THE GREAT GADFLY:

10,218 Words and Counting

I was dressed in a cowboy suit and sitting in a chamber of countless television sets, each one with a different image. One tube showed a little girl opening a present. One tube showed a collie licking a freckled boy�s face. Another tube showed a field of flowers. And so on.

Then I was outside, in the street.

A large but delicate man wrapped in tender white robes, blond as the sun, skin pink as untouched insides, paraded down a road, accompanied by a faceless, blurred-out body that I could not identify, leading a mass of adoring acolytes - leading silently, without a word, walking in a procession, I suppose - walking to where, I don�t know.

I smelled the ether of their gravity.

I felt laughter and love, but I knew it wasn�t real. I knew what I was feeling was an additive, a preservative, a chemical of some kind. A recipe.

I was dressed like a cowboy and I didn�t have a name. I didn�t have a name. They would call me �X� if they called me anything at all - if they could be bothered to acknowledge me at all.

The figure in white robes sauntered ever closer to me and the feelings pumped into the air taunted me. �Touch it,� something somewhere said. �Go on, touch it.�

I ran to block the way of the procession and I held out a hand in singular defiance. �Stand aside!� I drawled with a thick tongue, my own words dressed in the same frontiersman drag as was my body.

Everyone smiled wide and evil at me, suddenly standing still as if to take the time to warn me of imminent trampling. Someone laughed, and someone else took that cue to also laugh, and soon everyone was laughing and someone said �indeed!� and everywhere around me, guffawing and giggling and snorting and laughter and laughter and laughter.

The fat face in white robes looked at me and tilted his head and smiled as if to say, �you see?� He then walked up to me and put his hands on my shoulders. His blurred-out companion held its ground, saving its master�s place I suppose, yet I felt its enigmatic presence drawing toward me as well. I wanted to reach for my holster but I was frozen.

Guns in dreams that go unused mean the loss of something that never was.

The white robed figure wrapped its arms around me and hugged me tight and hard. The masses behind us cooed in unison. I screamed like an infant. He hugged me hard and tenderly and the rhythm of his lead felt like a dance on the Day of the Dead.