Inscrutible Design

There was a design and Jicklo had a purpose, a calling.

The proton beam from the alien vessel had struck him during the lightning storm that had struck him.

It takes things like that, like a bolt of electric hurled out of some unearthly closet to hit a drunken profligate man as if he were a dumb brute and carnal beast and turn him to a god’s grace. All in the technique and a flip of the wrist. Simply electrifying!

It was a revelation, a breach of faith in a lost time that he had been personally touched by the almighty highest being of all - a flash of white light and he was there with it forever. An ornithologist would have called it something else from a proctologist if evidence had been rigorously and scientifically collected.

From that incident toward there would be no change from the strength then endowed in Jicklo’s faith. Adam-ant as a multi-colored rock he would babble at the frop of a hat. He can sell fish water. A faith derived through a Baptism of Protoplasmic Electricity. And with it Jicklo in his squat twist and dance had a purpose that he was now in charge to shape up to a respectable prosperity -- to charge up, bring up to his god’s Standard of Voltage, as he talked at the morning crew on his first day while they stood around the floor of the shop dumb but expectant… a Standard of Voltage as he explained it to turn this hero shop around in his perfected inconsistency.

Nothing was the same ever once everything was not ever even the same again. It was just like this with the man. In image of his god, confused but perfectly delightful.

He yammered at them like a driven avenger. That particular mid-morning his normal small nutlike eyes alit with fire and glitter, with sparks and his tongue was like a whiplash of mayo on the mountain of their flesh nubile minds, these minimum-wage know-nothing kids.

During which Jicklo unconsciously displayed oddly natured compulsive techniques with a soiled mop handle to which he had duct taped a broken metal kitchen utensil as if to form a devil's fork - as if he were on the brink of a seizure, and he then ran and ran the day crew, the post-pubescent part-timers and townies who endured through the stations of his stiff display.

As if waltzing on black walnuts.

He said, “We will have a winning team or bust,” as he instructed them to hold out their hands in prayer. And so they were there stood in a circle of fervent beneath-the-breath mumbling with their hands extended out over the egg salad.

***

With a desire to win over by a grand gesture all of a heathen generation, and as Preacher Jicklo of the Agape Church of All Dominance who felt and perhaps or considered unwisely his being in need of a few additional points of divine intervention -- to go the halfway that oddly short little guy that he now knew and confessed as his personal god required in order for HIM to take over and handle the other half to achieve ultimate victory in a world of blasphemous sin, indecent bodily noises and fornication destined to burn in the very Hell that Preacher Jicklo had visited, vicariously or otherwise while sprawled out naked in the corn field on the tall North hill on that memorable night on the outskirts of Sumner Hill Nudist Colony in the pounded rain and world-record-setting hail.

They were as big as small melons.

But honestly, it all had very little to do with his shoving the broken fork into the electric outlet.