The Atonement or; Bubbles Reads Camus (Fiction, 7-2-02)

The Atonement
Or;
Bubbles Reads Camus (Fiction, 7-2-02)

After piercing her right nipple and suffering a momentary pang of middle class, "do as your daddy says," Bubbles determined a course of physical atonement for her cosmetic sin.

Having recently acquired an existential viewpoint from a Bantam paperback translation of Camus' "L'Etranger," the "Doomed if we do" Bubbles determined upon a course of "just reason-ability," which is to say, Bubbles had decided that her punishment should fit her crime.

Therefore Bubbles, who had just polished off Bulfinch's "Mythology," equated her plight with that of Sisyphus, the sinner condemned in Tartarus to an eternity of rolling a boulder uphill, only to watch it roll back down again.

Bubbles - a great Tragedian actress equal in conviction if not in ability, of the heroines of Sophocles and Euripedes (she had gone so far as to contemplate emulating Euripedes canine fate but, Bubbles was even afraid of her neighbors toy poodle "Squeekums" -swooned on her mother's imitation Louis XVI divan and just before fading to black, grabbed a chocolate wafer from the majolica candy dish strategically placed for such "Bubblish outbursts" and popped the treat in her waiting mouth.

Restored to her heroic propensities, Bubbles AKA "Our little actress" became determined to crack open her Aeschylus bust she used as a piggy bank. Bubbles, with a giggle, considered herself the offending turtle as she sang:

"Bang bang Maxwell's silver hammer came down upon his head. Bang bang Maxwell's silver hammer made sure that he was dead."

She brought the Craftsmans' Claw hammer crashing down upon the unsuspecting Greek Tragedian's bas relief dome.

"Hi yo, pay dirt!" Bubbles chortled, tickled to the pink with Romish pride as her eyes took on a glare of the "far-away girl."  Bursting from her room, our Bubbles, all toil and troubles, rushed to the local bus depot. Bubbles, being the first to board the jitney, bounded her way to her favorite middle-section seat and waited for the driver of her chariot to take her away to the local WalMart.

While there, she loaded up on all-purpose Plaster of Paris and flew home as fast as her Hermes'-like footsies would tote her.

Bubbles was way way big into the symbolism thing, having dug the idea out of an old, tattered copy of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."

All hopped up on philosophic expiation, she splurged on a, "taxi, taxi, hey, you Goll dang taxi!" and soon after, her heart aflutter, found herself in her 60'x 60' backyard.

Bubbles' plot was a hatchin' in her skull. She filled a Sears & Roebuck 1979 wooden handled, aluminum wheelbarrow with white powdered gypsum (calcium sulphate) and after liberally applying water, formed a paste. After filling and dumping the barrow some 45 odd times, Bubbles

formed a 15-foot high mammary gland, complete with protruding nipple which also sported a ring.

Soon, the breast was hardened and Bubbles, the philosophic queen, was ready for her atonement. She attempted to climb the boobie in hopes of grasping that ring, but each time she tried, she rolled back down in a Sisyphean revelry.

Thus, Bubbles punishment for acquiring a nipple ring was to forever climb the bosom of regret, and to acknowledge a theory, she'd fallen upon, that life is absurd and the only one we get.