It Never Happened

They’ll tell you it never happened but the hysterical dust speck wandered into a cartoon. There, it fell madly in love with an iron. The iron, who could not speak Norwegian, was nonetheless an expert ophiologist. When they met, minute inky snakes formed in every letter ‘e’ in all the books that began with the word “Stand”. A number of the ‘a’ shapes in books adjacent to those turned into small blackened apples, each with a peculiar private name of 13 or 72 elements. The cartoon itself, having been wandered into, written in, and made both invisible and famous, was desperate to complain (it had heard of this art from another cartoon), but there was no audience. No one listens to rolls of film. They sit in round tin boxes. In the dark. Occasionally, something lifts them into a machine that transforms their silence, briefly, into living, moving drama. Then, back to the cage and hysterical dusts.