Once again, I’d like to discuss my proposal that we formally abolish the Nuclear Family. There was a brief window in history where this arrangement made sense; but each passing year demonstrates that it’s increasingly untenable. It’s a toxic, patently artificial construct, and it’s slowly destroying our society. Whatever nostalgic attachment we have to this can’t continue to elide the fact that every time. Every single time the Fitzsimmons uncork that stupid hermetically-sealed lead-lined bunker they “live” in and crawl out to try and live like people do, the collateral damage is enormous.
Our lawns are barren at the corners where their 2.5 kids cut across in their rush to get to the playground, which, incidentally, FEMA has informed us won’t be usable by humans for about 10,000 years- which would in turn be a real problem if local childhood leukemia rates weren’t holding at a steady 97 percent, for some mysterious reason. You can tell when Ms. Fitzsimmons has just gotten done at the grocery store from the slew of half-dissolved clerks and stockboys draped over every surface, collapsed backwards into once-pristine displays of cans, the shift manager hanging out of the half-donned radiation-suit-turned-body-bag she wasn’t able to get into in time, all of their molten, unwound DNA leeching out of their pores and mingling with the scattered, trampled produce. Mr. Fitzsimmons made a surprise appearance at league night; I’d heard rumors he was thinking about coming, So I’d double layered myself in radiation suits done up in the colors of my league team, the Flailing Wildcats. But none of the other teams stood a snowball’s chance in hell. In his last moments of lucidity before his eyes ran out of his head, Don Cadwell got off a couple shots with the illegally owned rifle he kept behind the shoe return, but Fitzsimmons, like always, was able to reflexively refocus the intensity of his ground-zero emanation effect to mostly vaporize the projectile, with only a few loose drops of superheated metal speckling his flaccid, rubbery skin and running down it like tears.
So the two of us stood there, me limply holding my lucky striker bowling ball as the other three members of the wildcats voicelessly writhed and puttered out around me, staring through two tawny-orange, clouded panes of plexiglass at this distorted figure of our collective unconscious, this Levittown-reject atomic afterbirth standing guilelessly confident in his infuriating, calcified pastiche of mid-century masculinity, cob pipe clenched between ramrod-straight teeth, hair sculpted like wax fruit, sweater-vest and button-down shirt infuriatingly crisp. And I felt my breath, hot on my own face, as he looked at me in turn, his face locked into a vacuous idiot grin plagiarized from Rockwell. He released a heartly-delivered, vapid loop of canned, inaudible small talk from between his teeth, oblivious to the withered limbs clutching plaintively at his slacks as he approached the ball return. He looked at me with those eyes that aren’t eyes, how could they be eyes, eyes wouldn’t survive residency in his head- he looked at me with the inhuman substitute eyes the doctors had put into him, housed in substitute flesh suited to the inhabitant of the only future his bitter, desperate makers could entertain. And as I stared at him I felt a depth of hatred I didn’t know I was capable of, a hatred that would be monstrous if directed at a feeling person, a hatred that you can only direct in good conscience at an idea. And what was he, if not an idea. If not the idea of a man who was once called Simon Fitzsimmons, if not the idea of the world to come, the world that we thought we deserved, the world we thought deserved him.
And in that moment, I resolved that in the name of a world worth living in, I would bowl against him to the last so that he wouldn’t win the tournament by default. But then he kicked my ass because it turns out you can’t bowl for shit wearing fifty pounds of plastic and lead. It drapes weird and you can’t keep a grip on the ball. Thank you for your time.
