Sunday Comix (Little Black Book 4)
2001-08-21 - 5:23 p.m.
I got the idea for this story nearly eight months ago. Thanks goes out to �Jessica C�(seemingly random person on icq) for her correspondence on dance steps, and correspondence in general. It�s a story about a dancing penny that falls out a window, gets thrown in a fountain, and used in a vending machine. This is a rough draft of what I really hoped it to be...at least the idea is there.
I got a little black book for Christmas. This is what I wrote in it...
Lincoln was a dancer. It wasn�t that he loved dancing, but he didn�t hate it either. It was just something that he did. As it happened (as �it�s have a habit of doing), Lincoln lived as a slave in a lint-infested apartment surrounded by fields of blue cotton. Jefferson and Roosevelt, his step-bothers, were not suited to dancing; Roosevelt being too light and frail, Jefferson being too wide. It might have been due to their inabilities that they poked fun at Lincoln, calling him a �pasny� because he danced for the master. And when they became bored of this torture, they made fun of his skin because it was much darker than their own; taunting him with names such as �the dirty one� and �puddlejumper�. Needless to say, Lincoln spent whatever time he could away from the pocket-sized house that was his home...but time away from his brothers was time spent with the master, and time with the master was time spent dancing. Half-back somersault. Brush, ball, change. Fast Pirouette. Solitaire waltz. Slow pirouette. Freeze-fall. Repeat.
Occasionally, he made up his own moves, with names that resembled badly mixed drinks; the Crazy Wombat, Jackal-hop, and Einstein on Ice were his favourites. But regardless of the style or moves of the dance, it always felt the same. It was the dance of a slave. It was the dance of someone who has never known freedom. And it was for this reason Lincoln chose to escape. On a day like any other, Lincoln was dancing on the master�s stage, away from the blue-cotton fields...when he casually skipped to the edge of the stage and rolled out a nearby window. But it turned out to be a very poorly thought-out plan, because he had been on the second story of the master�s house when he jumped, and (as if that wasn�t enough) bounced his head off the alleyway garbage receptacle on the way down. The last thing that he remembered was the world, rolling. Like a dog chasing after a cat in a catnip field scattered with cow patties.
Before resurfacing to consciousness, Lincoln was paranoid that the master was going to (or had already) found him. To be caught as a runaway would surely mean some type of horrible punishment, but who would ever be able to find such a little slave, in such a large world? The recently liberated Lincoln was lying face-up on the edge of an enormous asphalt river, casually watching the sun bear down into his right eye. Just as he started to marvel about never having seen anything so brilliant or beautiful or warm or fulfilling, something even more gorgeous approached him. Without so much as a �hello�, she slid a hand over his shoulder, brushing his face with a finger en route. Lincoln felt much smaller then, as if all of his existence could have been packaged up and placed in her palm. The girl told him that he was lucky, to have landed with his head up, and as she said it, he felt lucky. Lucky in ways that he hadn�t felt before, lucky in ways that he doubted were even real. With down-soft footsteps the angel walked with him down the street, talking about wishes and dreams and boys, all of which were used interchangeably with the others. She looked down on him with eyes so blue they could have struck a match; eyes so blue he had to turn away when she looked at him. It seemed quite sudden, and without warning, that she was starring at Lincoln with those eyes, asking if he could make all her wishes come true. And really, what sort of demon could reject a face like that? As if sugar needed more sweetening, she massaged his chiseled features, memorizing the feel of his face, while his face memorized the feel of her hand, until she kissed him. When it happened, Lincoln wasn�t rightly sure if this goddess had kissed him on the temple, forehead, or lips...it seemed to spread instantly across his face like light in a dark room...and then his head began to spin. She lowered her lips to his ear and confessed to him what she wanted most at that moment, there in the street on a hot summer�s day. As if to tell him where he could find the wish, she flicked her thumb in the direction of a large body of water. It could have been a lake, an ocean, or a kiddie-pool, for all he knew about such things. At any rate, he was diving into it before he knew that his feet had left the ground; desperate to please.
But upon reaching the water, he found nothing that resembled the object of his affection�s affection. Lincoln turned back to see his love, but the she was gone. He became mortified by the idea that he might not have done the right thing by jumping into the water. He started to think that he may have greatly displeased her, and she had rejected him for it. Oblivious to anything but his own torment, he turned his head first this way, and then that, not sure if he was to continue onwards to find what wasn�t� there to find, or go back to she that might not wish to be found. Eventually, he settled with the idea that it was all pointless and he should do nothing but sit on the floor of this ocean and add to it his own salty tears. And then, through the water, he saw others. There were other copper-skins playing and dancing in the sea. Some were so old that they were starting to turn green in the water, but they still played as joyously as if they had springs instead of legs. At first, Lincoln thought that it might be a trick of the water...the variations in waves made it look like an intricate dance, and really they were standing still. But then, he looked to their faces, and they were truly and honestly smiling. Lincoln began to dance with them, sure that they would be impressed with his own formulated moves, and it looked to him as if some of them smiled even more brightly in response. In the blue-cotton fields, he had been the black sheep, the red crayon. But here, there were hundreds of more like him, happily dancing in the water. It was then that Lincoln realized that he was not an isolated incident as his brothers thought, but truly �e pluribus unum�, one out of many. And he took comfort in the idea that he had never really been alone.
He hadn�t been dancing long when a homeless man beckoned him to the edge of the water. Without saying a word, the man grabbed a handful of faces from the water, pointing and poking at them with his middle finger. The man chose someone from the group and took the rest aside. From what Lincoln could see, the oddball looked very much like Jefferson, but he doubted it was really his brother. The man began to speak then, to grumble. He said that Jesus was coming to take the souls. Jesus was coming to offer salvation, and that he needed money to pay Jesus so he could escape The End. The bum might have been sane or he might have been sane; but in all likelihood, he was neither. He looked as if he needed a miracle, but there were no miracles to be found in stolen dreams. The last thing he said, and maybe he had been talking to himself all along, was to run. Jesus was coming to collect. And he gave Lincoln a forceful pat on the shoulder to get him started.
Not sure what else to do, Lincoln ran. He ran and tripped and stumbled and rolled and ran some more. He kept going until he came to a �no parking� sign, and chuckled under gasps of breath about using it for a pedestrian pit-stop. And it was here, sitting on the sidewalk, that he met the village fool. That singular person in every town that proudly displays the fact that they have never given a thought to appearances, and, at quite the same time, gives the general appearance of someone who has not taken their daily shot of depressants. The fool must have had something up his sleeve because he kept looking over his shoulder as if the IRS were out to get him. Lincoln watched as the curious fellow walked up to a large metal building and shot salty water at the entrance with a squirt gun. The fool was starting to get irritated that nothing was happening when a rough hand grabbed Lincoln from the tail end and shoved him through the slot-like entrance of the building.
Whomever owned the building didn�t have the decency to turn on the lights as Lincoln was pushed down a hallway to a series if staircases. Metal detectors and magnetic strips prodded him from every direction, all returning undesired results. The fluidity and efficiency of the motions inside the building made it seem as if it was all one large mechanical monster. Eventually, he was pulled down to an infinitely darker waiting room, where he could hear the clanking of metal on jail bars. It started to rain then, and the pitter-patter of water sprites continued for several hours. After a while, Lincoln had begun to roll around in the waiting room, touching the walls and familiarizing himself with the darkness. The inmates seemed very close, close enough that he could whisper to one if he hadn�t been so scared. Regardless of whether he wasn�t talking, however, an inmate was talking to him. Introducing himself as Washington, he told Lincoln that he should be glad of his coppery skin. Eventually, he said, all the silver skins end up in a place like this. It had something to do with not trusting in God. And if you couldn�t trust in God, then who could you trust? The silver-skins said the words, chanted the words, but never really believed in them: �in god we trust�. And that was all it took, according to Washington, to land you in a place as dark as midnight�s undergarments. No one came down to free Lincoln, but he eventually stumbled until he found his way out. The exit sign had been painted over, and in it�s place was a sign saying �coin return�, which was understandably very misleading. It was still raining when he reached the door, and the sidewalk looked farther away than it was...the first step from the building looked more akin to the first step off the side of a cliff.
Waiting for the rain to pass, Lincoln thought about �liberty�, a word that had always been floating around in the back of his head. In his newly freed state, he never felt any more free than he had before escaping the master. He had done nothing but passed from hand to hand since; as if he had suddenly become a slave of everyone, a slave to fate. As the rain began to lift, and the clouds started to scatter, he considered that liberty might have nothing to do with being �free� of someone else. If fate was all there was, then the only true freedom had to be simply to enjoy the fate that you have while you still have it. With this, he jumped down from the doorway and stepped onto the asphalt, catching the last drops of the morning rain. Without a care to who saw him or what they said, Lincoln danced in the street. Jackal-hop, brush. Einstein on Ice...He danced until a copper taste welled up in his throat. And he was in love.
