Mike, the UPS guy, gave birth to The New People.
The New People were going to save us.
But there was a problem.
That very night, the moon became a cartoon bomb.
It reminds you of one of the old stories:
Once upon a time there was a race of sentient spiders on Mars.
Their society was running out of water.
Desperately they tried to contact Earth.
They hoped intelligent life from another world might save them.
But there was no answer from the 3rd planet.
So they built an eight-legged rocketship
and launched it toward Earth.
Using all their science they calculated the best possible place to find life.
They figured the lights they could see at night were volcanic vents.
They concluded there could be no life near those lights.
They assumed, based on all their knowledge of life on Mars,
that it would be unlikely to find any life in or near water.
It was far too wet in the oceans or on the coasts for anything to survive.
The most learned spider scientists agreed,
the green areas of the planet were also too wet to sustain life.
Any living being would choke on the humidity.
So they landed the eight legs of their Martian spacecraft
in the remotest patch of Australian desert.
Finding only a handful of scrubs nearby
they concluded it would be millennia before
the Earth might produce complex life forms.
So they headed home to their dying world.
So was the tragic fate of Mike’s children.
Rosa, Marcel, Lucy, Clara, Jas, Crow, and Billie
Rosa’s hints about her self™ were seen as assaults
She learned to hide music boxes
and hit things
Marcel was only at home in an alien tavern
They had an excuse to be there
A mutual invasion of body snatchers
Lucy’s bully menaced the other kids
with a board with a nail sticking out of one end
So she knocked him over and kicked him in the guts
For this she was punished.
The mutation hadn’t got there yet
So Clara hid behind a plastic curtain
and drank PBR with unemployed messengers
Jas could only see when she closed her eyes
If she opened them the world was white
If she closed them she saw everyone’s futures
Crow regurgitated their food for strangers
They would steal cake, foie gras, and milanesa
and vomit in the mouths of hungry children
Billie kept a jar of fire in her backpack
for cooking in parking lots
and a scimitar for cleaning gutter fish
Mike the UPS Guy Gave Birth to the New People But Now the Moon is a Cartoon Bomb, Born Again Labor Museum. Tish Turl and Adam Turl. Acrylic, ink, marker, stickers, photocopies, post-it notes, graphite, continuous feed printer paper, drawings, paper, coffee, vellum, cotton and ash on collaged canvas and canvas tarp (December, 2020-January 2021).
Subscribe to Locust Review for as little as $1 a month.
Submit work to Locust Review by e-mailing us at locust.review@gmail.com.