truth

Keith was a small person. He was an eight year old person at

the time of his smallness, and at some point during the eighth

year of his life he traveled, with his family, to the capital of

the United States. They saw many lovely and emotionally rousing

sites: the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and the

Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Be it now said that the Bureau

of Engraving and Printing had ominous effect on neither Keith nor

his brother nor his mother nor his handsome father with the

bright toothed smile.

But it should have.

Keith and his family entered the Bureau, the four of them, in

the heat of midday and joined a long queue, which led to a

security checkpoint, much like the ones most of us have witnessed

at the airport. Keith, being young, naïve, eager, impatient,

eager and lovely in both feature and personality, decided to pass

the time by playing with his toys, in particular a doll by the

name of Fetch Armstrong. (Fetch Armstrong, for those of you who

are uncultured, knuckle-dragging heathens, is a small stretchable

dog doll.) Keith pulled and twisted his dog doll and easily

avoided the monotony of queue life. Hurrah.

When Protagonist Keith reached the front of the line he

slapped his toy, Fetch Armstrong, down on the x-ray machine’s

conveyor belt and strolled gallantly through the metal detector.

What a confident boy. Then Keith heard the words that would, for

an hour or so, change his eight-year-old life.

"Hey, Keith" Keith’s brother called with all the compassion he

could muster, "Fetch is dead! HA!"

And Fetch was dead. This was of immediate

consequence to Keith, in whose supple young eyes Fetch had ever

been alive. Perhaps, Fetch was now running around a stretchable

farm in elastic heaven, thought Keith through his tears. Perhaps,

Keith, perhaps. But the only concrete information anyone had at

the time was of Fetch Armstrong’s unfortunate body, which had

snapped and exploded, covering the insides of the x-ray machine

in thick, sticky goo. Security guards and queue members tried to

clean the goo out, scraping it away with credit cards, and wiping

it up with paper towels, but with little success. So the security

checkpoint was closed for the afternoon and terrorist after

terrorist, white, black, brown, yellow, tall, short, thin, fat,

man, boy, woman, girl walked into the Bureau of Engraving and

Printing without notice, thanking our young protagonist as they

passed. Thank you, Keith, thank you.

A Letter to Santa from Noah

Cruickshank

Dear Santa,

During the course of this year I, Noah Cruickshank, have been

a very good boy. I apologize for never having written to you

before. Please do not think that my lack of my communication is

at all indicative of an absence of belief on my part. To the

contrary, I simply have lived by the philosophy: "waste not, want

not". I recognized then that you, Santa, did not want to be an

agent of crass materialism and thus I withheld writing for all

those years so as not to abuse your awesome generosity.

More to the point: where I sleep it is very dark. There is

acid and bile everywhere and it smells like fish. These are

inadequate quarters for one as dignified and goodly as I, Noah

Cruickshank. The walls quiver, the floor shakes, never a moment’s

peace, never even a brief respite. To clarify, I live in the

cavernous body of a whale.

And so I write to you, Mr. Nicholas, in order to request a

United States Navy nuclear submarine and several torpedoes. If

you deem me worthy of such a gift I would greatly appreciate

it.

Forever Yours,

Noah Cruickshank

P.S. For the love of God, I’m being eaten alive