On New Year’s Eve
five thousand blue nudes fell dead in Beebe, a small Arkansas town. It was all over the news— everyone woke New Year’s Day to naked bodies strewn over cold concrete and yards. The blue nudes dropped onto mailboxes, dented cars, their busts posed with spines bent backward, bare to winter. One blue nude fell onto a woman walking her dog around midnight. It both shocked and depressed her. Experts say it might have been fireworks that frightened the nudes, unable to see in the darkness of a coming year. Is this the end? Reporters go away, scientists explain, artists weep, poets write poems about miners and canaries—they try to create a myth or metaphor to understand— the ending contains blue fingers over blue faces, a feeling that we’ll all go on with life even as doomsayer rolls off grainy tongues, the results are coming in. The experts collect and count the bodies, while a mother counts the number on her lawn. She tells her children not to play with the poor, dead things.