The Corduroy Mtn. We Matt Leibel We were hungry for knowledge, so we started eating magazines. We were the makers of planes, of trains, of octagonal wheels that crunched as they turned. We stole Australia from a man who'd been keeping it captive inside a shoebox, and then replaced all the kangaroos with men in kangaroo masks on pogo sticks. We hiked down into the canyon of crayons, on the hunt for the elusive, endangered mauve. We started receiving secret, coded messages from the Devil. (But this was less exciting than you might think. The messages were mostly in the form of the Devil giving himself reminders: buy special dog food for Cerberus, pick up spare cape from drycleaners, check the markets for the latest price on Souls, etc.) Trees grew to the height of clouds. Inside the trees we built elevators. We piped elevator music into the elevators. The trees were tormented by the sheer banality of it all and ejected us from the elevators in anger. We climbed to the moon. It turns out there's a temperature gauge on the side of it where you can cool down or heat up the universe; we turned the dials and ruined yet another Florida summer. previous | next Added to The Corduroy Mtn. on February the Twenty Fourth in the year Two Thousand and Nine.