💾 Archived View for breadpunk.club › ~yeast › 2021 › 02 › 17 › a-stained-story.gmi captured on 2023-03-20 at 18:03:42. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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A Stained Story

Joan of Arc wore the wrong clothes. At her trial she was asked whether or not she knew if she was in the Lord’s powerful and fuzzy grace. she answered: "If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me." Her answer proved that she was not a heretic. Her answer turned the judiciary-eyes to her knickers. Joan of Arc wore the wrong clothes. Arbitrarily the Arbiter sentenced her to be roasted -- marshmallow-like. A roasting justified in that Joan of Arc wore knickers. Joan of Arc wore the wrong clothes.

December sighed. She halfheartedly gazed out the windows of the laundromat where she worked. She enjoyed the weight of her head resting on her left hand and was oblivious to the tugging above her right ear as she played in her curly hair. While she halfheartedly gazed out the windows her empty stomach wondered when lunch would be. She was hungry. A yogurt awaited her. The yogurt sweat in its blue-green-bag home under the counter. A spoon did absolutely nothing. A bell chimed.

December sat up and readied herself for interaction. She did so by sitting up. Through the door came a lime green and lemon yellow houndstooth shirt. The shirt’s pattern was broken by a coffee-stain-lion. As the door chimed itself shut December prepared to set to work chemically altering the shirt, getting ready to release electrons from the long chains of double and single bonded carbons clinging to the shirt. As she made ready to shorten the chains the coffee-stain-lion nodded across the bright shirt and snuggled into its polyblend-savanna. It looked at her, and with a voice like wool said "hello."

December left her yogurt to sweat...

Peacoat’d she ran down Arizona Ave. She crossed 7th St., 8th St., 9th St. and then stopped. Finned cars -- candy red, cobalt blue, mauve and ultramarine -- glided past. A young man wearing wool cap and sweater rode past on a clicking bicycle.

"Hello," said the coffee-lion roaming its houndstooth landscape, which December had forgotten to drop in her fright.

December sighed. "Hi?"

"I’ve a favor to ask of you, December."

"Dirty clothes aren’t supposed to know my name. Clean clothes aren’t supposed to know my name!"

The now squidgy-faced-coffee-stain-lion smiled. "Talk."

"What? I mean, I am... Why are you?"

The French roast feline turned its head to one side and said nothing.

"Why are you talking?"

The coffee-stain-lion smiled and said,"Talk."

"What the hell!?"

A gentleman coming out of a store stumbled and apologized to December. He blushed at her apparent insanity and walked away -- quickly.

"What the hell?" repeated December, holding a lime green and lemon yellow houndstooth shirt.

December sat on a bench by her favorite postbox. She looked at her glasses, which sat on her bluejean’d lap. She remembered getting glasses when she was little -- shorter than the postbox. She had been very excited. The prospect of being able to see was a nice one, but the real excitement lay in the actual wearing of the glasses. She fuzzily saw them to be a crown for her face. Two days after having gotten her glasses she cried. She cried her royal glasses right off -- they lost traction due to the tears. December cried and cried because the glasses made fun of her. They brought the entire world into focus, not just the world that she could see.

She looked at the rims, the lenses, the screws, the writing and the wavy lines of the plastic. She wondered if her world was falling out of focus. She interrogated herself, she questioned her sanity, as she poured rainbows out of her glasses onto her bluejeans. Crazy folk didn’t think themselves crazy is what the media told her. But she didn’t really know. Only a crazy person would have run, breakneck as she did, from their work in front of the manager and three customers. Only a crazy person would be spoken to by a dirty shirt. Only a crazy person would respond to that dirty shirt. Only a crazy person would be too scared to go back to work a week later. Only a crazy person would have left that yogurt to sweat. Only a spoon would do nothing.

A bell chimed. A green leaf blew into the laundromat, across the black-white checked floor, over the scuff marks -- the microscopic mountain ranges, valleys and canyons of worn out sole rubber. A bell chimed. A yellow harlequin silk sun dress followed the leaf. The dress beamed a greeting at December and her glasses. Allowing the rays of harlequin sunshine to penetrate the fog of her non-attention December reflected the beamed greeting.

"Good morning."

Without a wasted moment the harlequin lattice work dress began to deposit heaps and mounds of dirty clothes for December to converse with.

December gave conversation a shot.

"Did you know that if you were to view a rotation of our galaxy, the milky way, as one hour that the dinosaurs were around for 45 minutes, and we humans have been around for about 45 seconds?" December smiled. "I think that very neat."

The wear-er of the sunny-square-silk dress hadn’t any response save to ask as to the bill, and how long would she wait for her clothes.

"About a day. Have a good one."

December smiled. A bell chimed. December sighed.

"Good morning December."

"Good morning," December moved some of the clothes about, a grass-stain rabbit burrowed past the knee of some fancy designer bluejeans, the color of bleach and sweat. "You always seem to know my name... all of you... or is there only one? Do you have a name, names..."

The grass-stain herbivore munched at some knee fuzz.

"This is a control thing isn’t it? Cults do this. Next you’ll keep me up all night. You are softening me up, aren’t you?" December held up the bluejeans in an interrogative manner, turned away from the door. "You are going to try to get me to drink punch. And kill babies and handout pamphlets on street corners."

A muffled giggle doppler’d by December as the now fed green rabbit hopped to its back-pocket hole-home.

"I’m not a cult," came a voice from somewhere behind December.

"That is what they all say."

"All your customers claim to not be members of cults? I’m certain some cult going people dirty their clothes too."

December jumped.

"The door didn’t chime!"

"Sorry?"

"The door. It always chimes, it has a bell. It rings when the door opens or closes."

"I came in as a lady was leaving."

"The yellow sun dress," she said to the flannel shirt.

"Yeah. I guess. I’m sorry if I frightened you."

December sat on her cinnabar twin bed, about 15 feet away from her 1970’s orange fridge and her robin's egg blue table and only chair (a green-purple vinyl affair). Her 25 foot long trailer, her silver home, smelled softly of wool, fabric softener and nothing. December rubbed her eyes and blearily looked at her glasses. The flannel shirt, soft and beady -- worn out of season -- ready to deposit its linty pearls into a navel, had been laid over her retinas. December rubbed and rubbed but the flannel wouldn’t go away.

"Don’t worry about it."

December screamed! A doodle of a penguin, or possibly a panda bear, she couldn’t remember, looked at her from her thigh. Still tickled by the icy grey-white fingers of fear December undid her belt and took off her pants. She forced open a tiny porthole window a pushed the pendguina pants out.

"I’m sorry..." trailed off the pants as they fell.

December assessed her situation:

Pant-less, at home, heart-rate at a hundred billion times a hundred billion beats per-minute (about the same number of stars in the known universe) a bit peckish, and chilly. Possibly seeing things that weren't real.

She sat back down on her bed. It was warm from where she had sat earlier. December sighed and put on her glasses. The world struggled to come back into focus. The flannel shirt. Did it know? Did the flannel shirt know if she was crazy? "I don’t know," she said, softly confused.

"What in the sphincter of hell are you screaming about, December-Juliet!?" December hadn’t any idea why her landlord, a disgruntled old fart, a retired white-shirt and skinny black tie, called her this.

"Sorry..."

"Are you okay, December-Juliet!? I won’t have any of my tenants screaming on my roof," continued the wide collar’d shirt and the skinny tie, more softly, in a mumble, "and by any of my tenants I mean my only tenant... shit." the worn shirt and tie sighed and trailed off.

December’s head vibrated. Something wanted to rip through her skull and curly hair. The world turned blue and green. December wished to know if she was crazy... hoped she was. What else would do this? Filled with purple, mauve and (the most visible color) chartreuse, December stumbled to the door of her reflective mobile home.

She stood for a long while, pant-less as she was, in the open doorway bathing in the afternoon humidity and sunlight, trying to get her eyes to focus in the brightness.

"Oly oly oxen free!" a blue-rimmed past’s memory:

December’s eyes struggled to come to terms with being open. The world seemed to have been flooded with brightness since she took up her hiding spot beneath a rust-red jungle-gym. She hid low to the ground in a shallow space beneath the color changing cephalopod structure, once fire-engine red, faded to an orange, now gone. As a child she had loved to play hide and seek -- always wanting to hide, never to be found or to seek. Tiny, curly haired, and in a brilliant blue dress with yellow daisies all over it. Young December wrestled with the light, trying to get her eyes to focus. It didn’t seem to work, she couldn’t focus beyond her blue-rimmed glasses. The lenses dominated her focus. The sun flashed and flared, electromagnetically, its light blasting toward December. Eight minutes latter the sun’s light bounced behind her blue-rimmed glasses, projecting onto her what she sees.

In 1424 a 12 year old Joan of Arc cried in a field. She cried because of the beauty she had just witnessed. She had spoken with angels.

December sighed as she pulled on a fresh pair of bluejeans. She felt them slide on. They felt her and she was reminded that clothes are not just dropped off at a laundromat. They are picked up too. The flannel shirt came back, pilly, and worn out of season. Soft.

A chartreuse rimmed future:

A tear torn face runs toward December. The face buries itself a little above her hip. Sobs. December’s hand plays in the face’s curly brown hair, holding the child close to herself. The hair is thick and soft, like nothing else in the world. December looks down at her daughter through her chartreuse rimmed glasses. Her daughter, Joan, quakes. She is sobbing because she has dirtied her favorite shirt. It is a blue and yellow shirt, with a field of daisies distressed into it. The daisies are white, the color of the cotton, there is no dye where they are. A stain like a lion stretches across the belly of the shirt.