Stalk City

    Mushroom towers filled the sky with chimneys of smoke and spores, they lit up at night and cast shadows on the surrounding sea during the day, outlined with a reflected golden light. Giant aphids leap between them, carrying the working folks to work and the rest elsewhere.

The clouds were made of discarded orange peels left by a careless deity, rainwater dripping from their edges, creating a crystalline curtain at the edges of the mushroom stalk city. On the roof of one particular stalk, a frog puffs on a long, golden pipe, his pupils chasing one another around his head. He is in the midst of having a stroke, but doesn't know it yet. Will he find out any moment now? Will he ever find out?

A small toy followed him throughout his life, leaving bits of its stuffing behind at intervals. One of those now wafted on the breeze in front of his face, and he felt a deep kinship with this lump of stuffing that triggered no memory in his conscious mind, only left him puzzled at this feeling that had overcome him. Both the feeling itself and the resulting puzzlement were immediately erased by his stroke, which ended having done very little damage. His eyes went back straight in his head and he resumed smoking his pipe, admiring his own image reflected in the polished gold, admiring the way the smoke drifted from between his cracked and aging lips. When the wind picked up, it carried waves of dew from the crystalline falls accros the city, leaving a thin film on everything. He took his longest finger and wiped a streak of this moisture off of the pipe, so that he could continue gazing at his own reflection. His moustache had grown long with the years, longer than he ever remembered seeing it before. Long enough to devour him whole if the inclination took it, and he could only trust that it wouldn't, after all the time they had spent together, both good years and bad.
    He got up slowly from his seat on the roof and slid down toward an open window. The dew made this easy, but made ceasing difficult. The bristles on the end of his toes served to grip the window frame and carry him back into his kitchen, where mountains of pots and pans, never cleaned, never considered, never looked at since their use were overtaking all that he held dear. The living room was much kinder, containing by far his favorite rug in the known universe, a rug which he had kept for his entire life for being his favorite and was showng its age just as much as he was, which was now the only thing he loved about it, as all else that had made it great was worn away with time, just as he felt his own best qualities blotted out by wrinkles and callouses, and the many scars stacked upon scars that served as proof of the many experiences he could no longer remember, yet still made him who he was.
    On the wall of this living room, was a spider web, occupying the center of a twine hoop hanging from the ceiling for this very purpose. The spider had long since passed away, but he did his best to preserve the lattice it had woven. He had never liked spiders, and it served him to have something scarier than his own nightmares to catch and eat them as they drifted out his nostrils or from behind his ear drums.
He stood in the center of his favorite rug for a long moment, attempting to decide what to do, then attempting to remember what he was attempting to decide, then attempting to remember what he was attempting to remember, then giving up and making a decision anyway; which was to sit in his armchair and continue to smoke his pipe. This armchair had a plaid pattern on its back that pleased him whenever he glanced at it, which he could not now do as he was already sitting in the chair, which put the pattern firmly behind him. This distressed him so much that he stood and turned around to face the chair, gazing at the pattern while still puffing away, wiping the last of the dew drops from the pipe bowl. Only after a lengthy stare did he permit himself to sit back down, proud of having made and executed on a decision so decisively in such a short span of time, and also proud of the chair itself, which was not quite so old as the rug, but still felt like a long-time companion that had seen the dew rush in the window with the afternoon light for countless afternoons in this single stalk in the sky where he resided with his rug and his frog and his spider and all the other things that comforted an old chair on its last legs.
    "The badgers are at it again," he said, and realized as he said it that it was true and that he was commenting on the racket outside. He went back to the window to see them crowded aboard an undersized zeppelin outside, hooting, hollering, carrying on.
    "Hey there old man!"
    He shut the window. Outside it they continued carrying on, carrying themselves away on their zeppelin toward more open windows and the people who stood at them ready to observe their carrying on, who could be freely called to if they so chose, which they of course would. The dew was invigorating, splitting the light of the sunset into a million rainbows cast on the sides of the stalks, across the material of their balloon, even into the backs of their own eyes, where it was stored away as a burning sensation, fueling their carrying on to even greater heights than it could ever hope to reach unaided. The next window belonged to a giraffe. She was a prime hey there candidate, as it would take her several minutes to retract her neck and head back through the window, during which the crew could deliver countless hey theres, and still have time to deliberate about which hey there had been the greatest, the most glib, the most friendly, the most rich with meaning of all the hey theres. This sent them into a dew-fueled frenzy that lasted hours beyond the disappearance of the giraffe head, so carried on and away were they that they began to hey there at each other instead; eventually forming a rift down the middle of the zeppelin separating into two camps of Hey Therers: those who believed that a true Hey There consisted of a Hey There, and those who believed that a Hi There was also acceptable. The resulting pogrom lasted until long after sunset, and saw nearly half of the crew cast overboard, to their demise or at least to a long swim home in the dark.
    When night set in, the mushroom tops retracted like umbrellas, the zeppelins went to ground, and the only sound was the perpetual white of the crystalline falls all around them, even the wind having gone to sleep.
    Yet the giraffe was still awake by the light of her lamp, he neck coiled upon itself against the ceiling, her face pressed toward her angled writing desk where she scribbled furiously the events of the day, including the protracted Hey There Event and the resulting civil war, which she had observed through the frosted pane of her window, careful to stay out of sight and see the badgerers in their natural habitat so that she could later record and analyze their strange behavior. This involved a cup of tea and whatever contraption might allow a hoofed animal to hold onto a pen long enough to take down page on page of notes in immaculate cursive. When the sun finally rose, she found the strength to stop and discovered that her eyes refused to close, so she brewed another cup of tea and turned them toward the window to see if she could burn them into sleep with the burst of light that was about to break from the horizon.