Torch Bearer

Euripides the star was having a conversation with a bullfrog one day, while they were both reflecting off the surface of a pond on some western ranch. The bullfrog was nameless, because as everyone knows bullfrogs don’t have names, they just have songs. Euripides was telling the bullfrog about the folding of time and the death of the many eyes. It went something like this:

A small child was making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich one night, and he wanted to go outside and see the fireflies. So he grabbed his flashlight and went out into the prairie in his backyard, where he dropped his sandwich into the dirt as he was about to eat it. When he picked up the sandwich, the peanut butter was so sticky that it peeled back the earth and revealed a world beneath. This world was full of eyes, thousands and hundreds and millions of eyes, of all shapes. The eyes were floating under the earth, stuck in a gooey cloud-like substance, like pushpins in a jellyfish. The child reached down to touch the eyes but instead he fell into the hole. When he fell in, his body was covered by the thousands of eyes, and he thought to himself  ‘it’s almost like wearing pajamas full of eyes.’ The only difference was that every time he fell asleep he awoke as a different person. He felt the same, he just looked much different. One day he woke up and felt his face and he had a very long beard. Another day he awoke as a woman with rather large breasts and a saggy chin. This went on for years. He couldn’t escape the underworld and his cloak of eyes, he could only change his appearance. One day he bumped into another thing-it looked like a person at first but he realized it was just a marble statue of a man holding an urn of some sort and the man was not clothed. It was rather discomforting and strange to the boy, seeing this marble statue, so he covered his face with the eye cloak. Only then did he realize that behind the cloak it was much darker and there were no eyes. He fell into a sort of vertigo and then remembered that he had brought his flashlight with him, so he snapped it on. That’s when he realized that the inside of the blanket was a mirror, and he saw his face for the first time in years. He was a tiny baby and his arms were pale and almost useless. He hated this image and so he decided to snap off his flashlight and go to sleep. As he slept, the blanket of eyes twisted and turned. What the boy did not know was that a great upheaval was taking place in the world. The past was folding into the future, and all things were getting folded together and time was becoming like a collage. Buses were starting to drive through African plains, waking sleeping lions. A group of businessmen found themselves suddenly sitting at a conference table in the middle of a medieval battle. Airplanes were crashing into ice bergs, horses were shrinking into smaller horses, and dogs were losing their legs and growing fins, searching desperately for water. As he slept the world kept folding and folding, and he clutched his flashlight and dreamed and turned over and over. He slept for 300 years backwards, and when he awoke he was sitting in his cloud of eyes, out on the plains, staring at a group of Native Americans who were gathered around a campfire. They were all singing a song. They suddenly stopped and looked up at him and the oldest man, wearing a large headdress, silhouetted by the constellations in the sky, asked him…

“What is that you are carrying in your hand”

The boy, now a Native American tribal elder, was much smarter than he was when he fell into the hole in the ground 300 years in the future. He stood up and raised his hand and in his palm there was an eye. The others who were gathered around the fire stared at the eye…he held it there and the eye vibrated and was electrifying and told the others the boys story. Most of them believed the story. Then, he lowered his hand and sat back down. Draped over his arm there was a blanket full of eyes, and there were eyes on his shirt and his pants. Everything was everywhere, and he decided for the next two hundred years to stay awake, to never sleep, and share his knowledge with those who asked him. He would heal those who were sick and the eyes would find new paths into the past.  Unfortunately, the very next day a band of cinematic cowboys and soldiers rode though his camp and accidentally, almost casually, one of the taller of the cowboys fired a few shots as a warning, and one of them hit him in his chest and he collapsed and the eyes retreated back into the earth through a hole in an anthill, robbing the world of his wisdom and leading to the collapse of his nation.