Day: July 21, 2023

geographygeography

a national geographic reporter is in town.
he’s a tall guy, in a blue shirt and lackluster voice.
he has a cell phone in his hand. he’s talking into it, and listening.
he’s on assignment.

he sits in the atrium of a posh hotel
and talks into his phone about his assignment.
he’s going to go to a trendy, funky neighborhood this evening
to see what’s there to be seen. he said even for an hour will be fine.
he’s never been there before.

he’s also going to get a bite to eat.
last night, his car broke down on old 66. it was the car of his local contact.
it broke down the way a sentence or a train of thought will break down,
without warning or obvious cause.

he and the contact got out to walk to the nearest service station.
along the way, in a woods just off the road,
they saw large naked women cavorting.
the women saw them and ran deeper into the woods,
and this is where the story ends (though the road goes on a ways).

(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)

“I have seen a man cremated on a funeral pile, and it has given me a wish to disappear in the same manner. In this way everything ends at once. Man expedites the slow work of nature, instead of delaying it by the hideous coffin in which one decomposes for months. The flesh is dead, the spirit has fled. Fire which purifies disperses in a few hours all that was a human being; it casts it to the winds, converting it into air and ashes, and not into ignominious corruption. This is clean and hygienic. Putrefaction beneath the ground in a closed box where the body becomes like pap, a blackened, stinking pap, has about it something repugnant and disgusting. The sight of the coffin as it descends into this muddy hole wrings one’s heart with anguish. But the funeral pyre which flames up beneath the sky has about it something grand, beautiful and solemn.” – Guy de Maupassant, “A Cremation” (trans. McMaster, et al.)