There was a HOLE here
There’s a hole in my house.
a hole, about the size of a walnut.
Just hanging there in space near my bookshelf
I dont know why.
i first noticed it while i was sitting in my chair watching the news.
Watching the woman with the melted plastic doll face smiling at me as she magically transported us live to the latest exciting hostage situation sponsored by McDonalds and Disneyworld where even more people are smiling.
I watched while bullets zipped like flies and bombs rained down on villages and children died smiling, holding Pepsi cans and wearing shirts with the word Nike on them.
ah, everyone smiles.
I was smiling too, because none of it is real when i am sitting in my chair watching the news.
Then suddenly i noticed it,
The hole.
a perfect circle of nothing about the size of a tennis ball, just hanging there in space near my bookshelf
i dont know how i hadn’t noticed it before,
in this day and age the average person doesn’t notice as much about their surroundings as they used to.
i know this because i read it in a magazine, but this hole was slightly disturbing.
like some black cancer that had popped into my world and started to feed on my smiles.
or like in a dream, where the face of one of your friends starts to twist into a configuration of distorted, impossible terror driven totally insane by what he has just seen behind you.
i began to be frightened of the hole.
At first i wouldn’t go near it, but i had to do something.
i dug through my stacks of magazines sitting in a smoky corner hoping that the freshest faces of Hollywood or the brightest politicians could tell me what clothes I should wear that would help me get rid of holes hanging in space in ones living room.
Middle-class single-mother landscaping techniques, teen beauty secrets painstakingly siphoned from the mysteries of the 5th dimension, herbal remedies for the common cold known only to the pygmy tribes of South Africa and alien visitors with large knowing brains.
but nothing on what to do about a football sized hole.
Perhaps it wasn’t so important, since the faces in the magazine were all smiling…
The aliens were smiling too…
and what could be dangerous in a world were so many people were smiling?
even my friends were smiling when they came to see the hole
at least after a little while.
at first they didn’t smile, when they first saw the hole i remember there was screaming and ripped fingernails.
and blood.
Some of them couldn’t breathe
there eyes looked funny.
but i knew that if i smiled it would all go away
and it did
now all my friends are smiling
because they know none of its real
there is a hole in my living room
it takes up most of the wall
there used to be something behind it but, I cant remember what it was.
and it must not be important because everyone is so happy
inside this hole.
Smiling and smiling and smiling…
