Without a Half-Moon Shake

The half moon didn't shake as much as you would have thought, and certainly not as much as you were told. Nothing ever shakes quite that much, but you have to watch yourself. You go to bed a small child and wake up an adolescent; go to bed a young man, wake up an old man. You go to bed a scientist and wake up a shaman. I've seen it happen before.

So that is what the free-world would call the prologue, and that is what the not-so-free world would call collateral damage. Either way you try to minimize it, and explain it away until the point where everyone has forgotten it. So with the prologue behind us I share with you the tale-face of Misty Popper, hog-butcher to the world and a place where the sun doesn't shine. When people use that phrase and tell others to “put it there” (that is, in the place where the sun does not shine). That is the place they are referring to – the tale-face of Misty Popper, hog-butcher to the world.

Misty crawled away from the wreckage and brushed a little bit of the smoldering fuselage out of her hair. She could only think of the lunch she had never eaten and the lip she had never kissed. Just one lip. It was an upper lip. She had kissed the lower one, but could not, at the time, seem to locate the upper one. Sometimes you find challenges like that. Sometimes the challenges find you. Sometimes it looks more like ham than lip.

Go figure.

Misty Popper loved ham, and she loved lip, but her tricky-dicky neurons (remember them? Of course you do, sweet-ums) loved other things as well. The tricky-dicky neurons loved theft and fire and sticky fingers. She had to fight against the tricky-dicky neurons to get around to even a short thought of lips and ham.

Only one thing could silence the tricky-dicky neurons, and at times Misty Popper knew it. She knew exactly what could silence the tricky-dicky neurons.

Brushing a last little bit of the smoldering fuselage out of her hair, Misty cast her glance on what looked like a pelican with its head bowed low upon its breast. There was not even a sound.

Misty Popper looked at a broken pomegranate in her hand. There was not even a sound.

The tricky-dicky neurons fell silent, if only for a while.