TOPOLOGY

Sometime last night, the baby mouse died.  I found her clutching the paper towel in the rescue container I'd hastily made.  Maybe I'm at fault-- I shouldn't have intervened; should have just let her hop around franticly in the garage at work, confused and unable to find her way.  Maybe I let her get too cold, or maybe I should have got some Pedialyte-- should have used the dropper to nurse her, but I was unsure. She was the sweetest little creature.  A grey puff with a face on it.  A poor jitter with a tail stuck to it. A somebody.

I couldn't say when things went green. I had my head down all winter, and I never saw it coming.  There is a half-hearted garden outside the car window with a rogue's gallery of spiky grasses and chartreuse bunches of baby leaves.  Baby leaves. Miserable-looking elders huff up the road in some kind of marathon.  I just drive by, arm aching at the wheel.

I stare at the green lights to make sure it's safe. I'm afraid one of these times I'll lapse in attentiveness, and then SLAM-- never see it coming.  I was somewhere else for a moment.  Somewhere beautiful.  Still dreaming.  Everyone says that what you focus on, you attract. The thoughts you dwell on, you make them come true. It doesn't seem to work for me, because certain people haven't dropped dead yet. I guess I'm not straining hard enough at the wishing thing. Maybe wishing is like taking a shit. Wish in one hand... no difference, really.

The Game Genie suddenly plops into existence behind my car parked in the driveway. Jagged yellow pixellated lightning rotates and scales around a purple halo of intertwined dicks, pumped to full boners. They look like huge worms, choking and slurping, and slinking around one another-- a real writhing mass of fleshy jizzing thunder.  The Game Genie is all green, a musclebound wrestler floating the lotus above a gilded cusion-- you know, exactly how a genie is supposed to do.

"NAME THY CHEAT CODE, PATHETIC MORTAL," he bellows.

I dunno.  Maybe the ability to see through ppl's clothes. I realize this isn't an original idea, but I'm not really interested in changing reality all that much. You can never predict the outcome with much accuracy. Everything could go to shit, or decohere, causing some kind of spacetime domino cascade disruption, or split into crazily improbable thermodynamic configurations, like friction suddenly ceasing to be a property of matter.  Imagine that shit.

"YOU REALIZE THAT YOU WILL HAVE TO SEE EVERYONE NAKED, RIGHT.  EVERYONE..."  He leans forward a little and looks at me skeptically.

Ehh, yeah, that's a bad idea.  It's a good lesson. Examine your whims-- why do you want that thing on the shelf? That scarf, or that pair of headphones, when you know that getting what you want is the worst thing that can happen, because you never only get what you want, you get all the other problems associated with change. You can't just go around changing one thing at a time.  A whole network of connections shifts with that one instance of obtainment, and then the universe where the desire originated, well, it ceases to be the same universe.

"I would like to cheat death for my little mouse. I want her to have another chance to exist, out in a real prairie-- not in the city. Bring her back to life," I say.

The Game Genie howls, "THAT'S NOT GONNA HAPPEN. BUT I WILL DO WHAT I CAN."

With a clap of his hands like a grenade blast, he nods his massive head, and is sucked back through the vortex of purple dick lightning, which puckers in the air for a second or two, then POP, is gone.

I'm looking at green lights. I'm through the intersection.  I was off, daydreaming again.  Neuronal patterns are like wet constellations in the dark sky of your head.  Remember Escher, remember Hofdstadter.  Remember the black and white fractal shapes of formally reachable and unreachable true statements. All at once, a shift in topology, a little squiggle goes dark.  Like a puff with a face on it.  A memory of Somebody; suddenly, as I press the gas, I'm drawing a blank.