FDA APPROVED OPERA SERIA

The distorted face has always been her forte. The distorted face is the contrabassoon. I’m grimacing. It always starts with the contrabassoon to tell you that something terrible may happen. Then the sobbing. That’s when the bandoneon starts to play. The weeping. That’s the two-string Chinese violin, the erhu. The wailing. That’s the clarinet. The striking whimpering, the shaking bawling, and the scraping blubbering are hitting my ears like percussion. I’m covering my ears but the bagpipes have already swallowed the ode to joy and left a suspended note instead. Every suspended note needs resolution.

My little sister is running her castanet feet through the black and white diamond-pattern carpet without respecting today’s odd day which is the fifteenth of the month, so it’s white diamonds only. The new conductor throws one of my maracas on a black zone of the diamond-pattern carpet. It breaks in half with a muffled sound. The maraca’s sandy vocal cords are lost in the caesura. I can’t touch the sand with the treble of my feet. The sand undergoes an involuntary register change. I have a gross shuddery out-of-tune feeling in my spine. Every suspended note needs resolution.

Sand is made of decomposed rocks like quartz (silica) and feldspar. There are roughly eight billion grains of sand per cubic meter of beach, and roughly seven hundred billion cubic meters of beach on Earth. That’s five sextillion grains of sand. That’s too much sand, even for sand-filled hammer shakers. It’s making my head spin like the egg beater spins when Mom mixes dead chicken fetuses to make pancakes that look like frisbees. Chickens like xylophones. My pyrophone is burning inside. The mobile musical safari reflects flickering lights. My insides are like burners in cylindrical glass tubes.

The Queen of the Night is about to throw the second maraca. My dad walks into the playroom with the risperidone and blows the French horn to call the hunting dog out of the woods. But it’s too late for severe sedation. The six-second rule does not apply to frenetic random activity periods. I already threw my sister out the window. Every suspended note needs resolution.

This piece was featured in Volume 4, Mighty Micros. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.