Public Republic

Denitsa Dilova-Markova

Photo: movimente

On September 18th, sitting on a park bench, Polly saw a woman in a very beautiful dress. “Wow, I would look so good in that dress,” she said to herself. Her thought flew off and floated around. At the same time, scientists made a final decision to crash one neutrino into another neutrino, but made a calculation error, and that morning or rather before noon, the first neutrino crashed into a freely wandering thought that had slipped from a woman sitting on a park bench, and materialized it.

This was not the end to the story. What happened resembled a Mexican wave, and many neutrinos crashed into various thoughts they met in their paths, and the thoughts, in fits of hysterical screams, sped up into the material world, utterly fed up with sitting locked like rebellious ghosts in the heads of their owners.

An infinite number of beautiful dresses appeared in the streets. Women had their breasts heave up and enlarge. New cars, having tripled in number, drove over the old cars, with great difficulty. At some point, everybody began shamelessly copulating in the streets, like animals; in one pastry shop, some children were overjoyed to witness the cashier and assistant-pastry chef assume that very interesting doggy style position, right by the window with the cakes. Others did it shamelessly in their offices as if it was part of their work routine, and yet others – in the gyms they had gone to apparently lose weight.

That same moment, many mothers-in-law passed away, though millions of people instantly got cured from AIDS, cancer and other deadly diseases. Unfortunately, at the moment of the neutrino crash, nobody thought of discovering drugs to help cure those coming after them.

Quite a few wealthy men passed on to the better world, a thought conceived in the beautiful little heads of their wives. Oil burst out of the depths in the driest places on Earth; people were most stunned in Gobi, but no one ever suspected that a very hungry Mongolian child wondered, “what would happen if we too had oil.”

To the delight of those endowed with wilder imagination a dozen of ghosts appeared, as well as not one but two Lochnessies and a few flying saucers, but just one extraterrestrial overcame its anxiety and came down to check out what’s happening on the planet. The whole thing lasted no more than a couple of minutes – which is as much as the longest Mexican wave lasts. If you don’t believe it, ask anyone who was at the World Soccer Championship in Mexico in 1986. Luckily, no one figured out what exactly happened, but if they knew… oh, if only they knew!

Ignorance, perhaps, worked out for the best – instead of money, some munchkins, even punier than atoms, would be pulling the strings of our lives and all our dreams… No, no, and no again, it would bring about a huge mess, as if the world is not messy enough.

At this stage some interesting facts were reported, such as a high mortality rate among men of a certain social status as well as among middle-aged women, a bizarre invasion of flying saucers that disappeared without so much as a “good-bye,” unusual oil finds in a desert, several surprising bankruptcies of large companies and stock exchanges, but most troubling to all seemed to be the swarming of new cars.

“Look, dear, I made a wish to have this one dress, and the next thing I know I’m wearing it, can you believe it?” Beaming, Polly entered the room. “You shouldn’t be coming here any more, we’re no longer married,” her husband said.

Translated from Bulgarian by Zoya Marincheva