Dreams of a Fringe Cartoonist : Terminal, with Scarves

d 3/16 '86

Aboard a plane the shape of a child's wading pool.

Redundant pilots, comfortable in the undercarriage, their expert switch clicking ability on full display, ease the craft into a gradual descent.

On the speakers, they tell the passengers to 'return to your seats, if you wish… it would be a good idea… it's the safest thing… most likely…

We'll be landing soon, ladies and gentlemans'.

An enormous swimming pool, built into the main deck, and exposed to the passing clouds, disgorges its remnant of care freed slow pokes.

The deck's plastic surface is pleated and regularly punctuated with rubber buttons like dozens of stewardesses (actually absent) had dropped their pillbox hats in game board symmetries.

“Pas...” (passengers?), a never was recommendation or reiteration on the intercom falters, unfinished, leaving a note of menace.

Leaning over the edge of the parapet, the inflated rim, you can't see why anyone would risk a dance along the wing.

A couple turn from the distant door, heading back into the plane's body. A brief reconnoiter?

Some girl splops her leg out of the pool water.

The balloon like craft, without landing gear, touches down on the broad plaza with a nearly imperceptible pat under our feet.

We walk along the set gravel, hardly noticing the girl in the bone bikini.

Someone is failing to spot their native wife, who is holding up a (misapplied?) paper sign saying, RECOIL, instead of the 'here I am' of a proper name, (usually the arriving party's), as if it's a dire stage direction or a recommendation against union, a warning of future (if not currently concealed) repulsiveness.

Passing a row of costumed 'barbarians' in search of a convention. Their heights and widths mismatched, too motley to summon any notions of brute strength or singular heroism.

It is likewise odd how most of them stay together like a brood of chicken poults gawping at the normal passersby as if the over all broadcast perspiration might whisk their wispy 'feathers' into the vortex of the humdrum.

Fortunately, there's a sort of magazine shelf jammed into a nearby tiled wall, and you think to avoid them—their talking or their notice—by picking up what is left of an old issue of POSS'M magazine.

As you awkwardly feign interest in photo after photo of opossums, one of the aforesaid group, in a ratty wig and sandals, who fancies himself 'streetwise', interrupts.

“Hey, man! Gimme some money… … … for sandals.”

“You've got sandals.”

From the corner of your eye, (to the left of the now surly hemi-Hyperborean), the native girl with the RECOIL sign has reappeared.

You look at a wristwatch you don't have. “It's time to go.”

(Half past a monkey's ass. Or ten 'til a chinchilla, it's time to go).

And you take the magazine, just in case you don't have it.

As you turn toward a less trafficked branch of wide hallway, a woeful looking donkey marionette with furrowed brows and baggy eyes staggers wonkily about, piping, 'Oh, my ticket, where's my ticket, my ticket?!?'.

And collapses prone, into a wooden puddle.

Two nasty, delinquent 'kids' looming over a rail above, dropping the strings, laugh at him… at you... at all of us.

Wandering, half searching, down a wider unpopulated hall.

A tall guard with a brimless hat, a small, low nose and bushy eyebrows on a standard face radiates > stop your ticket < without pauses of speech to feel other than that the whole of your right to free travel will cease forever.

“… no...[ native wife ]...she's...gone...” As if you ever had 'her ticket', (though like with a bus station's, no one's name is on them), you worry you will have to present yours as hers.

Moving as if you won't be or aren't able to find it: “...wasn't expecting you so soon...”.

It would seem the guard could get angrier, but the one nameless ticket satisfies him. And you move on, with relief.

The long line on the escalator is blocked from getting off at the top by a herd of sawhorse barriers.

You imagine going around, up one side of the handrail medians, then down another, realizing they are not real, but rubber; then lost at the bottom, the middle of nowhere.

Roused, you see that the line can move ahead now, the steps meshing as they should, like oversized barber snips.

Ahead of you, an old lady swathed in sheer yellow scarves, is falling asleep standing.

The trailing ends of her excessive garb catch in the disappearing steps, dragging her along under the rim of the escalator, compressing her flesh like a soggy catalog. How can she flatten out so?

“Ooh, she boke a brone...”, that you've misspoken eclipsed by the rending resound of overdue cracking and popping.

As people have to step over, you wonder if she will return on the next go 'round, barring any further unfortunate tangles.

[This one would seem to most obviously present themes of drifting and avoidance, not an uncommon or unfamiliar part of my waking life. Any readers might like to bear in mind that I was asleep when it unfurled, and the same demands for involvement in others as could apply when awake are slowed and muted, if not altogether unnecessary. And you or I could also ask, just what is being avoided, and is it worthwhile in the first place?].