Ralph Lombreglia

The statue’s resting place looked pretty good. All she really had to do was get him deep enough so the dogs didn’t dig him up before the sale. After her exertions over his tomb, the hollow Saint Joseph seemed to weigh nothing in her hand. He seemed to float in space before her eyes. She set him down on his back in the hole, but found that she couldn’t shovel the dirt on top of him, not right on his face like that. She turned him face-down, but that seemed worse. When she picked him up again, half-frozen dirt had sifted into his open base. You could see it through the translucent, cream-colored skin: Saint Joseph turning brown as he filled up with soil.

Jennifer was a performance artist. The blood was a prop in her act. There were many props in Jennifer’s act, but blood was the unifying device. She concealed plastic sacs of the homemade blood in various articles she had with her onstage—a child’s fluffy teddy bear, her pearl-encrusted evening bag, the bodice of her white bridal gown. For an hour she paraded about to her own synthesizer music, acting out dysfunctional family relationships and decrying bankrupt, oppressive governments, while the Barbie-doll world hemorrhaged around her. 

More than anything, he would like to turn the nighttime sky into 3-D color TV. That would be the most incredible hack of all, he says, and he claims to know how to do it, but it would cost a lot of money, even for a few seconds, and so far the funding has been elusive. He pitched the idea to his old friend Vernon DeCloud—financing celestial television by selling some sky-time for advertising—and though Vern would be perfectly happy to go down in history as the man who turned the stratosphere into a Coke commercial, he said no. Vern didn’t believe Tempesto could do it.