SJU #12

banks could not deny the undercurrent of humanity that runs through every person‘s veins. They knew they had done wrong; they had harmed their fellow man for profit. The birds pushed them over the top; they wanted to apologize but the forces of capitalism would never stop, and all those human beings in the pits of finances now wanted to pay penitence.

Amos again picked up the dead bird and placed it next to its fallen brother in the garbage can. His mind drifted and he saw himself again as a child in Maryland throwing the football. He saw a euphoric smile on his face each time he threw and caught the football. He stared at this vision trying to figure out why he was seeing it. Again, it disappeared.

His soul was crushed selling universal apologies. He was meant to sing and dance on a stage, not clean up dead birds and help people who wronged the planet. Infidelity never bothered Amos much, but now with the birds dying in front of him, he couldn‘t take it. The summer kept getting hotter.

At 3:15 of that day, a stock broker came to Amos holding three dead pigeons and said, ―How did this happen. We believed the algorithms! Please give me $50 worth of any flowers you have.‖ He gave Amos the money and walked away without taking his flowers. The bill felt and smelled greasy.

Amos looked up from the bill and saw that Wall Street looked like it hadn‘t slept in weeks, disheveled and lost. They needed more flowers, more atonement, they needed Rita Lee. It‘s easy to forget that these monsters that prayed for destruction were once like him, once human. There was a moment when they could just smell a flower and not see a commodity. The collective soul of the financial institutions (not just Wall Street) was trying to break free, but they were too far gone.

Somebody needed to save Amos from this world. Amos was only getting a daily fix of Rita Lee; the alternative reality of ice crème and psychedelics was wearing thin. He needed to join her, he need to stay in the world that she and her ice crème truck followed. He said out loud at 4:45 of that day, ―Give me a world without money; give me colors, pop music and birds. I‘ll pay for it all with this street.‖ That next day Amos decided to escape the financial crisis. He was done; his humanity was starting to break through his skin. He couldn‘t help them anymore. Stocks and analyses were an imaginary religion to begin with; the system had just managed to take reality down with it. This world was created by numbers and circumstance, not by people.

He had never spoken to Rita Lee because the hallucinatory world was too strong for him to form words.

It always ended with him standing in front of his flowers holding an ice crème cone. The next time the ice crème truck came around; he would talk to her and see how far she could take him.

And right at the stroke of noon on that next day, he heard the pop music of Os Mutantes. Rita Lee‘s ice crème truck was approaching, the colors were changing. He saw her and started to take slow steps, savoring the feeling of New York disappearing. ―Take me with you,‖ he said. ―This truck will travel throughout the cosmos delivering color and music,‖ Rita Lee replied. ―Pop music.‖ Dead birds sprung to life and flew out of the corner trash can. ―Get me out of here! I don‘t want to ever sell flowers again! Please… wherever you come from… wherever you are going… take me there! I hate this financial meltdown. They cheated on us!‖ Amos grabbed the side of the truck and he felt the energy of the truck course through his body. He fell onto the pavement, which had turned into grass. He looked at the sky and saw himself as a six-year-old boy throwing a football. Amos shook his head, surprised to see himself show up in the hallucination. He stood back up onto his feet. Rita Lee looked at him from deeper inside the hallucination. ―Everything you need to know is behind you,‖ she said, and Amos turned around and saw himself still throwing a football.