Dial Tone Times Nirvana

 

Miami was officially bilingual from 1973 to 1980. Not many people remember, but Floramaria never forgot––not even when she found herself living under a series of repeating Cuban billboards and sleeping in 30-second anarchies of gloom-denying truth. The governor’s office prohibits her and everyone else within the state’s bureaucracy from using the words “rising sea levels.” Behind the scenes––where no good deed goes unpunished––a call goes out, offering her a job. She shows up for the interview and is immediately arrested by immigration. After factoring in the reversibility of all phenomena, she’s whisked into a forest of police brutality that becomes a bitter sideshow fruit stand with its produce of corruption stacked in pyramids. Reports show she was killed in custody by “flying umbrellas.” On her tombstone is written, “There’s a time for recorded history & then there’s a time for making it.”

 

 

[Published in The Ongoing Saga I Told My Daughter: Expanded Edition.

© 2016 by Jim Cohn.]