Crying Winds
Jerry Vilhotti

   Situated near a bay, across from an island where the souls of prisoners once howled like winds crying in despair - some being killed in a humanly State like way by those who believed in the sanctimony of life not seeing the irony of making sure babies with no lungs, half a heart or other needed organs missing be born to pay homage to the term "suffer the little children" and live in pain until their God took them into His or Her home where they might live again in better pieces rather than make the killers of others stay alive to see and feel for life their crime against themselves, beneath steep hills that plunged toward waters that had become grave fields for dolphins another living species falling to the dark ages, in a deep depression that daily copulated with air currents of great magnitudes of velocity - was a ballpark where the game of baseball was adventured from April to sometimes October.
    During home stands the park was almost always filled to capacity by fanatics - despite threats of earthquakes - who watch the doings with children-like wwonderment; never knowing the stadium was home to the Greek Aeolus of the tribe that lived in Thessaly or Lesbos and though he was not a god per se was given great powers by the Olympian Zeus after he and his helpers replaced the Titans; bumping off the likes of Cronus, Zeus' dad, and Prometheus who with his fire thing had uplifted humans from worshipping death in pyramids to a place of dignity in loving all things human; no longer afraid of the dark. The gods delighted in making this semi-meaningless thing perpetuated by the elite to keep the masses busy so they wouldn't become aware of all the scams that were making their lives difficult:
like having to do without medicines and other little niceties like food ....
The dedicated fans watched intently ballplayers who didn't know how to hit to the opposite fields nor bunt and were hitting at a paltry two hundred and twenty average being successful in getting two hits about every tens times up
to bat but who were still able to command four million dollars a year for their efforts.  When the windy guy decided, he could make a pop up hover over second base for a couple of seconds before propelling the little white sphere against a fence to ricochet into an unsuspecting uniformed person's
neck who was minding the pastures in right or left fields.
    "I bet twenty drachmas this one will be caught by the short stopper person," said Hermes.
    "And I'll wager it won't even be caught!" Zeus said.
    "I say the protector of the first wheat sack will!" screamed Athena.
    "You're both on!" Hermes said putting down the gold as he looked from their mount Olympus perch.
    At the very beginning of the sound of the ball hitting the fashioned tree trunk called a "bat" the thing appeared to be going out of the park so high and far it was smashed but then it began to come down to the protector of the second sack who had returned from a long journey to mid right field pasture and situated himself near the bag where he suspected the ball would land and just as he was about to pluck the ball out of Aeolus' mouth, it took another vehement bounce in the winds to allude the "big grotesque hand" completely and fall gently on a patch of the old titan Gaea's brown earth.
    While all the Greek gods continued to watch this thing they discovered some time ago and manipulated the mortals below like having the blue-uniformed mortal behind the pentagon forget where the "steek" or "baw" zones were, Aeolus kept on blowing out his lungs giving all the movements even more dimensions than the stealer of the game, from those inventors of the caste system who painted their bodies blue, ever imagined.
    "This is even better than watching little league home runs going over the green monster!" shouted Zeus who indeed felt pity for those Boston fans who cried in September after he put his mighty hex on that team after they traded his Babe for a Broadway play called  "No No Nanette" or something like
that and would not allow the Red Sox - whatever the Hades that meant spooking people who still feared the "red menace" overthrowing their compassionate capitalistic system that was bleeding all others dry
- to win any more world serious encounters.
    After a half hour of this amusement, the gods began to watch the fans in the stands who kept blinking rapidly while shivering as they bought seven dollar beers and four dollar hot-dogs - just realizing that this was just the begginning of the first half of the first inning of the big inning.
 

vilhotti@peoplepc.com 1