They Are Really Just Popcorn Farts

He glanced around him. On either side, tourists were in front of their bungalows in various stages of undress — putting on dry clothes or taking off wet bikinis and trunks. On that night three girls were chatting about his farts, which to one were just popcorn farts bursting open in a sizzling frying pan and to the other a more grievous departure from public mannerism and social norm. The one who viewed the spacious and almost imperceptible little bursts of sound as not bad things was the horniest of the three; the other two were more reserved, yet wouldn’t be applying for a position with a queen anytime soon. Certainly, none of them would have seen anything wrong with using a bagel to scoop up cream cheese, or using an errant moving index finger as a knife. None of these girls were of that breed, and a girl so inclined, probably would have been conspicuously out of place in a setting on an Island of Sand. These types of people — who grimaced at the thought of eating with unwashed hands, were more likely found at a company or some other social gathering where they could criticize the behavior of those who were not adverse to loading up a bagel beyond the socially accepted limit to satisfy an urge—who might scoop up the cheese with the bagel even when they clearly could have seen the knife set out for that occasion. It was these kinds of socially adept, ‘advanced’ women and men that had so much to criticize in this type of soul that they saw as uncontrollable and not abiding of their contrived rules.
Golem looked at a part of the ocean in front of him that was a different color and thought about the time, that while loading a bagel with a bit of cheese, that this kind of woman had approached him and pointed out to him the presence of the knife (which she may have been holding behind her back) and he had let out a ripper that didn’t even start to peter out before she turned to leave, having got out only two or three words before the gas — it seemed to start to sputter more infrequently and to come to a full-stop in the manner that air will stop hissing out of a bicycle tire when the pressure sufficiently reduces to a level more suited to its atmospheric condition, more equal to its surroundings.
It seemed to accomplish all this, as the socially adept woman crossed a point nine feet or so away from his location. Golem figured now in his hammock that this woman had probably reached her level of incompetence in some high-level government agency, probably making rules and revelations to crush the spirit, or whatever was left of it, much in the way that a communist society creates rules to crush out non-conformity — perhaps she was inking up a letter this moment to promote giving government booty to people who agreed to have at least three children, as her government looked on the current lack of interest in child bearing as a problem and something disagreeable, since if the population declined there would be fewer people to shackle and transport on ships and to pilfer twenty-five percent of their income from, in the form of quadruple-taxation in a country where double-taxation was looked upon as one of the reasons for the separation from England and the Revolutionary War. Golem let out a ripper that permeated his wet trunks and the underlying skin of the hammock to such an extent that he felt the warm gas rush out of and flow through the sand pasted on that hammock, and out of the corner of his eye he caught the gleam of a smile from the girl not bothered by the occasional popcorn fart.