As Dead As a Dodo
Noel Joshua Hadley
EVERYBODY knows that Charles Dickens
famously employed the term to describe
a Jacob Marley ghost sighting.
Ebenezer Scrooge first observed Marley’s eyes, nose, and jaw
fixed on the doorknob of his London home,
held in place of course by a scarf.
Moments later, Marley appeared as a Class IV apparition
locked in bolts and chains, prompting Scrooge to exclaim,
“By Jove, if it isn’t my old partner, Jacob Marley!
Why, you’re as dead as a dodo!”
Freud once prematurely used it
to reference early twentieth century America
as a failing Capitalist experiment.
In a far more devastating career blunder,
Charlie Chaplin resisted making ‘talkies’ for the studio,
famously shrugging them off with the singular line
written on a title card.
“Now that I think upon it,” Pauly Hart holds a carving knife and fork in his fingers,
“It is a rather odd phrase in popular culture.”
He holds the blade to the dodo, stuffed and cooked,
whom his wife has lathered with a baster and lovingly decorated on a bed of lettuce.
He then pauses to silently ponder the matter.
Across the table, I frantically flip through the pages of a history book, hoping to catch up with reality.
From the Island Empire of Mauritius, Madagascan kings
conquered the Tartarians and ruled the world.
And as everybody knows, pilgrims avoided starvation
by popcorn dripping with butter and the dodo,
thanks largely to the American Indian.
Did you know that Benjamin Franklin considered
printing the dodo as our nation’s bird rather than the eagle?
Fun facts. I just now read it in a book.
“Don’t say it.” Pauly cuts into the bird.
“The dodo is extinct in your universe rather than the cockroach.”
Slicking off a piece of its breast, he lays it on a plate.
“That’s what you were going to say, wasn’t it?
What next, the Confederacy lost the war; Nixon never became dictator?
There is only one reality, and it exists within the Pauly-verse”
Pauly points to his shirt as evidence.
It is black with a bold white font which reads,
‘DODO’S NEVER SAY DIE.’
Apparently a line from his favorite
Richard Donner movie.
Rebecca is the first to bite into the dodo.
She closes her eyes to savor the flavor.
“You all should be grateful,” she finally says.
“When I was a girl all that we could afford was a turkey.”