Because the New Yorker Won't Publish It

 *Radio fuzz* Person in custody has been yelling in her front yard in her pajamas. She is in decent hygiene but is displaying an erratic temperament responding to officers effusively. Neighbors made the call when she flipped them the bird for ‘not helping’. I am Officer Mayhew of Precinct 4 and have Stevi Alsdorf in transit to Ben Taub Hospital. She is a Bipolar Schizophrenic; lobotomy patient; over. 

“May I talk to you, officer?” she asked. 

“All right,” said Mayhew. 

“I get that I have the right to remain silent, but every other officer I ever had played music for me or let me talk,” said Stevi. 

“You can talk to me,” Mayhew said. 

“You guys are so kind. Well, this is important. It involves the Supernatural. Do you watch Supernatural?”

“I used to when I was younger,” said Mayhew. “I’ve seen a few episodes.” 

“Well,” said Stevi, “Mary Anne was working in a soup kitchen in Philadelphia feeding the homeless. I’m tempted to say ‘doing homeless outreach’ but they don’t really use terms like that out there in Gomorrah.”

Mayhew turned down the radio, which had been tuned to the country station.

“You see, when Jesus went to judge, he went ahead and gave Sodom to the Imperial overlords and Roman tax collectors he couldn’t win over. Out there, he has changed hearts. Here in Sodom, those who believe do it for organization. We do not particularly care for miracles being real or true. We give up on Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy once we’re potty trained and begin growing in our adult teeth and our ideals of what miracles even are become convoluted into lies and mistruths for fun or capital gain.”

Mayhew remained silent. 

 

“I worked off my community service hours in a soup kitchen doing proper homeless outreach on Galveston Island. Admittedly, I finished them at Goodwill back in Houston and now I know where the rejected articles of clothing really go–yes, to Gomorrah! I saw Mary Anne and her father and their fellowes on a religious documentary on FreeVee, a television streaming app using my Kindle Fire stick. I find myself wondering if they have such luxuries out there,” Stevi mused. 

“ It seems to me that they are far more tolerant and open minded individuals there. While they lack the level of organization we have here, I did not see many overweight people in that documentary. I believe they do not face the same oppression from evil that we do in Sodom.”

“What kind of oppression from evil, do you mean?” Mayhew gandered. 

“We have long been subjected to eating human flesh, indeed for more capital gain of unsavory organizations who are racially intolerant and have radical belief systems, like the Knights of Columbus. Like I worked at the Waffle House and drove through the town of Columbus and it only said SMITHFIELD on the regular green road sign NOT Smithfield Farms in the curly-cue font like on the menu!” she huffed, her lungs running low on empty breathwise. 

“I heard without seeing evidential proof that their organization has filed bankruptcy eight times since their inception in the 1940s. I don’t know why the Catholic church lets them do their fish frys. They’re anti-smeitic AND anti-Catholic and they wear their weird hats and leer at people.” She took a breath. “I think the tilapia is the portion of the arm from the elbow to the wrist and that they flay it out and soak it in bleach and chlorine and run some Tony Chateries on it!” 

“Jesus won’t let the bad people be out there. Sodom makes sure people of pomp and circumstance are all here plus some slaves. They warp our understanding economically into a sense of righteousness involving a strong work ethic leading to having all we need, but it’s mainly folks being smart with the money they have pre inherited. 

The National Guard is killing Haitians and other ‘illegal immigrants’ who have crossed the border and turning them into foodstuffs. A lot of new food chains that spring up are actually human flesh, such as P Terry’s and Bojangles. The longest standing franchised cannibalism to my knowledge is Shipley’s Donuts. Why do we waste such good donuts on such atrocious kolaches? Money and hate. Impure and dibasic.” 

 

“You see, I’ve figured out cancer. “It’s all inflammation” I’ve heard tell. Well, bone is all phosphorus. Phosphorus is in fact a magical gas from outer space comprising stars and heavenly bodies. It could be said that the stars are the cloth we are all cut from. On Earth it becomes bone during our so-called corporeal existence, both here and there. Read a can of Coke or Texas favorite, Dr. Pepper. Know that our bile is basic and that it causes the formerly dissolved human bone to resolidify into what we know as gallstones or kidney stones as a product of digestion, or lack thereof. You see, our bodies do not know what to do with that foreign matter not meant for our fluids and tissues and organs to process. That isn’t what causes the cancer though. The acid compromises our tissues and damages red blood cells and the sugar makes the blood cells toxic and the toxic sugar coupled with the acid makes tissues become inflamed; our bodies end up behaving as if we are very ill and produce more white blood cells, which make up the masses we know as tumors. Organs fail.”

 

“I wish Jesus and the Djinn could eradicate this issue and that His holy spirit who checks on us in this world could maybe bridge the gap between here and there. Mary Anne is my sister and her father is part of my father. He is a saint. He said something in a family therapy session that I later learned in Philosophy class Saint Augustine had said–something to the effect that there was a void in me where I was lacking some kind of a belief in a higher power. Well, I don’t anymore. Jesus is real. Krishna isn’t him. He’s a friend too though. The djinn are effectively the Transformers and since this is real life, I can’t make this into a better narrative. Maybe I’m not really much of a storyteller. I just want to let others know what I know and I’m tired of relying on the Internet. I long to forge a healthy connection between Sodom and Gomorrah, as limited as my understanding currently is. I mean, we have Guardians of the Galaxy for crying out loud! Shouldn’t our children have a real grasp on what that even means?”

“I like those movies,” said Mayhew. 

 

“Me too but anyway, saints lead a sort of double life, their wisdom dwelling here and their youthful work boot oriented selves out there in the fields, fighting for their meals so to speak in the ‘Baba O’Reilley’-esque teenage wasteland Jesus made clear of all us rich assholes for them. So my dad is that person there and just watched the O’Reilley factor on Fox News here and saw The Who live back in 1980 and also in 2014 at the Toyota Center (my little sister had got us tickets).”

 

“I am not a perfect person, Hoobastank. I really don’t know why I’d been yelling at my mother out on the back porch in 2017 but Lord knows it wasn’t her fault I was doing it wrong and she didn’t deserve that at all. I’d been shouting at her, specifically why escapes me, egoistic self-preservation making me forget no doubt, when I see a flash of a big black bug and feel it bore into my left ear, forcing me to scream “bloody murder”. The pain made me cut my shit really, now I think of it. I will likely never know why I'd been angry that day, beyond a big picture understanding of my own frustration about my life I’d been blaming on my parents. I’m a mental health patient, diagnosed schizoaffective at a fancy rehab center my mom had spent a chunk of her retirement fund sending me back in 2011. I’d decided to resent her even for that, believing she had wasted her money on me that she could have spent on herself and thereby denying her love and care for who I am. I thought I should have been able to live my own life without them controlling me or keeping me from doing so.”

 

“The big black bug was a Transformer,” she proclaimed. “The djinn showed me the error of my ways, a la The Ghosts of Christmas showing Mr. Scrooge in ‘a Christmas Carol’. They brought my better sentiments to the forefront of my mind. I’m always experiencing these startling revelations now. I’m selfish in nature. I’m admitting it because I’ve kept this all in and I know I need to share it.” 

“ I had a mentor, a retired doctor from New York who had this saying, ‘If it makes sense, buy it–if not, throw it in the trash.’ I hope you don’t just throw this in the trash. I hope if you think I have an ability to spin this into a narrative that you’ll let me edit it. I’ll allow anyone who understands and considers this validation to adapt these concepts into better stories if they wish. I just don’t know how to really while remaining direct and to the point. This isn’t really a short story. It’s a personal testimony. It’s about the actuality of colloquialisms like, “but that’s neither here nor there” and “taking it on the other side” like the Red Hot Chili Peppers song.”

“Here’s a storyline for you though. When I was about five I heard my mom and dad fighting through the wall. The ‘D’ word was said and my dad said something like, “Well I’ll take Stevi to New York and you can keep Carly” or vice versa. Years later, my dad had declined watching a Nicholas Cage movie, sort of sneeringly and when I asked him why he hated him, he responded, “Well, I don’t really hate him, he just has a face I’d like to punch.” I’d had dreams of being on the ward in New York City as a little girl and the truth is that my sister, whom I have a corporeal connection with, had been murdered there. Having made mental contact with the part of my dad who is out there, I now realize, and so do the djinn, that they had simply confused me with her. She was reincarnated in 1993. Biggie Smalls had found her body and reported her dead personally, but she’d really been killed by Armenians. There’s a movie where Nick Cage is an ambulance driver, the title escapes me, but it’s a rendition of what had occurred there. We are all witting of the “Quamputa” as alleged in the Black Mirror episode, ‘Joan is Awful.’ We see these true to life tales play out in made for TV dramas day in and day out now. Try to deny it.”

“It has Salma Hayek in it,” laughed Mayhew. 

“Exactly,” said Stevi. “I was born in ‘89 having been conceived in Roswell, NM where my mom and dad stopped and camped while visiting my uncle who had been stationed there for Operation Desert Storm, which was a CIA program to test the efficacy of HAARP’s electromagnetic field. Turns out, I’d died in 1975 trying to get a Ford Fairlane home from the ocean front property in Arizona; the nature of our consciousness being all positron, I’d led a fourteen-year-long afterlife where I’d been Louise as in Thelma.”

 

“Good Grief,” said Mayhew. 

“I’ve bargained with the djinn to only send out the part of my mother who knows her original daughter and to let me keep her past-life consciousness for my own mother here. She was Amelia Earhart. She’s a narcoleptic, having been a pilot and the only person I’ve ever known to be able to fall asleep with a cup of coffee in her hand and not drop it. She loves George Strait and I am indeed George Strait’s own mother. He was only four years old when I died. All this and more has been revealed to me. For instance, I’d been fifth runner up in the Miss America 1967-68 pageant and been knocked out of the top five for poor conduct having gone off on the organizers for disallowing me to read ‘Paradise Lost’ for my talent, which I’d backdated 300 years and penned a man’s name on having copied the styling of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. In fifth grade, one kid who’d been in my same class since kindergarten, who’d been rumored to be Geroge’s nephew, but come to find out, is really his son from his second marriage, told me that he knew I’d been his grandma. He recognized me from photos. Would you believe Taylor Swift herself is Thelma and the only evidence I have is her being precisely one week older than me. I found a YouTube video that said George’s firstborn had perished at age fourteen.”

Mayhew shook his head. “We’re just about there,” he said. 

“Ok well this is my real point I want you to consider,” she spoke more slowly and importantly. “Sodom is indeed a magical land. We are all well aware of it here. Miracles are different from magic though. I think miracles involve some form of sentimentality coupled with awareness. I think faith and magic both have to do with devotion rendering us safe from despair. I think magic is used mainly for evil and only a bit of good ever came of it. I think it could be used for more good than evil though as a Harry Potter fan.”

“All right Ms. Alsdorf, take care of yourself,” said Mayhew as he opened the door of the cruiser. 

 “Thank you,” said Stevi in a rush “and I am now aware this piece is more of a call to action than it is a cognizantly non-narrative or mere testimony now. I hear ‘The New Yorker’ is read in both worlds. I need the cannibalism to end. We need to end slavery too. You know, working forty hours a week should render workers able to afford a roof over their head and a vehicle and phone and I don’t know how they can afford to raise kids, having now worked in the service industry a good deal. Krishna told me there is intentionally an allotment of slaves in Sodom.”

“Stay on your meds this time,” winked Mayhew. 

“Use your magic to find out and protect yourself, using spiritual gifts promised to believers in the Bible, such as discernment when it comes to managing your understanding of good and evil, officer! People flinch at tongue-speaking but you just may be able to speak an antiquated language you weren’t aware of if you focus and believe.”

The orderly took a firm grip on her wrist and led her towards the hospital’s intake unit.

“‘ Dava dola sano dala.’ God loves you.” I shouted.