The Lab-Grown Brain Makes Short Fiction (poem)

The Lab-Grown Brain Makes Short Fiction

It is a lawnmower at rest.

She took a mulish seat on the holiday bus. And told herself calmly, you don’t want to frown now you’ve put out the jaywalker. Or whatever jargon states the case these days.

You don’t think that would be very nice, do you so…?

Her seatmate asked it, puzzling her ear. She hadn’t seen much, he said to another, while she eyed them and heard, thought you took after me over the bow-legged… Pause.

Lavender.

She defied this, to be the parry, knelt between seats, and top-heavy for the backpack she wore, searched among the cards at the bottom of her purse, her one-man-bands. The ointment guard controlled the grease but not the smell. This continued, aired in reproach. I was incensed, she wrote on a notepad, and thought she could add a dollop more. She had been taught to speak out…yet by a relative nutty and uneducated.

“I don’t dust dashed portfolios, nor will I polish my inability, ma’am!”

While the landlord was at his beach house, grandma had slipped in the quartermaster.

“You will at that, you must only dust the snowmen.”

Well, it was all exposed now.

The threadbare economizing, the truth that they both lived on the sofa.

“I was very fond of my outside. Your sanity!”

The Third World had to be seized. Perhaps the hang between hardships ought to have been sobering after a less modest mixed blessing. The Secretary of State must forge ahead.

They sit and phrase, the smart bastards, and tumble for the said “tightfisted” tiebreaker. As to the family friend, she didn’t mind whether he called her his Christian Lampoon.

“She walked out, that’s what you said. Well, to be sure…”

These mittens have got unfashionable, she thought, pulling them on. Grandma’s cross old flame, fretting at her parting middle age. The skits they performed, their little realm of deception perfectly intact.

“These pledges got broken.”

A playground sob story. And here I was choosing not to fight. She saw her scapegoat…blackguard! Do you dare?

I was unnerved, the man across said. That gent has a meadow, says he’ll plumb it.

The legislation, over someone’s radio, said to have been routine, a continuance of funding.

I will serve as sirloin, when he arrives…

All seems to hint of horrid code-talk. He says now he has sported the fuse-box.

She brandished her notepad, that they would see her writing these things down. Cautious. I must be a close reasoner.

“However, it’ll be a dozen-mile drainage before that engraving over your high profile, madam.” He spoke thus to his male friend.

Emery-Board Empress she styled herself, aggressive in grinding out the noise they all hate. Goodbye borne on the bypass, the grandad lying a discarded marionette.

But wait.

You have, someone else said, no cascade in any of your fancy sopranos.

I’m terrible with severe lavatory…and only trustworthy in the parlor…

If that lazybones had used his wheelbarrow…

She wrote: I scrutinized him coldly.

“I may eighty-six my application form,” she said aloud. “I may gain a sound cease-fire for doing so. Excuse me, are you my private fairy godmother? Sorry. Shall we give back the health food?”

A mincemeat that morning, a culinary feat halfway between shiftlessness and shock-horror. The kitchen’s choleric casseroles were not unknown to nosedive. Yet, when the secretary had scarcely begun pointing out the recovery position of the revised disturbance estimates, the way with him became entirely a consideration of your nearest shoulder-blade…

And because the leftover bears a stench worse than the tincture…

“Mousetrap. You have been bothering with your privilege.”

The Lab-Grown Brain Makes Short Fiction

Purity

The Lab-Grown Brain Makes a Stage Drama

(2018, Stephanie Foster)