S.Orange

A suspicious flicker of the government grade tungsten drove a bunch of crazed enthusiasts crazier and they cheered like mindless bumpkins at an impossible to predict game of penny toss. The bulb jeered back to life, laughing electrically in renewed brightness. And the crowd mexican-waved.
They said that the bulb was jinxed like voodoo pinned brains, wily and crudely villainous. For he chose to perform his near death acts almost only when there was people to stun. I thought it perfectly normal. But they thought that I was jinxed as well. So. Maybe I was.
I loved to sit by the distant and nearly unavailable warmth of the bulb's touted immortality and an orange S of a filament; it gave me a strange and optimistic reassurance. But I despised the way he feigned over and outs like a bear threatened nobody. And on those days, I really wished that he'd go with an audible boom or a fantastic light show, ending in a smoked and frosted bulb that I could bury like a precious bone that has lived. But I also feared that they would put him out in one giant candle blow when I slept. Or there could be a week long blackout and the charred remains of an unfortunate crow lying unclaimed, as my heroic S.Orange wore black and mourned the dead bird, in a forever funeral. But he was a hero, a showy one at that.
One of those zoo mornings, I walked by the fire station's controls, expecting to find curious chemicals that took care of fires, sand buckets, water tanks and tube snakes, like what one wanted to find. I wasn't disappointed, for everything seemed in clockwork place. But I met in the midst of this banality, a face that reminded me of the bulb itself; long and oblong and glassy, his cackles heart beating with the electricity through his facesake. Wired up in an impossible maze of circuitry, a large democracy of which wire led where, a board of the bulb face's misplaced brainworks buzzed like martian life. In forgotten heaps, lay factory produced crates of S.Oranges, inanimately waiting in their onion glass wear.
That was when I lost my faith in immortality; I do not care if you had believed in it or not. But there were many moments of this uncanny faith; something that told me that life would go on like an endless book, one that I would enjoy. I barged into the room and dropped the boxes of bulb carcasses and new borns for gravity to kill; the bulbous face flew back at me and stung me with a static but I hit him back. I walked to the wires and plucked one and heard a distant fizzle and a crowd’s mouthed breathe-in.
I walked back into the crowd and wrote of my immortal bulb. For all a writer can do is deify the inexistent or lost.

Comments

Sap said…
funnier by each post!

i am enjoying your evolution!
Arun Sethuraman said…
@sap:hehe!thankyouthankyou! :D
am enjoying it too!

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