4:05am

WHEN NEWS OF THE DISCOVERY OF THE METHADONE RIVER

seeps through the rock foundations of the Cave and into the Town’s Cable Access TV Station, where Lynda sits from 3 to 5 every morning waiting for the day’s news to arrive, everyone sleeping wakes up.

Slave’s parents, as well as Slave and Eye next door, as well as Stan, Gerb, Mac and Chiara and Rib and Stacee in Culvert City, even David Eidboff in jail: everyone is sitting up in bed. Their TV’s are already on, aware that today is unlike any other.


Lynda is sitting in her swivel chair, the giant weather map behind her. For the first time in her career, she has news big enough to merit skipping the weather, which is always, “hot, dry.”

Hot, dry, she mouths behind her hand, warming up her lips.
The news is so big a sign language interpreter named Carol, wife of Ronnie, the one deaf citizen in town, who never learned to read lips on account of being too shy to stare at faces, has been hired on a need-to-know basis. 

While Lynda warms up her lips, Carol warms up her fingers, reviewing technical terms from a manual on her lap without yet knowing what news she’s been called to impart.


On cue, Lynda begins:
She blushes. This is what she always says after announcing the weather. But not what I meant to say today, she reminds herself.

She tries again, with more focus:

She blushes again, looking away from the camera. The lights are burning her facial surgery scars. She feels as if she’s in surgery now. She wants to scratch where it itches but presses her fingers into the underside of her desk instead, envying Carol’s fingers’ spidery freedom.

Everyone in town, including Ronnie who’s trying hard to glean his wife’s meaning, presses closer to their TV.

Lynda’s jaw is hanging open now, a thread having come undone with the effort of breaking this unprecedented news.
she sputters, a blackish fluid dripping down her chin. 

She grips the sheet with the words Natural Methadone River Found tightly in her fist, crumpling it. She squints so hard her contact lenses break.


Grabbing the sheet just before it’s ruined, Carol decides to take action: at least she will sign the news to her husband, so that it will make it out of the studio before being lost forever – as if the sheet with those words printed on it were the only proof that the news is true.

SO SHE TAKES IT UP

as Lynda rushes out of the room and begins making the hand gestures to send the message, her sign language rusty and increasingly improvised.
4:35am

RONNIE IS NOT THE ONLY DEAF ONE IN TOWN.

In a storage locker on Rt. 5, the Dodge City Golems are also awake, their TV having likewise come alive with the news.

Usually bored by the repetitive nature of human affairs, the sign language now rivets their clay eyes.



They swivel to face the screen, shaking off a cloud of dust that flutters to fill their enclosed space.


Carol’s hand gestures entrance them: they don’t read sign language, but something in the way she’s moving casts a spell. It stirs them into a lusty frenzy, awakening a centuries-dormant itch at their cores.

Though androgynous, they suddenly yearn to breed. They never before saw their deaths approaching and now it seems they’re almost here.

Deep Golem-instinct, unfelt since the time of their parents, directs them toward the school, where the Teaching Genitals for Human Growth & Change class are kept.

Soon they’re on the move, their clay supple with reproductive fluid, the door of their storage locker hanging wide open.
4:52am

WHEN THEY BREACH

the school’s periphery, an alarm goes off, waking the children and calling them running in their pajamas and robes.


The children have done drills to prepare for this. Their teacher warned them that Genitals can activate at any time; it’s a natural part of the burden that everyone shares and all anyone can do is be ready.
So they tear into the school and take up hammers, drills, and screwdrivers, grabbing all the sets of Male and Female Teaching Genitals from the Human Growth & Change closet as the Golems burst in.

Above the tool cabinet hangs a sign that reads:

YOU CAN’T CONTROL WHAT YOU ARE BUT YOU CAN CONTROL WHAT YOU DO.

They pound and gouge the anatomical rubber as the Golems, fully in heat, their clay cracking, tear them from the children’s hands and affix them to their neutral groins.
Things turn quickly to chaos. The children keep smashing while the Golems attempt to couple on the lab tables. The still-howling alarm only adds to the pandemonium.
The Golems cluster into tight twos and some threes, unperturbed by the damage done to their midsections, not even aware of it.
The children know they’re beat. They weren’t fast enough, though perhaps no amount of violence would’ve kept the Golems from having their way with what was left.
Done with what they could do, they remove their safety goggles to watch the Golems rut, having learned that, in the course of nature, new Golems will be born.









5:46 am

DEFEATED BUT PROUD OF THE EFFORT THEY MADE, 

the children put down their tools and, helpless not to admire one another in their pajamas and robes in the rising sun, process out of the school, having decided en masse to take the day off.
The ambulance carrying an almost-faceless Lynda speeds by as they head toward Culvert City to ask Rib what’s going on after getting some Gushers at ULTRA MAX, where, as always, the naked man stands in the oil aisle waiting to be tackled by cops that, for once, aren’t coming.