The Rainbow
Shortly after dawn yesterday morning, before any less-insomniac Shalampaxians had yet prodded open their eyes following their nighttime slumbers, Bloodynose, CEO of Spams R Us, Shalampax’s leading spam company, awoke and witnessed the most beautiful rainbow imaginable outside his window. Living in a part of the world where the climate rarely affords any break in the wretched gloom, this was a rare, bewitching experience for Bloodynose, as it would have been for any Shalampaxian had he or she not slept through it.
The colors were more vivid than Bloodynose thought possible. The refracted and reflected multi-hued light shone so intensely that it fully illuminated his room, chasing away all lesser light that had the temerity to attempt to glow before it. Dazzling reds, yellows, oranges, greens, blues, violets and all of the other colors of the spectrum provided temporary decoration for his otherwise unadorned, humdrum bedroom.
The rainbow appeared so close that Bloodynose thought that if he could have just figured out some heretofore-unimagined way to smash the bulletproof glass in his window, and then shattered it and stuck his likely bloodied hand through the shard-fringed hole, he would have been able to reach out and touch the magnificent arc of painted light. But, he lamented, that was impossible.
Boodynose, who is universally considered to be the slimiest of the CEOs of our spam companies—and that’s saying a lot—is not normally moved to poetry, romance, or anything else that has little or no chance of successfully fleecing people out of their money. Nonetheless, even he could see the rainbow for the pure essence of splendor that it truly was.
While reflecting on the rainbow, other images began to enter his mind. His scam victims’ faces—most of which he could only imagine because his victims were typically masked by the obscuring quality of emails—flashed rapidly through his head.
Soon, his brain brimmed with visions of covetous souls who had forfeited their life savings to unleash purportedly massive inheritances that, mysteriously, were never unleashed; men who furtively handed over their credit card information in return for promises of male-enhancement lotions, potions and devices that, for some reason that was too embarrassing for the men to pursue, didn’t produce the desired results; women who emptied their bank accounts of hundreds or thousands of dollars for breast firming and enlargement creams and suction pumps that produced rashes and nothing else; and many others who, at the insistent urging of fictitious employees of his firm, placed failing bets that yet other things that were too good to be true would turn out to be true nonetheless.
The juxtaposition of the magnificence of the rainbow with the memories of his rapacious past and present brought yet another thought to the fore in Bloodynose’s mind: “There is absolutely no fucking way that I can make any money whatsoever—not a single fucking red cent—off this damned rainbow.” With that verdict firmly established in his brain, Bloodynose immediately fell peacefully back to sleep.
This, my friends, is why Bloodynose is such an inspiration to all Shalampaxians. His uncanny ability to cut through all of the clutter of a situation to see clearly its vital marrow far exceeds that of most other mortals.
