Bar Induced Brain Gas

Who knew it would come to this, except for a few raving televangelists that people had stopped hearing years ago and a handful of disparate theological pundits. I hate to admit it now, but they were right, possibly for the first time in their lives. Seven months and a few days have passed since the first one was born in a hospital somewhere outside Bangladesh in India. Since then thousands more have been born, not counting the ones aborted both professionally and in places where only the devil would feel at home.

They’re all the same. They don’t cry and rarely move. The people who have seen and cared for them say there is an eerie stillness about them and a discomforting similarity at how they stare at you without seeing you. They say they look right through you as though something just beyond you is too bright for them to take their eyes off of.

It’s been reported that at the same time they all begin to coo, or sing in a low almost imperceptible way, some kind of echolocation is the theory, but, if that were the case then why all at once, seemingly oblivious to distance and time zones? It may be echolocation, but it isn’t about finding their proximity to a wall, it’s about finding their proximity to each other.

While all of these things have started to form a sort of zeitgeist of discomfort and fear, everyone seems in agreement that the most disturbing thing is their lack of smell. They give off no odor at all, even when they defecate. The first person to notice this was the mother of the first child born. When they brought the child to her, her first instinct was to smell it, to know it; a deeply entrenched instinct from back in the days of foraging. The moment she realized it had no smell she began to scream and practically threw the child back at the nurse who proffered it. The mother never recovered and later committed suicide with aid of her bed sheets and a handful of laxatives she’d been squirreling away.

A new file on postpartum depression was opened of course and her condition was debated and crossed referenced with a hundred well-known psychology texts. But as the days passed and more of them were born, the debate quickly slid from psychology toward sociology and finally came to an inevitable stop at theology.

That’s where we are now, debating in ever growing circles what had been predicted years before. While not everyone believes the main hypothesis, most in the know do. We’ve run out of Souls.

[© 2006 Greg Bunch - Scribbled at the bar for no real good reason.]