I. the world after miralon

Page Five

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So that’s my world, and a great big welcome to it. My brother and I, and scads of other kids, have grown up knowing that we still have to eat to live (the scientists haven’t squirmed a way out of that one yet), but eating can be a darned tricky business. We’ve never had potatoes, because every single potato plant in the world mutated. People stopped eating them. People are pretty silly most of the time, but most of them did stop eating spuds. No mashed or baked, no hash browns and no fries. Everything we know about the tasty tuber we’ve learned from our parents or internet books. And no brussels’ sprouts either, because they all went and mutated into certain death too. But except for some loopy old people in Belgium, nobody’s very sad about the brussels’ sprout. But our parents sure do miss the humble potato.

But there’s one things that gives nearly every single human being the crying shames, and that one thing is the guavagranate. You can figure out by yourself that it’s another scientist’s hocus-pocus that crossed a guava with a pomegranate to get something new for the bored human tastebuds.  The guavagranate is the most popular food on the whole darned spinning planet, and people practically worship the bevy of botanists who’d gone gaga over the new hybrids they could twiddle with genetic fiddling, and came up with the GG. This beloved fruit appeared on the earth-scene about the same time as our old buddy Miralon, and it was a best-seller practically overnight. People bought them and ate them  like they were going out of style, and the grocers were running around like hamsters in wheels trying to keep enough of them on the shelves.

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read…    Being toward death…    Spite and malice…

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

I. the world after miralon

Page Four

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note: please read and follow http://www.pygmiesdancing.wordpress.com, not braonthree.

This time the scientists did what they hadn’t done the first time. This time they stop and go home when they found out the Australian lady’s potatoes were poisonous, no siree. Instead, they kept on testing until they found out why the spuds were deadly. And then they compared their stuff to all the stuff about Jimmy Johnson’s potatoes, and they had the answer. Everything was exactly the same. And the reason, by gum,  that potatoes in Oklahoma and their cousin potatoes in Australia were turning up poisonous was Miralon.

Yup, it was Miralon, the erstwhile savior of humanity that had up and changed its little chemical mind and decided to kill us all off, one by one, spud by spud. It was causing some of fatso Mother Earth’s plants to mutate, and the mutation made the plant proteins so deadly that even cooking them didn’t help.

First it was spuds, and then peanuts, and then wheat, and it all just kept going. Not many people died right away after they ate the poisoned food. Most of them would be sick for a week, or three weeks, or even three months sometimes. The sickness was awful. It made people’s mouth glands salivate so much that their mouths couldn’t hold it all, and the extra spittle would come spilling out the sides. That’s why everyone started calling the sickness the Drools, even though it was really called  Fatal Systemic Toxic Cell Destruction. There were lots of other symptoms that were a whole lot worse than the drooling, but I guess the sickness got its nickname so fast because the spittle was something you could see on the outside, while all the other nasty suffering happened on the inside.

My sweet-cute Papa was sixteen when Jimmy Johnson bit the big one. He and Mama told me and Gammo all about it when we were young. They showed us disks of all the news shows, and that’s how I know about Jimmy’s walking-dead Mama and the Aussie lady’s birthday bash. They also told us that the members of the hotsy-totsy science club named this vegetable roulette the Miralon Mutation. Nothing very fancy or hard to understand about that name. Right to the old point: Miralon was mutating plants, and at that moment the scientists didn’t know that every plant on earth would change, but in the end, they all did.

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read…    Sehnen…     Scealta liatha

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

I. the world after miralon

Page Three

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note: please read and follow http://www.pygmiesdancing.wordpress.com, not braonthree.

Two years went by. The plants produced and the people ate. Heaven was up (if you buy that sort of stuff), hell was down, and all was right with the world. Until one fine day, little Jimmy Johnson from someplace in Oklahoma, died. He died from a poisonous baked potato his Mama had fed him for supper three nights before. It took the the science people a while to figure it all out, but that’s what it was. Then they tested the rest of the potatoes left in his Mama’s bag and found out that some of them were deadly, and some of them weren’t. That’s how come nobody else in Jimmy’s family died: on the big roulette wheel of life,  Jimmy was the only one at the table who’d spun the poisoned potato.

They showed his Papa on the computer show. I wish it was me, I wish it was me, he kept saying. His Mama stood there like the walking dead. Finally she told the interviewer (she talked like the walking dead too) to go fry his ass. She nobody out there knew how it felt to poison your baby when you were only trying to feed him a good supper so he’d grow up big and strong. Eat your potatoes, Jimmy, she’d told him, and you’ll grow up big and strong. He was a good boy. He did what I told him. Now he’s dead as a rat. Go fry your ass.

The world talked about Jimmy for a few days, and then it just went about its usual silly business for nine days more. New and improved fatso Mother Earth turned around and around without anybody caring too much about one poisoned potato and one dead boy.

And then somebody else died. Way over in Australia. A lady with ten kids ate homemade potato pancakes for breakfast one day and was dead a week later. She died on her fortieth birthday. They’d had her on the computer news that morning, right before she died. She was lying in the bed with tubes and machines, trying to smile for the camera, which seems to me like a stupid thing to do when you’re dying of potato pancakes. Anyway she tried to smile. Her family were all around her, wearing dopy party hats and hanging onto pink and yellow balloons that had Happy Birthday Mum written on them. A few hours later she was history. Her husband had grown those Aussie potatoes all by himself right there on their own Aussie land. All of a sudden, he had ten kids with no mother. And all of a sudden, little Jimmy J. from Oklahoma was big news again.

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read…     Braonwandering…     Neverending solitaire…

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

I. the world after miralon

Page Two

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note: please read and follow http://www.pygmiesdancing.wordpress.com, not braonthree.

So my name is Hema, and I’m living in the world after Miralon. Miralon came along before I was born, while my Papa was a kid. In fact, the whole world was washed with Miralon only two years after my father’s happy tonsillectomy, which means that he was a lad of twelve at the time.

There was a very nasty food shortage in those days, and it was all over the planet. So the most la-di-da botanists and chemists from all over the world got together to form a sort of super-duper science club to come up with a way to make plants and trees produce more food. They made this club when Pa was a little shaver of five, but it took seven more years for them to have Miralon ready to spray. At the end of those seven years, they had it. Marvelous, magical Miralon. Miralon would make plants produce two to three times as much stuff as they really liked to produce. There would be more vegetables and fruits, more grains and nuts and what-have-you for everybody. And Miralon was safe. No plants or animals or people would get hurt. Humanity was happy. Miralon would save them all.

Little by little, the whole of big old plumpy Mother Earth was sprayed with the potion of the super-duper science club. The hungriest countries were the first ones to get doused, since that seemed like the fair thing to do. After that, all the other countries got their turns. Then everyone sat back and waited. Waited for reports to trickle into the main office of the super-duper science club. Reports about the rice harvests, and the soybean harvests, and all the other harvests of all the other edible plant stuff all over everywhere. And the news was hopping, flaming good: Miralon did make the plants produce a lot. A whole lot. And for a long time, things seemed just dandy.

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read…   Mugsy’s Book…    Lifelines…

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

I. the world after miralon (1)

Page One

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I’m Hema. Gabbalin is the rest of my name, the second part. Hema Gabbalin, when you jam it all together. It’s an unusual name, I’ve been told, and I suppose that’s most likely true. At least I think it’s as true as anything can be.

I came to have this unusual name because my father is a man in love. His first love happened to him when he was ten years old and sitting on a doctor’s table, tapping at his little teeth with an antique wooden tongue depressor while the doctor talked away at my grandma. The doctor was telling her that Papa was definitely not going to get any healthier unless he had a tonsillectomy, which was a pretty ancient sort of procedure, but still the best thing for tonsils as junky as Papa’s were. And it was when he heard that monster of a word that my little dad fell head over heels in love with medical lingo for the rest of his days. Which, by the way, are still going on. He’s not dead.

By the time my brother and I came mewling and prune-wrinkled into this world, Papa had got himself a very large collection of medical books. Old ones, made out of paper and ink. He’d memorized nearly every monster-word in them, not giving a fig about the pictures or the diseases or the cures: he only had eyes for the words.

As a lucky perversion of fate would have it, he was already blessed (he says) with the second name Gabbalin, which could have come straight out of one of those paper medical books. With half of his love already in place, it was easy as pie for Papa to pick out our first names — even before we were born. Gammo for my brother, Hema for me. And how many times has our sweet-cute Papa told us how it thrills his heart to hear what he wrought. He says all the time that there’s nothing dearer to his ears than to hear some doctor-words echoed so charmingly in his children’s names. To the world we’re Gammo Gabbalin and Hema Gabbalin, but to Papa we will always stand for gamma globulin and hemaglobin, two of his real favorites. To know my Papa is truly to love him.

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read…   Kaikenlainen…   Extemporaneana…

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.