2 — Sally King

We’ve all ignored those obnox­ious chat­ter­boxes seated next to us on planes, but Mar­vin could have learned some­thing had he paid atten­tion to the red-faced woman.  Bose noise silencer head­sets didn’t exist any­more, so he couldn’t zone out.  Ipods were long gone–gone the way of tran­sis­tor radios–so he couldn’t block out her chat­ter that way, either. The air­lines had stopped serv­ing beer, wine, and spir­its long ago, so he couldn’t even numb out.

The red-faced woman (her name was Peace­andlove) really DID have some infor­ma­tion about what caused the crater; she played dumb; she was test­ing Mar­vin.  But Mar­vin, Mr.I-know-everything left-brain, wouldn’t pay atten­tion to her the­o­ries about Venu­sian land­ing strips and Aztec Crys­tal chan­nel­ing.  He should have.  Marvin’s three Ph Ds really didn’t mean much when it came to really under­stand­ing The Crater.

You see, it all began with the shop that used to be on Bab­cock Street.  Until the explo­sion, the shop had a mas­sive fol­low­ing:  shop­pers bought crys­tals, lis­tened to Venu­sian chants, and draped FFP flags around their door­ways to ward off hate and evil. (FFP stood for Fab­u­lous Female Power, and the flags were hung to ward off neg­a­tive energy.)  The Believ­ers of the FFP Mili­tia were not man-haters; they sim­ply wanted to be respected, trusted, loved, and given equal oppor­tu­nity pay.  How­ever, the reces­sion in Boze­man seemed to make trust, love, and jobs nearly impos­si­ble.  Cer­tainly, get­ting a job was impossible.

In any case, the FFP Mili­tia, led by Pres­i­dent Peace­andlove, held cer­e­monies accord­ing to the lunar cal­en­dar that involved tribal danc­ing and drum­ming around a Burn­ing Man. (The Burn­ing Man cer­e­mony was usu­ally held in Liv­ingston at a well-known photographer’s house.) Again, to be clear, the FFPs adored men…they sim­ply had “some issues” that they were try­ing to resolve and they did this by chant­ing and hon­or­ing cycles of  the moon. They also were suc­cess­ful in rais­ing gov­ern­ment funds to have the Venu­sian land­ing strip built!

The FFPs had a huge fol­low­ing, but then, in the year of the rabbit–2011–something hor­ri­ble hap­pened.  The chant­ing and tribal cer­e­monies seemed to have gone awry and then dur­ing the FFP sweat lodge cer­e­monies it seems that the wrong ances­tors had been invited in.  The unin­vited ances­tors were thought to be what Mar­vin “saw” in the ref­er­ence sec­tion of the library.  Or so the story goes.