How My Brain Ended Up Inside This Box

Chapter One

"Drink your smoothie," Mother told me. I see her standing by the window smoking cigarettes one after the other. She is tall and yellow-haired, thinner than she ought to be and kind of mean-looking. She speaks in a growl and everything's about her laws and orders. She has a lot of rules and bosses me around. She would like to run the world. She says she could do a better job than the fools who do it now. She says it's a miracle with all the fuck-ups and failures that we're still right where we should be, at the top of the food chain killing everything. She likes her knives. She likes her tools. She especially enjoys her guns.

I went to school every single day from the age of six until the age of sixteen and then I was done with that. School was a cement-block room in the side yard with a shiny tin roof that pinged in the rain. We had lunch in the same room too, all of us kids together all day long. Our teachers were named Elephant Man and Snotty McSnotch. They taught mostly through straws. Most of what I learned tasted like chocolate. All in all the whole school thing took around eleven weeks human time or so I'm told. Joker Variety was the stupid one who pointed his straws in the wrong direction. Spitballs were his favorite topic. He said he had a big muscle on his arm that came from being bitten by a snake. He said that Chinese was a song you had to play before a football game. He said that fences were money.

"I can get you a dozen," Mother tells Mrs. Blather, who doesn't seem to believe her.

"I can get you a dozen by noon," Mother insists.

"Noon tomorrow," she adds.

"Twelve noon sharp."

I can hear bit and pieces of Mrs. Blather's side of things. She sounds like a nice old lady. She giggles every now and then. I don't know why. She says things like "practicality" and "intermediaries" and "cover your tracks", and she laughs. Mother doesn't laugh.

"Don't be a birdbrain," she tells me.

Mother is more difficult to understand than a housefly.

Mother says I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and she has a lot of knives. She says I am a "piss-poor student" and "she's had better". She was always on me about "time management" and "poor choices" and how it was "time to settle down". I knew all about settling down. This is after you're done with school and you have to let it all "soak in". They really mean that. First you have all those Nurture Smoothies to get the experiences and the influences absorbed into the body and the brain, and then it all gets sorted out over time until (presto!) you're all grown up. She never let me forget for a minute that I was an investment and I'd better "pan out" or else. She enjoyed comparing me to the rest of the batch.

"That Parsnip Caravan," she'd say, "she turned out pretty nicely, dontcha think?"

"Sure," I muttered. I hated Parsnip Caravan. All my life it was Parsnip Caravan this and Parsnip Caravan that. She was the ten on the scale. She was the "ninety-five percent" to get picked first. She was, well, you get the picture. Everyone has a Parsnip Caravan their mother compares them to, don't they? I'll bet even their mother compares them to somebody else who's better than they are.

"I could get a hundred kay for Parsnip Caravan," Mother said.

Mother didn't think she could get a hundred kay for me. Naturally, the Nurture Smoothies don't teach you what is really going on at all. I learned a lot of other things from Midgerette.

Midgerette says that fences are chairs and she can stand on any that are wide enough, but she is not the kind of bird that can perch up on a wire. You needed special feet for that and Midgerette is a water bird. Midgerette doesn't like glass because it's a trick. She says that babies grow up believing whatever their parents believe and that seagull-people have their own religions too. There are some who believe in the wind gods and some who worship the rain. Midgerette says the cliffs are worn away slowly and her people have stories about the time the ocean was much farther away from the hills than it is now. Silly gull-people, she told me, believe that the ocean is coming to eat up the hills and it's only a matter of time. Others believe the hills are running away and can never be caught. They like what people-people say about the stars, about how many there are and how far away, but they're not sure if all that's just make-believe. Gull-people know about the moon and the tides and the sun and the seasons and they know about distance and time. Midgerette just thinks it's pretty much "fifty percent" that our calculations about the universe itself are correct. Folder the squirrel once said that you get to the next world by climbing a tree.