SO IT BEGINS

An excerpt from "The Emperor Penguin Died En Route" chapter. And then on to our characters.

Once upon a time there was an Antarctic Emperor penguin that was mailed to a cold place in Wyoming called Little America. This cold place was named Little America after Admiral Richard Byrd's ice-shingled, circa 1933 Ross Shelf expedition camp down where the Emperor penguins roamed, which was how someone got the brainy idea to mail a penguin to Wyoming in the first place.

The Emperor penguin died en route. But that's all right. Its carcass was preserved, not on ice but in glass, destiny conspiring with destination to make the bird a fun curio for the Ross Shelf's foster child, the Little America haven for travelers bested by Big Daddy America's comprehensive sea to shimmer shing sea gluttony in Wyoming's southwestern desert.

Plants, weather, funereal customs etc. have regions to which they are specifically native, or such is the pedagogical idea. Never-the-less, the summer monsoons that nourish India are generated by the planetary heat engine in Africa, and the ash that was wiped up, as dust, off a Victorian sideboard in Kansas City on September 2, 1883, had its source in the August 27, 1883, eruption of Krakatoa in the Dutch East Indies; and that is how the conclusion is very scientifically drawn (with much supporting data, of course) that "indigenous" is a misnomer. 200 million years ago all the world was one stage called Pangaea, which grew weary of its neighbors (or lack thereof), migrated and became multiple continents. Is not one of the initial archaeological records of Homo typicalis the imprint of a foot at Olduvai Gorge. Why? Because it wanted to get to the other side. Homo typicalis has always been a migrant worker. And when it stopped migrating was when former migrators inhabited the land it wanted. At which time Homo typicalis became an invader, whereas Homo atypicalis threw a big party and married into the family. What this goes to prove is Human is not indigenous to anywhere and, following after the example of rocks that Ice Age glaciers moved hundreds of kilometers, should be classified Erratic. For Human to be other than Erratic indicates, if not an aberration, a dramatic shift in consciousness, which is in itself another exempli gratia of the inclination to change.

Symbols of human should not be astrologically or sexually subclassified but should be, universally, the sign of the moving van.

See the world. Plant spores do it. Butterflies and salmon do it. Canadian Snowbirds sun featherless limbs on the Gulf of Mexico. Via satellite, raft, horse and buggy, automobile, train, boat, bike, balloon, ora fully restored 1949 Harley Davidson 45 CI, by land, by water, by air mail, and military service, the instinctive urge to trip the globe fantastic transpollinates culturally, and otherwise, whether purist or prejudice likes it or not. Phone and TV recapitulate, to the global minority who possess them, the One World message of Pangaea that migration did not dispel but confirmed with broader horizons.

Even Mother Earth likes to travel. Once a year she loop-de-loops the Sun.

Shifting landmasses cause earthquakes all so a clump of sagebrush--yea, eventually San Francisco Bay--be supplied a new neighor, and a river or stream is permitted an occasional change of beds. Techinically, thse earth-shifting occurrences are a natural outcome of pressure and the means of releasing tension. Naturally then, to alleviate a long build-up of what could be thus termed as motivation, Faith had the final option of standing still and volcanically erupting or effecting a move.

THE CAST OF CHARACTERS

A FERRARI

FAITH HAZY
Mephistopheles running from impending nuptials and an unfolding history in soft-core surrealist art porn.

"The name of Chance's religion is, of course, Chanceism."

CHANCE HOPE
Member of the recessionary-in-perpetuity working homeless grieving the loss of her 1972 Impala as the Ferrari is nice but one can't sleep very well in it.

"I can't go back now, not even for references."

GRANT HARM
A golf shop owner who wants something more in life than a pyramid-scheming wife and trysts at the Oasis with his accountant.

"I have this way of talking about things when I'm drunk that sounds like total BS, but that doesn't mean I don't believe them when I'm sober, right down to the base, rock granite of my soul. I have morals. I have convictions. I have hope. I have goals. I have purpose. But I wish I had the kind of woman I could share all that with, the fine and the bad. Not all my morals are good ones. I don't think they should be either."

MARTHA HARM
Has never met Grant's alter ego, James Bond.

"You clearly show a lack of consideration for my fledgling empire."

MARSHALL HARM
The fiance, never met Faith's superhero alter ego.

"What are we going to do about Marshall? He quit going to work a while back. I hoped his potential was catching up with him and that boredom would push him into higher education and a business degree. Now, he rarely leaves his room. I have to wait until he's in the bathroom to clean it."

PRISCILLA, THE ACCOUNTANT

"You really do carry a vendetta, don't' you?"

ORANGE JOE
A band's band made up of musician's musicians, has no need of a light crew.

DOLAN FAIR
The band leader.

"What happened to that agent you were going to get to represent us?" the keyboardist asked Dolan.

SAMMY FONTAINE

Sammy's blood pressure went up when he heard the word cracker. It went down when he lifted himself out of the mundane temporal to reflect on the loftier mysteries of time.

A FEMALE ELVIS IMPERSONATOR

"They hired Gayle Leblanc, they want Gayle Leblanc, Gayle Leblanc is what they get!" she waved at the door of the Silvertone, out of which one-third of her former, minimal audience was presently fleeing into the parking lot under the head wind of Faith's poetic debut. "They won't let me go!"

CHANCE'S OLD BOYFRIEND

"Chance doesn't believe in handguns and violence so you can imagine how surprised I was that she knew how to load and fire a rifle."

VIRGINIA HAZY

The demons were giggling too, which made her giggle all the more.

"It's not normal for two women to run off together. They're hermaphrodites, aren't they?"

CATARINA
The fortune teller.

"It could never be replaced. Napoleon's fall was heralded in that very cup."

BOB HAZY

When Mr. Hazy did once grin at him, strangely, Grant Harm's first and lingering impulse was to go wash his face.

AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL
which killed off its buffalo and fenced up its First Nations peoples all so Faith Hazy and Chance Hope would be able to one day pursue pending dreams from Valentine, Georgia to Little America, fueled by novelty, convenience, and Faith's patriotic determination to be a good consumer on someone else's bankroll.