On November 5th we all awoke to a changed world.
Milk puddled in the indentations we left in our beds. When we opened the morning newspaper, milk gushed from between the folds, trickling between our legs.
Feet squirming into steel-toed boots found cream in the heel. Papers seeped out of patent leather brief cases filled with milk. Lunch boxes sloshed in the hands of our children. The clear platforms of the working girls’ shoes turned opaque.
In San Francisco, the thrift stores of Haight and Ashbury swirled with dyes bleeding into the milk. At Kent the sky swept the world clean with a white benediction of high-fat cream. We rolled in it. In New Orleans the milk spread quietly like butter above the buildings, never touching a soul, and we were relieved. The milk spurted from the towers and bastions of a bridge we never built in Alaska. The rigs in the gulf shut off their pumps when all they got from the sea floor was milk. The subways in New York had to be abandoned after the last of the tunnel-dwellers streamed past our sand-bag barricades.
We huddled around the government buildings in DC, looking for answers. They were filled completely, but their doors did not pour forth the gift of milk. Legislation was impossible and the laws of physics distressingly surmounted.
We wept with fear or joy, and our tears were white.
