From the smoking section came a trio of wise-men dressed as wise-guys in impossible track suits. They carried gifts of Goldschläger, Tic Tacs, and rum, and they stood there stupidly, staring at my wife writhing on the floor by the foosball table. When the doctor arrived he extracted a stethoscope from his satchel, followed by a pair of pilot's headphones, and said: Damn this birth is loud! And it was. It was so loud, in fact, you couldn’t even ascertain which eunuch was whining on the jukebox or the two teenagers from Texas puking in the men’s room. No, tonight all you could hear was a brand new light screaming into the world like it already hated the place. If you shut your eyes everything sounded so severe, but if you opened them just right and let them readjust to the beerlight, you could see the makings of a miracle as it happened. And it happened to be a boy, or at least we thought so for many years––until he began running around with prostitutes and tax collectors and raising the dead like a roof.
Ryan Ridge
rridge@uci.edu
Nietzsche's Horse
Christopher Kennedy