April Fools' Day

Over by the cemetery there was a little girl playing at a park by a duck pond and a river and a bamboo patch by three cherry trees pink with flowers.

“Look daddy!” She said. “A crow in the bamboo!”

And the dad came and looked at the bamboo and he saw the crow eating some carrion. They did not see the homeless man who had been sitting in the shade and canopy of the bamboo who was best friends with the crow.

“High ho the carrion crow!” The dad said. “Fowldy roldy riddle told me !”

The crow in the bamboo patch noticed them and looked up from the carrion it had been eating. It could tell right away that something bad was going to happen.

“Is that a man?” Another little girl asked, and that other little girl’s father came over to look and see if there was a man. But the man in the shadow in the bamboo had huddled and crouched into a position under a canopy of hanging leaves so that he was very hard to spot.

“It’s just a crow,” said the other girl’s father. “There is no man.”

A nervous woman who’d been obsessing over her phone on a nearby bench became very apprehensive and asked aloud in an alarming way: “is there a man hiding in the bamboo?!?!?” The man in the bamboo was very afraid so he stayed very still and nobody saw him.

“It’s a duck!” Said a boy who was passing by walking a dog with his mother.

“There’s a crow eating a dead man’s hand!” A wild eyed mentally ill drug addict such as one finds at parks among families and rivers and birds in America said loudly, causing alarm among the general population of the park which amounted to about thirty adults and fifty children who had heretofore been enjoying the great American pastime of the pursuit of happiness but were now startled and confused.

The little girl ran away screaming and all the dads at the park became alarmed and thought there was some kind of emergency. The ducks and geese began to quack and honk and take flight from the water and the redwing blackbirds exploded out of the three cherry trees pink with flowers. The previously placid park had erupted into alacrity and alarm. A white heron took off from the water evacuating a thick lengthy rope of bowel in the process. It was definitely shit but it was also definitely poetic as hell as it fell out of the bird’s ass as it took flight in the reddening dusk. The moms in the park became very worried and gathered their children, corralling them into cars. The children were alarmed but intrigued afraid yet attracted to whatever was going on.

“She’s just a crazy drug addict! There is no dead man’s hand!” One of the dads said.

“It’s a duck!” Said the boy who’d been walking his dog with his mother. “And the drug addict is a transgender!” The boy was very excited, he was sparkling with boyish excitement.

“That’s it,” the crow said. “I’m outta here,” and then the crow took off and flew away and nobody had even noticed that the crow had spoken perfect English as the man in the bamboo had taught it over the past two years.

“Raymond!” The boy’s mom shouted. “Be quiet!” The dog began to bark and get worked up. There were sirens in the distance and a loon flew over the scene ululating weirdly in the pastel spring dusk of the first day of April over the cherry trees pink with flowers.

The dads somehow managed to simmer down and now they congregated and conferred in a gazebo across the parking lot from the river and the bamboo patch and they were talking about what was going on.

“I’m not a drug addict!” The crazy drug addict said. But she had scabs and berry marks all over her face and body and was holding a cigarette lighter in one hand and some aluminum foil in the other. “There’s a dead body in the fucking bamboo patch and somebody needs tocall the cops!”

“I’m a cop!” One of the dads said as he left the other dads to check the patch and bring some much needed peace and social order to the situation. “Where’s the body?”

“In the bamboo!” The crazy lady with the scabs said, pointing at the bamboo.

“There’s a dead hand duck in the bamboo?” One of the moms asked loudly before taking another big slurp of wine from her “water” bottle.

“There’s a dead man stuck in the bamboo?!?!?” Cried another worried mother, waving her hands around in the air agitatedly.

“Dead fuck in the bamboo!” The crazy drug addict lady cried as she fled the park never to return flailing her arms and screaming at the pink cherry sky.

“There are little girls in this park!” One of the dads shouted, enraged and vigilant as a dad might be around a little girl and a dead body.

“I think I might be transgender!” The little boy said as he watched the crazy drug lady flee the park, transfixed by her weirdness and frenzy.

“Raymond!” The boy’s mom shouted.

“It’s Ramona! I’m Ramona!” The boy said, turning into a girl.

The conference of dads became wary and the moms all corralled the children to their cars.

The man who had been sitting in the shade of the bamboo patch did not know what to do. He had been conversing with the crow who was his friend. He didn’t have a lot of human friends because he didn’t fit in in society. He’d been sexually abused as a child and was dangerously intelligent and very eccentric and strange and preferred the company of plants and animals to that of people and he didn’t know what to do. He was sitting in a shadow under a leafy canopy and nobody had seen him. No one ever saw him in life in general. He was invisible to everyday people at the park even though he lived there and they were just visiting. His last girlfriend had been transgender.

“Raymond!” The mom cried out loud. Then she noticed one of the other moms trying to film them with her camera and she cried out and ran at her. “Put that fucking phone away!”

“I heard there’s a guy who lives in the bamboo,” one of the dads said to the other dads. One of the moms over by the cars overheard him and told the other moms and the moms and the kids all began murmuring and rustling like trees full of birds when the wind passes through in the night.

“I don’t trust that guy,” another man said.

“Let him be Ramona,” one of the moms said.

“Let ~her~ be Ramona one of the other moms said, correcting the other mom and sparking an argument over pronouns that would last decades.

“I’m having anxiety about the situation in Israel with the Gaza Strip!” A young mother cried out, and ran in to the duck pond where she would live the rest of her days as a kind of mythical creature and take a large male swan as a lifemate.

“You really can’t trust that guy around little girls,” said one dad furiously, pounding his fist into his palm. “I seen him lurking in the cemetery!” And all the dads became vigilant and moral. Then all the moms became moral and the children imitated them and acted like the were very moral.

“I bet he gets dead bodies from the cemetery and fucks them in the bamboo patch while the little girls play because he’s a sick freak and that’s how he gets his jollies,” one of the women said. “That is totally inappropriate in a post me-too cultural landscape!” She cried, running off into the actual landscape never to return as a flock of geese honked over a soft cherry tree sky.

“There’s a weird guy in the bamboo and the duck left,” Ramona said, and suddenly everyone became quiet and intense and the dads felt the need for dynamic action and the creation of certainty and civilization. They bristled with fear and fury and formed a huddle and began to mumble and murmur to one another but nobody else could hear what they were saying. The women and children hid in the cars and closed all the doors and watched and listened through the open windows.

The man who had been sitting in the bamboo patch was very worried but he didn’t know what to do so he sat quietly and waited and hoped for the best. The three cherry trees knew that sometimes the springtime brings madness but there’s nothing you can do about that and they continued to be pink and beautiful and true. The dad huddle began to move as one unit toward the patch of bamboo, like a giant sea creature come to take over and devour the land, a throbbing anemone or cephalopod of dads come to save all little girls from all weird guys who fuck dead people forever.

“What are they doing?” Squeaked a mousy mom from a range rover with a big quack lives matter bumper sticker on the door with a picture of a duck who looked like a little black kid. Up in the sky the universe seemed just about ready to tear away and be done with it.

“The guy is fucking dead people in the bamboo!” hollared the cop dad as he burst from the huddle and all the birds in the surrounding trees scattered into the sky and a dark cloud passed over the sun.

“Let it be Ramona,” the dog said. In the frenetic frenzy of it all nobody even noticed that the dog had spoken English. “Just let the kid be Ramona,” the dog sighed wearily, his tongue hanging out in the true pink spring cherry air.

“Leave dead people alone!” A mom cried out from a Subaru full of kids and broken dreams. “Nigger!”

“Why is this guy around little girls?” Another dad shouted, hulking out and storming into the bamboo. And the bamboo shook and shivered and trembled and quaked and then from the ruckus of it the dad came out holding the homeless man who had been in the bamboo by the collar. Venus then became visible in the sky and twinkled her celestial beautificence upon them. The man who had been in the bamboo was absolutely overwhelmed and could not plead his case and the dads began to overpower him.

“You sick freak!” One man cried out, and punched the man in the face while the other men held him and stripped off his clothes. “You animal!” He snarled like a beast.

The man who had been in the bamboo cried out for help and mercy but the dads all beat him until he fell to the ground and then they stomped on him. and some jumped up and down on him like he was an old mattress or something. The women felt sexual arousal at the spectacle of it. Some of the children cheered from the cars.

“He turned Ramona into a faggot!” Said a tense skinny man with a good job and rich parents.

The cop dad took out his gun and unloaded it into the man who had been in the bamboo pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop whereupon several of the moms had orgasms in their cars and one of them who’d been holding her son’s hand squeezed the hand so hard that it hurt the little boy as she shuddered and moaned with a pleasure he would never understand.

“He fucks dead bodies in the bushes!” Said another man, tearing off his shirt and getting down on all fours and putting his face right up against the face of the dead man who had been in the bamboo. He growled furiously: “You sick freak! You necrophile, you cannibal!” And then he thrust his face into the dead man’s neck and bit his throat and shook him like dogs do growling and shuddering with lust. He gnawed with vicious intensity on the neck as another man came around the other side of the body and stripped off his clothes and howled up into the sky before getting on all fours and rutting on the dead man who had been in the bamboo, fucking him violently.

“Take that you sick freak! You monster! You have been hanging around this park and cemetery and fucking dead people in front of all these little girls and cherry trees pink with flowers long enough! I’m going to have you cancelled online!” The other men began to hoot and cheer. Some fondled themselves. Then the cop dad started singing the national anthem of the united states as loud as he could and all the kids got out of the cars and stood in the parking lot with their hands over their hearts and a a few of them even got boners.

And Ramona began to weep and stream live video of her personal experience of this important event on various social network platforms and  now everyone in the world was watching and arguing about Ramona’s pronouns as the one dude literally chewed the man who had been in the bamboo’s head off as the other man continued to rut on the corpse faster and harder and all the moms had orgasms and the kids cheered and the entire thing came to a great terrifying climax as the birds scattered from the trees and out into the sky before the scene in its entirety lapsed damn near instantaneously into the most profound silence that the world has ever known. It was as if all of history and the cosmos and the meaning of everything ever had suddenly culminated in this suburban duck pond rite of spring fiasco after which there could only be nothingness and desolation to the last syllable of recorded time.

All that was left was the dog who looked at the dad who had just shot a huge load of cum into the poor dead homeless man and the dog was like, “hey man, dead lives mattter.”

and finally the merciful night fell down full upon them and plunged everything into absolute dark.