THE BILL

by: Darrell Bob Houston

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The onion has as many pages as War and Peace. evetry one of which is as poignant enough to make a strong man weep, but the various ivory parchments of the onion and the stinging green bookmark of the onion are quickly charred by the belly juices and bowel bacteria. Only the beet depars the body the same color as it went in.

Beets consumed at dinner will, come morning, stock a toilet bowl with crimson fils, their hue attesting to beet's chromatic immunity to the powerful digestive acids and through microbes that can turn the reddest pimento, the orangest carrot, the yellowest squash into a single disgusting shade of brown.

At birth we are red-faced, round, intense, pure. The crimson fire of universal consciousnes burns in us. Gradually, however, we are devoured by parents, gulped by schools, chewed up by peers, swallowed by social instiutions, wolfed by bad habits, and gnawed by age; and by the time we have been digested, cow style, in those six stomachs, we wmerge a single disgusting shade of brown.

The lesson of the beet, then, is this: hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown. Once you're brown, you'll find that your blue. As blue as indigo. And you know what that means:

Indigo.

Indigoing.

Indigone.