancient Grigovian tongue while one of them, dressed all in black with a frightening mask tied to his head, walked around growling at the children and yelling at them to sit up straight.

Adulthood rituals are no laughing matter, and the organizers of Grigovian Child Pioneer Company 2.2 (W), Pyltagrad City / Village of Border Heights, knew their business. Properly preparing children - especially boys - for the rigors and expectations of adulthood was a task the nation had learned not to leave up to chance, or happenstance. After days of strenuous exercise and patient coaching from their leaders, the boys and girls were near the breaking point, physically and emotionally. Joining the Child Pioneers was not mandatory, but a majority of Grigovian parents encouraged their children to do it, mostly because the benefits far outweighed the possible drawbacks. Sure, some kids broke bones, occasionally, and almost all had to deal with scrapes and bruising, but these annoyances were a small price to pay for a lifelong sense of purpose, identity, and self-respect.

The drums fell silent, and the children were told to remove their blindfolds. In the corner, they saw the masked man lurking, his face illuminated by a handheld torch, which frightened them slightly. He laughed at first a cackle, which quickly became more human, and kind, whereupon he removed his mask and threw back the folds of the tent, bowing forward to usher the children outside. As they emerged, their leaders applauded them and handed each child a black bandana as well as a cup of hot herbal tea sweetened with local honey. After being informed that they had passed their tests and could now join (with their parent’s permission, of course) the ranks of the Teenage Pioneer divisions, the eleven and twelve year-olds limped off to their tents, where they were soon sleeping soundly.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

scandal rag closes

In the face of both non-existent demand for its product as well as a lack of nefarious dealings in-country about which to write, the Grigovian branch of the News of Today ceased operations. A British paper that specializes in hyping up scandal and reporting the world's celebrities, News of Today's owner, Randall Winsloam Cunningham III, conceded economic defeat. “The people of Grigovia mind their own business,” Cunningham said. “They care about things such as beauty and self-respect; they live according to rules of honesty and competence written in no book, codified in no proclamation, but stemming from good parenting and a dedication to be a sound-minded and proud people. We tried our best, but we just can't seem to sell them images of dolled-up celebrities or candy-floss reports of the latest trends in pop culture.” Upon hearing the news, ten score Grigovian teenage girls immediately signed up for wilderness survival training.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

the young stranger

(Grigovian fairy tales 4)

It was the Week of the Lit Windows. As was their custom, the townspeople had placed candles in the windows that faced the road and gone to bed with their doors unlocked. Unlike the year before, however, winter had arrived early, furious blizzards piling the snowbanks high and keeping everyone but the most hardy inside. All hoped that someone would bring a change in the monotony, that a visitor would arrive to enliven the dark and dismal evenings.

Sure enough, one evening, a strange young man burst through the door to the Kiergoyast household. He stamped the snow off of his boots and leaned his wood-framed pack against the wall in the small foyer, where it dripped onto the polished floor. Iyoan Kiergoyast and his wife, Baruwvel, showed the stranger to his quarters and invited him to dinner. They pulled out his chair for him, the place of honor at the far end of the table, next to the youngest children. The young man told tales of crossing the high mountain passes and fleeing bandits in the sun-drenched valleys of far Hinntia, which, he claimed, lay many weeks' journey to the south, and to the east. After dinner, he shared a pipe of fine czabtyip with Iyoan and told the children stories of magnificent foreign beasts before he excused himself and went to bed, falling asleep promptly. No one heard or saw the young man leave, but the next morning, to their delight, the children found small carvings of strange animals sitting in their wooden eating dishes. The eldest girl, however, a maiden of 16 years named Opol, said she had awoken in the middle of the night to find the strange young man standing in the foyer, dressed only in his underthings and leaning mightily against the door whilst holding a knife in his hand. She claimed that his eyes had flashed with an unusual inner light and that he seemed convinced something was trying to come through the door, although she had heard nothing but his frantic panting.

Some months later, during the Festival of Life's Reawakening, a neighboring family told a similar story. A strange young man had come to their house near the end of the Week of Lit Windows; he had carried a traveling pack of unusual construction; he had given the children small wooden figurines; and he had roamed throughout the house, late at night, with a knife in his hands, although he had not brought to anyone harm, nor had he violated either of their beautiful young daughters. The village seer, an white-haired old woman named Uulanthia, said she'd had a dream in which the young man revealed himself to be the long-lost son of Queen Pylta Pyltandyennd, and that his nightly vigilance had paid off when he thwarted a group of prince-killers, who had been indeed following him, by waiting for them into the wee hours of the morning and dispatching them with swift thrusts of his blade as they came through the door.

mentiri factorem fecit © 場黑麥

Grigovian fairy tales 3

(These stories are among the few that remain of the rich tradition of folklore that was all but destroyed during the Soviet occupation of Grigovia.)

'Do not leave here, and do not be afraid,' said Mother Rat. 'I shall return soon, with more to eat.'
Four sets of black eyes stared up at her as she gnawed at the greasy heel of a tuber, the first bit of food they had seen in weeks. With a shake of her lank and oily fur, she slipped out, and was gone.
The young rodents waited only a moment before they descended upon the tuber, scarfing it down and tussling with each other for the scraps.
'I am going out,' the rat child with the white facial marking said. 'To eat the bread I can smell with my cunning nose.'
'I shall go with you, to grab the bit of sausage I spied yesterday with my keen eyes,' said his sister, whose pelt was a light brown. 'We shall eat bread and wurst, and find more food.'
The third rat watched as his litter-mates left the cramped surroundings of their cozy little recess, cast a glance at his remaining sibling, and followed the others out into the dark.
The last rat, whose fur was red and gray, curled up in the corner and began to shiver, trusting that Mother would return.

Later than she had hoped, Mother Rat returned home to find three of her cubs missing and the fourth being swallowed head-first by a thick, black snake. She lunged at the intruder and bit its face, but the snake thrashed about so violently that she was forced to flee the hole. She sniffed the air with her little nose and perked up her little ears, but neither sound nor scent of her babies reached her. So, with a shake of her lank and oily fur, she turned tail, and ran.

***

The child watched the sun rise through a crack in the beams of the wooden trap door. As soon as she heard boots marching on the courtyard's stones, she hurried back to the hole through which she had come. Replacing the bricks one by one and with great care in order to confuse anyone following her, she wiggled back through the narrow gap, taking care not to rip the pouch of stolen grain, and emerged into a familiar section of tunnel.
There was a noise behind her where no noise should have been, so she pulled herself into an alcove, to hide. After a long time, her limbs began to hurt. She was about to shift position when she heard the noise again – closer, this time. Her heart was beating so loudly in her ears that she was convinced it would betray her presence.
After an few more agonizing minutes, the noise sounded from just around the corner to her hiding space. It reminded her of someone with a bad cold muffling a sneeze.
'I must move now, or else whatever is out there will catch me,' she thought.
She leaped from her crevasse and ran through the dark, her hands feeling for the familiar guide-points, her memory guiding her home.
'I cannot lead it all the way back, for whatever it is will likely endanger my family,' she thought and darted into a section of tunnel she knew to be unstable and full of deadly sinkholes. Trusting her ears and toes, she wove her way through the ink-black pitfalls and plunging deeps of the dangerous length of tunnel, pausing at the end to listen.


Within a few minutes, she heard something scrape against a far wall; it made the strange sound that had made her want to hide.
'Here is where I make my stand,' she said to herself, settling into a fighting crouch and pulling her knife from its sheath, a brave decision for a girl of eight years.
She heard the muffled noise one last time, followed by desperate squeals and the sound of frantic scraping. Then, all was quiet for a moment, until whatever had been following her impacted, somewhere far below, with a dull and distant thud.

mentiri factorem fecit © 場黑麥

$7 a day

Nanjing – On an otherwise nondescript Wednesday morning earlier this year, 13 year-old Chinese national Zhou Fu Shi changed into a set of worn coveralls and headed to work. Earning the equivalent of seventy U.S. cents an hour, and working ten-hour-long days, Miss Zhou makes roughly seven (7) dollars a day fabricating cellphones and other electrical devices for export to markets in the Europe and America. “I used to spend summers working in my grandparent's rice paddies or tending the local communal forests and gardens with friends from school,” Fu Shi said while sprinting to the bathroom during her single, ten- minute-long daily break. “Things were better then, I think. It is hard to remember, even though it was not that long ago, but I think that despite having less physical money in hand, I was creating bonds with the land, with my family, and with the people in my community.” We continued to speak with Miss Zhou on her way home from work until a pair of censors overtook us, demanding to see our passports and grilling us about our involvement with an innocent factory girl. By the time the censors had left (taking many of our yuan with them), our new friend had vanished into an enormous tenement-housing block.

“I don't want to work, but the state forces me to work,” Fu Shi was saying just before the censors' arrival. “I don't want to work because I don't really need to buy anything. I see the new advertisements, I listen to them on the radio and television, but I don't need any of those useless things. And speaking of useless, who is buying all of the mobile telephones that my fellow workers and I are making? A friend of mine has an illegal, uncensored Internet connection, and he and I were looking up prices for the things that we make, and the phone we are making right now costs almost two hundred American dollars. Two hundred dollars? I assembled one hundred models after lunch today, for which I was paid roughly three dollars and fifty cents. Last week, when a friend was blinded at work by corrosive gases, she was fired, and is now very, very poor. Is there any justice in this world? Somewhere, someone is making a lot of money on the backs my factory-sisters and me.”

Upon reading our story, two American politicians – a Senator and a Congressperson, who both asked to remain anonymous – contacted us, saying derisively that the girls in our story should be happy that they have jobs at all, let alone paying jobs, and that they should see those jobs as stepping-stones of opportunity, and not worry so much about how much they might be getting paid right now, or who might be profiting immensely from their hard and continuous labor.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

sun ruins date

Just as Vladimir Kirishnikov had stepped into the shadows and was removing his trousers in preparation for jumping into his family's in-ground pool, the sun peeked out of the clouds behind which it had been hiding all morning, exposing his birthmark-riddled legs to a blast of blindingly-bright sunlight. With a shouted curse directed at the gods of his ancestors, the seventeen-year-old young man from Paoli, Pennsylvania yelled, “Bozhe moi!” and leaped into the glittering wet, but not before his date, sixteen-year-old Keren-Ann Chesterfield, cheerleader and text-messaging enthusiast from a few towns over, caught a fully-illuminated glimpse of the large, splotchy red marks that cluster around the tops of his knees. Swimming to the bottom of the pool, Vladimir attempted to punch himself in the mouth for not having worn those swimming trunks with the longer legs, forgetting, however, how difficult it is to to punch things while underwater and rising soon back to the surface, to face the music.

Having uttered a barely perceptible, “Ugh,” Ms. Chesterfield pulled her summer dress back on over her freaking brand-new bikini and dragged her designer purse back onto her lap. Reclining into her slender hardwood deck chair, she started to compose the first of many messages to all of her friends mocking her date for his unfortunate skin condition, which she had heard of in rumor but never actually seen with her own eyes. “Yeh,” she said in a text to Barbara “Bunni-Buns” Reyes, her best friend forever from cheer-leading, “legs like so gross. omfg pls come get meeeeee!!!?!?!?!???!?!?”

Keren-Ann left soon thereafter without even trying to get close to any part of Vladimir's body, leaning forward and giving him the most awkward a-frame hug yet witnessed by man. While Mr. Kirishnikov at first admitted to being somewhat peeved by the girl's behavior, any residual sadness vanished as soon as his backup date – a fifteen-year-old lacrosse player from his own school – got dropped off at the front gate to his house, by her dad.

場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit

man refuses true love

A single, highly-educated, physically healthy, financially-well-to-do American male of Asian and First People ancestry, Thomas Jefferson Gathering-Cloud, aged 28, himself a successful entrepreneur hailing from Dubuque, Iowa but residing currently in Bangor, Maine, has spent the last several years living a lonely, single life after his last girlfriend broke up with him via a text-message. His business is booming despite the weak economy, his dog is well-trained, his house is modern, paid for, nearly self-sustaining, and tastefully furnished, and his neighborhood is filled with kind and generous people whose company he enjoys, but Mr. Gathering-Cloud cannot seem to wrap his mind around the fact that, as he is by all measures on top of his game, the universe would see fit to send his way a nice girl with whom to settle down.

“I just want to relax and have a good time minding my own business without the love of my life, the most beautiful, kind, caring, and giving woman I have ever seen, waltzing around in front of my house all day,” said the afflicted gentleman while peering out of his tightly drawn blinds with a look of barely-concealed, secret love. “There she is again, just walking by with her dog and what looks like a bag full of groceries. Would you please come and see how cute she looks in those sneakers? I know in my heart that she is The One: she and I have even spoken about it, and she has expressed to me – openly and with considerable erudition – her undying loyalty, profound respect, and deeply-rooted affection for me and for all that encompasses my being – she even goes out of her way, a few miles at least, to walk through this neighborhood and past my house every day, enticing me with her loveliness and taunting me with those fabulous legs. She is perfect for me in height, weight, race, level of intelligence, dental hygiene practices, physical fitness, and mental acuity, but, I don't know, I just can't seem to bring myself to actually trust that the universe would simply just drop a gem like her in my lap.”

As of press-time, Mr. Gathering-Cloud had nearly made up his mind to not worry about things too much and to finally ask the pretty girl out on a date.

場黑麥 menterefecterem fecit

Woman, mother, “Has things sewn up nicely.”

Reading from a prepared statement to an unsuspecting crowd of her siblings and other relatives who had gathered in commemoration of one death or another, Violetta D. Juk, 28, mother of two girls and a boy who now lives outside of Wilkes-Barre Scranton, Pennsylvania, said, with due gravity and poise, “Yes, you all heard correctly, and this is not a hoax or a joke, nor is it vainglorious bluster. I, little old cousin Vio – buddy, crying-shoulder, and confidant of yore – I have reached a plateau that I have been striving for for some years now, and things are nearly completely sewn up.” With a nearly invisible flick of the hand, Violetta signaled to her two girls, who swept in from a side room – where they had been obviously waiting – carrying their toddler brother, Fredirik, on a chair between them, paraded with him around the table of seated and perplexed adults, and exited without explaining themselves or making much in the way of unnecessary noise.

“Do you see?” Violetta said into the void left by her children's nearly silent passage. “Do you all get it now? I am telling you guys, this is what I have been trying to make clear to you all these years. It is, truly, possible, and, do you all see how very happy I am? How well Hildebrand and June managed with their little brother on that chair? Yes, dear family mine, yes, it is all coming together nicely.”

After the get-together had broken up, while everyone was packing up their cars and generally getting ready to disperse, Violetta was waylaid by a certain Uncle Darius, who was more interested, however, in obtaining her recipe for light and flaky pie crust than in listening to her nuanced, mysterious, and apparently sewing-related proclamations.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

wine & dine - limerick

I'll be in town, so if you're around
I certainly would like to meet.
But if not, that's fine,
I'll wine and I'll dine,
The next girl I pass on the street.