The Old Fool

 

Oh, how once the world burbled and tittered with the crackle-call of life, with pipping whippoorwills and barumphing bullfrogs. And oh, how the old man still longed for the caterwaul of the awakening spring forest, with its symphony of peepers and trillers and chatterers as they went skittering through the gnobbly shoulders of ancient elms and oaks and willows. You wouldn’t know it to look at him now – swaying unsteadily in his kitchen with his matted gray beard and his crumpled bone body – but the chaotic harmony of nature used to fill him with such unrestrained bravado that he couldn’t help but call back to it with his own spontaneous, laughing, nonsense songs. He would howl his songs up from the mossy forest floor into the dappled canopy above.  

Over the years, of course, the silence set in, with entire constellations of living sound swallowed by a faceless hush of creeping darkness. Somewhere, though, his head still echoed with the distant whistle-calls of the mating larks whom he knew then by name – their twitching wings long since lost to the grumble of tractors and smoking men.  

“Hitter-two! Hitter-two! Hitter-two!” the dumb dead cardinals still called inside his head as he reached for the kitchen counter to steady himself.

And that’s when it happened. A bellybutton of light, what else could he call it? A tiny round rip in the fabric of the ceiling tore open and illuminated him from above with a thin tendril of blue light.

He looked up, uncertain, neck craning, eyes squinting. Leaning back, he lost his balance. The floor was a hard fist on his rheumatoid spine and his bald head bounced when it hit the floor.

The rip in the ceiling became an undulating orifice, expanding unevenly above him. A tunnel – the tunnel – spiraled down to meet him from the Great Beyond©. Echoing out from inside the tunnel, he could hear the clatter of a billion passenger pigeons, a timpani roll of beating wings, as they flushed to the sky and blotted out the sun. He felt himself called upward, drawn to fly amongst an undulating cloud of butterflies – paradise birdwings – that flitted above brooks and waterfalls and swaying cattails. He could see, too, in the great beyond, Grendel, who, to be honest, he’d always found a bit too crass for his liking. Grendel grinned his mossy grin as he lifted his leg and farted out dodo birds, who wore monocles and bowler hats and waddled around in circles about his feet. Lord God birds rode kimono dragons to an ecstatic choir of reed warblers and fringe-limbed tree frogs and hooting Woodsy the Owls.

“Ring a dong dillo!” the old fool cried out. And all the angels sang.

At two in the morning, the only illumination in the old fool’s apartment was from a streetlight just outside his dirty kitchen window. It was orangey and lifeless and cast long shadows. As his eyes fluttered open, the pain in the old fool’s spine was red. When he moved, it was a glowing white. His head hurt purple. His eyes, yellow.

Is this the dream? he wondered. Or is this the awake?

“Someone, please!” the old fool cried out. And all the angels sang.