Snowmen (03?)

At the half-time show couples stomp their cleated cowboy boots on an improvised dance-floor – line-dancing cowboys, authentic Indians, and Aleuts flown in with snowmen from Mars, the last of who impress the fans and journalists as overly grave albeit dignified, but surprisingly disinclined to pronouncements about the state of civilization, whether in the form of cable TV, loud music, video parlors, or porn. They glimpse civilization from iceboxes with little windows no larger than slots in camera oscuras since snowmen require constant air pressurization to keep their bodies and their noses and coal eyes intact. Being close to diamonds, coal is a surprisingly good medium by which to see through reflection, despite its skewered facets, creating a ricochet effect in which what enters does not leave the same way. Nor is their vision as geometrically repetitive as that of the fly. Snowmen take things in at odd, unpredictable angles.
There was some initial concern about the effect of pollution but this was solved by sprays of dry ice supplied by maiden attendants in bustiers too risque and revealing for the cheerleaders who leap in the field. But snowmen are men, and men will be men. Their pleasure appeared in a melting no dry ice jet could counteract. Sometimes however the cowboys appeared to take flying punches at the snowmen, immobile themselves except for their coal eyes, frightened and wide as eyes of dogs when they sense their masters’ violent tendencies. But snowmen don’t have the brains of dogs. They can calculate complicated algorithms the concepts of which are yet untranslatable into contemporary physics. On the other hand, dogs calculate algorithms of a similar complexity, such as: how soon will master retrieve that bone meal biscuit from the cupboard? Were this energy to be harnessed to human use, it would build a bridge span to space with material more fragile than cotton fiber or egg-casing.
Some promoter had the novel but stupid idea of giving the snowmen beards of ice to achieve Homeric dignity, but during the half-time show, the beards threatened to suffocate them. The band’s amplifiers vibrated so loudly their icicle fingers were shattered, depriving them of the sensations crucial to their well-being. Only two survived to be shipped to a Greenland convalescence, another adopted by a boy in Minnesota who witnessed its melting demise during a prematurely warm winter, but if it’s any consolation, after the snowman had melted into two coarse crystalline lumps the texture of sno-cones, the boy brought a lump of coal before his eyes and saw domestic objects dance in the black aperture, cars parked on the street, budding trees, and picket fences. No half-time line-dancing cowboy kicked in his direction a veiled threat.