“Why from the Abyss,” she answered the hot dog guy, trying to guess the ambiguity. The Christmas look and the green nose didn’t win him over. “Gracious goodness I’ve forgotten the name of this festive thingamabob growing out of my nose,” she said just earlier, talking about it before he did, they all did (in her mind). “Not mistletoe — that’s for hanging *above* your head, not *off* it, ah ha ha ha ha!” Did the laugh convince?
“Well it looks like a big long booger,” he said crudely, and then asked if she wanted relish on her big loong dog. Disgusting. Why did she come out of hiding in the first place? To deal with lowlifes like this beach bum? This nobody? “Where you from? Woman?”
—–
Where indeed? There were *elephants* in her Abyss now, another sign she had to go, along with the rest of the avatar family. Zimmy is obviously Jimy. Jimy Z., gone as sure as Zimmy since he was also dead. Only the symbolic Liverpool plane remains: big red machine, twitch of the Morgan, lumber for a Bench. Red as Rose, another archetype and more obvious. Red Star becomes Old Red Star and is banished from the game he so so loves. They bring in a Foster boy and he turns out to be just as legit as any of ’em. Conception is an error caught between the legs. Perez just is. Geronimo! (and he died) Griffey had a Junior who took control. One through eight complete. Visible compendium. No need to worry about the zero and the nine. They were enough by themselves to carry the team through any troubles, ride it to victory. Never mind who pitches what. What’s the pitch, Pitch? Didn’t matter. They were enough. Biiig lumber.
She went to talk to Willy Wonka in the past present future to give him a piece of her mind, dodging big piles of elephant doo all along the way. They met at the south end of the property, where we’ve been before, CROOKED in clear sight through an opening between palm trees and rocks. “You *don’t* understand,” she complained while indicating. “Those are *historic* buildings over there.” “That *junk*?” he reiterated, trying to think of new and more effective ways to derender all that for his fancy smancy artsy fartsy photos. “It looks like, I don’t know, a giant kid ate a whole bunch of tinker toys and legos and then threw up.” “*Moard* *Ling*”, she kept defending. “You’ll never hold a candle to him… Wonka.” It took a while but she had learned to respect the prolific prim creator, stuck in the past but with lessons to teach. Sometimes the past is better, at least in part, in ways. This is what she learned from Constantynople, soon to be no more here. She was about to have her last pass through it. She spotted the purple garbed guy — another *former* after all, another one living in the past. Why can’t he *see*?
It could have been different.




