I, Doody Claire

chorus:

She drinks Thai fu tea
and loves films by Awesome Welles,
When she ain't kickin' buckets
she is casting dizzy spells.

And who was she? My aunt Aggie never said. Nor did she ever write any verses to her song. When the slime mould finally took her in the fall of 'sixty-nine she was still humming the chorus fit to bust. Nobody knew it better than she.

Aggie was a third-generation octopus, a Walloon without a favour. Her childhood in London, Tennessee was a troubled one by all accounts and in the cold, hard winter of eighteen and ninepence she had hardly a pair of flip-flops to her name. Her father, the town sober, was despised by all. She never had a mother. An itinerant glassblower gave birth to her by the side of the road as a favour to her father who, on account of never getting drunk, couldn't forget about it.

When she was thirteen Aggie left home, went down the road without treading on a single crack, then returned, never to set foot outside again. She supported herself by giving harpsichord lessons to frogs. Many were the times tables. The sleepy town became a city, a county, a continent, and finally the entire world. Aggie gave milk to her cats and ignored it all.

When they eventually found her underneath the concrete of an airport runway she was a vital link to the olden days, where the government hoped to dump nuclear waste before anybody knew what it was. They questioned her closely about suitable sites. She offered her own bedroom in eighteen ninety-three since she hadn't slept there that year. The government thought she was holding something back and demanded to see her papers and pencils.

She will never be forgotten since nobody remembered her in the first place.