NOBLE OBLIGATIONS
THE CHILD IN THE SKY
By Jim Bronaugh © 2005
We found the child, or rather he found us, lying in our flight path on our fortieth trip to Paris. He was laying there in that azure sky seemingly oblivious to the possible inconvenience that he might pose to others and was swept up in the backwash of our jet engines as we passed.
The doors were open thanks to Linda (the bulimic, Breatharian cow) who insisted that the doors remain open at all times screaming, “air is all I need to live”
He flew in through the door and skidded across the carpet and lay there, his arms and feet waving about in the air and we did the polite and socially acceptable thing and ignored him for a fashionable length of time before Marsha (It’s always Marsha) defying convention in her usual Bohemian manner, went over to within a few feet of the child and stared at him in that languishing bored manner that marked her ideological preference and announced it to the world.
The child was Semitic and only a few days past circumcision.
“Perhaps we should do something”, Marsha said finally. It was a complete conversation killer and most of us found it irritating, but the cat was out of the bag and soon a sense of resignation set in. Everywhere we went, it seemed, our obligation to the third world found us.
We tried to sit the child up at the table, but he kept falling over, each time insisting, “It isn’t my time yet”. He spoke in English with an odd and indefinable accent, so finally we laid him in a corner on the floor and thought to give him some refreshments in the hopes to get back to more important conversations of art and literature putting the mundane once more behind us. He didn’t seem to like the wine, and the Brae was totally wasted on him. He had no palette and no sophistication and the stress levels were growing high.
He also made conversation impossible, talking constantly about life and beauty and any number of other things that had no relationship to art.
Even Walters’s gambit of dowsing him with the chilled water and remaining ice from the wine bucket couldn’t shut him up, it simply brought a tirade of offensive descriptions of what Walter would face when he reached the after life.
With a sigh, Marsha finally created some sort of contraption out of a coke bottle and the tip of a finger of a rubber glove. It was crude and yet strangely attractive just like her art and it was difficult to hide the smiles behind hands as the group flashed looks of both amusement and pity between them.
An artist who actually creates art. How gauche and uncreative.
Marsha found the cream that I was saving to make the Alfredo sauce and, under protest from me, she warmed it and put it in the bottle and began to feed the child. Again the lack of sophistication struck us all.
Finally it was David and his life partner Jason who took matters in hand and, wrapping the child in some of the lovely embroidered tea towels from the galley, swept the child up and took him the three floors down on the elevator to the cargo hold, where the dozen or so small African women who write the books and paint the paintings to which we sign our names, were busy creating our next great works of art.
They found a woman who had recently given birth (can you believe it?) and whom they hoped could take care of another.David offered her two shiny new quarters for her trouble.
At first she looked confused, but after seeing the child and hearing him speak with that strange accent, she fell to the floor and began to kiss David’s feet, which he later complained seemed like such a limited and almost insulting level of gratitude, considering he had given her TWO shiny quarters.
The rest of us could only shrug our shoulders and nod our understanding of his pain.
Three days after landing in Paris we heard rumors of some sort of mass migration of peoples from around the globe who were seeking out a strange child with miraculous powers.
It was Walter, our resident poet, whose work has appeared on cereal boxes in twenty countries, who was the first to inform his lawyers to investigate possible copy write ownership of the child’s words. It was, in fact, we who had found him, and the lawyers felt we had a very strong claim.
It is good to be an artist.
Jim Bronaugh
By Jim Bronaugh © 2005
We found the child, or rather he found us, lying in our flight path on our fortieth trip to Paris. He was laying there in that azure sky seemingly oblivious to the possible inconvenience that he might pose to others and was swept up in the backwash of our jet engines as we passed.
The doors were open thanks to Linda (the bulimic, Breatharian cow) who insisted that the doors remain open at all times screaming, “air is all I need to live”
He flew in through the door and skidded across the carpet and lay there, his arms and feet waving about in the air and we did the polite and socially acceptable thing and ignored him for a fashionable length of time before Marsha (It’s always Marsha) defying convention in her usual Bohemian manner, went over to within a few feet of the child and stared at him in that languishing bored manner that marked her ideological preference and announced it to the world.
The child was Semitic and only a few days past circumcision.
“Perhaps we should do something”, Marsha said finally. It was a complete conversation killer and most of us found it irritating, but the cat was out of the bag and soon a sense of resignation set in. Everywhere we went, it seemed, our obligation to the third world found us.
We tried to sit the child up at the table, but he kept falling over, each time insisting, “It isn’t my time yet”. He spoke in English with an odd and indefinable accent, so finally we laid him in a corner on the floor and thought to give him some refreshments in the hopes to get back to more important conversations of art and literature putting the mundane once more behind us. He didn’t seem to like the wine, and the Brae was totally wasted on him. He had no palette and no sophistication and the stress levels were growing high.
He also made conversation impossible, talking constantly about life and beauty and any number of other things that had no relationship to art.
Even Walters’s gambit of dowsing him with the chilled water and remaining ice from the wine bucket couldn’t shut him up, it simply brought a tirade of offensive descriptions of what Walter would face when he reached the after life.
With a sigh, Marsha finally created some sort of contraption out of a coke bottle and the tip of a finger of a rubber glove. It was crude and yet strangely attractive just like her art and it was difficult to hide the smiles behind hands as the group flashed looks of both amusement and pity between them.
An artist who actually creates art. How gauche and uncreative.
Marsha found the cream that I was saving to make the Alfredo sauce and, under protest from me, she warmed it and put it in the bottle and began to feed the child. Again the lack of sophistication struck us all.
Finally it was David and his life partner Jason who took matters in hand and, wrapping the child in some of the lovely embroidered tea towels from the galley, swept the child up and took him the three floors down on the elevator to the cargo hold, where the dozen or so small African women who write the books and paint the paintings to which we sign our names, were busy creating our next great works of art.
They found a woman who had recently given birth (can you believe it?) and whom they hoped could take care of another.David offered her two shiny new quarters for her trouble.
At first she looked confused, but after seeing the child and hearing him speak with that strange accent, she fell to the floor and began to kiss David’s feet, which he later complained seemed like such a limited and almost insulting level of gratitude, considering he had given her TWO shiny quarters.
The rest of us could only shrug our shoulders and nod our understanding of his pain.
Three days after landing in Paris we heard rumors of some sort of mass migration of peoples from around the globe who were seeking out a strange child with miraculous powers.
It was Walter, our resident poet, whose work has appeared on cereal boxes in twenty countries, who was the first to inform his lawyers to investigate possible copy write ownership of the child’s words. It was, in fact, we who had found him, and the lawyers felt we had a very strong claim.
It is good to be an artist.
Jim Bronaugh
posted by Jim Bronaugh | 3:37 PM
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