Untitled Short Story #2 - Toby Irikura

And spans for centuries and centuries above the ground, too far for any prince to climb

And the dragon that guards her is friendly and her best friend

But that does not fit in a four function calculator, not even on a graphing calculator

So the girl knows her name means everything and nothing

And it ends without a boom

Without a ba-ba-bang

Without even a pft

MIRAGE, Dashiell del Barco

Ink, Magazine, Soft Gel Matte, Watercolor, Bristol paper, and Procreate, 3981 x 3007 Pixels,

2021

Untitled Short Story #2

By Toby Irikura

The maroon judge runs through town screaming at the top of his lungs I’ve just been

made, eyes rolled into the back of his head, which is missing a scalp. Seneca hears but does not

see and gets ready for her bath of sweat in which she will shed tears of joy. The train moves.

Delilah moans that her coal has been burnt and turns to Ovid who mutters to himself the fact that

Johanna’s not here anymore. Delilah throws herself off a cliff looking like a dove and sinks into

an ocean of black coffee and crude oil.

Zeno comes back from his work at the factory producing vegetable parts and sits down to

a dinner of duck bills and chicken heads while Thomas gets ready for a banquet of roast beef and

iced tea in his steel house that sits atop Skinner’s Row. Hear the judge belting out Leviticus

28:30. The guests file through and sit at the round table, Joyce first, Marx second, Mao III, James

Baldwin, Joan of Arc, and an unexpected visit from the ghost of old Hamlet who takes a chair

near the corner of the table and laughs uncontrollably before keeling over in his grub. The feast

begins.

Jesus and Proust talk about the weather and how it wasn’t supposed to rain frogs today.

Proust yells at the sun and screams what is it made of, which was already revealed to him in a

song. Jesus speaks, stop don’t do that it’s April and you know what happens then. The sky creaks

and begins to weep lemon juice on top of everybody and those sprinkled but not covered begin to

dissolve into a fine orange-colored mist. Thousands disappear in mere seconds.

You see the child. He dances in the street to an old Ellington recording of the standard

Spain and begins to fly. Ophelia sees the child take off and gets on her wedding dress and dives

into the river Styx, where she meets an old poet who blabbers about his hatred of April. The train

moves.

Old Shakespeare gasps in horror at his creations and cries blood into a puddle of mud

tearing up his new play concerning war in East Asia. He conducts an orchestra of elephants and

monkeys playing a Beethoven symphony. The deranged man runs by naked in the street

prophesying the end of sea life and the extinction of mammoths in the year 2056.

Joan of Arc sits at the table and tells a tale of how she once slayed 20 boars with a broom

while drunk on Turpentine, and how she wishes she had made it in Hollywood. Baldwin sits and

agrees and proceeds to talk about racial politics on modern-day Mars. Joyce conspires with Mao

on how to lead the Irish peasants into a full blown revolution which will give the Proles bird feed

and golden teeth. Old Hamlet weeps and tells his imaginary nephew to swear to avenge the

destruction of his chickpea farm, destroyed right after the second war of the roses. The train

moves.

Already the sun has set in the east leaving the sky deep green. As the guests file out from

the steel house crying, Ezra Pound and Dylan Thomas take a stroll on the beach quoting

Sophocles preparing for their debate in the House of Commons. The deranged man comes to a

halt and collapses in a pool of his own feces. Ovid mourns the death of Delilah and prepares his

coffee for yesterday’s morning. Jesus descends back down into the ocean in a flash of light

screaming about the morality of architecture, claiming the Romans perfected everything before

the age of modernity. I’ve failed, he says, while he comes past the floating body of Delilah which

he pushes away with his left foot. Zeno settles down in his straw bed with his pet tiger and drifts

off into a deep sleep in which he will dream about nothing in particular.