Conspiracy
It’s perfectly clear that the whole thing was a conspiracy, this time of epic proportions.
The government was involved, of course, as is always the case with every conspired plot. The government, and the sewerage district, the latter being in control of all the underground wiring and sensors under the house and such.
What sets this conspiracy apart from all others is that every branch and administration of the government was involved, as evidenced by the way everyone was squinting conspiratorially on that sunny morning last week. Even the news anchors on TV.
No one made any discernable, honest eye contact; they were all squinting, everyone, everywhere.
That they managed to work into the whole plot those 16 clowns, and that monkey riding on the back of that camel, now that was creative, must’ve taken some planning, definitely not a coincidence.
And they tried to hide these trained beasts—the clowns, the monkey, the camel—in that parade—but the connection was too obvious. It’s hard to hide that kind of blatant involvement in such a secret and subversive plan.
Otherwise, it was your typical, run-of-the-mill conspiracy, including the part where the taxi cab crossed Broadway and 1st just minutes before the number 26 bus went through that same intersection. And 26, of course, is nothing less than 13 twice, which makes even more sense now, if you really look at the whole thing critically, because the plan, the process, the outcome, was twice as unlucky as anyone could have imagined.
Even the weather conspired, at 86 degrees Fahrenheit. We all know what it means to be “86ed.” You get your name off the list only after they find out you’re dead.
Dogs were involved, too, but only because their barks were loud enough to set off the electronic transducers, hidden in those transformers at the tops of the telephone poles, bark-detecting devices which were no doubt designed to trigger other events, such as the pigeon landing on that statue on 5th and Carbunckle at 12:08 p.m., which obviously signaled that lady in the pill-box hat to bump into that guy (or I assume it was a guy) outside the Tasmanian restaurant, where her tapioca pudding spilled onto his gorilla costume, dripping down onto his fishnet stockings (he wasn’t wearing the lower half of the costume—for obvious reasons), making the sidewalk slippery under his chartreuse roller skates.
And it was certainly no coincidence that her pudding was topped off with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry. You’d have to be totally nutso to miss the intent of that handy little touch of attempted diversion.
The media never covered it, of course, because they were as complicit as the whole of society was, and as complicit as the entirety of government (well, every known government on earth, come to think of it—they were all involved, it’s clear now). And every bit of news reported during that prior month was fake, all invented, made up, overt prevarications widely disseminated as a distraction, a smoke screen of sorts, to divert attention from the conspiracy and conspirators. And it worked all too well. Or so they thought.
So, it appears that everyone, everywhere, was in on the caper, the ugly event. The jig is up, the curtain raised, the sheets pulled back, the facts laid bare, all is exposed. It’s a horror, and a wretched shame, a scar on the whole of the human race.
Those involved should slither away into obscurity, like the banana slugs they are (and the banana slugs, probably trained by the CIA, were in on it too, for sure), for their egregious transgressions. The courts should try them, lock them away forever in deep, dusty, bat-infested, abandoned mines. But the judges, they, too, were involved in the whole thing. No one can be trusted. Lock your doors, hide your children, don’t leave pie on the window sill to cool, and remember that the TV remote is likely bugged, as is the toilet flush valve.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure that this explains how and why I walked into that light pole while checking out that obviously planted tall blonde walking past me in front of the Monkey Bar, and how that stain appeared on my shirt, at the bottom of the breast pocket. It’s probably poison.
They broke my pen, too.
I burned the shirt immediately, in a trash bin behind Lenny’s Electronics Emporium. Or did I?
It was clearly a conspiracy.
Keep your back to the wall. They’re always plotting something.
Mark Forseth is a regulatory technical writer with the Federal Aviation Administration in Seattle, Wash. His career has centered on public-broadcast journalism and technical writing for such industries as GE Medical; ABB Robotics; Harley-Davidson Motorcycles; Allen-Bradley Motion Controls; Johnson Controls; and Imago Scientific instruments, among others.