Maria Reveals The Secret

Maria tried and tried to generate business but Bell Atlantic kept cutting off her phone service! How sad. What she needed was one final push into the market, one Fat Ad that would eclipse all other competitors and bring her to the magically slender land of capitalist bounty.

One Friday night the answer came to her. She was alone in her Psychic-Reading parlor/Diet-Magic shop after a miserable day selling only 44 dollars worth of products to three bitchy, greedy and wondrously big-boned customers. A rough week was thankfully over but still there were boxes and boxes of phen-phen crowding out the trick Tarot cards and Canadian spirit-cleansing candles. Suddenly one of the boxes began to glow golden and shrink before her very eyes!

"Maria, I am the Magic ingredient that makes all people find their inner selves, I am the one thing that people seek within and find without. I come from China, from a land of wonder and healing that is much different than yours. You do not know these things about me, but I will tell you.

My journey begins in the deep forests around Qinghai Lake where ma huang is harvested by local farmers who were once doctors. A special tribe exports my essence to Fujianese horse traders who then..."

"Wait," said Maria. "Por que los oblivados tienen ma huang por los Americans mucho gordo?"

"You fool!" responded the magical glowing box, "You speak out of turn!" Maria cowered back into her corner, frightened. The crystal ball offered no help to her fearful soul, complacently reflecting only a deep iridescent amber belying the sudden nasty tone the box had undertaken.

"The Fujianese know my secret and they have become immune, foisting it upon strung-out surrogates and clam boys. But they also know that I am not ready to be imported illegally into America over cargo ships carrying small plastic toys and class C fireworks. I must make my way to Myanmar where deep in the mountains I will be fused with what we call the "purple majesty of flowering grace."

Maria shook with fear, "Opium?"

"For legal reasons I cannot say. This room may be wired," related the box curtly. It continued, "After I am bargained for clean underwear and water buffalo in Myanmar I am brought over the high mountain pass of Burgunzhia Mai Tai to the crowded marketplace on the Yangtze river...wait, we've already been there....I mean to the crowded port of Bangkok. I travel as a light grey powder, concealed in small plastic toy rifles and decks of fake playing cards. In Bangkok I am carefully divided and measured into small capsules for oral consumption. Millions of capsules are produced from one single delivery."

"Herbalife! Diet Magic!" blurted out Maria, still shaking with fear, her eyes unable to unlock from the fantastical talking and shrinking cardboard box.

"Yes, Maria, you are correct. But in so many ways you are deceived. There is no magical cure for obesity and problems with gaining weight. Weight gain is an external manifestation of an internal longing, of a kind of addiction to the simple guilty pleasure of eating, all the more intensified by an ever-increasing complex world where nothing is simple and life moves much faster. Food, you see, temporarily puts the mind at ease and satisfies the body. I am getting ahead of myself.

"The special purplized Ma Huang capsules become the property of a Chinese businessman named Chin and his Herbalife Magic of Diet Lose LLC company which exports them to lands far and wide. Usually a ship bound for America carries me to New Jersey where I am unloaded at a dock and driven in a van to a warehouse in Newark.

"Maria!!"

"Ssssss Si?" she trembles.

"I am speaking to you right now with only one command and one command only and you shall follow this command and lead others unto the greatness of Diet Magic!! What I need is what you need, Maria, what all of us need. Everyone that partakes of me, Maria, does so in place of love, in exchange for faith and in desperation. They come in all colors and sizes, well big sizes usually, and they come to me because they have lost their way in the world.

I too have lost my way, Maria, do you understand this??"

Maria nods her head.

"I have been uprooted from a peaceful existence in western China, pulverized into powder for the noses of slaves in Fujian, bartered for oxen and Kalashnikovs in Myanmar and combined with another substance, which I shall not name, to increase potency and addiction, then encapsulated and packaged for overpriced capitalist consumption in the land of the Free and Greedy in America, and all in the name of..."

At this point Maria tried to run from the room. but the strange presence of the glowing box and its magical contents began to rise into the air and transform, slowly, into a most wondrous thing. Maria stood in the doorway, transfixed and filled with a sense of rapture. The box had spun open and small plastic bottles began to circle in the air. Each one pulsated with the rhythm of a new life, with the strains of joy and happiness. The bottles began to coalesce into one shifting shape, a trick of the eyes thought poor Maria. It looked like the world's yummiest Flan was before her.

"Maria!" resonated the inner voice of the God-like thing, "What you see before you is what you most seek, what you most want from life, that which gives unconditionally and asks nothing in return. For you it is the biggest bowl of Flan ever made. For others it is Luther's Fried Chicken, Philly Cheesesteaks, or Ben & Jerrys Double Chocolate Fudge Brownie Chocolate Chip."

"What I seek is what you seek, Maria, what all of us seek. And now I command unto you and you will have no choice but to follow, "IF YOU DON'T NEED SOMEONE YOU LOVE, I DO. Bring them unto me, Maria, I need those people that people love and then neglect, those objects of affection, I need them to put me back together, to make me whole again and you shall follow my words!!!!!"

Maria shrieked in fear and understanding. She had found true love, rather she was engulfed by a love that needed her. Had to have her, was as addicted to her as she was to it. It understood, it knew. It needed more.

***

The next day Maria made her new Diet Ads and on the bottom she typed in "If You Don't Need Someone You Love, It Does" and everything was alright.