A FAIRY-TALE

(This fairy-tale was not stolen from Gwen Lawson.)

There once lived a alley-peasant-princess in the Kingdom of Realphlippers. As was the custom, peasants were forbidden from having any dealings with the Flippers of Realphlippers, whether up in their shiny glass towers or down in their shiny glass carriages. So, instead, the alley-peasant-princess scrounged the alleyways and Starblast trash bins for Flipper-touched art-ifacts, tech-ifacts, nutr-ifacts. These trifling tokens called to her, spoke of another lifetime-space – a dreamy life above and beyond her dank ensuitement-base.

One fateful day, from atop his glass slippers King-Chief Seniorpartner caught the alley-peasant-princess ogling an electrical engineer who'd come to her favourite alley to fix the neighbouring tower’s dis-faulty broadest-band. This so enraged the King-Chief he ran into the alley and destroyed the girl’s standing collection of middling-class thrown-away treasure-tripe. “This is who-how you is-are-am! Why dream of a more you will never be-have?” he said as he crushed her not-belongings underfoot while gesturing at the tower’s thrice-lacquered, twice-gold plated ever-bored-room. He bent down, pinching a tattered copy of Neo-Nylon Maga-zine between three fingers and, shaking it wildly, proclaimed “You are not this!”

Overcome, the alley-peasant-princess cried out, “No! I so love that-this! I wish-dream to be an English Major with a partially incomplete Minor in Post-Reconstructionist Denouement Studies!” Her not-father gasped and banished her from the not-street.

Late that night, she procured a nip of the wi-fis (exposing her whole-life, her credit-history, and her genitals to a quarter-million data contractors) and made it to the on-line. There she enacted a life-debt with the Student-Loan Witches – trading mere poverty for the most debilitating of non-dischargeable ever-debt. She would transition to the above-ground and live, a full-mask, amongst the middlest-crass. She would, with delight and pride, Major in Olde-English and Minor in Ahistorical Antipathy. Joy!

Away at school, in a fore-feign fiefdom colloquially referred unbeknownst as The Gru, she fell help-hopelessly in love with the university’s dis-literary under-review maga-zine. She alone saved it from certain debt-death by producing a super-successful non-homoerotic bake sale and empowerment calendar. As graduation approached, she planned to be the writiest writer and grew to accept the hole-truth that her happiness was here-to-forever secured.

Though deep-loving the pub-lashing industry, it abandoned her completely and entered into polyandrous non-marriage with the sex-cat-superhighway. She tried to get on-board, yet the hybrid digi-outlets only offered a non-negotiable, three-hour, for-exposure un-contracts. She, as tragically as a Hans-Christian-Methodist-Hexacostal, starved to death within a few short months.

(Actually, she, our Proust-tagonist actually became a re-con-ceptionist at a local, flare-trade, arts-boutique – working for the streetz-creditz and three-quarters sweet-bachelors' rent – which is quite dearly-nearly as grim-sad. But it could be said that – for a time, between March and June of 2022, when she was affording to eat real-kale (albeit stolen from the petit jardin-communautaire), had a rotating roster of yoga-routine downloadings, and could dream of pinning the hashtags-vanlife to her digi-wall – she was as nearly as happy as two merged half-clambs deep in the under-sand, sucking on the brines and filtering silty mercury-mucks. And what more of it is there than this-that?)