“Good morning, Greg. It’s seven am.” I turned to see a pair of overalls ride a bearded man up the staircase. I squeezed my dreams out of the pillow I had cuddled all night and threw the covers off my twelve-tone skin. It is not seven am. I set an alarm for seven am and it does not make the sound of a burly man practiced in the art of stirring his two young daughters. Good morning, Greg. It is six fifty-four am.
I followed the overalls out into a room with seven severed heads hovering over a motionless young woman. “Good morning, Hannah. It’s seven am.” The girl rose from her slumber in the traditional fashion of Wabasha, Home of Grumpy Old Men. Fresh light sank into the room through a hole in the ground. We checked our bags and prepared for departure on American Stairs flight 1101. Avoiding an incoming Ruby, the captain and I climbed back to surface level.
We were escorted to the processing plant. “You guys smell alright?”
“Well, we just took showers.”
“No, I mean – you might wanna plug your nose”
We entered the chamber. We had not eaten breakfast, but the boot dip didn’t look appetizing. Still, that was a lot of guts to see on an empty stomach. We heard a grunt and a loud mouth unhinged its metal mandible to exhale a dead aroma. It gave me the chills. A man appeared from the gullet in a shredded Jimmy Buffet shirt. His legs were wrapped in cellophane and only a patch of hair remained on his chin. He pushed a rack of bodies back as we approached the avalanche machine. Just then, a cry broke though the roaring buzz – an emergency alert that time itself was broken. The building was evacuated.
A one armed man told us about the machines that the government used to abduct his daughter. “I looked up how much they cost and if I buy one, they will just build something bigger.” He finished his coke and returned to grind his bucket of eggs through a mesh screen. I stayed outside. I covered a slice of paper with ink and grass and traded it with Adam for a bag of Cheetos. It said “I’ll take pleasure in guttin’ you.”
“Thanks, I’ll put this on my dashboard!”
Bringer of Melody 