lanterns. He suffered a slight limp, but had been given medicine to
dull the pain. What was more painful to him at that moment was the
fact that his last-chance affair to resurrect Undergrounds looked like
an utter disaster. Literally no one had come besides the two people
he and Yak had formally invited, plus their respective entourages. It
was as if no one had even seen the thousands of flyers pasted all over
town.
“Maybe Leona put the wrong directions on the flyers,” Colin said.
“This place is hard to find even with the right directions,” added
Niles.
Leona huffed. “You all saw the flyers. The directions were clear.
Don’t harp on me Colin,” Indeed Leona had drawn a beautiful aerial
view complete with seagulls and lots of arrows and intricate
shadings. But Niles strolled out anyway to check a nearby lamppost.
He came back a moment later, flyer in hand.
“Well, it’s clear, isn’t it?” she asked.
“It’s nothing if not clear,” Niles said.
“I told you,” she said, “Perfectly clear.”
“Perfectly,” he repeated, holding up a blank sheet of paper.
It seemed like a colossal cosmic conspiracy, one that defied
reason and plausibility, until a plausible reason was put forward by
Roy. Leona had them printed with overly natural inks and nature is
not waterproof. Nature eats itself. The rains had drowned their
inklings.
“May I harp on you now, Leona?” Colin grumbled.
Leona started to cry.
Niles passed around a suite of joints to mitigate the burgeoning
despair.
A shudder of pain tore through Roy, from the bump on his head,
down to the scarred tissue of his heart, and settling on the exposed
nerves of his rent manhood. He let out a loud groan. Leona tried to
offer immoral support, caressing his thigh but he quickly brushed her
hand away. He would be unable to engage in things conjugal for a
while; indeed he already feared his next hard-on as an aging man
fears his last.
He stood up and walked out of the garden, through the
insanatorium that Undergrounds had become, and out through the
narrow gate. There was some strange music on, a song performed by
a descendant of Herman Melville. It sounded lugubrious to him, like
the sad bleating of a dying sea monster.
ABYSSINIA
50
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