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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
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