The First Kid

I am the first kid, Kid A. They sent me on a great wooden carrack where I contracted scurvy almost immediately after my departure. In my delirium, a storm had raged, both internally and externally. My crewmates were experiencing the harsh violence of the storm outside, while I was experiencing it inside myself in the form of a fever. They had me lay in bed, and to keep my mind steady I focused on the placement of things in the cabin. Everything was where it should be. The lantern that swung madly in the storm was placed above the crates of supplies, and it was in its right place. And the crates of supplies too were in their right place, the crates themselves as well as their contents. The flag of the 26 Kids which hung over my bed was well placed. Even the sweat stains that riddled the clothes on my body were correctly positioned. Each dew drop of sweat my scurvy-addled self produced was right where they belonged. 

When my crew-mate, Kirkham walked in without his head, I panicked. His head was not in his right place. Where was it? I did not know. Surely In the wrong place, wherever that was. And the blood fountains that spurted out of him were also not in their right place for the blood was not staying in his body, but spraying on the floor and walls. And the Sharkgods that languidly swam their way in were not in their right place, for they were not seated on their underwater thrones. And I yelled, “you are in the wrong place!” But they paid no heed. As one of the Sharkgods injected treasure into my arm (which was definitely not in the right place), I passed out. The glow from the gold and diamonds and emeralds within my arm had coursed through my bloodstream, enveloping me as I slipped into unconsciousness. 

I slept through the remainder of the day, but woke briefly to the sight of Kirkham leaning in close with his headless body and trying to whisper something in my ear, but he had no mouth and therefore I could not hear him. What did you try to say, Kirkham? I won’t be able to understand you until you put your head back on your body. 

More injections, and more sleep. 

As I slept, I dreamt of two colors and two colors only- Orange and red. And I understood the vast world of each color. I never realized how many things are red, and how many are orange. It’s easy to forget that fact, or to never discover it in the first place when the colors are spaced out and mingled with the other colors. But when they are condensed, they are stunning. They become the world. In one dream I was transported to a Medieval theatre show where dissatisfied audience members threw bright, red tomatoes at the actors. Of course I knew that this would never actually occur, because most people were poor and would never waste food merely to express their disapproval of the entertainment. But the dream world is occupied by stereotypes and myths and false truths, which make the whole place hazy, personal, and contrarily realistic. And as I watched the patrons chuck these tomatoes, the sky started raining tomatoes and drenching the audience. I realized it was God who was expressing his own dissatisfaction with us, for we make a poor sort of entertainment for Him. 

    Blood, of course, inhabited my dreams, but not in oceans or rivers or trickles. They came as sound itself. Sound had been replaced with blood, so that a car horn honked blood that radiated outward in the street. And the chatter of people spoke in blood-notes that sprayed on each other as they blathered their desires and prejudices. And even the tranquil sound of books became blood as their pages were flipped through or turned delicately, and blood misted out lightly from those pages. Who's to say they were not the blood of the author?

    And I saw a roadless place that was littered with bright red stop signs, and the cars that found themselves here would not stop. The stopsigns lost confidence and began to wilt like sad flowers, so that this place became the Place of the Wilted Stop Signs. One old woman had walked slowly to this place as cars raced by her, and she stopped at the first stop sign she came to. And she stayed unmoving, so that the stop sign came to life again, and stood tall and proud in its rejuvenated occupation. The other stop signs stayed wilted, but turned their heads in her direction and looked at her with awe and envy. The old woman had stopped so long that fungus begun to sprout from her, and they were in the shape of her. Then more fungus facsimiles grew. A plethora of plump, twisting, mushroom copies of this old woman had sprouted and grown prodigiously. 20, maybe 30 of them. The sight was unbelievable, and all the cars stopped to watch the incredible geriatric display. And at their stopping, the stop signs had become strong again, erroneously thinking it was their doing.

    Red is also the color of firetrucks and lobsters, and I saw a house that was a large lobster set on fire, and the fire trucks came wailing down the street. As they rushed to grab their hoses, the lobster house spoke to the firemen and said, “thank you, firemen, for coming to my aid. I would surely burn to death without you. Hooray for taxes that pay your salary.” But the firemen said nothing, and when they sprayed their hoses, hot liquid butter had come rapidly out of the nozzles . They doused the Lobsterhouse and flavored it at the same time. The Lobsterhouse was cooked, the smell of butter and hot seafood flooded the neighborhood, and the firemen went inside through the doors and windows and ate it from the inside out. 

    And the color orange- the color of cheetos, safety cones, and basketballs.

    Like the movie, GATTACA, wherein the protagonist wanted to be an astronaut but did not meet the physical requirements, and so underwent great pain to achieve his dreams, the Cheeto wanted to be a medical doctor but wasn't allowed because of his flaky cheeto dust which would contaminate everything in the hospital. He used abrasives to remove all the orange cheese dust from his body until he became a white, puffy, cheeseless Cheeto. I watched him do this from the point of view of his ceiling fan, and I spun slowly as I was on the lowest setting. I did not get motion sickness for I was motion itself. He kept his cheese-dust skin in a box labeled ‘SHAME’, and in my dream I briefly became this box before returning as his ceiling fan. I felt the flakey, orange shame of the cheeseless Cheeto doctor. While he went to work to fix spines and gall bladders, I tumbled around his house, until the Cheeto dust settled everywhere. It settled on his medical books and furniture and awards so that he would come back home to an orange house. I did not want him to forget who he was. The world may only allow you to achieve greatness if you change yourself to be a certain way, but if the Cheeto doctor could manage to at least keep the Cheeto dust within him (since he’s not allowed to keep it externally on his body), then he may be successful and remain true enough to himself. 

I moved on to the next orange dream, the one of safety cones.

    I found this fever dream the most interesting because in it I realized that an entire world is contained within a single item. The memories that an orange safety cone conjures up, for one thing, is almost limitless. Not only my own memories, but all of humanity’s. For me personally, my memories involving safety cones involved throwing them along the highway like they were rocks to be skipped on the lake, and of a picture I saw once of a man drunkenly wearing a safety cone as a hat, and the memories of “error 404” safety cones I have seen a few times online. These are only my own. Other people have other memories of safety cones, and some may be funny or dark or indefatigable, like of the time a safety cone persisted in courting Princess Leia until she finally gave in. They had the safest sex that ended with the cone spurting orange semen out of its narrow top.

In conjunction with the memories are imaginings and daydreams. For instance, the imagining of a child who has made a cliche volcano for his science fair project, but the volcano is a safety cone that spills lava out of its top. He received an F because the safety cone does not represent a real volcano, at which point the student pointed out that there is a large volcano on the Indonesian island of Lombok in which the volcano is indeed a large safety cone. The locals both fear and respect it.

    The safety cone in my dream erupted orange items that were a part of all my previous dreams. This fever dream on the eve of my death solidified as the nexus of those dreams since it had remembered each individual orange thing in all my previous dreams and brought them together. I was deeply impressed, not with myself, for I had nothing to do with it, but with my subconscious brain which acts as my own secretary but is far more powerful than I am. All manner of orange dream things had erupted from there. Even things that weren’t traditionally orange like bees, cotton balls, dinosaurs, and glaciers to name a few. I stood entranced by the eruption of orange, of all the orange things of my dreams, and I remembered, orangely, the dreamworlds and stories of my past. 

    And the basketball! The basketball that was a planet! I traveled there to this distant sports planet in the NBA galaxy and when my spaceship landed I was greeted by a tall basketball player who offered me basketball shoes as a peace offering. All the inhabitants were tall basketball players. There where basketball player seamstresses and midwives and mayors and cobblers, bakers and police officers and artists (who only painted basketballs in all its artistic forms) and the sky was orange and raw like leather, and I feasted on basketballs which were juicy like oranges, and I slept with a handful of maidens who dribbled my testicles like basketballs.

    I finally awoke from my fever dreams of red and orange with a ripe yellow lemon in my mouth to help with the scurvy. My dreams and reality had converged to be fire. I was healthy. I was cured. I was ready. 

As the first kid, Kid A, they sent me to the fire on the sea, to be burned and sacrificed to The Alphabet, as all 26 kids will be. As it should be.

    Everything where it belongs.