The Refrigerator Awakes

As it approached midnight and I slumbered in what was proclaimed to be an electronic graveyard, the announcement slithered out of the fiber optic like a spirit ascending from a tomb. The president was unhappy with the measures taken and they were to be undone immediately. The minister in charge joined the chorus of the unemployed and not a sound was to be heard as they stared into the zombie night.

After less than twenty-four hours, Nabokov’s fabled refrigerator had won. The people in the streets held placards and demanded their rights in vain. The refrigerator took on the comandante with a “rumble and shudder and crackle and pound” until capitulation was the only common ground.

With the stroke of a pen, the “dichlordisomethingmethane” had been banished from the valleys and hills of mystic Teresa’s haunting ground and as quickly as the exile occurred, open arms welcomed it back and an apology was heard. A government in denial that has spent 11 years falling off the wagon, admitted that it is powerless to the “wide-open white god,” and embraced a multi-step program to rectify its challenge to the looming dragon.

Life is again back to normal in little Venice’s capital while the people of the woodlands and snakes pay the price for our self-indulgent consumption. The narcissists on both sides of the spectrum have forged an alliance to make sure that when the bubble bursts the last bulb, in the city with Oranje disease, will flicker until it is seen “collapsing at last in the criminal night.”