A variation of an Exquisite Corpse

 

The first thing Horus saw when he walked up to the mat was a mottled yellow ground filling the screen.

He eyeballed a woman dancing in the wind. Her arms flailed about like how a bird might flap its wings in a vacuum. The mad scientist found the key to turning off gravity. The world turned topsy-turvy.

Now is the time that rain brings ply and September slithers sly.

Silvery cords shedding photons snake their way from the stars to the ground like how Isis felt when she met Orion for the first time. They swooned, they moaned, they made love on the banks of the Nile under a grove of Palms. Long fronds stretched their elephant trunks to the cosmos arms open wide in praise. Orion laid his belt on the plateau of Giza. Isis opened his tunic and a cloud of locust flew out his exposed breast

The sixth order represented a tennis ball that hadn’t cleared the net and lay disregarded flat like squares.

A little boy toddled across Osiris’ court at Luxor Las Vegas. His eyes were drawn to the misshapen ball lying in a pool of vomit. An elderly bedraggled man broken by society lay against a cyclone fence. He was partially sleeping, partially intoxicated, and his eyes were cocked partially open. In his stupor he dreamt of world different than the American status quo. A world flowing with ice cream and dark beer. A world where people acted in temperance and charity toward one another. A world where people were generous with the words their snake tongues spat.

And my dreams, and my dreams, and my dreams is all the guidance I need.

That was how his dream ended as he gave up his breath like how his stomach gave up his last meal eaten from the refuse found in a high-rollers garbage pail smeared in feces and alive with maggots. A father yelled at his son, “Don’t touch that ball,” but the boy already had. His innocent hands were instantly tainted with the blood of the American underbelly.

I wish I could turn my skin into metallic green and go live in the jungle and get back to nature as they say.

This was that Horus’s last lucid thought before the lights shifted red. As the oxygen fled from his cerebral cortex he saw his life play backwards on a screen trimmed out in golden ambrosia. He winced each time he witnessed a shameful and uncharitable event commuted against his family, friends, and strangers. The movie began to creep to a halt as he approached his boyhood years. He stepped upon a red rubber mat in the bathroom. He peaked over the lip of the tub and saw his mother arms splayed out like angel wings mottled yellow. A long hypodermic needle dangled out her arm. Fat droplets of blood cried into the water like how a river gives itself back into the sea. He squalled, “mamma, mamma, mamma don’t leave me. Mamma, mamma come back. Mamma, mamma I need you. Mamma, mamma please…” A light brighter than a billion stars burned through the film. Beauty unfettered by gravity enveloped him into an embrace.

The man wept for the first time.