by Kevin Johnson Murillo<\/p>\n
Chance. By chance. What? A muttering. A muttering, sputtering fool standing by the sidewalk. Change in its pocket? No, no change, just drool drip dripping from its chin incessantly. Passersby do their best to ignore this mongrel human, which isn\u2019t too difficult for most, seeing as it\u2019s immobile. It might be asking for change or some sympathy in those depths inaccessible to those unwilling to dig past the sorry, stupid look in its emerald eyes, or the drool drip dripping from its chin. Then again, it may very well be that there isn\u2019t much going on beneath the surface. Static. Short waves.<\/p>\n
An extremely short man in a trench coat and a bowler hat walked by and wouldn\u2019t have paid attention to this idiot if he hadn\u2019t slipped and fallen when stepping on its drool. On his back, on the sidewalk, his trench coat drenched in saliva, he looked up at that stupid face.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s the matter with you?\u201d<\/p>\n
No response. The fool was as still as a statue or, more accurately, a stone water fountain.<\/p>\n
\u201cHey, I\u2019m talking to you!\u201d shouted the man, trying to get up and slipping again on the spit.<\/p>\n
\u201cWILL YOU LOOK AT ME?\u201d<\/p>\n
Immediately he regretted this disrespectful request. The fool looked down on the short man in a bowler hat, its face darkening visibly and its emerald eyes shooting thunderbolts.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m sorry, I\u2019m sorry. I didn\u2019t mean to disturb you. It\u2019s just that\u2026\u201d said the little man while squirming away backwards, like a crab, and slipping, slipping. Once he was far enough away from the spit to stand, he turned and ran away, back nowhere. The fool returned to its statuesque, imbecile posture in a short moment, so that a witness would have doubted seeing its arresting gaze in action. All was again, just like that, as it had ever been, unchanged. All was well, even if the fool didn\u2019t have any cash in its pocket; it didn\u2019t need any change to stay alive; it survived indefinitely by vegetating there, where it stood, by the sidewalk and the stone steps leading into the abandoned post office. As long as no one bothered it, it could stand there, with the same stupid look on its face, for three millennia. (This is only an estimation.) The problem was that every time it was bothered it lost some time of life. In other words, every arresting gaze it was forced to direct at a stranger brought it closer to death. Which is why, perhaps, it would have been better for it to settle someplace less traversed by people, such as a prairie or a cave. It too had had this thought one of the many frightful times it was forced to act and felt, as a consequence, its life force drain out of it. The problem was it couldn\u2019t move. To move would have meant swift death, so it was forced to deal with the circumstances brought upon it by nature.<\/p>\n
Luckily its misfortune turned out to be surreptitiously beneficial for the community. A boy and his binoculars spotted this anomaly of nature and city from afar, where its monstrosity couldn\u2019t reach him. Gathered with his playthings on the rooftops, he told them what he had witnessed, namely the endless river of drool spouting [\u2026] being lost in the city\u2019s sewage system. These feral girls and boys told the mayor (who had once been one of them) in his office that they could use this endless outpouring as a source of energy for the city. After a few moments of deliberation, the mayor agreed that this would be beneficial with the policy of carbon neutral alternative energy.<\/p>\n
Yes, they would have to put it to use. The question was, then, how to harness what that fool had to offer, namely spit. It was up to the mayor and his lubricated imagination to come up with a solution to the city\u2019s energy crises. (They had been using oil to power the city\u2019s automobiles and gunk factories for exactly twenty five years. Before that they\u2019d used Religion, but the potency of that life source diminished to a dribble by the time the nineteen thirties arrived. Now oil was frowned upon because it was clogging up all the drainpipes and dripping onto peoples\u2019 soup. A solution had been found: The Fool\u2019s spit, but how?) What first came to the mayor\u2019s mind was to set up a small wheel with a paddle several centimeters in front of the fool\u2019s toes, where the spit was freshest and still had a long way to go to reach the drainpipe. This was a plausible solution, if only the saliva had had enough momentum to move the paddle, which it hadn\u2019t, not to mention that the engineers who were in charge of installing the wheel were frightened away by its arresting gaze. Both became disabled and stared at the ceilings of their bedrooms indefinitely, their right arms twitching. This, therefore, was not a plausible solution. The second solution the mayor came up with was to install a contraption inside the drainpipe that could absorb the falling saliva and transform it into something useful for the energy-starved citizens. The problem was that the fool\u2019s spit was too acidic and bore through any and all contraptions that were put in its way, except for the drainpipe that led gracefully to the sea, this the spit didn\u2019t seem to mind.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re ruined, it\u2019s no use!\u201d exclaimed the mayor wringing his hands in the air and tossing his legs into the air in his office.<\/p>\n
His secretary told him not to despair, she had brought him chocolate pudding. This, though it did distract him, didn\u2019t put an end to his consternation, which soon took the shape of a taste for distraction. If he couldn\u2019t put the fool\u2019s production of spit to use for the city, what good was it to him? It was a hazard\u2014its arresting gaze, as we have seen, could be dangerous\u2014and it ruined the scenery of that wondrous brown part of the city. He would have it destroyed. Luckily the mayor had spent a significant portion of the city\u2019s budget on Defence, which, it turned out, he could quickly turn into Offence if the need arose.<\/p>\n
Thunderous attack helicopters and puke green tanks surrounded the fool that was immobile. They bore their sights on its stupid, lugubrious face, and on the count of one they fired their guns and rockets at it with the expectation of pulverizing it and any trace of its useless existence. This firepower did the trick: an expansive eruption ensured all sight and trace of the fool was permanently dispersed. The problem was that\u2014and this had not fit into the mayor\u2019s calculations\u2014this excessive use of force brought about a catastrophe that reached far beyond the bounds of the fool\u2019s inutility. The abandoned post office burst into flame as a result of the explosion. The unused paper inside was rapturously engulfed by it this that forceful parasitic rage. It didn\u2019t take long for the fire to latch onto the neighboring buildings, and soon enough many a building was burning, much thanks to the remnants of oil in the apartments, office buildings and hotels in the area that encouraged the flame to swallow.<\/p>\n
The mayor attempted to exit this life when he witnessed what he had provoked but failed miserably. His secretary found him dangling from his nose in the middle of his office. She helped him down and soothed his troubled face with her palm.<\/p>\n
Revived slightly, he looked up at his employee with astonishment, the way a wee boy looks up at his Mutter<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cWhere have I been all this time?\u201d he murmured.<\/p>\n She smiled condescendingly.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019ve been in Heaven, my dear, you\u2019ve been dreaming! But everything\u2019s going to be alright now. The big bad Wolf is gone and now no one can steal the eggs from the basket.\u201d<\/p>\n This brought a big, stupid smile to his aging face, one reminiscent of the gaze of an idiot. A trickle. Now no more spit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Kevin Johnson Murillo Chance. By chance. What? A muttering. A muttering, sputtering fool standing by the sidewalk. Change in its pocket? No, no change, just drool drip dripping from its chin incessantly. Passersby do their best to ignore this mongrel human, which isn\u2019t too difficult for most, seeing as it\u2019s immobile. It might be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1872,77],"tags":[1873,1123,1652],"class_list":["post-16332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-egophobia-89-90","category-english","tag-egophobia-89-90","tag-english","tag-kevin-johnson-murillo"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DakB-4fq","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16332"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16333,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16332\/revisions\/16333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}