Dallas Pimiento, Book Three, "Bronco Die Later"

Dallas Pimiento

Book Three: Bronco Die Later

Part One

An Extraordinary Pair of Eyes

I have unusually keen vision. People riding in the car with me are often amazed at how far away I can read street signs. It often amazes me that other people cannot see the individual leaves on trees half a mile away. There is more to this extraordinary vision of mine, however, than mere clarity and acuity. I see the hidden images within scratches on painted surfaces, spatters of paint or caulk on a window, or the subtleties of shade on a spackled ceiling.
You do too, you say? Perhaps, but I doubt if you see the details that I see. I doubt if you can see the referential framework into which these images fit. You will just have to take my word for it since, until the global neuronic network that will render us all one great, singular world-mind is in place, there is no way that you can see through my eyes. If you want a hint of what it’s like you should look at some of my recent paintings. All the time I’m getting closer to what I want to express, which is, in part, the kinds of hideous bugaboos found on any sufficiently scratchy tabletop or randomly mottles tile of linoleum.
As much as I dread the coming computerized singularity I must say that I am intrigued at the idea that others will finally look through my eyes, register images through my unique interpretational software, and admit aloud, in a global cry of delight, “Lance was right!” Oh happy day among the infinite chain of nightmares to come!
Confirming my suspicions that these eyes were meant to achieve greatness, of course the forces of darkness have tried to put them out of action many times. A kid in second grade named Cedric Sanders chucked sand into them on the playground. I had the intelligence even then to wash them out and not to rub them. I was hit in the right eye with a baseball hit by an older boy. I ran into a tree at summer camp. A branch sliced open the skin below my left eye. I bore that scar many years.
I see all these events as proof that they’ve been trying to stop me for years. But it really wouldn’t have mattered if I had went blind. I would have become a great musician.

To These Beautiful Ends

Kim Kickmore and her husband Brad had been going back and forth to the Mapzone for about a year now. Kim in particular had adopted a completely new image for herself, that of a sculptor. Brad had found it easy in the Mapzone to become more the person he had always wanted to be, a man who could make public pronouncements of his political beliefs, but it was Kim who really blossomed in this new world.
They were delighted to find that their dollars were good in Tomatoville, where they decided to rent a small house. While Brad spent his time at coffee shops around town debating with strangers, Kim worked on her assemblages back at the house. She brought junk from her native world to make her sculptures with, items that gave her pieces an alien quality that was quickly appreciated by the locals.
“Where do you find these things?” One older lady asked Kim at a showing of her work.
“I spend a lot of time walking around.” Kim replied. Thinking that this answer didn’t quite suffice, she added, “My husband and I have traveled to many places. I’ve collected quite a pile of junk over the years.”
Miss Angela Okrea, the older lady, nodded thoughtfully. She bought a piece entitled “Let It Fall Down on its Own.” While her servants were installing it in the game room in her house, Kim was returning to her rental in a happy daze. She found Brad poring over a crudely printed book.
“I sold a piece!” Kim cried. “To a rich woman! Brad, I love this place!”
“That’s only because you don’t know its sordid side yet. Believe me, there is one. The government is corrupt as hell. The last mayor was murdered to keep him from spilling the beans on something called Operation Mocker. It’s an old, old plan of some kind to maintain the Mapzone’s economic independence.” Brad did not raise his eyes from the book he held.
“You really know how to bring a person down.” Kim said, throwing her bad onto the tattered sofa.
“Kim, I’ve met some people from Tomatoville’s underground. This is a book of pieces of underground reporting on what’s really going on here.”
“I sold a sculpture to a rich woman.” Kim repeated half-heartedly.

She Could Consent Afterwards

If she wanted to, the leader of the squad of priest-police informed Miss Okrea sinisterly, she could always consent to the search of her house after it was over.
“Just as one may posthumously donate one’s property to the church.” The squad leader added, smiling, as his men hunted through Miss Okrea’s rooms for something they would not identify.
“I’d sooner donate it to the city government.” Miss Okrea snapped.
“That may amount to the same thing one day soon.” The man, whose name was Firgin, curled his lip as he taunted the old lady.
A member of the priest-police squad entered the parlor holding a small green orb mounted on a pedestal.
“Is this it, sir?” He asked.
Firgin removed the straw he had been chewing from his mouth and smiled. “Why, I believe it is, little brother.”
“That is an antique reliquary.” Miss Okrea announced. “You be careful with that.”
“We will.” Firgin said, taking the object from his underling. “Miss Angela Okrea,” He recited formally. “I am seizing this artifact in the name of the Tomatoville Registry of Religious Antiquities. If you would like to protest this seizure, you may do so at the appointed time before the mayor’s board of review. However, be advised that you are under conditional arrest, a state that may be upgraded to formal detention at the discretion of the high priest of Clamdigger’s Cathedral.” Firgin pulled a rumpled form out of a pocket inside his jacket. “Unless you’d like to sign this consent form?”
“That reliquary is my property. I obtained it form a licensed dealer in such antiques. I will not consent to its seizure.”
“Didn’t think you would.” Firgin almost yawned, stuffing the paper back in his jacket. “Very well,” He snapped his fingers to summon the rest of his squad. “But remember what a vulnerable position you’re in. Our ministry now has the ear of the mayor.”
“Piss on you and your god.” Miss Okrea hissed.

The Uplifting, Sustaining Wave

The wave that allowed Dake to see over the mountains and thrill to the sight of the distant eon-giants that nestled in the crook of the horizon was composed of bundled streams of ouagir particles ad the most frigid air in the Mapzone. Dake could feel the wave slowly dying beneath his sail sandals, so he made an adjustment of a couple of degrees with the silken cord he held threaded through the fingers of his left hand. In his right he held a flask of moolava. From this he drank a tribute to the unreachable giants before beginning his precipitous descent.
“Ready his blanket.” Gavlak instructed his son Smears as he sighted Dake nearing the ground. Gavlad, his son, and the other men of Dake’s rangers hustled to meet their leader when he landed. All were hardy fellows who showed little sign of exertion as they crowded around Dake, though they had just jogged a half a mile in the thin air. They stood on a plateau near the summit of Panaifus, a central peak in the Gonzo Mountains.
“Damn cold up there.” Dake admitted as his blanket was thrown about his shoulders. He handed the moolava to Shaw, who took a sip and passed the rest to another man.
“Did you see them?” Smears asked Dake.
“I did.” Dake looked at Gavlak. “They were there, in the aura between the land the sky, just as the old lady said.”
“Just as the goat said the old lady said. Let’s remember that.” Gavlak was stern. He was suspicious of the provenance of the information the rangers relied on.
“Have it your way, Gavlak.” Dake sighed. “As for me, I would rather follow the words of an old lady than a goat.”
“Goats have been known to see visions, Dake.” Smears enthused.
“Yes, and goats are known to be in league with the mechanists.” Dake reminded the lad.
“I wouldn’t be so hard on goats, Dake.” Spoke up a heavily bearded man near the back of the group. “Goat’s milk cheese is nutritious and keeps well.”
“You ought to know, Borton.” Dake joshed. “You were nursed from a goat’s teat.”

One by One on Her Fingers

As I handed Lana the rings one by one she placed them on her fingers.
“That’s all of them.” I said, turning the old shoebox over.
“Good. My fingers couldn’t hold any more.” Lana answered. She held her hands out, examining her new ornaments. I stood up from the floor of the closet, pushing on my lower back with my hands.
“I’m stiff.” I said.
“You shouldn’t work so hard.” Lana advised me.
“Thank you, your majesty.” What did some college girl know about the deleterious effects of hard work?
“Your queen thanks you.” The young woman waved me away as I exited the room.
Outside I took possession of the balloon Lana had traded me for the rings. I told the balloon attendant that the deal had been concluded and opened the door on the side of the basket, preparatory to stepping inside.
“Just a moment, Lance!” Lana called from the porch of the house as she walked out. “I’m keeping the navigational equipment.”
“What?” My nostrils flared unflatteringly, I’m sure, as I turned about.
“I just said the balloon. I never mentioned anything about the instruments.” Lana walked closer. I stepped into the balloon quickly, intent on taking off.
“Stop him, Todd.” Lana ordered the attendant. The uniformed man got in with me and began disassembling the three modules that formed the balloon’s navigational equipment.
“It is obvious that I meant the balloon as is when I agreed to this deal! How am I supposed to know where I’m going?” I demanded.
“That’s not my concern.” Lana wasn’t looking at me at all. She was looking at a large ruby on her left thumb.
I sized this Todd up. Could I take him in a fight? I had been diligently lifting weights since the new year. I resorted to bluster.
“I’ll get you!” I yelled at Lana. As the attendant stepped out of the basket with the equipment in his arms, I cast off the moorings and began to rise.
“Have a good trip, wherever.” Lana smiled up at me, the smug little ecologist.

Into Pretty Excesses of Civility

I had a paper sack of muscadines with me. These provided me with food on the journey, while the sack provided me with a hat to wear when the trip turned cold, which it did the following day. I passed over an immense container of blue cheese dip, one that I hoped marked the northern border of the Mapzone. Without proper instrumentation it was hard to tell. I had never been to the Mapzone before. My other problem was that once I landed it was unlikely I would be able to get the balloon in the air again. In order to come down I would have to release the precious maxon gas from the bag.
It was the sight of the famed chicken reactors of Okraton that convinced me to land the balloon. The gas, loosed from the valve at the top of the bag, made a sound like the native antelope, that gathered at the sound and followed the course of the sinking balloon in an ever-increasing herd. Finally coming the earth in a muddy field within sight of one of the reactors, I dispelled the antelope by filling my hat sack with air and popping it. As I walked over the deflated balloon across the field I was met by a couple of farmers.
“Hello there.” I saluted them. “Is this Okraton?”
“Just outside of it.” Replied one of the men. “You got some way of getting that thing off my field?”
“What if I gave it to you?” I asked.
“Got no use for no flying machine.”
I nodded solemnly. “OK then,” I said. “Could I pay you or someone you know to drive me and my balloon to downtown Okraton?”
“How much you willing to pay?”
“Fair price. One hundred dollars sound good?”
The man rubbed his bristly chin and looked at his companion. “Well, I don’t know.”
“How about one-fifty?” I upped the offer.
“Alright, sure. Where’s the money?”
“Right here.” I produced a wad of bills, each one bearing my image. Seeing their error, the two bumpkins bowed low.

Even of Old

“Brisbig XII died with the name Okraton on his lips.” I told the enthusiastic crowd that gathered to see my triumphant entry into the city. “He regretted that he could never find the time to pay a visit to the Mapzone and to your city I particular. As your new sovereign, I have made it among my very first official acts to fulfill what my predecessor wished.”
The two farmers who had driven me into town were pressed for the whole story of my arrival. As they spoke haltingly, but proudly, to a group of reporters, one reporter detached himself from the rest and went to a payphone.
“I need to speak to Trent Fricker.” He told the operator at the Tomatoville Comment. While he waited for Fricker he glanced back at the farmers and shook his head.
“Fricker here.”
“Trent Fricker? This is Earl Hudson from the Okraton Questioner. Thought you’d want to know that the king is here.”
“King Brisbig XII?”
“No, apparently Brisbig is dead. We’ve got a new king. Name of Lance. Ever heard of anybody by that name?”
“There was somebody connected with the Loath Procurement Ministry named Lance Ash.” Fricker began making notes on a pad.
“I think it’s the same guy. Listen, this King Lance is coming to Tomatoville next. I’m going to follow him. I’d like to get together when I get there.”
“Sure, Earl.”
But the next place I visited was not Tomatoville, but Corn City. Even of old had the kings of far and near made their tours of the Mapzone in this order, saving Tomatoville for last. Besides, I wanted it this way. I wanted to give the forces of darkness time to gather their strength. In the meantime I enjoyed the hospitality of my subjects, asking of everyone I met where I might obtain a large quantity of maxon gas.
“You might try the maxon gas depository just outside of the eastern entrance to Tomatoville.” One public official told me.

Six Other Guests Only

Corn City proved to be a tiny, squalid dump whose residents greeted my arrival with the waving of the royal flag and an interminable display of patriotism. On the crudely built dais were six other guests only, the members of the rock group Fibrous Delicacy and eminent scientist Emile Hoffnung. All of us had decided to come here at the same time.
“He’s in Corn City.” Hudson told Trent Fricker over the phone.
“So I heard.” Fricker chafed at his enforced inaction.
“Tomatoville next. He’s leaving tomorrow morning in a motorcade right after he visits the giant Laundromat they have here.”
“Give me a call.”
Meanwhile various persons interested in seeing that no king reasserted his authority over the Mapzone gathered together in conference.
“I say we shoot him, JFK style, as he rides through.” One suggested.
“I say we unmask him as an imposter.” Another countered.
“But his picture’s on all our money.” Someone pointed out.
“Yeah. How did it get there?”
“Automatic currency exchange. Whenever the king dies the next one’s portrait is automatically substituted.”
“The global brain interface is almost here.” A young woman in trendy clothes observed.
“Well, what of it?” The chairman of the meeting, an unhealthily over-tanned man in his mid-fifties stood up and begged. “Isn’t that what we wanted? Isn’t that what we’ve been working towards for over fifty years? Brotherhood and unity?”
Everyone snickered at the joke.
“I say we turn the army on him, disguised, of course.”
“Not a bad idea. Get somebody working on that, will you, Trammel? When this big shot, undemocratic king comes parading into town, we’ll give him a really hot welcome.”
“What’ll we do about avoiding civilian casualties?”
“What do you mean ‘avoiding civilian casualties’? If anybody gets hurt, it’ll be his fault, not ours. We didn’t ask him to come here.”

Had Got a Little Apart

I hadn’t driven into Tomatoville more than five miles when the army met me. My original escort of two farmers in a truck had swelled to a motorcade of six touring cars followed by a line of cars carrying reporters, well-wishers, and other interested parties. There was also a tanker truck donated by some over-excited businessman to carry the maxon gas that I was slowly accumulating. I still rode with my farmers, standing in the bed of their truck, however, they eagerly wishing to accompany me for the duration.
“Antelope followed in his wake!” They told the reporters.
“Halt!” Ordered a masked soldier through a bullhorn. They troops blocked the entirety of the road.
I rapped on the hood of the truck, bringing us to a halt as instructed.
“Lance Ash, come forward alone. The rest of you stay back. Lance Ash, if you comply, none of these others will be harmed.”
“Don’t do it, your majesty.” The truck driver shouted out the window.
“Don’t worry about it, John. I can handle them.” I assured him as I jumped over the side. “You just wait here and enjoy the show.” I started forward, but stopped as I heard car doors opening behind me. Not only was my entourage leaving their cars, but the people lining the sidewalks were stepping into the street.
“No!” I ordered. “Stay back. Watch how I deal with this.” I turned back to the army. As I took a step toward them, a smaller unit broke from the rest and moved towards me, rifles leveled.
We met in the middle of the street. As they moved about me, ready to seize my arms, I smilingly said the magic words.
“Bronco Mechanisto Ipecac Toadsgoboad.”
With this statement, accompanied by an elegant gesture of absolute power, I caused the soldiers around me to fall backwards, dropping their weapons and choking blindly on savage ethereal indifference.
“Fire!” Shouted the masked officer a couple of dozen yards away.
I held my hands aloft and shouted “Bug bug bug bug tic tok link lak tika laka fyra wana tic tac tonofon tobriasti nokriana stoblipunu pili ladnen ganen taku ibriaig cadig fitriato lato lolo liliada bug!”

Horrible As It Was to Impute

Not a single weapon was fired. The man in command of my assassination force stood immobile, his mouth frozen open.
“Drop your weapons.” I ordered. All did so.
“Remove your masks.” I ordered. Each man did. Their eyes were all upon me, but slowly, under the power of my gaze they dropped to the pavement. Now they were feeling the shame of their position. I pointed at the ground before the officer’s feet. He fell to his knees, quickly followed by all his men.
Thereafter my procession advanced without incident, except that the soldiers fell in with the crowd that now followed me all the way downtown. Consulting some of the citizens, I learned the location of the Roughshed. Led Jaguin was waiting when I arrived.
“I am proud to have your majesty visit this place.” Jaguin bowed, sweat dripping off his nose.
“They tell me you had something stolen.” I said to the man.
“Yes, your majesty. A reliquary.”
“An orb mounted on a pedestal?” I asked.
“Exactly. You know of it?”
“I know what it is.” I looked up at the stuffed creature mounted in the middle of the room. “I know what that is too.” I shook my head. “And I’m glad it’s dead.”
Outside the Roughshed the crowd awaited. An old woman, evidently well known and respected, for people made a path for her, pushed her way through to the front. “King Lance!” She cried, out of breath. “I know what you’re looking for.”
“You do? Then tell me.”
‘You’re looking for the Flashorb.” She declared.
“What do you know about it?” I was becoming more kingly all the time.
“I took it.”
“You?” Jaguin boomed.
“Yes. I took it to keep it from them. But only last week the priest-police came to my house and took it away.”
“Who is them?” I clenched fist.

Undoing the Leash of a Dog

Some said it was magic that made the royal symbol of the exploded popcorn kernel appear on the balloon as it expanded, but in truth it had always been there; people just interpreted it differently before. Lana’s personal symbol was a chef’s hat, very similar in appearance to the kernel royal. As I rose into the air in the balloon the crowd below seemed to disperse rather quicker than one would like, especially if one is a beloved monarch watching from on high.
I had been supplied with a warm coat and a picnic hamper full of provisions. These saw me through the four-day journey to my next destination, a tiny house in the middle of the woods. As I released the gas from the bag no antelope responded to the sound. These woods were empty of such animal life. The winds carried me some distance from the house before I finally settled in the branches of a large pine. I ate the last biscuit in the hamper just before climbing down the rope ladder to the ground and setting off in the direction of the house.
Along the way I had many adventures that I won’t bother to tell you about as I am trying to press on as quickly as possible before I wake up. Reviewing the recent past is a tricky business. It can lead to depression and the reawakening of bad habits. Both of these I suffered during the course of my walk. Of course I became less kingly the further I went; that’s to be expected. I also became more interested in the tiniest of details, so that by the time I reached the little clearing around the house I was walking slow enough to read the tiny hieroglyphs on wildflower high rises and on the ladybug taxis that made their way among them.
As I came closer to the house a dog, tethered to a line at the side of the house, began to bark. His master, dressed in overalls and clutching a screwdriver, emerged from the basement door.
“Get ‘im, Vandal!” He ordered, undoing the dog’s leash.
Retreat was impossible. I had to enter that house. As the dog bore me to the ground and tore at my throat with its yellow fangs my only thought was of reaching the comfort and safety of the interior.

Part Two

New Conservation Regulations

Feeler motioned to the fellow on the opposite side of the narrow gorge.
“You have something to add?” The fellow asked.
“Yes.” Feeler spoke unnecessarily loudly. “As much as possible, I will keep to my usual schedule.”
“That’s great.” The fellow answered as he made the ‘OK’ sign with his hands, thrusting both at Feeler.
“That means that I will continue doing my normal activities.” Feeler arched one eyebrow.
` “As long as you get the bridge built by the centennial,” Bob, whom Feeler habitually thought of as a fellow, informed him. “I don’t care what else you do.”
“OK.” Feeler made the ‘OK’ sign back at Bob. That enraged the latter for some reason, though he didn’t show it. Maybe he thought Feeler was mocking him, which I guess he was, but I doubt if Feeler meant it quite so offensively. Bob was a hothead anyway. He stalked back to his tent by the small sea out of sight of anyone standing where Feeler had stood. Bob had only been seated on his cot a few seconds when old Phillips rapped on the flap of the tent with his flogger and asked if he could come in.
“Sure.” Bob sighed. He glanced up from untying his shoes and nodded at the old man.
“Taking off your shoes, eh?” Phillips asked as he settled himself on a camp stool made of bones and rawhide.
“That’s right.” Bob lay back on the cot with a luxuriant spasm of goose bumps.
“How did it go with the fellow from the other side?” Phillips asked. He glanced around Bob’s tent. There was a rumor among the tribe that Bob kept pornographic literature hidden somewhere. Phillips wondered where such material might be. Was it inside the lava lamp in some kind of secret recess? Perhaps folded very small and tucked into the decorative treasure chest at the bottom of the fish tank? It certainly wasn’t on the bookshelf. The books there all dealt with camping in one way or another.

Open the Door to Corruption

I wrote my name with a supposedly indelible marker on a packet of ketchup and placed this packet on the table at the rear of the room. Hopefully this would, if other people adhered to the same standards of behavior that they demanded of others, reserve the table while I retrieved my bag from the security desk. The marker I returned to the fiberglass hand of the mannequin standing in the middle of the room. This mannequin was dressed as a typical child of eight in the year 2112. I laughed at the incongruity of the futuristic tuxedo and the mannequin form, which was that of a common beast, though one with the dexterous digits of an artist.
“I need my bag.” I asked the uniformed attendant on duty behind the circular desk.
“Yes sir. What is your name?” The man was new. It was only natural that he should not have learned by now who I was.
“Lance Ash.” I said distinctly, to keep the two names from running together.
“Do you have some proof of identity?” He picked up a clipboard and readied himself to scan it.
“I never carry my wallet on me. It’s in my bag.” I explained.
The attendant made a face as if I had suggested that he press the button that would end the world.
“Well, I’m sorry, sir. I can’t let you have access to the bag.”
I stared at him, debating whether to throw myself on the floor and cry in an exaggerated manner when suave, solicitous Merkin Handwood laid his hand on my shoulder.
“Hello, Lance.” He said. He turned to the man behind the desk. “Some problem, Jerry?”
“Yes, Mr. Handwood. This gentleman has no proof of identity and he’s claiming a bag.”
“I’m his proof of identity, Jerry. This is Lance Ash. You’d better remember the face. He’s a Very Important Person. Get it?”
“Yes sir.” Jerry began to get my bag. I turned to Handwood to thank him. He tore open a ketchup packet and sucked out the contents.

Lunchtime at Many Thousands of Feet

There would be no returning by the path they had ascended. The roar of a nearby ice giant had sent rocks and undercooked beans tumbling down to obliterate that means of passage.
“Our only hope now is to make it all the way to the top.” Link Davenport made his comment while arching first one eyebrow and then another and craning his head back and forth as he peered upwards at the hidden summit.
Ned Feese, panting with exertion and fear, wanted to say “You think so?” in as sarcastic a voice as possible, but lacked the wind. He had to content himself with imagining his teeth sinking into Davenport’s skull. Unluckily for Walt, the new member of the team, it was that moment that Walt chose to turn up the TV.
“Do you think you can turn that down, please?” Ned sniped.
“Sure.” Walt agreed with flashing eyes. Under his breath he muttered “asshole” as he complied with Ned’s request.
“Thank you.” Ned nodded forcefully.
“You’re welcome.” Walt bit the words off. He turned back to the TV with a frown. One of his favorite movies was playing: The Robot Who Killed Everyone Named Sarah Conner. With all the falling debris and shouting, however, he was having a hard time making out the dialogue.
“Never mind, Walt. You’re seen this movie at least thirteen times.” One of the dogs that pulled the cradle on which the TV was mounted tried to reassure the newly divorced team member.
“Let’s get a move on.” Davenport called out.
It was hard work for Walt to keep his eyes on the screen and watch his steps on the rock-strewn mountainside as well. He grumbled as the reception grew worse the moment the team continued their ascent.
“Humans, Meglin.” An ice giant signaled to a friend further up. “Get ready.”
Meglin, one of the oldest of the mountain terrors that spend their lives howling at the sky and frightening travelers, rooted among his meager possessions for the dentures that would add to his presentation of nature’s brutal indifference to planning.

His Anal Cleft Was Heavily Pigmented

“Give me but one man who knows how to wield a hammer and the collective good will of all you gentle people,” promised the reverend Fridslip, “And I’ll get the good word to those heathens down in the next valley!”
As the crowd gathered before the pastor’s makeshift pulpit in the town square burst into awkward vocalizations of approval, Turnblatt and Wells backed away, into the smelly alley between the bookstore and the other bookstore.
“He can’t continue speaking like that for long.” Turnblatt kept his voice low. Who knew what elderly ears might be poised at the windows overhead? “He’ll go hoarse.”
“And thirsty.” Added Wells. “Who do you think he’ll get to wield the hammer?” He pushed the bell button by the garage door at the end of the alley.
“Oh, Roger,” Well’s first name was Roger. “That’s metaphorical!” Turnblatt snickered as the door was lifted up by little Snoker.
“How do you mean?” Wells asked.
“He’s using the hammer as a metaphor for violence. Fridslip wants a bully boy to accompany him on his evangelical tour of the next valley, someone who can both protect him from harm and help him ram his faith down the those people’s throats. Hi, Snoker.”
“Hi, Snoker.” Wells followed Turnblatt’s lead and greeted the little, slump-shouldered man in the thick eyeglasses and filthy sweater grimacing idiotically at them. This last fellow said nothing. It was said that the power of speech was beyond him. He made a choked, pig-like sound as he turned back to the two men from lowering the garage door and locking it. His head twitched once to the left and the noise was repeated. He watched Turnblatt and Wells disappear into the room, beyond this former loading area. Then, hopping on one foot, Snoker turned to a shadowy corner and from it picked up a short sledgehammer. He swung it about, getting the feel of it, all the while thinking of colorful dolls propped up throughout a hillside vineyard. He set up two empty oil cans on a cinder block and smashed them, but with little grace or skill.

Seven Men Debate What Should Be Obvious to All

The longer the penguin oil stocks remained imperiled, the greater the chances that Neurongo would begin seeing things out of the corners of his eyes. Why this should be so Dr. Spoonacre was hard put to answer, but he maintained that it was so in the face of mounting political pressure both from his colleagues at the Diabetic Pickle Disfunctionary and the subscribers to Elder magazine, a thin weekly whose sole purpose, so Spoonacre’s daughter suspected, was to stir up frenzied, irrational opposition to the work of men like her father.
“This must no be allowed to go on.” President Eisenhower’s Indian Affairs Bureau chief Jack Styler gave the conference table a painful thump with his finger. As he squeezed his injured digit he kept his eyes on the other concerned men around the hard table of lacquered teak.
“As I’ve already indicated,” Bruce Stylist sighed. His horn-rimmed glasses reflected the light of the omni-recorder orb that served as the table’s centerpiece, giving him a cold-authoritarian appearance that those who knew him best would say was a fairly accurate depiction of the real man. “The threat to the penguin oil stocks is a fiction designed to create an instability in the power structure governing the nations on the other side of the Antarctic ice shelf. Your Indians are in no danger of missing a single dose of their precious life-extending elixir.”
“What about this Neurongo person?” Styler shot back. “What about the threat to this man’s sanity? Or don’t you care about that, you cold, authoritarian…” Styler’s invective was interrupted by the entry of President Eisenhower.
“Please, gentlemen, remain seated.” The former general flashed his broad grin and motioned the conferees back into their chairs. “Gentlemen,” The president pulled down a retractable map from the ceiling. “I’ve just received word that Dr. Spoonacre has taken a subsonic transport from the dispensary at Cicada Base and is even now heading towards Baffin Island.”
“But that’s in the Arctic.” Kirk Newbold looked confused.
“I guess he doesn’t know where the penguin oil stockyard is.” Eisenhower speculated.

He of the Sparkling Shoes

“The lines are evenly spaced.” Nodrel the Elf-lord noted. “That’s good.” The noble elf’s talents went beyond mere aristocratic swagger and the proper oversight of his subterranean manor house; he was also a fair draughtsman when called upon to act in such a capacity. His judgment of the lines, however, no matter how expert, meant little to Ted Gomez. Of course, he didn’t reveal this attitude to Nodrel; he wanted the Elf-lord to look benignly on him.
“Thank you.” Gomez held the plans for the monolith before the tiny Nodrel. His own head was stooped to avoid striking the ceiling of the ballroom where this reception was being held.
“You can put them away now.” Nodrel called out.
“Yes, of course.” Gomez began rolling the blueprints back up, once more revealing his host to his sight.
“I think, however,” Nodrel sucked on a piece of pear in his gloved hand, “That what this monolith needs is an expression of the chaotic mind.”
“Indeed, your lordship. I had originally envisioned such a thing, but I did not think that the public…”
“Oh, the public!” Frowned he of the sparkling shoes. “They make me sick with the hidebound sensibilities.” Nodrel shook his head savagely and flung his uneaten treat into a porcelain urn. “Have some moolava, Mr. Gomez.”
“Well, how did it go?” Gomez’ portly partner Allen Fin asked as the former joined him by the 1/10 scale model of the HMS Bruce Willis.
“I think I have him interested.” Gomez rubbed his chin as he answered. “I think I can convince him that there is a kindred vision in my eyes.”
When the monolith was constructed, however, Nodrel’s builders relied heavily on the vague notions of the Elf-lord himself. Paying a bitter, much-delayed visit to the monolith one Independence Day, Gomez and Fin disgustedly compared the thing before them to a whale’s penis thrusting up from the ground, as conceived and executed by a blind sculptress from some planet where males are unknown.
“I hope he’s resting uneasily inside that monstrosity.” Gomez thrust his old hands deeper into the pockets of his coat against the unnatural chill.

Cagey Atlantean

Once Doug Florentine had reinvented himself as a power drink, charges that he was blaspheming the Lord’s Supper in the ensuing marketing campaign were dismissed by Baconomics (the manufacturer of Doug Florentine, the Drink) chairman Wilt Lungfowl in an emotional press conference.
“I don’t care what he says.” Wanda Pillowcase, one of those protesting outside Baconomics headquarters, was quoted as saying. “To have this ex-rock star ask people to eat of his flesh and drink of his blood is nothing but an affront to the Lord!”
“I wish they’d let the ‘Lord’ speak for himself!” Doug Florentine put down his tumbler of whiskey and, leaning on his palms, looked out over the city.
“Well, that’s clearly impossible.” Lungfowl’s right-hand man Noabo growled. He spun the oaken lazy susan before him. Various Baconomics products moved one by one before his eyes.
“We never had this kind of problem with the Jesus Christ weight loss gum.” Lungfowl polished his glasses with a bit of rag as he spoke.
“We didn’t have a rock star endorsing that product.” Nabo noted.
“We didn’t have a rock star as the product.” Lungfowl added. His humor was bitter. No one laughed.
“But that’s my point.” Florentine turned from the window. “Or one of my points. I’m not a ‘rock star.’ I’m an actor who’s had a couple of hit singles.”
“Perhaps the cognoscenti know that,” Lungfowl said, “But I’m afraid that’s not how the average consumer sees you.”
“Maybe that’s it.” Nabo sat forward.
“What is?”
“His image. We change his image with the average consumer.”
“How do we do that?” Florentine asked. He downed the remainder of his whiskey.
Two days later Florentine announced the foundation of his personal monastic order, with himself as the head monk. He appeared in a velvet robe and sported a short fake beard.
“Those who wish to retreat from the world have only to send in twenty proofs of purchase.” He touched his fingertips together and intoned.


No Grievable Chorus

I find it odd that the Centerpedes, in their seemingly endless conflict with the Sencaurians, have not hit upon the idea of taking advantage of my advertised services as psychic, drummer, and bean counter. For those of you who say the original ad in the back pages of Dybbuk Franchisee, know that I have since removed the reference to my work as a pastry chef. It seems there are insurmountable licensing problems on some of the Punkliquor Islands where, if you read Dybbuk Franchisee with any regularity or thoroughness, you must know the Centerpedes have established a military colony. Even if my price is too high for them, I have put the word out that I would be willing to work in exchange for lessons in classical Centerpede calligraphy. You would think that such a bargain would be immediately snapped up, but no; with next month’s issue my ad will lapse having attracted no takers.
I can’t afford to continue to advertise in Dybbuk Franchisee. I can’t even afford to continue buying it, though it is a most diverting magazine. Alone among human and semi-human publications it is favored with the custom of the Centerpede military establishment. Until my funds completely run out or my whim to visit the Punkliquor Islands ends, I guess I’ll have to maintain my acquaintanceships with the University liaisons who have the ears of so many of the Centerpede general staff.
Only the other day, to show you the difficulties I face, a friend of mine from the sanitation department here in Fungroid Minor stopped by my quarters and marveled at their tiny size.
“I thought you were moving back to the country.” He let me know.
“What? Why would I do that? I’ve got everything I need right here.” I gestured with my burrito towards the Herbie Hancock poster, the ornamental cactus, the new, unplayable Peter Murphy CD.
“But you talked with such sentimentality of the hot summer days spent shelling peas and shucking corn under the pine trees in the back yard of your grandmother’s house, sitting on a homemade stool with a glass of iced tea on the ground beside you.”
“Annakin, I think you’re confusing sentimentality with sentiment.”

Written Specifically For Conquest

I was compelled to speak with far less eloquence and verbal dexterity than usual.
“Remember,” the show’s producer had said, “You’re going to be seen by millions of people, most of whom not only don’t know the proper usage of the word ‘whom,’ but are also suspicious and contemptuous of anyone who does.” She offered me a cup of coffee, but I declined, citing health concerns.
When my image appeared on the black and white set in the Goobersons’ living room, instant recognition overshadowed anything than I had to day.
“Hey, Burl, isn’t that the guy that tried to steal your kayak?” Rick pondered, pointing at the screen.
“Yeah, I think it is!” As a paroxysm of angry memories flooded his mnemonic horn, the rhinoceros-man was thrown about in his easy chair, dropping his beer and tossing his head from side to side so that the small living room’s wallpaper, patterned in furtive lions, winking suns, and stylized roosters, seemed to flow together until a bizarre psychedelic jungle seemed to envelop Burl on all sides. He paddled his kayak down the muddy river of my voice running through the center of it all.
“And so, in conclusion,” I enunciated the word clearly and slowly. “Let me repeat, starting tomorrow a free copy of Interuniversal Communications will be delivered to every household willing to display the bronze bacillus of Procurement in its front window. Thank you, and good night.” I smiled unnaturally until the green light on the camera changed to red.
“You didn’t say ‘God bless.’” The producer admonished me as I was led away from the set.
“I don’t say ‘God bless.’” I informed her. “Ever.”
“Huh.” The woman exhaled. She looked at one of the headphone-adorned flunkies on either hand. “He doesn’t drink coffee. He doesn’t say ‘God bless.’ And yet he wants to be a media star. A-choo!” She pretended to sneeze.
“I’m sorry.” I said as I loosened my tie.
“Didn’t she advise you against the bow tie?” The director demanded of me later just as a couple of men with leathery hides burst into the room.

Anguished Banquet

“There will be no frozen yogurt I’m afraid.” Oatosh Burk announced in a low voice to his immediate tablemates as he lowered himself back into his seat.
Although a couple of pairs of eyes moved to him as Burk sat and delivered his news, no one indicated by word or sign that he had heard what the corpulent man had said. The eyes that had followed Burk’s return to his seat had already fixed themselves on other interlocutors when Burk added, “There was a fight in the kitchen and the bucket containing the frozen yogurt fell on the floor.” He elucidated to no one. “The yogurt got dirty.” Burk looked about at the ladies and gentlemen who he knew to be within hearing of him. Perhaps they didn’t care that there would be no frozen yogurt. Perhaps they hadn’t heard him, a voice countered in Burk’s head. Surely they would be as disturbed as he had been to discover the loss of the tasty dessert. He was just about to repeat his news, this time having made certain to get someone’s attention first, perhaps by tugging on his or her sleeve, when old Gammelson, down at the end of the table on the left, rose and began making an announcement.
“What is he saying?” A lady in yellow across the table from Burk asked.
“Perhaps they have saved some of the frozen yogurt after all.” Burk supposed enthusiastically. Tom Cutney, thumping one of his heavily waxed mustachios, snapped a fierce, outraged look at Burk from his seat next to the lady in yellow.
As Gammelson continued to orate in an inaudible mumble far away, Burk noted a trolley being wheeled in from the kitchen.
“Frozen yogurt at last!” He thought excitedly. He glanced at Cutney, but kept his mouth shut. He picked up a spoon from the untouched array beside his plate.
As more and more heads turned towards the approaching trolley, Burk heard one woman say aloud, “Oh, it’s cake! How nice!”
“Yes,” replied Cutney. “It’s old Gammelson’s birthday. Didn’t you know?”
At this exchange Burk tossed his spoon back onto the table with a clatter that brought another admonitory glare from Cutney and a violent confrontation after the meal.

What the Font You Pick Says About You

No less than fifteen of the short pieces collected in Brant Borden’s first book, The Cat Globe, started with the words “Time was…” More, three of these started “Time was when a man…” Borden faced no criticism for this repetition; in fact the handful of people who actually read the book made no note of it at all. Of course, none of them were in any way close to being professional reviewers of books or anything else. They were each merely patrons of the Nethermore Coffee Shop where Borden had casually left a copy of his book among the pile of reading material made available to the customers.
One on the days he was free to waste Borden went to the shop and sat against the wall watching the spot across the room where he knew his book to be. He sat doodling on a pad and letting a cup of coffee go cold. After an hour he was nearly ready to leave and perform some espionage duties when two older gentlemen sat down at the table adjacent to the stack of literature with their drinks. One of them took up Borden’s book.
“I say, The Cat Globe.” Gouverner Sweet laughed to his companion, Lornel Duress. “Sounds intriguing.” He opened it. As he did, Duress sipped his black infusion and commented on the cover.
“Illustrated by the author, apparently.” Oh, he was dry!
Sweet flashed his friend a look.
“It’s self-published, Lornel. What do you expect?” He said. Duress was actually formulating a reply, but before he get the beginning of it out, Sweet had begun to read aloud.
“Listen to this.” He said. “‘Time was when a man could ride his mule through the bean orchards of Her Majesty without suffering the indignity of having his hat knocked from his head by ill-maintained, low-hanging branches. Although it was my job to maintain those branches, it amused me so to watch from my tiny hut the mule-riding gentlemen have their hats knocked off that I must confess to shirking my duty.’ Oh, Lornel, I must have this book!”
“I supposed you can purchase it at the counter.” Duress suppressed a yawn.
Borden was indeed ambivalent at seeing the proceeds of the sale go to the coffee shop.

Gettysburg Lite

Her zippered mouth, inspiring disgust among the clothespinners, yet issued words of comfort that many took to heart that day. Dan, as disgusted as any of his contemporaries, walked back to his vintage arts and crafts bungalow stunned at the glow of confidence warming him from within.
“Martha?” He called when he had stepped inside the front door. As he stood poised to receive his wife’s answering voice, his gaze was arrested by the stuffed head of the bear his father had shot so long ago. “Yes,” he nodded slowly. “I’m going to burn you this very day. No longer will I tolerate your malignant presence.”
“Dan?” Martha interrupted her husband’s mental declaration.
“I’m home, Martha! Where are you?”
“I’m in the kitchen, Dan. Come in here.”
Dan did as he was bidden and found his wife standing over the worktable, her arms elbow deep in a large metal pot full of gray slop.
“Martha, something wonderful has happened! Let me tell…”
“Sorry I can’t touch you.” Martha interrupted. “I’m covered in this stuff.”
“That’s OK. Martha, let me tell you: something wonderful has happened!”
“Where have you been?” She looked him up and down as her fingers worked at the thick gray substance.
“Down at the square. That zipper-mouth woman was down there…”
“Haven’t they run her out of town by now?” Martha scowled. “She makes me sick.”
“She makes me sick too, but… Martha, what is that?” Dan pointed at the pot.
“It’s the rest of that bear meat we had in the freezer. I’ve boiled it down to its essential paste.”
Dan stared, dumbfounded, for a few seconds before remembering his intended statement.
“Darling, something that woman said has made me determined to change my life! I’m going to write that book I planned!”
“That’s wonderful, Dan. But what could that woman have said…”
This time Dan interrupted her. “It doesn’t matter, Martha. What matters is that I’m starting afresh. And, I’m burning that old bear’s head of my father’s.”
“Dan. The whole living room is decorated around that bear’s head.” Martha answered with determination.

The Bankable Smell of Restricted Carbon

Although never as popular as the more general purpose models, the Lincoln-eared Peasant Remora garnered a devoted fan base among the specialists dedicated to the bean insertion phase of the whole operation.
“‘The whole operation.’” Sneered Chancellor Shanty. “You make it sound so generic, so palatable. Why don’t you admit the truth of the ministry’s aims: the remaking of the whole world?”
I was under no obligation to answer Shanty. By breaking the protocols of good literature, he had put himself in the wrong. Still, my pride demanded a response be made.
“You mea the whole universe, Chancellor. Your paltry global conceptions…”
The ringing of the old-fashioned telephone device interrupted my haughty rebuttal.
“Excuse me.” Shanty held up a hand yet leathery from a youth spent in the lumberyards of Factus Mono. He picked up the receiver. “Chancellor’s office. This is Shanty.” He listened for a moment to the tinny, squawking voice coming through the line. With my secret eavesdropping gadget I was able to pick up the carnival-like sounds of a heavily commercialized beach in the background of the caller. Were they nothing but a recording designed to deceive the Chancellor? Was this unknown person with the Brazilian accent actually sitting in some office somewhere, an office as equally stuffy as the Chancellor’s own? It was none of my business, I decided, putting the secret gadget back into its convenient carrying case and turning my attention to the framed arrangements of Brazilian nut wings that covered the wall behind me just as Shanty replied, “I don’t think so, my friend. Though I must admit, the whole operation bears watching.” After a kind and solicitous farewell, Shanty hung up the receiver in its two-pronged hanging place and turned back to me.
As he seemed at a loss as to how to begin I had no real desire to know any such thing.
“No.” He said. “I’m alright, of course, but it’s these Lincoln-eared Peasant Remoras. It seemed they’ve been superceded by a new and flashier model.”

Blueberry Buckle

The old cracker chewed on the ends of his fingernails, but did not actually bite into them. He merely worked his saliva-covered teeth under the nails, then put his fingertips to his nose and enjoyed the resultant cheese-like smell. Being a forgotten member of the underclass, he had no way of knowing that he should have been on guard against publicly succumbing to this old habit of his. As he sat in the dirt with his back to the heavily vandalized wall of the library chewing and sniffing, he was being filmed.
A day later as the edited footage of his orgy of self-perception made its way through the entertainment terminals of the world, debate began to rage over whether the short films was meant as humor or as social commentary.
“In essence, is the filmmaker poking fun at this wretched ignoramus or is he inviting us to pity his plight?” Dr. Nasine discussed the matter with his dinner guests.
“Or both?” Clarence Fishlung hiccupped.
“Clarence.” Admonished his wife. “That’s silly. It’s got to be either or. Right, Dr. Nasine?”
“Oh, I think so.” Nasine replied as he jiggled a handful of salted nuts. “Or the filmmaker could just be astonishingly inept.”
“Shocking.” Rupert Handstand sounded truly shocked.
“Yes, it’s hard to believe that such ignorance of technology and creative form exists these days, but it does.”
Everyone at the table turned to the camera filming them and smiled.
“Laziness.” Bob Tookshower declared. “That’s what it is.”
“It brings us a good questions, though.” Debra Fishlung mused. “If the filmmaker is technologically ignorant, how much more ignorant is the subject of this confusing film?”
Dr. Nasine and Bob glanced at each other uneasily.
“That’s why I come down on the side of moral ambivalence.” Clarence declared forcefully. His declaration would be a perfect ending for the film, should the filmmaker decide to use it.

Conference Room in Spring

“How lovely two or more shades of green look adjacent to one another.” Thought Ramona Appletuba.
I was watching her as she thought this. The room was empty except for a long table, crudely built and painted white, that ran down the length of one wall, and the handful of characters aside from myself. These others were all ladies in simple cotton or linen dresses. Ramona Appletuba was one of them. They were all gathered on the far side of the room from me. I sat on a small folding stool intermittently watching them and doodling in a graph paper notebook.
Eventually one of them approached me.
“Excuse me.” She said to get my attention. After I had looked up somewhat blankly she asked, “Are you drawing us?” Her smile was friendly.
“Take a look.” I held the notebook up. The drawings were of a singularly horrific and abstracted nature, yet depicting a monotonous vision of a world populated almost entirely by ugly men.
After apologizing, the woman, whose name I believe was Tocie Prawnvendor, asked me if I knew what we were waiting for. I hesitated, glancing at the other women, hesitating just long enough for the door behind me and the to the right to open and answer her question for me. Still, I added, redundantly, perhaps, “For this, I think.”
“Ladies!” Boomed the immense head that entered the room on spider-like ambulatory pinions, hemmed in to either side of its cheeks by high, armless shoulders that hunched and bunched and preceded it first one and then the other. “I am indeed pleased that you could all make it.” The head, called Foster by his intimates, of which I was not counted, I assure you, turned to me and asked, “Are they all here?” His voice was like that of an elephant, nervous and hungry.
“All except that Debra Fishlung woman. Apparently her mail service has been…”
“It matters not!” The head roared, turning back to face the terrified group of women. “These should prove more than adequate. You may go, Senor Andante.”
I had some trouble folding my stool up.


Only a Few Doors Down

Ned Feese started a Senor Andante fan club.
“His mysterious appearances and puzzling adventures fascinate me.” He explained to Dorothy Pajam. As she sat regarding him with her own, patented mixture of curiosity and disgust, Feese busied himself hanging up the Senor Andante poster he had ordered from overseas at great cost.
“He hasn’t even noticed what I’m wearing!” She thought, crossing her long, meaty legs like a pair of self-conscious scissors.
“You’re the first to arrive,” Feese continued to talk, oblivious as to whether anyone was listening or not. “But, judging by the responses I received from the mass mailing I sent out, you shouldn’t be the only one!”
“May I have some punch, please?” Dorothy asked in a voice like some primordial ocean god talking through helium.
“You certainly speak properly.” Feese observed as he ladled a measure of the green drink into a plastic cup. “Almost everyone I know would have said ‘can I have some punch?’”
“I attended a finishing school.” Dorothy at last captured Feese’s direct gaze with her own perfectly formed eyes. “Just for girls.” Her fingers touched his briefly as he passed her the cup of punch.
“What’s your favorite Senor Andante story?” Feese asked, wondering it he was about the sneeze.
“I don’t know that I have one.” Dorothy kept her eyes on the president of the fan club as she sipped. Her not-overly-painted mouth turned down in a sour frown at the table of the punch just as the door opened.
“Ned!” Jasper Tonguearl howled along with a half-dozen other men entering the room in a silly, merry group.
“Jasper!” Feese returned the greeting. “You came! Welcome to the inaugural meeting of the Senor Andante fan club!” He saluted each newcomer by name until he came to the last man to enter the room. This last man was one he knew, but yet did not know. His eyes grew large. “We brought a friend.” Jasper informed him with a broad grin.
Dorothy took the opportunity to drop her cup into the trashcan. She had already guessed at the identity of the man in the conical hat.

The Inexhaustible Bread Bag

By reducing the diagrams of the various arachnidsleds, egghatches, and vibratowers to tiny size it was clear even to Todd Groaner how these machines could have been derived from the intricate doodles of the King of Veils.
“And conversely,” Groaner enthused, “By magnifying those doodles we could have the basic designs for countless new products!”
Reg Shoutpansy wanted to bark “Duh!” but he knew only too well of Groaner’s kinship with the Executive Lord Bean Counter. Fortunately old Lister was there to take the discussion in another direction.
“Or fine art.” The older man added to Groaner’s statement.
“Or fine art!” Groaner repeated happily. He punched the air. “Hot damn, what a concept!”
“A sufficient supply of the doodles is available?” Shoutpansy asked Lister while Groaner grew somber, puzzling out how fine art might be obtained from mere magnified doodles.
“There are two or three on every page of the original manuscripts of the King of Veils’ books.” Lister explained.
“How do you mean ‘fine art?’” Groaner asked.
“Have you ever heard of Franz Kline?” Lister asked.
“No.” Groaner did not exactly rue his scattershot and truncated education at this point, but the seeds were planted to blossom into the suspicious discontent of his middle passage.
Lister studied the young man’s face for a moment before dissembling. “I’ll show you some photographs of his work some time, but right now we need to decide if we want to go the route of stealing the manuscripts or using some sort of publicity agent to pump up the desirability of the King of Veils’ work to the point where his heirs will want to sell the manuscripts on the open market.”
Reg Shoutpansy was not listening. He was eyeing a pen and a used envelope that lay near at hand. What if he were to…?
“Reg.” The experienced old man commanded his attention. “I know what you’re thinking, but forget it. The doodles of the King have an irreproducible spontaneity and genius.”

Paul Revere Rides Forever Vigilant

“Pick up that box and follow me.” Instructed Sudsmaster Colvene. The partially mechanized boy standing before the indicated box studied it closely before obeying Colvene.
“It contains documents and illustrations relevant to our people’s struggle against the peas.” Colvene explained, although he didn’t need to for two reasons. The first was that, as a grade L underling, the boy deserved no explanation. The second was that the boy, whose name was Edir, was only looking for the best way to lift the box as he had been trained to do.
Colvene, shouldering his own burden, a case of Gadarene swill, led the way down the darkened hallway. Nearing the end, where the flashing warning light indicated the doorway to the isolation chamber, the sudsmaster suddenly turned to Edir.
“You understand that you must never reveal what you are about to see?” He hissed at the boy.
“I understand.” The boy’s voice box rendered his answer as a series of funky electronic beats.
Colvene then inserted his right index finger into the peptotic reader linked to the isolation chamber’s locking mechanism. The door swung noiselessly aside revealing the blue illumination of the entrance to the chamber.
“Who is there?” A resonant, masculine voice demanded.
“It is I, Sudsmaster Colvene, delivering the items as directed.” Colvene placed his box on the floor before the great easy chair from which the voice emanated. He jerked his head at the boy, indicating him to do the same.
“And who is this?” The voice, softened by curiosity, asked.
“A grade L servitor—partially flesh.” Colvene answered.
“You are dismissed, sudsmaster. Leave the boy here.” The voice commanded.
“Yes, Great One.” Colvene exited and resealed the door, leaving Edir inside.
The next time the door to the isolation chamber was opened was over ten years later. Promises of resolution aside, it remained for the peas to master the secret techniques that would allow their emissaries to respond in kind to those few parts of the beans’ whole operation they were to observe.

The Grays that Gaze

Glittering ideas for the opening of this piece are suspended just above my eyes like antique ornaments on a Christmas tree but dimly remembered from one’s third or fourth year. Was Jimmy Smith better than Groove Holmes? The odd mouth feel of seedless watermelon—similar to that of flesh, it makes me wonder if this variety of melon is actually some kind of green, legless hog. My latest Mick Jagger dream might be a good way to begin, but then, it occurs to me that I have already begun.
A knock at the door of the tiny one-roomed office I occupy at the top of the southern tower, the loneliest tower in the complex, distracts me from my struggles with form and technique.
“Message for you, sir.” The mail handler dressed in the colorful costume of his medieval forebears handed me the wax-sealed envelope.
“Here, boy.” I bid the man stay a moment before “rushing” back to his other duties. “You’ve know me for some time now. We’ve worked together in this complex, albeit in different capacities, as fellow laborer. Why do you yet address me as ‘sir?’ Seems a bit formal for such close comradeship.”
The fellow hesitated a moment, perhaps wondering if the truth were too precious a treasure to part with.
“It was mean ironically.” He at last confessed.
“Oh.” I acknowledged his answer and closed the door upon him.
“Now to attend to this message.” I said aloud to myself in the accustomed manner that has helped me to conceptually compartmentalize my mental functions into various identities. I split the still-warm seal with a thumbnail and withdrew the stiff piece of beige cardstock.
“Mick Jagger is here with a seedless watermelon. Would you please come down?” read the message. It was signed by my wife.
My bowtie showed the telltale signs of having been hastily donned as I entered the reception hall.
“Not the bowtie!” My wife mouthed in horror.
“Ah, Mick.” I said grandly. “I suppose you’ve come to debate who was better: Jimmy Smith or Groove Holmes?”
“Oh, Jimmy Smith, definitely.” Replied the old man, revealing a discerning taste.

Expertly Separated

“Where do you think it’s drawing its power for?” Pahabrus asked Dr. Fungroid.
“Difficult to say, General. Perhaps that wall socket?” Fungroid had been confined to a mobile immersion tank since his accident. He answered Pahabrus through the oil drum speaker mounted above the tank.
“Harrelson,” Pahabrus ordered one of the lieutenants surrounding him, “Take a couple men to men to that wall socket to which the creature is attached. Use whatever you’ve got to destroy that connection.”
“Yes sir.” The young lieutenant, played by the eternally snarling Rafe Pinworm, saluted and left.
“He plays a creep in everything he’s in.” My mother expressed her disgust. My mother thinks Keith Richards is a creep. I don’t know how that affects your judgment of her assessment of Pinworm. My mother is of the opinion that Tyrone Power was a “good-looking man” and that William Powell was funny. Maybe that will help you make up your mind. I can’t help you. I didn’t see the movie in question. I was busy in my room making lists of things to buy with my lottery winnings.
Two stout gorillas, linked to the main creature by wireless communication, guarded the power source. Lieutenant Harrelson and his two bravos advanced warily, hoping to get their weapons within range before they were noticed.
“What are you going to do with your share of the lottery winnings?” One of the gorillas asked the other.
“I’ve always wanted to move to Europe.” The other replied after some thought.
Before his companion could denigrate this plan, pointing out that no amount of money would allow an immense, gorilla-like alien to live in peace and comfort in Europe and take advantage of all of Europe’s cultural offerings, Harrelson’s team began blasting at the socket mounted on the wall.
“Stop! Stop!” Cried the large, bug-shaped mechanoid. “I’m just trying to find out where to redeem this lottery ticket!” Its cries were in vain, however, as none of the surrounding soldiers understood its language, a sad manifestation of the American educational system’s paltry state.
My list of wants petered out after #15: to have the size and shape of my ears surgically altered. Dumb idea, I thought.

The Last Chance to Recycle Batteries

It was Christmas eve 1964 when Wayne Shorter recorded his classic album Speak No Evil. Fifty years later World War One re-enactors in northern France sullied the purity of their performance by playing the album through their brain unifier chips as they readied themselves for the famous “truce” their great-great-great grandfathers had so annoyed their officers with.
“Why isn’t Tony Williams on this album?” Phil Lune asked his brothers-in-arms.
“It is rumored that he was busy studying the Beatles’ records. As you know, only a few years later he would come out with the first Fusion record.” Gary Pershing unwrapped a banana flavored Twinkie as he spoke.
“That’s debatable.” A young man known only as Todd threw in angrily.
“The debate is what makes it so fun.” Gary smiled. His mouth was full of corruption.
“What are you men doing?” An officer, whose regular job was stocks analyst, peered over the top of the trench in which the men stood. “You’re supposed to be playing football with the Germans?”
“Sorry, Larry.” Someone apologized.
“It’s Captain Wills!” The stocks analyst barked. “Get a move on! The artificial snow won’t last much longer.”
The men picked up their gear and began climbing the ladders.
“We call it soccer in Canada.” Todd told the captain.
“I’ll bear that in mind.” The officer replied just as yellow paint balls splattered his uniform. Of course he wasn’t injured, but he lost his balance under the impact and fell into the trench, where he broke his neck.
Todd and the others already over the top saw the German re-enactors advancing on them. They too were shot with paint balls.
“We’re listening to the Scorpions.” One German informed the prisoners as he and his fellows herded them into a corral.
“You are dead! You are dead!” The Germans complained to the soldiers that insisted on walking about after being shot.
“‘Dance Cadaverous.’” Gary said smiling. He managed to get his picture taken with a real horse before he went home.

Biscuits as Big as a Lumberjack’s Fist

Standing upright for the first time the giant pig seemed less like a grossly magnified farmyard habitué than a grand money making opportunity.
“Reminds one of Animal Farm, eh?” Shepperd, the cereal box model, commented to Radal, champion of the circuit.
“I have never read the novel.” Radal answered robotically. He picked up a long stick of bamboo and approached the giant pig.
“Now, what are you going to do, Radal?” Old Klem saw Radal coming towards him and the pig and asked.
“See how long we can keep him standing.” Radal held the bamboo like a flashlight pointed at the stars.
“That’s not how you do it!” Klem cried out, though calmly, very calmly; he didn’t want to spook the pig, used though it was to the sound of gunfire. “You do it with love.”
“Love takes time.” Radal countered bitterly. “I want to be a millionaire before it’s too late.”
“Boys!” Mama called from the back porch of the mobile house. “Lunch is ready!” She had on the red and white check dress and white apron that Sheppered loved to see her in. Her hair was up in a bun, the color of an imperfectly ripened tomato. As Shepperd and the others stomped up the muddy hill to their lunch, some willingly, others reluctantly, he asked himself what Radal had meant by “before it’s too late.”
“We have a guest.” Mama announced as the men took note of the bearded stranger sitting at the head of the table, where Moonwig used to sit. “This is Doc Brigger.”
“From the Ministry of Transients.” The stranger added. As he spoke it was evident to everyone that the man had already had a taste of the creamed corn.
“What do you want with us?” Radal, still clutching the bamboo pole, demanded.
“Well, I was going to order you to move on, but now that I’ve seen your pig, something else has occurred to me.” Brigger put goose bumps on the men’s arms with his words. “That pig needs shoes.”

Leave It Till Tomorrow to Unpack My Case

Much the best way to travel, if one is traveling to some destination both remote and conventionally out-of-bounds to the financially restricted postal worker such as the Strapblacking Islands or the Krizmus Gorge, is by aluminum balloon stick. It was by means of this innovative yet simple contraption that I voyaged to Awkwardia, the tiny swamp-locked kingdom that is just as good as the Strapblacking Islands or the Krizmus Gorge, but far less expensive than either. I remember telling a co-“worker” that when I returned from my month-long retreat I would still have enough money to go for broke in the big multi-planet lottery, so thrifty would be the whole affair. Of course, I was not so foolish as actually to blow the money I had saved on lottery tickets, but I do not make a point of insisting on truth when a witty statement is available. This sentiment has led to much confusion over the years—people thinking that I have actually murdered my wife, advocated the violent overthrow of our divinely mandated government, or honestly intended to have my nipples surgically removed, but I think the satisfaction I feel in speaking so cleverly is worth all the interrogation by police, federal agents, and mental health workers.
“How was your trip?” A plump man in a new straw hat asked me as I sat down with him in the lobby of the Petrol King Hotel, the largest structure in all of Awkwardia, outside the royal compound itself.
“Oh, fine, fine.” I answered, refusing the man’s offer of a share of his bottle of the local rum. I was sweating, a rarity for me, even in that quasi-tropical climate. Nervously I scanned the surroundings.
“Relax, my friend.” The man, whom I shall here call Mr. Obduro, advised me with a chuckle. “There is a reason I conduct business here. It is absolutely safe.”
“OK.” I whispered. I picked the battered old grocery bag off the floor and placed it on the table. It had sat on my lap all the way on the aluminum balloon stick. Mr. Obduro took a look inside.
“Yes.” He acknowledged. “It is the head of my sister’s rapist.” He then passed me the small box containing my payment.

Vegetable Alignment


Mel put on his sloth armor. Bethany watched from the secret pantry her cousin’s husband had installed the previous summer at a greatly discounted rate. Afterwards she consulted the tiny parrot that lived downstairs. The bird was drunk—one could always tell because he habitually put on a hat that was a miniature replica of Daddy’s—but he still made sense.
“Well, Bethany,” He said in that Mickey Mouse voice of his. “Mel must have a reason for putting on that suit.”
“Unless he’s totally insane. And I mean really insane, not just some ‘ha-ha, he’s insane’ thing.”
“Bethany, you always were a worrywart. I’ve known you since you were a little girl…”
“No you haven’t.” Bethany interjected. “I just met you last year.”
“I must be thinking about some other little girl.” The bird’s words were slurred, but contained no more emotional content that usual. That’s the primary disadvantage of a bird’s vocal apparatus. Everything is rendered in a monotone. He slid down the pole on which his perch was mounted and lay back on the floor, apparently asleep.
The following day Mel’s wife Karen opened a pneumatic tube capsule addressed to her and inside found photographs of Mel parading through the illiterate sector of town in the sloth armor.
“What is this?” She asked Mel, handing him the photos.
“I don’t know.” Mel placed his stein on the table and shuffled through the pictures. “Somebody trying to threaten me? Blackmail me? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Does this person think I don’t know about you and that suit?” Karen asked. Her hands were on her hips in outrage.
“I don’t know, honey. I can’t think who would take pictures of me and send them to you.”
Listening through the specially filtered hose that she had run up through the insulation, Bethany bit her hand in frustration. Big, hot tears fell from her eyes. What could she do now? Should she ask the bird? He was probably hung over, but what other option did she have?

Contemporaries of Buttoned Pumpkin

“Standardized packaging really satisfies something in my aesthetically.” The fellow with the word “corporate” printed by hand on his pale blue t-shirt told Laudner.
“Try to keep your mind on the game.” Laudner replied. He and Corporate sat on either side of the long rectangular board on which they were passing the time until Friscow returned, playing the game of Beans and Peas.
Corporate made a quick response to Laudner’s move and said, “I must confess I’m not really interested in playing this game.”
“You must not be, you’re playing so badly.” Laudner triumphantly moved his dodgem into the Zone of Referral.
“What do you expect? I’ve never played before.” Corporate glanced at the clock over the bar.
“What?” Laudner wrinkled his brow. “I thought this was the game for you Board of Trade guys.”
The man in the pale blue t-shirt smirked. “I’m not exactly Board of Trade.”
Laudner was about to press for details when a jangling of keys outside the door was heard. The door opened and in stepped Friscow with several plastic grocery bags hanging from one hand.
“Give me a hand, will you?” He asked.
Laudner jumped up and took the bags from him. He put them on the bar. Meanwhile Joseph Maturdly, the “corporate” man, studied the forsaken game board. He swept the pieces into the game box.
“Hey, ‘Corporate,’” Friscow hailed the man. “Nice shirt. You do that yourself?”
“Yeah.” Maturdly stood up. The kinetic device, taped to his solar plexus, could clearly be seen as the material of the shirt was stretched.
“I’ve got bad news.” Friscow told Laudner as he removed a bottle of vodka from one of the bags. “We’ve got to change rooms.”
“But why?” Laudner asked.
Maturdly made a futile dash for the door.

Flashing the Dome

Secured to the underside of the bottle’s screw top by a powerful acrylic-based gum paste was the station dweller’s main power source. This was a reactive coil of tufiftium that usedthe carbon dioxide exhaled by the biological organisms inside the bottle, either dwelling on the floating station or living in the deep sea of protonic milk on which the station floated, to produce light and heat.
“What a miracle of science it is.” Johnny Owldiet marveled one day in July when periodic atmospheric conditions unique to life inside the bottle rendered the surrounding mountains of textile moss but a mustard-colored blur through the glass.
“A miracle by definition cannot exist.” Responded thin-whiskered Dangyr McCuel. He rubbed his thumbs and forefingers together brutally making a grinding sound as he looked over the side of the station into the milk. In the semi-opacity of the milk’s surface he could see a few of the bizarre creatures that teemed in unknown numbers in the depths.
“You’re such a sour puss.” Owldiet laughed, slapping McCuel on the shoulder playfully. McCuel whipped around.
“I told you not to touch me! I told you before!”
“Trouble, amigos?” The voice of Dr. Carmike’s assistant Ramuelo intercut the scene. As he stepped forward the two parted. Owldiet asked Ramuelo if he did not think the reactive coil a miracle of science.
“A miracle?” Ramuelo repeated dubiously. “Udonomics manufactures many fine products, but I don’t think miracles number among them.”
“I’ve told him not to touch me!” McCuel jabbed his finger at Owldiet. “I’ve told him a hundred times!”
“Is that right?” Ramuelo asked, but even a child of three or four could sense the lack of concern in his words. “Dr. Carmike predicts a steam storm is building up. You two had better come inside.”
“Oh, he’s ‘predicted’ one, has he?” Owldiet sneered, though he followed Ramuelo back into the safety of the station’s interior readily enough.
“Yes, Johnny. With the help of his machinery.”
“A miracle.” Owldiet shook his head. “They’re all miracles.”




Cigar and Cocoa Butter

I’m tempted to purchase a honey bun from the vending machine with the change my wife gave me expressly for putting air in the tires of my car. If I don’t give in then all I have to eat is a can of beans and a banana. That doesn’t seem like enough given all that I have to put up with tonight.
“How you get so big eating food of this kind?” Yoda said that a long time ago and I still wonder over it. I look around me and I see not rage, but potbellies. Some, their lineage going back to William Blake, though they know it not, say give in and have a honey bun, have a treat. I think I’ll forego the pleasure and keep fighting to get trim again.
At home it’s a different story. I eat like a furnace mouth in the belly of a dreadnought there. Here at the post office I try to maintain an ascetic mindset. Here I am a holy man, meditating constantly to control my emotions, living in an imaginary world while my body is subject to the amplified gravity.
No honey bun is going to solve anything. Now, if I had a glass of milk to drink with it, things might be different.
“Men, we’ve got to reach the remaining holdouts from our honey bun program. Any ideas?” Hurgard, to be replaced in less than a year by a man half his age and half as effective as he, stood in what out grandparents would have called his shirtsleeves at the head of the conference table chewing on an unlit cigar and eyeing this team of his arranged about the table in as many variations of the common slouch. Even Bielta, who had started off full of energy, ambition, and ethnic pride, had slowly assimilated the others’ posture and attitude.
“We could take out the word ‘honey,’” George said. He always said this. Everyone groaned. Carey threw a wadded up agenda at him. “It’s confusing!” He insisted.
“And call the product what?” Hurgard asked. “The ‘cinnamon bun?’”
“That’s the primary flavoring agent!” George repeated his refrain. “There’s no honey in them!”
“Why don’t we make them even bigger?” Bielta suggested.
“Now we’re talking.” Hurgard examined the soggy end of his cigar.

The Mayfly in the Center of Apprehension

“You put too much faith in that old horn.” Ned Feese’s mother griped as Feese watched the morning news on TV and idly polished the bell of the white clarinet.
“There’s something about the wax museum!” Feese cried. He pointed with the end of the yellow polishing cloth at the screen.
“You ought to burn that horn.” His mother’s gums hurt as she tensed the muscles of her jaw. “It’s not a real musical instrument anyway.”
“Oh, look at Elvis!” Feese laughed.
“At least Elvis could play the guitar, not just polish it.” The old woman’s mouth turned down at the corners.
Without taking his eyes off the TV Feese pointed the bell of the white clarinet at his mother and blew a single note of revolt.
“Hideous, ugly-sounding thing.” Feese’s mother’s fingers worked at the tightly knotted laces of a big black boot in her lap.
“In other news,” Newscaster Don Francois began, “Local musician Ned Feese…”
“This is it!” Feese was triumphant.
“…has been marked for death by the village elders.”
“Ha-ha!” The old woman laughed. She had loosened the knot at last. With one wrench she pulled the whole lace free of all the eyeholes.
“‘Marked for death?’” Feese repeated incredulously. He stood up from the ottoman upon which he had been perching.
“You put too much faith in that old… albino horn, I told you.”
Feese turned on his mother and blew a flurry of squawks in anger. The old woman responded by blowing into the cracked toe of the old boot, fingering the eyeholes as she had the plastic recorder she had once learned to play in grammar school back in the old country. The mouth of the boot coughed once or twice before emitting a baritone sound much like the squeaking of the heavy bronze hinges on the main gate of the Mustachio’s palace.
“I’ll trade you!” Feese shouted with delight.



Menace

With her knuckles depicted as white, bulging, and bearing the letter B-E-A-N-S-N-P-E-A-S in subsequent portraits commissioned by the Baker-in-Chief’s wife, Amanda Milan became both a cultural icon and a heroic figure in the more basic sort of textbooks. What, however, was the truth behind this supposedly wild-eyed and messily-coifed female whose name was later to adorn coffee cups and beach chairs in a display of either ironic ignorance or ignorant irony? One man, perhaps the last living man able to provide us with any first-hand insight into Amanda Milan’s real-life character is Stenhope Dulton, now publisher of Raspberry-Centered Chicken Tower magazine. One wintry day last summer, as the village band rehearsed on a distant platform, we met with Dulton on a public park bench covered with violent, impulsive expressions of young love carved into its much-painted wood. I asked the elderly publisher and hulking bear of a man had he ever been in love with Amanda Milan?
“Oh, I don’t think so.” He replied after considering the question only a moment. “I was only five or six years old when she died.”
“Did you attend the funeral?” I pounced eagerly, for, aside from ten precious seconds of silent film, no known documentation exists concerning Milan’s funeral. Even her burial site is a secret closely guarded by the dwarves employed in the dough works.
“No,” Dulton explained, “There was a cartoon I wanted to watch, Mr. Salmon’s Salmagundi. It was my favorite.”
“But surely that was a live action children’s program that showed cartoons as part of its content, not a cartoon itself.” I gently corrected, certain of my facts, as I own a copy of The Guide to Obsolete Children’s Television Programming and have spent many hours perusing it.
“No, it was a cartoon.” Dulton shifted his bulk that he might more effectively wag an office-work-softened finger in my face.
I lowered my head and mumbled apologetically, “Mr. Salmon’s Salmagundi was a show with actors. An actor played Mr. Salmon. He introduced the cartoons.”
“You’re wrong!” Dulton bellowed. He struggled to his feet, but collapsed suddenly into a gathering storm of controversy.

Sickness

Fresh arrangements of woodland weeds and singularly diverting twigs were placed about the room in the festive plastic urns that the witness claimed to like so much.
“I remember the first time I walked the Clipshaw Hills.” The witness reminisced as Sally applied darkening agents under his eyes. I turned from watching the entrance to the auditorium and waited for this unnamed young man to continue, but seeing that his observation was completed, I looked away again.
Sneaky’s voice came through my headphones.
“Relax. He’ll be here.”
I grunted something meant to convey my legendary surliness—in reality I could think of nothing to say, and slipped through the black curtains to the little clearing amid last year’s props where Stan and Walter were playing cards.
“The Governor here yet?” Stan asked.
“No.” I said. I watched them play a moment and then remarked on how Frank Sinatra had once told Margot Kidder that he only drank milk during a thunderstorm.
“You’re a know-it-all.” Stan said, putting down a card bearing the likeness of Raymond the Janitor on top of Walter’s defensive assembly.
“Always butting in and telling people what’s what.” Walter added as he angrily turned over useless card after useless card.
“That’s my job.” I agreed, more distracted than surly.
“The Governor is here.” Sneaky whispered in my ears.
“Gotta go.” I excused myself and left Stan and Walter, who, I am sure, spoke warmly and appreciatively of me after my exit, thankful that I had give them both high-paying jobs that required nothing more of them than that they play cards all day.
“That’s the man!” The Governor was saying as I re-entered the scene. He stood between two of the urns and pointed haughtily at the witness.
The latter rose, the paper makeup sheets still protruding from his collar. “Me?” He cried. “You’re the one!”

Cyclonic

The diplodicus ate the proscribed macaroni anyway. Bunk and Lewis were disappointed, of course, but what could you do?
“He’s far too big for us to control.” Bunk admitted as the two young peasants played gin rummy.
Lewis was about to discard the king of hearts, but paused. He turned an ear towards the wall. “I hear something.” He whispered.
“What are you whispering for?” Bunk smiled.
“It’s… recorded sound.” Lewis decided.
Bunk’s smiles disappeared. “In the next apartment?” He started to stand up, but showed his hand to Lewis first. “I had crap.” He said.
Lewis turned his cards to Bunk. “Me too.”
Bunk put his ear against the cheap wooden slats that made up the wall. Lewis did the same. Their noses were seven inches apart.
“Sounds like a train.” Bunk’s eyes roamed the outer edges of their sockets.
“I guess they can record the sound of a train.” Lewis mused.
Bunk straightened up. “Who lives on the other side of this wall?” He asked.
“Don’t know.” Lewis had no answers. He watched as his childhood playmate chose one of the heavy prodding forks from the rack and began digging at the slats.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” Lewis asked.
“Anybody with a recorded sound machine will know what to do about a nearly fully grown diplodicus.”
“Unless they stole it.” Lewis countered, though he hated to throw cold water on Bunk’s idea.
Bunk did not respond. He tore out the first slat. The ones to either side were easier. After jerking them free he pulled down the woven banana skin insulation.
“I’ll be damned.” He swore.
“Is that old comic strips?” Lewis stepped forward and examined the funny pages that lined the wall.
“Just think.” Bunk ran his fingers over the yellowed paper. “Right behind Garfield’s head may be a television!”
Antacid Intolerants

Hamhock, that succulent novelty, lay waiting in the stewpot for Laurence, should he ever make it to Beebra’s apartment to indulge in its flavors of brine, gristle, and marrow. Laurence stood in the rain under the towering immensity of the imperial capitol building watching the police tow away his car.
“Poor guy.” Rick Brokersfeld shook his head from the comfort and security of his father’s domed walking machine.
“He deserves it.” Rick’s friend Shaglimb sniped. “Filthy car driver! Four wheeler!” He shouted at the receding figure of the stranger, though he certainly knew that he would not be heard.
“Should I give him a lift?” Rick asked, making as if to turn the tall ambulator about.
“God, no.” Shaglimb answered. “It’s crowded enough in here as it is.”
Rick glanced back at the precious cargo they carried: boxes and boxes filled with comic books. He sighed. “Just kidding.” He said. There was no way be would let some stranger (especially one drenched from the rain) into this space with so much treasure.
“Ah, comics.” Rick Brokersfeld sighed again.
“Who would have thought, one hundred years ago,” Shaglimb philosophized, “That our entire lives would be based on the template of the once-lowly comic book?”
“Indeed.” Rick rubbed his chin with a hand tattooed in green ink. The images were tiny Mayan glyphs taken from the ancient comic strip Mento Dento.
By the time Laurence arrived at Beebra’s apartment the world had changed. The apartment was now occupied by big-nosed foreigners professing no knowledge of the previous tenant’s whereabouts.
“Would you like to have dinner with us?” The man invited Laurence. “We’re having hamhocks.”
“You’re using that word in the plural, as if it was a count noun.” Laurence noted, gripping the handle of his briefcase tighter. He backed away slowly, as the wolf reluctantly admits defeat.

You Can’t Tell Anybody

A single page from the book of Hazard was sufficient reading material for Anzal the Digger. He took the thin sheet to his tiny cabin and sat terrified for the remainder of the voyage.
“Loopwick Island!” Cried the starboard walker on the morning of the twelfth as the fragrant breeze from that fanciful destination wafted over the great wave-riding train.
“See if he’s alive.” Pam instructed Digby as she sat trying on straw hats in preparation for the imminent disembarkation. The man called Digby went to the door of the neighboring cabin wherein lay the Digger, Anzal. He rapped twice with the knuckles bearing the tattooed letters M-E-T-A-L.
“Anzal! You alive?” He called. His voice was like whole horseradish sent through a Cuisinart. After another rap and another call, interrupted by the passage of balloon-laden children along the corridor, a hollow-eyed Anzal answered the door. He merely glared at Digby. The latter returned the glare for a moment.
“We’re at the island.” He said. “Get ready.” He turned away.
At the end of the corridor Jimmy accidentally popped Elise’s balloon with the sharp end of one of the pieces of straw that composed his hat.
“I didn’t mean to!” He protested as Elise began to cry.
Digby chuckled softly to himself over the incident as he stood at the door of his own cabin. “Stupid kids.” He said. All of this had not gone unnoticed by the two uniformed men sitting in secret observation across the corridor.
“He still has a soft spot for children.” One said.
“Fine.” Said his comrade curtly. “What about the Digger? Would you say he appears ‘impaired?’”
“If you mean is his musculature diminished, then no, I would say it is not.”
“Hmm.” The second man in the uniform of gray and white mused. He rose from his stool in front of the peephole and went to the porthole on the opposite wall. “Do you smell that?” He asked. “That’s the smell of a fat bonus and leisure.”


Surely MTV Keeps Records

“The elongation of the checkerboard is but an illusion.” I explained to Parminter, though he seemed, as I well knew, reluctant to accept anything that I might have to say.
“I am trying to visualize the biscuit as you suggested,” The old man’s voice was weak; had I been pushing him too hard? “But I fear that I am too set in my ways. Perhaps I am too…too…” He faltered, unwilling to say the dreaded word.
“‘Too old?’” I finished his thought. “Nonsense, old man. Why, I myself was thirty-something when I learned to do without alcohol. I took up the German language long after I had been written off by all my contemporaries. You need a rest, that’s all.” I switched of the oscillocybin and Parminter’s head fell forward onto his chest.
“It’s easy for you.” He muttered. “You, with your secret source of unlimited wealth and your so-called ‘procurementary’ brain. I was born in a treehouse on a cliff by the sea. My people were all sponge divers. The Coca-Cola Company was our only source of stability.”
“Tell me about your treehouse, Parminter. Did you have television?” I rolled a tiny piece of a dowel painted to look like an unfiltered cigarette between my fingers and gazed up at the ceiling fan contemplatively. Did I really care about Parminter’s background, his possession of a television or lack thereof? These were not questions that I asked myself at the time. Only later, when it came time to dictate to my secretary my report on these events did I give any thought to them. I paused in the middle of pacing the borrowed office, fake cigarette in hand, and laughed in a snorting sort of way.
“What’s so funny?” Asked Gloria, the secretary provided me by the commission.
“Nothing.” I snapped, immediately regretting it. “Nothing.” I repeated in a softer voice. I longed to apologize, but a man in the position I was in at the time cannot afford to show weakness by apologizing to an underling, especially a temp. Later on, however, I made it up to the woman by remembering her birthday with an ice cream cake.


Mammy’s Tin Tater Cup

“This container was recently used to transport octopus.” Glint pronounced.
“How can you be so sure?” Scorbo demanded.
“His nose is extremely sensitive.” Thales, the last to speak of the celebrated Three Companions, smiled at his joke. It is often remarked in the most ancient of source materials for these chronicles of the Three Companions’ adventures how Glint frequently complained of subtly offensive odors that others could not perceive. He also had strong associations between certain smells and memories which could not be accessed in any other way.
“We can’t afford to be picky.” Scorbo reminded his friends, climbing down from the loft. “It’s the only thing we have available.”
“Couldn’t we scour it out with some sort of detergent?” Glint begged.
“We could, had we such a cleansing agent at hand, but we don’t.” Scorbo hunted through his pockets for the miniature, but powerful flashlight that spaceflight engineers were also known to use.
“‘Such a cleansing agent!’” Thales mocked the tall, blond companion. “What are you turning into, Scorbo?”
“I am certainly becoming more the person I have always longed to be, Thales.” Scorbo folded his arms across the image of Techno Texan that adorned the front of the orange, 100% cotton t-shirt that he wore.
“We don’t have time for your bickering, you two.” Glint admonished.
“Very true.” Scorbo agreed, favoring the swarthy, medium-sized Glint with a smile that others, those unfamiliar with Scorbo and his companions, might perceive as cruel.
“When this is all over,” Thales, shorter than the other two, and the possessor of a pale, freckled hide, had turned his profile to Glint and Scorbo. “I’m going to start a band. I really am. And I don’t know whether either of you will be invited to join.”
At that moment a distant rumble of reptilian vocalizations, gargantuan in its tone and timbre, sounded through the large windows that lined one wall of the abandoned warehouse.
“The people of this village, idiots all that they may be,” Scorbo declared, “Are counting on us. Let’s not let them down!”

Double Ultimate

Going directly to the closest independent distributor of narcotics after setting foot on dry land, Gatherer, a bear, spent half his paycheck on a box of smoking salts. He thanked the pleasant and helpful young man behind the counter and went out into the city to see what wonders it contained.
At the corner of Flam and Girdle he was spotted by Nancy Cucum, an agent of mine posing as a cola tester. She followed him as far as Fudgeburn Stadium, all the while trying to make contact with my office through the transmitter cleverly built into the housing of her watch.
“Damn him!” She swore. “Why won’t he answer?” Running now to keep up with the eager bear, Nancy managed to get the cleaning woman on the line just before she lost sight of him.
“Tell that asshole that one of the bears he’s looking for is in town, currently somewhere near the graveyard of sports greats of the past!”
“Got it, dearie.” The cleaning woman acknowledged, writing down the gist of the message (I never got the ‘asshole’ part; it was Nancy’s posthumous memoirs that revealed it to me) on a sandwich wrapper. “I don’t know when he’ll be back. He and a couple of the robots went down to greet the new director of water allocation.”
Indeed, at that very moment I was introducing Festus and Ramshat to the director.
“This is an old friend of mine, boys.” I smiled, hoping that the two had enough sense not to crush the man’s fingers in their hydraulically powered grips.
“We’ve known each other for some time, Lance.” Mike Pepsi, the new director of water allocation, ignored the robots’ programmed politeness and addressed me.
“Do you remember the night we were watching The Misrepresenter over at your mother’s house…” I began.
“And we heard a noise outside?” Pepsi had not forgotten.
“And we looked outside and a drunken bear was trying to open my domed walking machine?” I laughed, joined by Pepsi. Oh, the good times we had had then!

Unsold Copies Line the Crypt

Fun—one can find it in a spinning wheel of bees and fruit, or one can find it in the somber contemplation of the random patterns of grease stains left on a piece of paper by a biscuit. Only by accurately timing one’s responses to fun, by statistically carting these fluctuating responses along the spectrum of fun, can one begin to penetrate the mysteries that will one day cause the dedicated observer to completely spoil his own fun and that of others when he decides to analyze and critique each experience as it happens. Girlfriends may abandon this kind off person and acquaintances may strike his name form the lists of invitees to parties without number.
Some of us can’t help it. The seductive pull of verbalizing and the habit of thought are too great. It is not that we like being killjoys; in fact, in quiet settings with only a couple of people, we can be quite entertaining. It is just that spontaneity is something that is best left to our solitary times. I know that personally, I’m always worrying that the other person(s) isn’t enjoying or feeling the same thing I am. I’m a take-charge guy with plenty of doubts about whether others want me to take charge.
He walks alone, the emotional analyst. Awakening in the middle of the night, he wanders out into the back yard to feel the first chill of autumn in the air. A space ship of unusual design (he later recalled it as resembling a fistful of golf tees annexed to a traditionally shaped barn) lands almost noiselessly not ten feet from him.
“I’ve always wanted to see a UFO.” He thinks, as the tears roll copiously down his face. All his life he has both feared and longed for the day when he would see the impossible. First it was Santa Claus, then Jesus, then Mick Jagger. Lately it has grown into his own picture on the cover of Time magazine (or some other, similarly prominent publication, the appearance of which in would confirm his arrival among the ranks of the celebrated and interviewed).
“What planet is this?” Asks the disappointingly mundane-looking alien that emerges from the ship.
“How come you speak English?” Our master of weights and measures asks.

Enlightened Produce

Two sneakerlamps, torn free from their positions beneath the bronze belly of Santa Claus’ statue on Hospital Gown Lane, found themselves demagnetized in an unlit stairwell by the crudest of methods and thrown into the back of a panel truck headed, as best they could tell, south, towards the dried up sea bed. Not once during any of this ordeal had they managed to get a good look at their abductors.
“I guess that makes us abductees.” Roger, who had until now been the right hand sneakerlamp (as one faced the statue of Santa Claus, with one’s back to Porcelainity’s show window), wondered to his mate laughingly.
“Shut up back there!” Barked a phlegmy voice through the tight grillwork over the tiny window that separated the cab from the cluttered cargo area.
Megan, the other sneakerlamp, lay on the floor and whimpered softly, piteously. Her left bottom asparaguswheel had been raggedly broken off in the assault. It would never grow back, no matter what Roger might optimistically promise. As she lay huddled in a heap with the part of her anatomy that roughly corresponded to a head cradled by a dirty Happy Meal box crushed about it, Roger made no effort to comfort her. Did he secretly blame her for their predicament? His warnings about her being too friendly with passersby had made no impression on her over the two years of their existence. Did he think she should toughen up and prepare for the next phase of this trip? Unbeknownst to her, he too had suffered degradation at the hands of these criminals. His fish joints, both terminal and ablutive, had been smashed, probably beyond repair.
Whatever Roger’s true thoughts, it is certain that more than once on that long journey south he imagined with bitterness their former neighbor coming to rescue them. That was a laugh! Santa Claus was nothing more than a myth. Just like Jesus and probably this Mick Jagger character.
A cinematic version of the above events was in due course produced. Midway through production a reporter from Cineman Toast magazine stopped by the elaborate set. Reading the same summary that you have just read, she asked,
“What happens when they get to the dried up sea bed?”
“I don’t know.” Replied the novice director. “We’re going to leave that up to the audience’s imagination.”

Glut of Giants

Beans lodged in the old saxophone gave it an unusual sound.
“I am convinced that you need to have those beans removed.” Pilot Whitney tried to make Todd Groaner see sense.
“I like the way it sounds.” Groaner insisted calmly. He tooted about the room, offering up a musical tribute to each of the portraits of his ancestors that hung on the walls.
“I can’t talk to the boy anymore.” Whitney, already an old man when Groaner had been born, complained to the scullery supervisor, Mrs. Sudsel.
“He’s not a boy anymore. That’s why.” The old lady smiled crookedly and went back to her task, carrying a box of heaving chocolate up to Todd Groaner’s sister’s room. Along the way she passed the room where old man Groaner, Todd’s grandfather, had died. She was not pleased to see that the door was ajar. Putting her head inside for a quick peek before closing it, she was further upset to see workmen in white coveralls busy with alterations to the room.
“What are you doing here?” She demanded.
“Our job.” Replied a burly fellow who seemed to be in charge. After a hot exchange in which Mrs. Sudsel learned that Todd had ordered the work done, the old woman hurried off to complete her errand.
“I don’t feel too good.” Lana, sister to Todd, admitted to Mrs. Sudsel as the latter peremptorily dropped the box of heaving chocolate on the table beside the bed to which the deformed young woman was loosely chained.
“Well, I don’t have time to cater to you right now. I have to talk to your brother.” Mrs. Sudsel snapped and left, as Lana gurgled and moaned in her nasal voice behind her.
“You might have informed me at least about your intention to have your grandfather’s death room transformed into a… a chamber of perversions!”
“Mrs. Sudsel,” Todd Groaner began, pausing to toot on his bean-corrupted horn. “Heavy Metal music isn’t a perversion!” He chuckled.
“I tried to tell you.” Whitney shook his head at Mrs. Sudsel. “And I’ve tried telling you:” He turned his gaze to Groaner. “You don’t play Heavy Metal with a sax!”

Envisioning the Peace Structure

A lavender shirt lay draped over the hood of Banefellow’s vintage model Canebreaker. For a moment as he cautiously approached the thusly adorned vehicle, Banefellow imagined that someone had been polishing it with an old rag. However, seeing the Dirk and Dumple label sticking out of the collar, he knew that this was no old rag. More to the point, he realized as he picked up the shirt, no one would polish his car for him. He wasn’t even a member of the country club, where his car was parked. “Car,” He thought, feeling foolish. He corrected himself. “The Canebreaker was never a car; it was, and remains, one of the finest mechanical walking units ever made. I must be going senile.”
“You must be, talking to yourself.” A voice said behind him. Banefellow turned and saw a young, shirtless man bronzed from the sun and as leanly muscular as a racehorse, emerging from a thicket of magnolia blossoms. “My shirt, pal.” He held out his hand.
“My car, pal.” Banefellow answered, tossing the shirt to the stranger. “That is, my 1962 Canebreaker mechanical walking unit.”
The stranger began to draw the shirt over his head. “Still a car, essentially.” He said.
Banefellow said nothing to this. He couldn’t afford to get into some kind of argument with a member of the club, which this young man obviously was.
“I mean, just look at him!” He explained to Irma later, handing her a photograph of the guy that he had obtained from the praetor’s files.
“I am.” Irma replied, hungrily drinking in those handsome, boyish features.
“She should have seen him with his shirt off!” Banefellow thought. “I mean, no she shouldn’t have!”
“It’s a nice one, though.” The tousle-headed Adonis admitted. “Nosotrox 839 under the hood, right?”
Banefellow, preparing to unlock the door and get in, replied, “I really don’t know. I just drive it.” That ought to show him! he thought.
“Sam!” Called a feminine voice. “Are my panties out there?”
Banefellow glanced at the magnolia in outrage.
“I don’t know.” Sam called back. “Hold it a minute, pal.” He said to Banefellow. “Is it for sale?”

Stricken Past the Template

Tense hours at the whalebone disinfection plant: Dulles Rhodia, a low-level transport worker, had brought a gun to work and begun firing at people from the foremen’s observation tower.
“Only foremen are allowed up there!” Dather Rarrick shook his fist and recited angrily. The whites of his eyes showed all around the hot chocolate of his irises. His prerogatives had been usurped. A shot from Rhodia’s gun shattered a thermos not eleven inches from his ear.
“Get down, you moron!” Snapped Pyson Pett, perhaps the only man at the plant that day with any sense.
“He just might be our only hope.” Wanda Small thought as she watched Pett crawling on his hands and knees. “But he needs encouragement.” She took off her bra beneath her sweater and drew it out through a sleeve. “Pyson!” She shouted. “Look at this!” When Pett turned towards her, she lifted her sweater up over her pendulous, white breasts.
Pett stared, mouth agog, only a second, then crawled away to reconnoiter further.
“That’s a fine trick.” Merton the janitor told Wanda. “But how will you get the bra back on?”
Wanda burst into sobs as she put her hands over her face. She turned and ran towards the stores of copier paper at the rear of the room. As she stepped into the long stretch of sunlight that streamed onto the floor from the row of cloister windows she was shot down by Dulles Rhodia.
“I warned them to stay out of the light.” Pett shook his head sadly. He had reached the whalebone splinters repository, a rack of woven baskets into which the splinters resulting from processing were sorted by shape. He reached into the disused basket marked “cameo shaped” and withdrew a pint of tequila. By the time the police helicopter finally arrived and sent a thousand lethal rounds into the observation tower, the bottle was empty.
“I guess that sorted him out.” Pett commented with a giggle.
“Pyson, you need to get back to work.” Dather Rarrick growled as he stood before the tumbled structure that had once stood so high.

Content with a Vegetable

Feelings of vague unease and guilt never bothered the little girl hiding in the goat barn. Her marvelous rendition of one of the many historic Coca Cola jingles (one from the seventies, I think) always gave her an inner strength whenever things started to go badly for her. Just at the moment, however, as the Centerpedes hunted over the farmyard for her, she knew she must remain silent. For inner strength she must rely on a secondary method, visualizing Mick Jagger’s triumphant knighting by the Queen. Unfortunately, all the little girl could visualize were the Centerpedes discovering her and knifing into her flesh with their sharp claws and equally sharp teeth.
She was hardly a little girl by our standards. At twenty-two years old she was already strong enough to pick up and carry the largest of the goats. However, among her own people, the Reaumer, who grow quite tall and whose lives are unusually long, she was considered still a little one. The goats, indignant at being carried around so much and for no good reason, plotted secretly to turn the girl over to the Centerpedes.
“When they reach the barn,” whispered old Tichley, “Everybody shout ‘She’s in here! She’s in here!’”
“Why wait?” Demanded impetuous Stan Filkler, muscling forward through the crowd. “Let’s do it now!”
“No! No!” Hissed the others, dragging him back and surrounding him. As Filkler struggled, old Tichley went to him and put his hands on his shoulders.
“Listen to me, Stan.” The old goat said calmly. “The girl is still too powerful. Remember when she threw you into the pond?”
Filkler looked away, red-faced.
“Patience and caution have always served me well, Stan. Let them work for you.”
From outside the barn came the flash of lightning. All the goats began counting the seconds until the thunder followed. Before they could find out how far away the lightning was, the girl was among them, tossing them bodily out the open barn door. As she tossed she glanced nervously out at the sky.

Light Bicycle with Radishes

Chief among my current batch of problems is that the spaghetti fails to work as bait to capture the mechano-goat.
“I told you that wouldn’t work.” Our director of photography, Dieter Helms, reminded me just after lunch.
“He claims he warned me it wouldn’t work,” I told a journalist who has come to watch the proceedings. “But I don’t recall him doing so.”
“Trouble on the Dallas Pimiento set.” Is what this journalist will report when she gets back.
“You can’t entice the mechano-goat with a plate of cold spaghetti.” Helms gestured disgustedly and puffed nervously on his European cigarette. He knows my temper. The rest of the crew have yet to see a demonstration of it. So far I have been an exemplar of fun and civility.
“You think hot spaghetti would work?” I asked pointedly. Spaghetti is all we have. The local tribe, rebuffed in their attempts to find work on the picture, refuse to provide us with anything that might tempt this strange beast which we hope to capture on film.
“Have you tried batteries?” The journalist asked me. She is beautiful, in a funky, wiry-headed, journalist way. She chews on pencils. No European cigarettes for her. At my diabolic look she retreated a bit. “Battery acid?” She suggested.
“Manfred!” I cried out to my assistant. “Have we tried batteries?”
“The mechano-goat doesn’t eat batteries.” Manfred told the journalist.
“What does he eat?” She asked.
I glanced at Manfred, then Dieter. I raised my shoulders. I looked back at the woman.
“Have you actually seen the mechano-goat?” She asked.
“I haven’t.” I replied. “Not with my own eyes, but I’ve seen illustrations.”
“What are we going to film then?” Helms demanded.
I pondered. “Heat up the spaghetti.” I ordered. “We’ll leave it out, but we’ll move on to the scene where Brant Borden first talks to the native woman.” The actress portraying the native woman is European, but our makeup artists have skillfully disguised this.

He Came Upon the Prime Minister Consulting a Tapestry

Discipline, so long a fantasy for the prophet, was at last within his reach. He had begun a list of all that he wanted to achieve. By mid-morning on the eve of Saint Turbidian’s day he had reached #14; write a book of analogies, these analogies to provide revelation and instruction for those who read it. The prophet, named Stiles Norvo at birth, put his humble ballpoint pen into his mouth and pondered. The book really should be illustrated to make the analogies come alive for the reader. Having only a crude conception of two-dimensional depiction, Norvo was not the man for the job and he knew it.
“Perhaps Dr. Schlange could do it.” The prophet said aloud, startling his tortoise. He congratulated himself on the idea as he calmed his pet.
Later that day, after he had completed his day’s quota of prophecies, Norvo put on his best sandals and set foot on the path that would take him down the mountain to the little village where Dr. Schlange lived. Along the way he met a man tending a flock of goats.
“Hail, Stiles Norvo, prophet!” The man called. He beckoned him closer. “It’s a good thing I ran into you.” The goatherd said. “I need to ask you something: do you think Lindsay Lohan’s career is over?”
Norvo rubbed his chin. “Well, I don’t have any of my consulting tools with me, except for this talking rock, but we will see what it says.” He thereupon threw the rock he held his hand down on the ground and examined it.
“Not yet.” He answered definitively. “But I don’t know exactly why. Visit me when I return to my cabin and I’ll give you details.”
“Thank you, Norvo.” The man bowed low. “Take this goat as payment.” He grabbed one of the goats by the ear and thrust it into Norvo’s hand.
Arriving at the village by nightfall, Norvo led the goat to the home of Dr. Schlange. Entering, he found the doctor/illustrator tending to none other than Lindsay Lohan.
“She’s drunk.” Said Schlange. “But I think I can mend it.”
“Nice sheep.” The actress slurred and laughed.
“A sheep is like a goat.” Norvo replied. “But how to illustrate it?”

The Essence of the Screw

“You’re nothing but a fake!” Dancy’s note read. It lay unopened on Sneaky’s desk. Dancy gestured viciously at Sneaky, stabbing her index finger at the note. Sneaky, however, refused to look at her. Of course, he knew she had thrown something onto his desk, but fearing it was a dead mouse, would not look down. His plan was to wait until the class was over, and then walk away. Besides, he didn’t want to miss any of Dr. Schlange’s fascinating lecture.
“Remember:” The white-bearded doctor of dubious medical learning pointed with the length of bamboo at the screen. “Don’t allow the customer to get away with just the purchase of an appliance. We make money on the appliances, of course, but that’s peanuts compared with what we make on adapters, ornaments, and refinement additives for the appliances. Gum pastes and naval jellies are the foundation of this company’s wealth!”
“I don’t see why he has to use peanuts as a term indicating low value.” Complained Rachel to Dancy. “Peanuts are a valuable food crop where I come from.”
Dancy ignored her, continuing to flail her hands at Sneaky, and now adding a series of grunts to her signaling.
Sneaky heard the grunts, but did nothing except slowly put his hand on his shoulder in an indecipherable imitation of a mouse. He moved his hand about as if the mouse were dancing mockingly at Dancy, who understood none of it.
“What is he doing?” Rachel asked Dancy.
“I don’t know.” Answered Dancy. She began pounding on her desk.
“Is that supposed to be a peanut!?” Rachel suddenly gasped in horror.
“Dr. Schlange,” Ned Feese, also taking the class, although he was actually attending a different convention at the same hotel, rose to his feet. “Could you go over the new product line again, this time with an emphasis on how the prospective consumer is predicted to view it? From a domestic consumption standpoint, that is.”
“Certainly.” Schlange managed to say as he began to cough. A mass of beard hair had become lodged in his throat. As he collapsed to his knees, clawing at his face, the fake mouse continued to dance.

The Significance of These Truths Has Been Wildly Exaggerated

“She’s gone.” Verlin insisted. He tried to get back to his writing, but Marla still stood in the doorway behind him, calling “Julia! Julia!” over and over at intervals precisely spaced to infuriate him the most.
Bob passed his hand before Verlin’s face and picked up a stack of business cards from the desk.
“You print these yourself?” He asked, biting hard on his pipe and tilting the cards to the light.
“Yes.” Verlin sighed. He had to finish this story or overwhelming guilt would set in, making him useless for the rest of the day.
“It’ll never do, old boy. Hand one of these to a potential patron and you’ll get nothing but a sad shake of the head.” Bob returned the homemade cards to the desk with a sad shake of his own, impassive, patrician head, gray at the temples and drawn ever upward by the pipe.
Verlin ignored him, concentrating on finishing the story despite the increasing number of freaks and zombies filling the room, though he did make an effort at working a quick parody of the man onto the page. Marla, who now asked aloud, “Can she not hear me?” would be spared this treatment. Verlin had no place yet for a woman in his story.
“What are you writing?” Julia, who had crawled back into the room through the secret door that only she and Verlin knew about, now huddled under the table, but craned her head up to look at the nearly completed story.
“A story.” Verlin snapped. “Keep your head down or I’ll tell Marla you’re here.” He finished a savage rejoinder by the Colonel without conscious thought.
“Why would I care if Marla knew I’m here?” Julia asked stupidly.
“Nnnng.” Verlin literally growled as he pushed Julia back down and pressed on, heedless of whether his ending would make sense. The Colonel, smugly basking in the satisfaction of having told the Bob character exactly what to do with his expensive paper goods, now turned his attention to the Julia character, slowly smothering her beneath his immense foot. Only the Marla character could save her now, with a brutal knife thrust to the Colonel’s unprotected back.

Tasty Passenger

It was determined that the only way to accurately count the number of hairs in Questadle’s moustache would be to pluck them out one by one.
“Won’t that cause him immense pain?” Baldenwooks, who always had to imagine the other person’s feelings, questioned.
“Not if he’s dead.” Nemento replied. He rambled through a drawer full of knives and stabbing weapons until he found a big pair of dressmaker’s scissors, which he held aloft. “Not if he’s dead.” He repeated with all the dramatic power he had learned in his ten years of amateur theater.
“He should have snapped the scissors open and shut a few times.” Ray criticized from his seat at the back of the theater.
“Lack of insight.” His friend Harper concurred.
The problem with such an attack upon Questadle, it was ultimately decided, by persons whose authority on such matters Nemento respected, was that the attendant violence and loss of blood might disturb the moustache hairs to be enumerated and thereby give a spurious reading.
“You want as accurate a quantification as possible.” Explained Nemento’s mother.
“Very well.” Nemento sighed. “We very gently poison him.”
“Very gently.” Baldenwooks emphasized. “I know that, for instance, cyanide is quite painful.”
“Use beryllium.” Nemento’s father advised as he put on his running shoes. “Put it in his scrambled eggs. He won’t taste it and he won’t feel it. He’ll just drop dead like an old man on the side of the road.”
And so the plan was formulated: Baldenwooks would get a job at the bookstore at the mall and save his money until they had enough to buy the precious beryllium. Nemento would concentrate on learning to make the most delicious scrambled eggs in the world.
“Oh, what a happy and satisfying day it will be when we know the answer.” Nemento rhapsodized to his girlfriend Amy.
“What is so special about this man’s moustache?” The ignorant woman asked.
“Oh, you’ve got to see it!” Nemento enthused.

The Boy Who Could Smell Botulism

“A miniature tugboat!” Exclaimed Ranigerd, who was a female, in case you felt that name held any masculine connotations.
“Yes,” Francine (who was also female, but then you knew that) cheered, delighted at her friend’s expression. “Bobby found it in the basement when we moved in. He spent all winter cleaning it up.”
“Can we go for a ride in it?” Ranigerd begged.
“Sure.” Francine agreed. “There’s just one thing, though.” Her own expression changed. “The boat is operated by a mechanical brain.”
“Oh, I’ve heard of those. It’s like a computer, isn’t it?” Ranigerd’s enthusiasm was undiminished.
“Yes, but this machine thinks it’s alive.” Francine watched her friend’s eyes carefully. “You don’t object?”
“No, why should I?”
“I just wanted to make sure. Some people have strong objections to associating with such things because of their religious convictions.”
“Oh, Francine!” Ranigerd tittered. “I gave up all that a long time ago!”
“All of it?” Francine wondered.
“Well, I still feel a sacred thrill when I see our flag, but aside from that, I’m completely free of those old superstitions.”
“Good. Because if I thought for a moment that you didn’t still regard our nation and its symbols as holy, I’d…” She glanced around at the small pond in which the sentient miniature tugboat floated. “I’d knock you off this pier!”
“Francine! You talk like a man!” Ranigerd’s eyes grew wide.
Francine turned away. She looked up at the tops of the ugly pine trees that ringed the pond. “I…I feel like a man. It’s something I’ve never told you before. But it’s true.” She turned back with a wild look. “I feel like a man!”
“But you love Bobby!” Ranigerd’s voice was a whisper.
“Yes, I guess that makes me gay!”
Ranigerd promptly shoved her friend into the water with the patiently waiting boat.

Stephen’s Commercial Pancreas

The instructor’s birthday happened to coincide with Brant Borden’s new girlfriend’s birthday. Borden bought a jar of peanuts for the instructor, Laird Foxfur, and an apparatus of military application for the girlfriend whose name was Belinda Carlisle-by-extension.
As Borden sat on his sofa tying a ribbon around the neck of the jar of peanuts, he fell to examining the jar.
“How many peanuts would you say are in there?” He asked himself. Of course, he didn’t really care. He wasn’t about to start counting. They were fascinating, though; each individual peanut was its own little creature, a unique expression of peanutness, whatever that was. He smiled thinking of these individuals crowded together in their traveling capsule as he affixed the bow. Then he noticed that one of the peanuts was signaling him desperately.
“Thank you.” Said the peanut after he had caught his breath and powered up his voice amplification module. “I didn’t think you’d ever notice me.” The peanut stood on the coffee table before the sofa. Borden had spilled all the peanuts out onto a plate in freeing the one that had attracted his attention.
“Are you a regular peanut?” Borden asked his guest.
“No, I’m not a ‘peanut’ at all.” The non-peanut made quotation marks with the fingers on his paper-clip-wire-thin arms. “The name’s Flapjed. I’ve been sent by the Ministry to warn you about a squad of assassins that…”
“Wait a minute.” Borden interrupted. “They put you into this jar of peanuts?”
“Yes.” Flapjed nodded. “Now, this squad…”
“How did they know I’d buy this particular jar of peanuts?” Borden demanded.
“They didn’t; they put one of us in every jar currently on sale at the store that you habitually patronize.” Flapjed waited to see if there would be any further questions. There were.
“How did they know I’d be buying a jar of peanuts?”
“Because you always buy peanuts as presents for teachers. Your mother got in the habit when you were a child.”
“I see—oh Grodin!” Borden cried. “Now I don’t have a present for Laird Foxfur!” He quickly tore the tag bearing Belinda Carlisle-by-extension’s name off the military apparatus and substituted one with Foxfur’s name.

Oblong Defense Makes Stagecraft Unnecessary

“Shall I try again?” I asked the young lady with whom I had been partnered by the seating committee.
She shrugged her shoulders indifferently. I gather she had not foreseen that I might turn out to be a middle-aged nobody.
“Alright.” I returned with all my teeth showing. I chose another of the crabapple windfalls, one not too mushy, and, aiming carefully, threw it at the cat perched on the roof of the old inn where all of us had gathered.
“You missed again.” My companion dryly noted. She unfolded her arms and stepped away, heading for the bar, I presumed. I flung one more crabapple at the cat, which, still untouched, climbed over the apex of the roof and disappeared.
“Foolish girl.” I thought. “She had better not disappoint tonight.”
There were several hours to kill until the ceremony began. I was bored stiff. Of course there was plenty to eat and drink, but I indulged in neither. I had brought a book to read, Die Blechtrommel, but as my German wasn’t really ready for that challenge, it stayed in my bag. Not being a social man, I stayed away from the main room of the inn where everyone seemed to be.
I walked down to the tiny pond behind the inn. One the other side were the housing facilities for the Wiggipigs, the peasant class in this area. I could imagine them enjoying their family parties on this summer Saturday afternoon. Part of me wanted to join them, but I knew that just setting foot on that side of the pond would endanger my life. Besides, it was necessary that tonight’s activities be performed.
Giving it up finally, I returned to the inn and took a nap in my room. I was having a dream more intriguing than anything I’d done all week when my partner, the young lady, banged on the door.
“They’re ready for us.” She said simply, her attitude somewhat softened by either our imminent appearance or a couple of drinks. I don’t know, maybe both. As we descended the stairs to the main room, we were greeted with thin applause.
“Applause applesauce.” I said coolly as we ascended the makeshift stage.
“What?” The young lady asked. I shook my head and seated myself in the high-backed chair. With a professionalism and sense of showmanship that, frankly, astonished me, my partner placed the metal cap on my head.


Large Wood Grain Sticker

Imperfectly formed circles thrown about the page in neither apparent order nor an attempt at homogeneity completed the document. The girl who had modeled for the image on the bread bag studied the circles and the text carefully. As she performed this necessary chore, Danny leaned toward Jerry and asked,
“Do you say ‘loaf bread?’”
“Yeah(?)” Jerry admitted.
Danny nodded. “Me too.”
“Why?”
“Well, I said ‘loaf bread’ to Karen and she gave me a look like I had said something uncouth.”
“It probably is uncouth to her.” Jerry whispered. “You know she went to a finishing school.”
“Is that so?” Danny glanced at the model’s bustle-covered fanny.
Karen, satisfied that all was as it should be, hefted the ceremonial pen like a farmer judging the weight of a bag of boiled peanuts. With a little sigh she signed her name to the bottom of the document and turned to Danny.
“Your turn.” She said. Her voice was that of an animated baby goat—literally, in some countries, for a team of impersonators provided celebrity voices, Karen’s among them, for the characters on Farmyard Friendlies, a popular show overseas.
“Do it.” Jerry mouthed the words as Danny stepped forward. The latter man extended his hand as if to take the fancy pen, but just before he clasped it, he knocked Karen’s arm aside with a blow to her wrist. He then stabbed at her abdomen with the retractable ice pick. Some obscure toxin coating the pick began to work on the almost obscenely infantile woman immediately. She dropped to the floor, one leg kicking convulsively.
“Get the paper.” Jerry instructed Danny while he went to retrieve the pen which he had seen fly across the room. He hunted on all fours over the dark shag carpeting beneath the equally dark paneling for nearly a minute without success.
“You find it?” Asked Danny as he stood over Jerry.
“No. And I saw it land right here!” Jerry was puzzled.
“Mr. Winegruel needs that pen as much as he needs this paper.” Danny reminded his comrade.

Kiss Opens for Love

“I hear the bell.” Connings cupped a hand around his ear to emphasize his words.
“Thank you, Connings.” Drawled Mr. Gumphrey. “I hear it too. Go on, Miss Cattamurley.” He directed the young Nordic woman sitting before him. “Start from the top.”
Miss Cattamurley, not only blond all over, even to he eyelashes, but so blond as to be almost white-headed, sat up straighter in her chair and held up the imaginary product. “Introducing,” She said in a voice more mature than one would have suspected of so young-looking a woman, “New Fasnex gum pastes. Not only are they the gum pastes most asked for by our Navy’s ships’ captains, but they come in a series of twelve graduated textures.”
She was interrupted by the bell sounding again.
“Oh, go see who it is, Connings.” Mr. Gumphrey ordered.
“Yes, Mr. Gumphrey.” Connings smiled at the young woman as he said this, stressing the words, “Mr. Gumphrey.”
“About time you answered the door.” Inspector Mills growled as Connings opened the door.
“I’m sorry, Inspector.” Connings began. “Mr. Gumphrey is not at home.” He quickly added as the inspector put his foot forward onto the jamb.
This checked Mills only for a second. He brought his other foot up to meet the first. “Then how come his car’s outside?”
“Mr. Gumphrey owns more than one car.” Connings countered. He blocked Mill’s passage with his tall frame.
“That’s a lie, Connings, and you know it!”
“Mr. Gumphrey is a wealthy man!” Connings called out, knowing his voice would carry back to the kitchen where the interview with Miss Cattamurley was presumably still underway.
“Then why does he live in a trailer?” Mills’ moustache bristled with victory.
“He’s an eccentric.” Connings snapped.
“I think you’re the eccentric, Connings. A man of your accomplishments, pretending to be a butler!”
“You leave me no choice, Mills.” Connings’ voice took on a chill and an accent wholly different in origin to his previous one.

Chicken’s Ruler Backdrop

Base eight appealed to Witcane the Sower. As he sat around the earthenware transfer house he used to sit and ponder how this world of ours might be different if base eight were the standard.
“Shouldn’t the world of The Simpsons be base eight?” Witcane the Sower asked Lovis, a young fellow whom he assumed to be a Simpsons fan.
“Shouldn’t you be sowing?” Lovis replied, busy refitting a beard to one of the steam presses.
“No.” Witcane sounded puzzled. “No, because they only have four fingers on each hand.”
“How many fingers do you have?” Lovis demanded sarcastically. Having finally driven Witcane away, he returned his concentration to his task, which is where it belonged. The refitting took him longer than he had expected. By the time he finished, Mr. Winegruel had arrived.
“Hello, Mr. Winegruel.” He called across the floor as he wiped his hands off on an old Iron Maiden t-shirt.
“Hello, Lovis.” The swarthy, thickly-made Winegruel replied. He walked closer. “What tour is that from?” He asked, pointing at the t-shirt.
“Uh,” Lovis held the shirt up before him. “‘Fear of the Dark.’” He read aloud.
“I used to like that record.” Mr. Winegruel mused wistfully. “But, in context, it seems it wasn’t that great after all.”
“You listened to it on record?” Lovis asked.
“No, on CD. It’s still a ‘record.’ You’re using the word ‘record’ as if it only applied to vinyl. Technically, the term you want it ‘LP.’” Winegruel explained.
“I knew you were stupid.” Witcane the Sower sneered at Lovis from his makeshift perch up in the rafters. “But, somehow, because of your youth, I convinced myself you possessed a hip education.”
“Witcane,” Mr. Winegruel addressed the man overhead. “Are you still a sower?”
“I will always be Witcane the Sower.” Was the answer.
“Then shouldn’t you be outside?” Winegruel made a motion with his arms as if casting seed about.

Drop Tear Basic

Praiseworthy vodka had been served to each guest. As the last tiny, chilled glass was set before Mr. Gumphrey, T.V. Louder rose form his comfortably padded, yet still foldable chair and began his address with a stammered “D-D-Daring…”
“He sounded like a Hip Hop song.” Ken Brainwave, discussing the evening later with his wife, related. “Just for that one instant he sounded like a Hip Hop song.”
“Was Mr. Gumphrey there?” Marla Brainwave asked.
“Hmm? Oh, yes. He was there, looking pleased with himself as usual.”
Marla could hear her husband’s voice rising. He was about to launch into one of his customary rants against one of the more prosperous members of the club. She forestalled him by jumping in with, “Let me tell you what I heard today. I heard that on some old Jazz albums you can hear the saxophonist glance at the clock. Is that true?”
“I think it’s true.” Brainwave took the bait. “I think it’s because they’re anxious for a fix. I’ve heard it myself on a couple of albums, Sonny Rollins, Coltrane. Who told you that?” He pulled off his socks and threw them against the wall.
“I heard it on the radio.” Marla ignored the socks as best she could.
“Marla.” Ken remonstrated. “We have a perfectly good internet connection now. And you’re still listening to the radio? That’s caveman practice.”
“We still drive a walking machine.” His wife pointed out. “That’s been superceded long ago. What’s the difference?”
“The difference is that the walking machine in an antique.” Realizing how that word opened himself up, Brainwave quickly added, “A collector’s item. It’s vintage. A radio is like undergoing trephination for a headache.”
“I like the immediacy of radio.” Marla insisted.
The phone rang.
“There’s your immediacy.” Brainwave grumbled. He lifted the receiver and greeted blindly his caller.
“Ken? This is T.V. Louder.”
“Good evening.” Replied Ken meaningfully.
“Ken, I’ve just heard the most shocking news about Marty Gumphrey.”

Personal Automation Needed

Triangular-headed automatons put to work making macaroni-and-cheese with a variety of ingredients drew immediate comparisons to the old Maynard Ferguson band. Of course, there were those who didn’t see it, but, as Allan pointed out, most of them hadn’t even been born before Ferguson met his tragic end.
“All they care about is this electronic dance pablum.” He grumbled as he stuffed another limited edition basketball into the silk bag.
“Well,” Objected Lee, “They care about their relationship with the Lord Jesus Chri…”
“I mean musically, Lee!” Allan snapped. “Jesus, you’re dense!”
“Boys, can we exchange ideas amicably, please?” Watkin Millwheel remonstrated with them both. He looked each man in the eye and turned back to his own work, stuffing limited edition miniature footballs into a silk bag. Occasionally he would glance up at the telenet screen, but mostly he kept his eyes on his work. Nearly everyone else watched the screen closely, whether they remembered Maynard Ferguson or not.
“Doesn’t their efficiency suffer?” Asked Lone Bravo, a manager from the regional office visiting this facility, as he and the Baroness spied on the work floor from an observation post.
“Yes.” The Baroness answered frankly. “But without the telenet screen we have so many problems that it’s just easier to let them watch it.”
“What kind of problems?” Bravo shifted his sweaty scrotum about and wondered.
“Excessive socializing mainly.” The Baroness, an attractive woman despite her rumored age of ninety, wore a long, purple dress with tall green shoulder attachments that rose to points higher than the tops of her ears. “But, more than that, the men are prone to boredom and anxiety. This leads to negative feelings towards the job that we feel cause them to denigrate not only their own jobs, but the company as a whole when they are allowed the mingle with the unemployed sector of the populace.”
“You shouldn’t allow them to ‘mingle’ with the unemployed sector.” Bravo advised.
“It’s in their contract, Mr. Bravo.”
“Please call me Lone, Baroness.” Bravo winced as his scrotum needed another adjustment.

Turtleneck After Hours

“Too much cinnamon.” Haebner judged. He examined the honey bun closely as he chewed.
“If you knew how those things are made,” Wilson pointed a quivering finger at the pastry in Haebner’s hand. “You’d never touch another one in your life.”
“That’s what they said about sausage.” Haebner smirked.
“Who did?”
Haebner considered. “People.” He said. “Certain…people.”
“They said it to you?” Wilson inquired.
“I’m trying to think.” Again Haebner considered. “Well,” He decided. “Even if the conditional statement wasn’t made to me directly, it was definitely one of those things meant to make one reconsider sausage as a…oh, what would you say? Regular entrée?” He folded the honey bun wrapper carefully, so as not to get his fingers sticky, and dropped it into the trash receptacle.
“I see.” Wilson looked at the floor, wondering how best to continue.
“Look, you two.” Watkin Millwheel flushed the urinal and turned around. “Why don’t you take a tour of the Mrs. Killingworth bakery? It’s not too far from here. That would settle the question once and for all.”
Haebner noted the pee stain on the front of Millwheel’s trousers and hoped that no one had seen his eyes directed at that region.
“Together?” Wilson asked, somewhat confused.
“Sure.” Millwheel shrugged his shoulders. “Hell, I don’t know. Do what you like.” He exited the capacious restroom and returned to his table just before the stage.
“You took awhile.” Dr. Doofus told Millwheel as the latter sat down.
“Yeah.” Millwheel acknowledged. He broke a breadstick in half and nibbled nervously, ill at ease with the comedian performing in front of him.
“Don’t you hate these guys who think they’re do intelligent because they read books? They look down on us normal people who get our entertainment and information the easy, modern way through the telenet, but it’s they who’re living like troglodytes!”
“You don’t look so well.” Doofus said to Millwheel.
“He peed in his pants.” Barbara explained.

Dallas Eluded the Guards

Even as the fishy smell in my can of beans disspated, I fought to hold back the rising memories of, and associations with, the sea.
“I could surely use some mayonnaise.” I said aloud.
“Individual packets of mayonnaise were provided by the management of the facility.” The robot across the table from me noted.
“Where are they?” I asked the robot. Normally I wouldn’t respond or acknowledge anything anyone said to me in the lunchroom, but, this being a robot, I knew he wouldn’t take advantage of the opening to tell me where I was wrong politically, discuss the latest telenet offering, and/or ask me if I could draw a picture of his father’s champion goat if I was provided a photograph to copy.
“I do not know.” He said. “All I know is that individual packets of mayonnaise were provided.” His name, Sugarling, was stenciled in black enamel across his smooth forehead.
“OK.” I nodded, dropping my eyes back down to the notebook in which I was writing. The current novel I was working on was to be called The Gifted Retard.
“What do you want mayonnaise for?” Sugarling asked.
I glanced up. Was he just being solicitous? Heaven help him if he was some new ‘chatty’ model.
“This hunk of bread.” I answered, holding up the half loaf my wife had baked.
“Understood.” He spoke solemnly.
I turned back to my work, barely noticing the robot slide out of the bench seat opposite. I had just finished Chapter Twelve, fortunately for Sugarling, when he reseated himself and told me that he had hunted through the lunchroom and found no individual packets of mayonnaise.
“That’s OK. Thank you.” I replied. I scratched my own, name-free forehead and debated how to begin the thirteenth chapter.
“What are you writing?” Sugarling asked.
“Goddammit, what do you care?” I demanded.
“Just because I’m a robot doesn’t mean I’m devoid of curiosity.” He said, with slightly less monotony than his earlier words.

You Have A Washing Machine?

Ranged along the sill of the kitchen’s lone window were the small glass bottles in which Intempest kept the jellied or pickled remains of his enemies. I seemed to recall Intempest telling me that he had had some of these bottle since college. The sight of them of course horrified me, but I needed a drink too much to be stopped by their macabre presence. Adjusting the bill of my crow mask to a jaunty angle, I headed for the refrigerator. I paused in the act of opening the refrigerator door at the sight of the photographs Intempest had stuck to the door with magnets. So these were his friends, I thought. Could these be their “remains” as the stringy items in the colored bottles were those of his enemies? I asked myself. My memory had no answer, though my sense of fantasy was ready to supply one.
Inside the refrigerator I found the jug of grape juice I thirsted for. I took it out and placed it on the counter. I made no noise as I opened a cupboard and found a glass. The kitchen, like the rest of the house, was as silent as an empty house in an unfinished neighborhood can be. As I poured out the grape juice I remembered going with my mother to look at recently constructed houses as a child. They were empty and silent and, going into a succession of them, I got the impression of traveling through an endless labyrinth, albeit a carpeted and air-conditioned one.
I had no time for further reflections, however, for just after downing the juice I head an old-fashioned television come alive in one of the rooms on the floor above. Slipping my hands into the white gloves that completed my disguise, I headed for the stairs that led to the basement. I didn’t bother washing out Intempest’s glass; let the bastard do it himself, I thought! With his crowd of neatly photographed friends and row of vanquished and reduced enemies he should have no problem finding the time to wash a glass, even one stained with grape juice. Would that it had been buttermilk, I wished bitterly as Mr. Getz’ voice crackled through the cheap micro-transmitter stuck in my right ear.
“Why are you heading into the basement?” He asked.
“How do you know I’m heading into the basement?” I suspiciously replied.
Nancy cautioned me through the more expensive micro-transmitter stuck in my left ear.

No Need for a Television in Every Waiting Room

Over half a bell pepper was utilized in the construction of the sandwich. With the help of a fortuitously discovered and long-wished-for packet of mayonnaise (fat free though it was) the sandwich was not too bad. Along with a can of beans Rudd Inferno had enough food to make a satisfying lunch.
“What do you think of the music?” Wanda asked. She referred to Lou Donaldson’s version of “Love Walked In” coming through the telenet screen.
“Ehn.” Inferno shrugged. “I prefer Frank Sinatra’s version.”
“Frank Sinatra played the saxophone?” Wanda’s overly painted mouth fell open.
“In the off-season.” Inferno dryly confirmed. He finished his sandwich and idly turned to the immense telenet screen that covered nearly the entirety of the mural on the south wall of the Grand Hall. All that remained visible of the mural was the portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson to the left of the screen and that of Jim Carrey on the right. Inferno was flabbergasted to see that the imagery chosen to accompany Lou Donaldson’s music (as no known cinematic footage of the man existed) was a host of computer generated eggs with clown faces and pointed party hats dancing about a stereotypical “Old West” town’s main street, the whole scene illuminated by black light.
“What the Hell is this?” Inferno scowled.
“It’s the Ova Posse.” Wanda explained. She giggled merrily at their capering on the screen. “They come on whenever the music is out-of-date to give a modern counterpoint to it.”
“‘A modern counterpoint?’” Inferno repeated incredulously. “Why does it need any kind of visual accompaniment at all?” Inferno demanded of the very fabric of the universe.
“Well, Rudd, you can’t just have a blank screen. That would defeat the whole point of having a screen in the first place.” Wanda, a heavy woman with a pretty enough face, accepted the status quo without question. Why Rudd Inferno was sitting with her in the Grand Hall on Telephone Memorial Day is something that Inferno wondered about himself. After he ate his sandwich he would light a candle in memory of the telephone. He didn’t need a companion for that. He did not wonder or question at the presence of the telenet screen. He had been born into its ubiquity.

A Playful Red Snake

Turser’s bald head was, in Natterley’s opinion, without doubt the ugliest bald head in the world.
“He looks like a burn victim.” He groused to his friend Ned Feese.
“Maybe he is.” Feese bent the cover back on his copy of Ambulatory Intoxicant magazine and kept his eyes on the article within. It concerned gangsters, a topic he was much interested in.
“He looks like Darth Vader with his helmet off.” Natterley was angry about Turser’s bald head. How could someone thoughtlessly subject others to such ugliness?
“Listen to this:” Feese decided to try to distract the other man by reading aloud from the article, though he knew in advance that the topic would only be of minimal interest to Natterley. “‘Giancarlo Flippillili, the so-called brains of the Pucci family, knew that the four Kiss solo albums were bound to be shipped platinum. He therefore decided to use the family’s contacts at the upstate pressing plant to…”
“Hold it.” Natterley interrupted. “Are you trying to distract me?”
“From what?” Feese asked innocently.
“The nausea-inducing abomination that is Turser’s bald head!” Natterley stabbed the old butcher’s block upon which the gentlemen kept their drinks with his pocketknife.
“No, of course not.” Feese assured him. “I just knew that you’re a big Kiss fan…”
“I have never been ‘a big Kiss fan.’ Just because I like, or rather, at one time in my life, liked the song ‘Tears are Falling’ does not give me the right to call myself a Kiss fan nor for others to assume…”
“Here comes Turser.” Feese nodded towards the doorway behind Natterley.
“Jesus.” Natterley swore, turning to look with hate at the pitted scalp whose raw pinkness contrasted so putridly with the rest of Turser’s swarthy skin. “Where?” He asked, seeing no one. He turned back, but Feese was gone. All that remained was the magazine he had been reading. Natterley picked it up with the intention of flinging it across the room. The sight of a blurb on the cover promising an article about Depeche Mode checked this action.


Like A Vestigial Spine Running Through A Boneless Hog

Newspaper columns by the late J.K. Hoodwink, collected under the title Bean-Eater, and illustrated with great liberty by Amy Knitted, did not prove as appealing to the young consumer as the approval committee had expected.
“I just don’t understand it.” Bob Headfirst clawed his fingers through the mass of wavy black hair that would one day fall so maddeningly out. “I thought for sure that today’s college student or ready-for-college teen would eat up these bite-sized narratives of absurdity and abstraction.”
“Perhaps they are a little too esoteric?” Susan Dirtlong suggested. If she but turned her ginger-topped head, she would be able to see a line of men using hand trucks to cart unsold copies of Bean-Eater back into the building whence they were spawned.
“Too esoteric?” Cried Headfirst. “Why, today’s crazy, existential youth love the esoteric! They practically lap it up like dogs do some kind of gravy-covered meat!” He thrust his nose over the table and made licking motions with his tongue at some invisible, yet obviously tasty dish.
“I put the blame for this fiasco squarely on your shoulders, Bob.” Old Haswood, the director of the company, pursed his lips sourly and stabbed at the air with a pencil.
“My shoulders can’t bear the load! Headfirst barked. He fell forward sobbing.
Susan Dirtlong watched him for approximately seven seconds. Assured that he was faking his outburst, though why she should be assured, I don’t know, since she didn’t care for the man; she addressed herself to Haswood.
“Why don’t we simply remarket the book to an older audience, one whose tastes might be more in line with the book’s content? She emphasized these last words while turning to look at the tiny bald spot on the top of Headfirst’s head.
“But the current edition has that nearly pornographic cover that Bob cooked up.” Objected the director.
“That’s just the dust jacket.” Susan told him. “That can be replaced.”
“But not the interior illustrations.” Headfirst croaked from the tabletop.
“That is a problem.” Susan admitted. She thought with mortification of the imaginative drawings that portrayed J.K. Hoodwink as a half-naked cherub skipping and dancing from page to page.

Loon of the Looming Embassy

“Clarity, gentlemen, clarity.” Gomez Spacechip exhorted his colleagues. He sat down with a look of both pride and relief on his face and took up and his can of soda pop from the old butcher’s block.
“Thank you, Gomez.” Dobbs Plaidhammer broke the silence that followed Spacechip’s brief speech. He turned to the other men gathered around the old butcher’s block. “Does anyone else have anything to say?” He asked.
“When filming begins…” Old Lapsebag began.
“If it begins.” Spacechip interposed.
“I think we’ve heard enough out of you.” Lapsebag growled.
Spacechip sipped his drink through a straw and stared forward.
“When filming begins,” Lapsebag continued. “We need to make sure we have somebody there to watch out that our beliefs are not parodied.”
“Well,” Plaidhammer, the informal chairman, spoke up. “I think, as executive producers, we’ll have plenty of opportunities to see to it that our interests are kept uppermost in the minds of the cast and crew.”
“No, no.” Lapsebag beat his knee with his fist. “You mark my words. I know these people…”
“How?” Asked Ed Fishanthropy.
“I read the paper, Mr. Smartness. I know how these movie people think. Ever since John Wayne lost his box office appeal this country has been going down the toilet.” Lapsebag folded his arms defiantly.
“Has anyone else something to add?” Plaidhammer looked about hopefully.
“I just want to make sure that our financial interests are looked after.” Tommy Tankardin sat slouching in his chair, his boredom at the general flow of the conversation thus far all too evident. He had been reluctant to invest in Mosquitoes Are Eating Me when first the idea had been suggested, but, encouraged by the success of the gentlemen’s rivals, the Joe Henderson Fan Club, in backing the hit film Ape Shit/Scalded Ape, he had voted along with the rest of his colleagues. He now recalled bitterly that it had been Gomez Spacechip who had cautioned them against this particular film.
“My son is the director; I ought to know.” Spacechip had said. Only now did Tankardin suspect that the man’s insanity might be hereditary.

Brotherly Christian Laughter

Faceless ranks of zombie spaghetti-consumers ringed the lighthouse.
“I hate that word ‘fellowship.’” I mopped my forehead with the sleeve of my t-shirt as I spoke aloud to no one in particular. The shirt bore the image of Sir Francis Drake on the front. If one is going to advertise for something other than oneself, I reasoned, it might as well be something totally non-commercial. Little did I know that Betterlox Pictures was producing a big budget film on Drake at that very moment. By the time it came out, however, the image would be faded beyond recognition.
“That would make a good name for a Henry Rollins song.” My nephew commented on hearing the story so far.
“Why Henry Rollins in particular?” I asked, my amusement at the little boy’s idea overbalancing my irritation at his irrelevant interruption.
“Because I see him as a MacArthur type.” He explained.
“Now you’re being silly.” I recrossed my legs and hefted the book of many instances once again before my battered old eyes. “Don’t interrupt me anymore.”
And so, I continued, we faced the mob of sauce-spattered zombies without air conditioning. As they waited silently below for the arrival of he-who-would-command-them, my small, but dedicated team and I prepared ourselves. While I and my assistant Doober frantically filled out the necessary paperwork, the three other men studied the air conditioner.
“Are you any closer to figuring it out?” I called across the tiny room.
“No.” The man with the red hair answered. He has since informed me that it is strawberry blonde, but as I cannot recall his name, I don’t think we’ll worry about it.
“Put down ‘no’ for question 75.” I instructed Doober.
“What about 74?” Doober asked.
“Still no answer for that one, eh?” I bit my lips, upper and lower, at the same time. I went to the window again. It was there I saw the answer.
“Put down ‘yes.’” I instructed. As he obeyed Doober asked me who it was.
“It’s Henry Rollins.” I said, watching the zombie commander pass through the ranks on his pale horse.
“I figured.” Doober mumbled.

It Takes A Strong Man to Write This Stuff

Two hundred dollars, pocketed furtively and counted with equal furtivity in the back of a green van, seemed like just enough cash to take care of Nancy Cow’s immediate problem: getting her book printed. She substituted her platinum wig for one of golden curls and exited the van, her illustrated manuscript tucked under one arm.
“It’s a thriller.” She had explained to Gomez Tributary, an editor at the only book publishing company in town.
“Don’t call me at home again.” Tributary, sounding far less substantial than she had imagined, had ordered Nancy Cow. “In fact, don’t ever call me again. Nor, in case you’re one of these people who looks for a loophole in everything, speak to or in any way contact me again.”
“Children will enjoy it as well as adults!” Nancy Cow managed to say before the connection was violently terminated.
“This was in the days before the brain chips allowed everyone to communicate constantly with everyone else.” She told the clerk at Kinko’s, whose mind, while not exactly on anything in particular, was certainly not on Nancy Cow’s story. “So I’ve decided to publish it myself.” She finished the narrative of how she came to be there.
“The copiers are over there.” The clerk, his beard shaped into the rune symbolic of power, vaguely indicated the direction with a sleepy roll of his eyes.
“Thank you.” Nancy Cow enthused. “How do I operate them?”
“It’s self-explanatory.” The clerk answered, little realizing that his answer also described itself.
Two police cars entered the Kinko’s lot.
“They have come for you.” The clerk appeared at Nancy Cow’s elbow and droned.
“I’m almost done.” The desperate writer did not look up. She watched as the next to last page was cranked out.
“Why didn’t you do them on both sides of the paper like a real book?” The clerk asked.
“I didn’t know how.” Nancy Cow put in the last page of her book.
“Is your name Nancy Cow?” The first policeman to approach her asked.
“That’s my name.” She answered proudly. “It’s there on the cover.”
“Why did you only make one copy?” The clerk asked.

Elephants Bred for Intelligence Over a Period of Two Millenia

About the surface of the pool lay various objects that had fallen from the boughs of the tree which grew up from its center. I personally identified three of these objects, a toy toaster, a plastic duck, and part of a pinwheel. The rest, however, were collected and catalogued by the researchers whom I accompanied to this nearly inaccessible spot.
“Shouldn’t we leave these things here?” I asked uneasily as I watched the grad students putting everything into individual baggies.
“Come now, Mr. Ash. You were all for the salvaging of relics from the Titanic. I read your comments to the paper at the time with much interest.” The bearded Fledge Dinglehoop responded.
“Yes, but I thought you people were for letting natural events occur without interference. You know, letting baby animals get eaten and so forth.”
“Surely gathering trash from a pond isn’t interfering in a natural process.” Dinglehoop watched on the braless females perform her bagging.
“You do realize that this isn’t ‘trash.’” I sprang my surprise upon him.
“What do you mean?”
“This is the fruit of that tree.” I could not suppress a smirk.
Later that evening as we sat in Dinglehoop’s tent listening to a tape of the local tribe performing some sort of funeral chant, Mary, a short-haired young woman sadly tattooed beyond desirability, spoke of the coming election back home.
“I’m going to vote this time.” She said.
“A meaningless gesture.” Dinglehoop clawed his fat fingers through his beard.
“Are the natives democratic?” I asked, not wanting to get into a political discussion.
“Indeed.” Dinglehoop answered. “All village decisions are made by the villagers as a group.”
“They gave you permission to explore here?”
“Oh, no. The regional administrator did.”
At that moment Carey, a young man who would one day be Dinglehoop’s clone, burst into the tent.
“This fruit is nasty-tasting!” He bellowed.

First Among Many Clowns

Associate checkermaster Lula Scraw stacked the foldable checkerboards neatly and sealed the checker barrel before sitting down with her boyfriend Reggie Boarsmeat. She was dressed in a beige pair of slacks, a white shirt with large, lacy cuffs, and her official Checkers Institute smock. Boarsmeat was dressed as always: like a man who, although not actually a lumberjack, liked to hand around lumberjack camps.
“How did it go today?” Lula asked Reggie. “Did you catch any fish?”
“Stop it, Lula. You know I didn’t come here to talk about my catch.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“No, I… well, I caught fifteen fish, since you want to know.”
“Great! Are they edible?” She reached across the table and took his grimy hands in hers.
“I doubt it. Listen, I’ve come to ask you to marry me.” Reggie belatedly snatched the baseball cap off his head. There was a picture of a chainsaw on its crown. Reggie had never handled a chainsaw before, but acquaintances of his had assured him that the brand advertised on his cap was one of the best.
“Oh, Reggie, I’ve told you I’m not ready to get engaged.”
“Yeah, I know. You told me last week. But, Lula, that was… seven days ago. At least. Look, I got you a ring.” He fumbled in the pocket of his flannel shirt and produced a cheap band with a heart-shaped “stone.”
“Keep it.” Lula begged after she had looked at it. She pushed it back at Reggie.
“Lula, I don’t understand it. I want you to come share the great outdoors with me. How can you spend every day cooped up in this room, playing checkers?”
“Reggie, checkers is my life. I made that clear to you when we first started going out.”
“Isn’t is supposed to be ‘checkers are my life?’” Reggie questioned.
“No, because checkers, despite ending in ‘s’, isn’t a plural, not in this use of the word.”
“Not plural? Plural means more than one, right?” Reggie puzzled it out. “But there are a bunch of checkers on each board.”

The Young Olivier, All to Rare

Ambidexterity, for so many years cursed as a sign of the Devil’s favor, is now making a comeback in the Fleetbush household. As cousin Spokane Fleetbush (Aunt Birturdla’s son) sat watching John Withespoon perform yet another hilarious stand-up routine, he stirred his chrysanthemum tea with his left hand. The maid, a leftover from the days of old Colonel Fleetbush, shuddered in horror at the sight from her hiding place inside the false grandfather clock.
“He’ll be summoning the Devil’s Red Wife before the equinox.” She later warned the frankly contemptuous kitchen staff.
Nandine, stirring the beans with both hands clutching the big wooden spoon, released one to make the “crazy” swirling motion at her temple. Everyone chuckled and the old maid (Bobra, by name) was driven from the room, but Cindy Buttons, the egg girl, having had her laugh along with the rest, ceased laughing before the others and pondered the origins of the swirling-finger-at-the-temple motion. “Did it begin with the invention of the clockwork mechanism?” She asked herself. “And if so, did it indicate an understanding on the part of earlier peoples of the obvious similarity between the human brain and the workings of a clock?”
“You shouldn’t be working at an egg girl.” Tacoma Fleetbush, at nineteen, the youngest member of the family and a friend of Cindy’s, told the latter when she was told these ruminations. “You should be going to college, studying philosophy.”
“And then what would I do?” Cindy asked. “One can’t care for a sick mother while studying philosophy.”
“No, I suppose not.” Tacoma agreed. The gulf between their two circumstances was once more shown to her. It made her uncomfortable. To dispel this vision, she took down a handful of books from a shelf. “Take these.” She told Cindy. “They’re philosophy books. Maybe you can’t go to college just yet, but you can still study on your own.”
“The others will think I stole them.” Cindy protested.
“No, I’ll write an inscription on the flyleaf for you, proving they’re yours now.”
Cindy took her new books downstairs. When Bobra saw them, she opened one and saw Tacoma’s script. She fell back, clutching her heart.
“It’s written with the left hand!” She cried.

I Haven’t Had a Coca-Cola in Years

“Blessed creature, to be chosen to pull the magic box through the transom of memory.” The many bracelets on the old woman’s wrist jangled as she patted the neck of the little goat. The old woman straightened up and looked Mr. Cosmonaut in the face. “Will the g-o-a-t be k-i-l-l-e-d after the ceremony?” She asked the white-robed man.
“Why are you spelling the words out?” Asked the normally profoundly perceptive Mr. Cosmonaut.
“I don’t want to alarm our animal friend here and possibly disturb the smooth unfolding of the ceremony.”
“Well, don’t; it confuses me.” Mr. Cosmonaut insisted. “Now, as to your question, why do you think the… ah, animal will be… ah, done away with?”
The old woman glanced at the approaching cadre of acolytes.
“No time now.” She said. “Here they come. Take this wax effigy of Julio Cortazar. It’s packed with salt. Winter comes early this year. Remember that!” She placed the crudely formed effigy in Mr. Cosmonaut’s white-gloved hand and withdrew to her seat in the bleachers at the side of the dais.
“Hail, Mr. Cosmonaut.” The seniormost of the acolytes, distinguished from his comrades by the red sash embroidered with dozens of stylized portraits of Emile Zola about his chest, saluted Mr. Cosmonaut in the accustomed fashion, his right hand extended overhead, fingers apart.
“Hail, acolyte seniormost who is called Steadley in the common tongue.” Mr. Cosmonaut returned the greeting.
“Is the doomed animal ready?” Steadley asked.
The old woman nudged the redneck beside her. “This is it.” She enthused, grinning.
“What does he mean by doomed, buddy?” The goat asked Mr. Cosmonaut.
“He is using symbolic language. Don’t worry.” Mr. Cosmonaut’s reassuring smile was mostly lost within his unkempt mass of facial hair. “And keep silent during the ceremony.”
“All is prepared.” Steadley turned and said to the audience, among whom were to be seen several members of the goat’s extended family as well as a couple of friends from his place of employment.

Glad to Have Abstained

An environmentalist, sitting on a portable stool in the middle of the telenet screen store, thinks about a bag of frozen waffle-cut fried potatoes that lay, he assumed, where he had left them, in the freezer at his Cliffside home. From the back of the store, where the Alonzo brothers were caught shoplifting only the other day, Nelson Givenema, a junior member of the sales team, approaches the area where the environmentalist, whose name is Manx Lipution, sits. He wears the blue and yellow polo shirt of conformity with little of the discomfort that junior members usually feel. It would seem, to one unfamiliar with the dried cattle turd of reality, that such a fellow is surely bound for an executive position with Terminal Transaction, the company in whose store our story has up until now taken place.
In another part of the ward two men in green plastic bowlers sit at an old kitchen table and discuss the environmentalist’s fate.
“I like today’s crop of comedians.” Says Romulus, the first of the two men whom we hear speak. “They really know how to milk a single joke for eight, nine, or even ten explosions of laughter from their audiences.”
“You’re so contemptuous of the new and young, Marty.” The second man replies. He alternately shakes and nods his head over his companion’s bitter dismissal of things that he personally sees no problem with.
“After all,” The second man once told his mother. “This is the way society and culture have evolved to this point. Why not embrace life as it is? After all, isn’t that what embracing life is all about?”
“Oh, Mordred, you are a good boy, so full of affirmative impulses.” His mother had wiped her hands on her apron and smiled.
“So, Remus, do we kill the environmentalist or not?” Romulus snaps his fingers in his companion’s face to draw his attention back to this moment.
Mordred considers a moment, alternately shaking and nodding his head.
“Yeah.” He says at last. “We do it.”
Nelson Givenema stands before the environmentalist.
“Is there anything I can help you with, sir?” He asks.
“You can begin by selling products friendly to Mother Earth.” Is the reply.
“To be honest with you, buddy,” Givenema whispers, “I hate this job.”

Hell of a Lot of Bugs Around This Year

“Dead batteries.” Slunder Ashabgo pronounced his judgment on the magorjic beam interactor. He slapped the side of the device disgustedly.
“So we can’t contact the Great Eyeball?” Linda’s Marie stated more than questioned, although I have appended a question mark to her statement, due to the slight questioning lilt she imparted to her words. You know what I mean.
“No,” Ashabgo confirmed. “And the Great Eyeball can’t find us.” He stood up and faced the ocean. Everyone in the group digested this information silently. All except Marvin: he was a noisy eater.
“I feel like primitive man.” He said.
“Even primitive man had his omniscient gods.” Kenny reminded him.
“Yes, but those weren’t real.” Marvin clutched his knees to his chest. He sat on the floor of the crude hut.
“Primitive man didn’t know that. I mean, you take someone like Aquinas…”
“We haven’t got time to take Aquinas anywhere.” Ashabgo interrupted angrily. He turned and faced his colleagues. “We have to reach the ruins before the rains.”
“Even though our expedition won’t be digitally documented?” Linda’s Marie asked.
“Precisely. We’ll just have to keep notes and write up a report when we get home the old-fashioned way.” Ashabgo’s bucket hat, sunglasses, and beard obscured what the university’s newspaper had once called “the specimen of male beauty for the year.” Perhaps all his determination had been born of a desire to bury that image forever. It made no difference to Linda’s Marie; she still lusted after him. Too bad the witchdoctor on the main island had mistakenly pair-bonded her with Marvin. She had caught him staring at her in a non-academic way. She had to keep him from figuring things out before she could counteract this “curse.”
“Well, Slunder,” Kenny, his own bucket hat embroidered with his name in the local language, addressed himself to Ashabgo. “With the professor ill with fever, you’ll have to call the shots. You were his pet, after all.”
Ashabgo resented that and said so.
What none of them knew was that Bob was an android whose synthetic brain was transmitting data back to the Great Eyeball even as they sat debating what to do.

A Happy People Free From British Rule

“Strike the tents.” Delchrist ordered the morning of the sixteenth.
“We’re leaving?” Hatted Veeble couldn’t believe it. They still had a week to go. “We’re only half way through with this stay.” He protested.
Delchrist pulled his suspenders up over his shoulders. The little monkey boy, Jeremy, poured a cup of coffee and passed it to him.
“Thanks. Oh, that’s good.” Delchrist’s moustache seemed to rise like the fur on a cat as he sipped. “We can’t stay here any longer.” He said to Hatted Veeble. The manager of the circus stepped down from the wagon followed by the tall man in the top hat. No one had ever seen Hatted Veeble without his hat.
“But why not? We’ve yet to squeeze the Methodists. They’ll be arriving any day.” Hatted Veeble pointed out.
“Times are changing. I can feel it. It don’t think we’ll get the kind of reception from the revivalists that we have in the past.”
“You’re thinking of that boy the other night.” Hatted Veeble and Delchrist stopped before the dragon’s enclosure. “The one that questioned the reality of the cowgirl.”
“First time I’ve seen that kind of incredulity in thirty years of making the circuit. And from a child too!”
“You can’t let that throw you. If we move now, we’ll be off our itinerary. We might bump up against the tail of Colonel Fleetbush’s Insect Parade, or worse, the Cosmic Mysteries Air Show.” Hatted Veeble’s eyes climbed into the sky, contemplating horrors.
“I’ve got an idea.” Delchrist patted the neck of an ostrich walking by. “There’s a city over the mountains that’s never been squeezed. Not by us, not by the Colonel or Captain Cosma.”
“A city? I don’t know, Delchrist. Those kind of people are just too sophisticated for what we do.”
“Veeble, I’ve got an idea that ideas themselves are changing. The wants and needs of the city people are being exchanged for those of the country, and vice versa.”
A young boy, about as old as Delchrist had been when he first joined the circus, ran up to the two men. “Mr. Delchrist,” he said, “The big elephant’s sick!” Delchrist and Hatted Veeble hurried to deal with the situation.

Four Years Since the Remark

It had sounded like the man in the next room said “Frank Zappa.” Brant Borden listened closely for a few seconds thereafter, but couldn’t hear any other words clearly except perhaps “our family” and “make my regard.” Borden dismissed it, realizing that the chances of anyone in this building discussing Frank Zappa were miniscule. He turned his attention back to the magazine article he was reading.
“Don’t you ever read the short fiction for which that magazine is so rightly famous?” Asked Angela, who sat inside a box opposite Borden. The side of the box that faced Borden had a round-cornered glass window through which Angela could see Borden and he could see her.
“I don’t like to waste my time on short fiction.” Borden replied.
“Unless it’s by an author that’s known to you and whom you like.” Angela prodded the man on the sofa.
“That’s not entirely true. I have been know to read something by a trendy young writer, and I have avoided for the most part the short stories of most of my favorite authors, so… there you have it.”
“You’re a snob.” Angela put a cowboy hat on her head.
“That’s a subjective term. What you… listen, there it is again.” Borden cocked his ear to the wall behind him.
“What, the man in the next room?”
“Yes, I think I heard him say Frank Zappa again.” Borden put the magazine on the low table before him and stood up, smoothing out his trousers and tucking his shirt in more neatly.
“You can’t go yet. I haven’t passed judgment on you yet.” Angela shook a small noose made of a shoelace at him.
“I think you have.” Borden countered. “I’ll be right back.”
“Light-weight!” Angela cried as Borden left the room. In his absence she rummaged among the array of accoutrements that lay beneath the bottom edge of the window. When Borden returned she had drawn a moustache on her upper lip with a marker and slipped a spiky red wig over her head.
“Well, what did he say?” She asked in a deep voice.
“He said he said ‘Fran’s Wrapper,’ but I didn’t ask why?” Borden sat down and picked up the magazine again.
“You’re not curious enough.” Angela accused.

What Will You Do When the Drill Wonders Why?

The song which Prince wrote for Miles Davis’ Tutu album, but later withdrew, was revealed in a dream to me to be a trivial piece of funk moving back and forth between B and A. A silly piano figure not unlike the beginning of “Manic Monday” was the recurring theme. As the song played over a loudspeaker with Freddie Hubbard standing in for Miles yet again, a line of long-legged Dove bars danced about on a stage set designed in that 1970’s Art Nouveau revival style we all love so much.
“Art Deco was an extension of Art Nouveau.” I said to myself upon awakening.
“Who are you talking to?” My robotic bed companion asked.
“Nothing. Go back to sleep.” I whispered, fumbling with the half dozen prescription drugs that keep me functioning as other men do. And I don’t mean just sexually; when I use the term ‘men’ in this context I mean ‘mankind,’ although I am also conveying to you that I am a male, almost by the way.
I don’t identify myself primarily as a male. I get the impression that other males do. I don’t think to myself: “What are you, Lance Ash?” “I am that which has a penis.” When I think about what I am, I call myself a painter, a writer, a cartoonist, a composer. I don’t say “I am an American” or “I am a southerner” or “I am white.” I tend to look down on people whose self-identification is as facile as that. I am the one who cannot relax. The one who eats a can of beans for lunch every day. The one who worries about a future that no one else even suspects.
Among the list of my heroes’ names you won’t find that of Prince. Miles Davis is there, but not Prince. There’s something fake about Prince, some refusal to admit that it’s a game he’s playing. I think it’s a game, anyway. If it’s not, then Prince is in the same category of annoying people as Salvador Dali and Michael Jackson. That’s not to say I don’t like Prince. I do, but he’s not a hero of mine. My heroes are people like Francis Bacon, Woody Allen, Frank Zappa, Jorg Immendorff, Italo Calvino, Charles Saxon, Julio Cortazar, Jim Henson, and Tony Randall, not to mention Miles Davis. There are others, of course. “Hero” is such a vague term. Would John Lennon and Lenny Bruce rise to the level of such a term? I don’t know. I admire them both a lot, but they each have so many grating flaws. All of the people I’ve named do. That’s why ultimately the greatest hero to me is the image of myself I have, the image I’m striving to become.

The Sandwich Wasn’t As Good Today

Mustard had always complemented Hank’s sandwiches. There was no time that he could recall that he had eaten a sandwich without the delight of some variety of mustard adorning its interior.
“But what of peanut butter and jelly?” I hear you askind as you turn to the painted polystyrene model of your mother and shake your wee head in disbelief. The answer to your distracting question is that Hank had never eaten a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
“What, never?” You ask, mouth agape, lines of saliva running from gum to gum and that impudent, pouting lower lip quavering at the effrontery of it all. One day that lip will sag under the weight of your dead, dry tongue as you stare mindlessly out at a world that has ceased to number you as anything other than an occupant of a home for the enfeebled. So watch out.
No, I say to you. No, Hank reserved his peanut butter for crackers and his jelly for toast. As he once said to Claire, the unicorn shackler’s daughter,
“It isn’t really a sandwich if you make it out of crackers.”
“What isn’t?” Asked Claire. Outside her window she could see the Easter Bunny, hopping with less than the expected gracefulness, which, given that he was over five feet tall, was only natural I guess. Yet she must remain indoors with this mustard-smelling old man.
“The foodstuffs that I prepare.” Hank answered with a mysterious twinkle in his deep-set eyes.
“So you’ve never tasted peanut butter and jelly together?” She asked as she back into the closet.
“Oh, I’ve tasted them together. I’ve taken a bite of my peanut butter cracker and held it in my mouth while I took a bite of my jelly toast. I’ve done that many times.” Hank slowly withdrew a long, thin blade from a cracked leather scabbard strapped with pink yarn to his leg.
“And did you like it?” Claire’s head bumped against the bottom of the closet shelf on which were stored her board games.
“I hated it. I couldn’t wait until the taste was out of my mouth.” Hank raised the cruel blade even with his shoulder.
I can hear you now. You’re loudly proclaiming how good this story was.

The Really Obscure Stuff Remained Hidden

Special seeds, flown in on an otherwise empty cargo plane, were entrusted to Dallas Pimiento on the first anniversary of his resurrection from the dead.
“Thank you, majestic sky lord.” He said, bowing his head humbly.
“You’re welcome, you polite young man.” The pilot returned, much impressed.
These seeds were of the dreaded narcoweed known as coughinoui. Ruthlessly suppressed elsewhere, the consumption of the leaves of coughinoui was a treasured pastime here in the land in which Pimiento and I found ourselves.
“What land is this, anyway?” I asked Pimiento, when we had ceased giggling over our good fortune.
“I don’t know. Why don’t you go ask that lady over there?” He pointed to an alert-looking old woman picking through a box of radishes.
“She’ll think I’m crazy, not knowing where I am.” I saw the flaw in the proposed plan.
“No, just ask her the name of the town. Then we can find it on the map.”
“What map?”
“There’s one lining the bottom of the box the seeds came in.” Pimiento pulled back a scoopful of the seeds to reveal that of which he spoke.
“Why don’t we just look at the map then?” I asked.
“You still got to know the name of the town.” Pimiento, or Dallas, as I was privileged to call him, pointed out. Acknowledging that that was a good point, I approached the old lady.
“These radishes are all bad.” She complained to me as I came within hearing.
“Mmm.” I nodded. “Excuse me, but could you tell me what town this is?”
“This is no town, sir.” She frowned. “This is a shithole.”
“Ah, aha.” I smiled and laughed abruptly. “And what is the name of this…”
“Shithole?” She completed my sentence. “It’s called Esquituttle.”
“Esquituttle.” I repeated. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She began heaving the radishes one by one at a herd of goats on jus the other side of the fence. The goats responded slowly at first, but then scattered as the radishes continued to fall among their number. A fat, sunburned man came out of the house and yelled at the woman, but not as angrily as one would expect of one who might own the radishes, the goats, or both.

I Don’t Have All Day to Sit Here

The promenade that Dallas Pimiento and I took through the baked goods sector of what we assumed still to be Esquituttle was blessed by an overcast sky.
“I wish I knew how to play the saxophone.” I said to myself. The great loudspeakers in the sky were playing Sam Rivers.
“The clouds are muffling the sound.” Said Dallas.
“I don’t think we could bear the pure, unimpeded noise.” I mused.
A bathysphere, loaded with the turncoat’s blandishments, emerged from the solitude of the Minerva Minsky memorial fountain, its turrets emblazoned with the icon of the pastry dervish.
“I’m breathing out tiny specks of paper!” Dallas announced suddenly. He stopped in the middle of the narrow street, intent on examining his life.
“These ‘cobblestones’ are nothing more than oddly shaped bricks!” I said aloud. Each bore the name of some local business. The crassness of it offended me.
“I hate ‘ness’ words.” Mrs. Raines used to say. I wished that she was there to see the full panoply of a world ignorant of Puritanism. Have some apple strudel, my old teacher. May it purge your voice of its nasalness.
“It’s alright now.” Dallas put his hand on my shoulder and reassured me with a laugh. “I have reverted to oxygen.”
“I wish I knew how to play the saxophone.” I said to him.
“Why don’t you teach yourself? I’m still amazed you taught yourself to read German.” He purchased a pastry with his dirty money.
“Well, I had a lot of help from you.”
“How so?”
“You kept out of my way.”
“Yes, but I’m back again. Do you think that will interfere with your saxophone education?”
“Probably. But I don’t have time to learn the saxophone now.”
He was asking himself “Why not?” I could tell. Before he could swallow and ask me the question, however, I had diverted his attention to pantheon of Jazz greats filling the sky.
“The only black men you admire are Jazz musicians.” Dallas indicted me.
“That’s not true.” I differed. “You couldn’t really call James Brown a Jazz musician.”
Ipecalgrium Monosilicax

Torn between his desire to throw a can of beans through the telenet screen that stayed on twenty-four hours a day in the break room and his need to explain to the young lady sitting before him why he found Dexter Gordon boring, Dallas Pimiento, he who bears upon his upper left arm the sigil of the Latter Two-Thirds (often described as a secret society in the press, when it is actually closer to being a private club), abruptly rose from his seat and plunged into the darkness of the disused party room. As he felt his way towards the dimly lit Wall of Stratagems where hung hundreds of framed portraits of non-existent cartoon characters, he was greeted by a familiar voice.
“Bored, Mr. Pimiento?”
“Dr. Fungroid, is that you?” Pimiento turned toward the voice. He saw the greenish light from the wall faintly reflected on a bald head and large eyeglasses.
“None other.” The man stepped forward and Pimiento smelled the great research scientist’s distinctive fragrance.
“Ipecalgrium monosilicax.” Pimiento identified it.
“With just a hint of orange oil.” Fungroid added.” “We’ve actually begun marketing it under the name of Lake Water.”
“Without the hint of orange oil, I take it.” Pimiento’s hand rested on a folding chair, ready to heft it as a weapon should the situation require it.
“May I accompany you to the Wall of Stratagems?” Dr. Fungroid asked.
“Certainly.” Pimiento agreed. He allowed the other man to move ahead, while he followed. He wasn’t entirely sure he trusted Fungroid; there had been that odd business with the jugged horsehead-man last year.
“I’ve always thought this ought to be called the Wall of Technique instead of the Wall of Stratagems.” Dr. Fungroid commented.
“Wouldn’t it be great if they actually made cartoons with these characters?” Pimiento sounded enthusiastic at the idea.
“That would defeat the whole point behind these portraits.” Fungroid replied. As he spoke the overhead lights, twenty-five feet above, flooded the party room. The voice of a young woman drew their attention to the door.
“Dallas! I think you are extremely rude!” She yelled. “And, for your information, I don’t care about Dexter Gideon!”

A Man With Specific Needs

Plague, the worst anyone in the Pitted Shaven Dome area could remember, was working its way towards the Fallen Forest. Some said it originated in a contaminated batch of honey buns, but no one could say for sure.
“The vending machine attendants were among the first to die.” Madame Trapsid spoke to Dallas Pimiento through a thick veil of wool that covered all her face except for her eyes. These looked at Pimiento through a window of flexible plastic sewn into the veil.
“But you’re still open for business, right?” Pimiento was eager that it should be so.
“Certainly, my dear.” The old lady’s cultured voice still bore traces of her formal education, despite nearly a lifetime spent in this uncivilized wasteland. She pressed a button under the tabletop upon which her heavily robed elbows rested. The button triggered a mechanism that rolled back the iron grate that barred the entryway to her shop. Pimiento entered and approached the table at which Madame Trapsid sat. He began to pull out his wallet. The old lady drew back.
“I’m sorry.” She said. “We don’t accept cash anymore.”
“What?” Pimiento sounded distraught.
“Cash is one of the worst carriers of disease.” Madame Trapsid explained.
“Then how do I pay my deposit?”
“Don’t you have a credit mark?”
Pimiento rubbed his eyes. “No.” He said. “I don’t believe in them.”
“Oh dear.” Madame Trapsid thought for a moment.
“Maybe I should just go.” Pimiento suggested.
“No, no, Mr. Pimiento. There’s always a way. I know!” The old lady fumbled in the trash can near her feet. She pulled out a sealable sandwich bag. “You put your cash in here. Seal it tight now.”
Pimiento did as he was told.
“Good. I’ll freeze that should you part with it today.”
“I think I will. I’ve got to get something to tide me over.”
“Well, go ahead now and have a good time.” Madame Trapsid beckoned Pimiento to enter the chambers within. He did so, passing into what was probably the greatest collection of strange illustrated texts in the islands.

Competing Films

Contrary to expectations, Bruce Mamurphy himself took the controls of the experimental airship for its first public flight. The king was there to see it, standing in the royal reviewing stand both as regal as a man in his position should appear and as eager as a little boy, his white gloved hands grasping the railing as he watched Mamurphy climb behind the wheel.
“I had thought to see Mrs. Cumbersome here today.” The king spoke to Baron Recipe standing beside him. “But I suppose she couldn’t tear herself away from the telenet.”
“His majesty is witty today.” One of the shabby bums propped on the beams below the royal reviewing stand said to his neighbor.
“‘His majesty’ is lucky we’re not anarchists.” Replied the other bum. “A fellow could plant a bomb under here as easy as he could fart.”
Out on the field Bruce Mamurphy started the peat-fueled engine that would propel his craft into the sky. Dud Gorillaframe, his chief mechanic, stepped backwards. “He’s either crazy or a god-damn genius.” He said to himself for the thousandth time. Of course, he would never say such a thing aloud. His father had always impressed upon him the extreme naughtiness of the word “god-damn.”
“Aircraft again, Sidney?” Millicent Shranck expressed both her boredom and her disapproval as she and her husband made their way to their seats.
“Hot damn!” Sidney Shranck enthused. “That’s the Mamurphy Beangrouser! Look at it go!” He watched the experimental airship slowly and awkwardly leave the ground. His wife had to tug at the seat of his pants to remind him to sit down.
Up in the air Mamurphy reached into his shirt and withdrew the medallion on the chain around his neck. He took a somber look at the blasphemous rune imprinted thereon. Then, secure in the knowledge that his manifesto was at that very moment being faithfully delivered by the postal service to the famous reporter Firman Bellchange, he turned his vessel towards the ground, carefully aiming it at the royal reviewing stand.
Speaking nearly six months later, Bellchange predicted that his forthcoming book on the disaster would be “a real page-turner!”

Dad, What Was Loverboy Like?

“You can’t expect that pill to work right away.” Hezmoor the Exposer remonstrated with Nob Agumbo. The latter individual, fidgeting in his tiny seat, mused on his own mortality and tried to avoid watching the telenet screen before him, where celebrity plumber Nancy Steeris explained the difference between the two leading candidates for the office of Cultural Imperator Supreme.
“You just can’t trust someone who denigrates the Impressionists and the Impressionist movement. That’s why, this November, I’m voting for Huck Smilington.”
“Would either of you gentlemen like a drink?” A boyishly handsome steward asked Hezmoor the Exposer and Nob Agumbo.
“Hell yeah.” Agumbo asserted, but was cut off by the Exposer.
“He can’t drink anything because he just took a pill and I can’t because of my deep, personal convictions.” Hezmoor, whose long beard was black except for a gray stripe extending from his chin to the nationalist symbol pinned through his tie, smiled both charmingly and, truth be told, hungrily at the steward.
Later, as the vessel passed over the Sonrisa Rift, the steward, Ron Emery, slumped against a wall and chatted quietly with Cathy, a co-worker.
“If that Hezmoor the Exposer wins the election I think I’ll just die!” He nibbled at a peach refused earlier by one of the passengers in his care.
“Little chance of that; he’s not one of the two leading candidates.” Cathy examined the infected and poorly executed tattoo on her leg.
“You should get that looked at.” Ron did not sound much concerned. A sudden jolt to the vessel sent him and his peach tumbling to the floor.
“What was that!?” Cathy barked.
Jesus McDonald, an operative for the Lucifer Biggs campaign sent to keep an eye on Hezmoor the Exposer, was also an expert on flying whales. When he saw the fearsome creatures outside his window, he knew exactly what to do.
“Stewardess,” He addressed Cathy. “Tell your supervisor that he must send the vessel’s full static charge through the electronic stabilizer spikes.”
“Sir, please return to your seat. Everything is under control.” Cathy directed.
“No, you must listen to me!” Shouted McDonald. “Tell your supervisor…” Ron, who was stronger than he looked, seized McDonald from behind. As they struggled, Hezmoor the Exposer noted with satisfaction that Agumbo was finally asleep.

David Lee Roth Doesn’t Speak Spanish With Anything Approaching Fluency

“I bet she was cute when she was younger.” Roger Chandelabrium was looking at the intelligent-looking woman with the over-sized posterior as he spoke to his friend Nathan-Willow.
“You bet?” Nathan-Willow sniggered at Chandelabrium’s quaint use of language.
“Orthodontic work in her early teens would have changed her whole life.” Chandelabrium opined.
“Oh, I don’t know. Her genetics wouldn’t have been changed by it, and genes are destiny, you know.”
“So, you think that DNA is a more powerful influence on the outcome of one’s life than how one is perceived by others?”
“Why do you use the word ‘one?’”
“Let me tell you that is a load of bunk.” Chandelabrium continued. “Genes are very important; they inform your predilections and your general attitude towards life, but attractive people have it much easier than plain or ugly ones.” Chandelabrium was hot about it. He put his milkshake down with a bang.
“But that’s genetics again.” Nathan-Willow pointed out.
“Genetics, my friend, decreed that her teeth be fucked up. If now, as I have postulated, she was cute as a teenager, how much cuter would she have been had her teeth been fixed?”
Nathan-Willow considered. He glanced at the woman in question. “A lot.” He admitted.
“And so, she would have been treated that way by others and, possibly, she wouldn’t now be working here at the fungus depository with us.” As Chandelabrium said these words he jerked his thumb in the air, indicating to Nathan-Willow that he wished to rise from the bench upon which he and his conjoined twin sat. Nathan-Willow complied and together they struggled to their feet. As they exited the break room with a last, wistful look at the intelligent-looking woman on Chandelabrium’s part, the scene faded to black and the film ended.
“And so we see that genetics is only responsible for fifty percent of one’s makeup.” Said Professor Starling. “The other fifty percent is influenced by environment.”
“I feel sorry for the one twin.” Carol Maxwell said.
“They’re just actors, Carol.” Replied Bobby Tinhook.

Arguing About Who Got Overtime

Tammy tried to indicate the depth of her disappointment to the cast of “Superb Cantina,” the morning telenet program who were visiting her by way of the remote operated camera in her cell, but submerged in the movement-inhibiting oxy-gelatin as she was, she could only work her fingers slowly yet desperately, and hope that Peggy Stybold, her attendant, would interpret these signs correctly.
“Why is Tammy moving her fingers like that?” Whit Chogg asked Peggy over the telenet interface.
“Oh,” Peggy turned from the camera and looked at her charge, the thirty-four-year-old, slightly obese woman who had spent the last six years in the gelatin tank. “She’s just waving. Aren’t you, Tammy?” She turned back to the camera, and by extension, the several million people watching at home as they are their breakfast, and spoke of her great delight in being privileged to be Tammy’s attendant.
“Now, we’ve blocked out portions of Tammy’s body with digital blurs,” Said Lindsay McCoy, the female half of the “Superb Cantina” duo, “But she is in fact naked, isn’t that right?”
“That’s right, Lindsay.” Answered Peggy.
“And why is that?”
“Well, Lindsay, due to the unique nature of the oxy-gelatin, any clothing that is in there with Tammy will rot. That’s something we found out the hard way. I don’t know why it is exactly. That’s something you can ask Dr. Scupperford when you talk to him.”
“That’s right,” The camera cut directly to Whit Chogg. “We’ll be talking to Tammy’s inventor—I’m sorry…”
“You mean the oxy-gelatin tank’s inventor!” Lindsay McCoy interrupted with a laugh.
“That’s right.” Laughed Chogg. “We’ll be talking a little later with inventor Dr. Lariat Scupperford. But first we’ll join our own film critic Lamar Druggle in the Theater Corner. Thank you for talking with us, Peggy.”
“Oh, thank you, Whit. It’s been a pleasure.”
“And say goodbye to Tammy for us.”
“I will, Whit.”
Tammy’s disappointment had been that it wasn’t the David Letterman show visiting her.

Improperly Rolled-Up Sleeves

They had described the tricycle as tricky, but brooding science master candidate Rollie Flexigraf assumed they were being facetiously alliterative. Or alliteratively facetious. He couldn’t decide which as he climbed onto the three-wheeled conveyance. After he had been pitched off he couldn’t remember what he had been trying to decide.
“You alright down there, young feller?” Grizzly Allen leaned out of a window in his treetop lean-to and inquired.
“I’m…not…young.” Flexgraf gasped irritably as he painfully got to his feet.
“You stay off that contraption now if you know what’s good for you.” Allen stirred the pot of beans on his ancient cast iron stove as he spoke. The beans’ aroma of “slow cooked perfection” wafted across the valley to the home of Mr. Cosmonaut on Dirtlong Mountain.
“That damn fool’s cooking beans again.” Mr. Cosmonaut sniffed the air with his zucchini-like nose. He stood on the large deck of his house dressed in one of his distinctive robes and clasping his hands behind his back.
“Gustav Mahler wore robes like that.” Virgil Omar, a houseguest, said to Sassy Gomez, a reporter come to interview Mr. Cosmonaut.
“You mean Gustav Klimt.” Ms. Gomez corrected Omar. She sat on a bench on the deck, her notebook on her wide lap.
“Do I?” Omar wondered. He helped himself to another glass of Mr. Cosmonaut’s expensive port.
“Although Mr. Cosmonaut himself does not partake of alcoholic drinks,” Ms. Gomez later wrote. “He is always certain to make such refreshments available to his guests, of which there was only one at the time I visited with him. This was Virgil Omar, whom Mr. Cosmonaut introduced to me as a painter.
‘I’m going to teach that bastard a lesson.’ Mr. Cosmonaut promised in as evil a voice as I have ever heard. He slapped his hands together and started down the stairs at the side of the deck. Before I could follow him, however, I heard the sound of voices and saw the return of Mr. Cosmonaut accompanied byu another man.
‘This is Rollie Flexigraf.’ He introduced the man. ‘He’s a science master.’”

Quantified Remains of Solar Lord

Although Bobq-Yank claimed to have hated the Emptyhead album Which Way Did They Go? that I lent to him, I know that in some way he must have appreciated it. Only a month later he could be heard humming the melody of the album’s only single, “Brutal Thrust,” as he filled orders in the warehouse. Not wanting to rub it in, I merely smiled and continued on my way to the disused ladies’ restroom on the third floor where I had secret business to take care of.
The restroom was lit only by the full moon coming through the window. Although I had a hard time making out the other man in the room, I could smell him immediately upon entering. He was not from our society.
“What do homoerotic photographers pour on their pancakes?” He asked. This was the first half of the pass phrase, one that I had come up with. I tried to get the joke into the public consciousness by writing it on the wall of a restroom in the university’s art department, but I guess it was too advanced for the people back then. When I returned a month later, someone had written “what?” beneath the question and my answer, which I properly gave now to the man in the ladies’ restroom.
“Mapplethorpe.” I responded. Not only would this confirm my identity to this man, his laughter would give me some clue as to how to deal with him.
There was no laughter.
Instead, the man merely noted, “Identity confirmed.” I heard him moving in the darkness and saw him withdraw a fat, white envelope from his coat. “Here is the itemization you requested.” He handed it over.
“I’ll check it later.” I said, stuffing the envelope into the special compartment in my hat. “And now, you may ask the question that I am told is the price I must pay for this information.”
“The question is ‘What reason did Bobq-Yank give for hating the Emptyhead album to which he was exposed?’” The man’s voice was flat, unemotional, that of a professional, yet I thought I detected a polar accent beneath the evident years of training.
“He said it droned.” I told the man.
“It droned?” He repeated, a faint note of incredulity on the last word.
“That’s what he said.” I sighed. “I didn’t understand it either.”



Morbid Indulgences

Baxter described the film in detail to his cat Susan,
“It’s called A Light-Hearted Romp.” He sat at his kitchen table while Susan sat atop it. (“And he wonders why he keeps getting sick!” Baxter’s mother would complain.) “Basically, it’s about a man who lives with a cat in an apartment high up among the treetops. He’s a college student and his cat is very special. She has the intelligence of a human and a small flying machine she can operate.” Baxter fed Susan a piece of bacon and scratched her under the chin. “I think you’ll like it. I’m going to try to cast Brad Pitt as the man. I think he kind of looks like an idealized version of me, don’t you? Of course you do.” He gathered Susan up and walked over to the bench seat in the large window that looked down on the forest floor below.
“I’ll get the CGI people to put Zero Mostel in as the nominal villain, though of course he won’t be a villain in the traditional sense. I don’t believe in characters that are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or sharp-edged depictions of moral absolutes. No, he’s just the main character most in opposition to the Thaxton character.” Baxter paused. He stared at the dozen or so people standing on the ground below his apartment, holding up signs and occasionally glancing up at him.
“Now,” Baxter sighed. “As to the plot, well, I really don’t know. Obviously there’s some sort of conflict between Thaxton and Zero Mostel…” He continued to stare, but saw other things than the reality before him. “Maybe the Mostel character, who has an ordinary name like Mike Hammond or something, is trying to get a hold of Thaxton’s cat. Trying to obtain her secrets.” Baxter held Susan up as if she was a baby being inspected at arm’s length. “I think I’ll name her Susan!” He cried in a baby-talk voice. The cat looked about, eager to be put down. Baxter complied. He put her on the floor to walk away while he stood up and stretched. He looked down at the protestors below. His face became hard.
“And now to deal with you bunch of idiots.” He said.
As Baxter disappeared into the secret chamber in the attic Susan the cat rendezvoused with her friend Mortimer the weasel.
“How’s it going in there?” Mortimer asked.
“Not great.” Replied Susan. “Baxter still hasn’t figured out I’m a boy.”

Pressure Sensitive Square Meat

Some among the laugh-weary audience said he was a born trucker. The set of his shoulders as he drove the forklift around the playground was exactly that of a twenty-year-veteran, declared a couple of men whose special driver’s licenses proclaimed their expertise on such matters. Others said he would have made a good pool shark, considering the way he shoved objects into others, always striking in exactly the right places to effect the movement he intended. Whatever his destiny should have been, it was certainly the fact that Dallas Pimiento was a goatherd by day, a bean farmer by night, and an arranger of shapes on the weekends. He was also tired and, as he descended from the forklift, the only two thoughts in his head were that it was now socially acceptable to sop up one’s plate with a biscuit or some other such baked good, and that he was heading straight to bed.
As he made himself comfortable in the high-canopied bed in his onstage quarters, some in the Stewart Copeland Memorial Theater restlessly hoped that there was to be no sexual antics in the next scene. They had heard that this director was of the modern, relativist bent and consequently assumed that anything could be in the offing. They were right about that last, but needn’t have worried; what happened next was a fairly straightforward depiction of one of Pimiento’s nightmares.
Of course, Pimiento always told anyone who would listen that he didn’t have nightmares. But how else would one describe the entrance of a group of grotesquely modified people accompanied by a wild, unbroken horse? As they moved about the stage miming a variety of culturally debased activities and passing among themselves a doll meant to represent Pimiento, one of the members of the audience could be heard to whisper to a friend on the other side of the former’s date, “That horse symbolizes the Bronco, Pimiento’s name for the spirit of confidence that sometimes visits him.”
“A wild horse is a mustang, not a bronco!” Hissed the other man in reply.
“You’re both wrong.” A heavy-set man in front of them turned around and said. “‘Bronco’ is Pimiento’s code name within the Ministry of Procurement.”
“‘Code name?’” Demanded the first man angrily.
“He’s a spy. Didn’t you know that?” He laughed. “You’ve got to pay attention.”

Thumbprint Gallery

The marmalade offered by Mrs. Stalegg to her guests was of the Epuisdesaal variety, supposedly made of the flayed hide of gilded elephants.
“I’ve been wanting to try this a long time.” Francis Wartman said eagerly as he spread a spoonful on his waffle.
“I hope you like it.” Mrs. Stalegg watched Wartman bite into the waffle.
“What an unusual flavor.” Wartman remained polite despite the disappointment in his mouth. He had expected something a little more… well, different from this.
“It is very subtle.” Mrs. Stalegg tried to help him out.
“Mrs. Stalegg,” Randolph, who had contented himself with a cup of coffee, drew his hostess’ attention to him. “When will we be able to see the painting?”
“You can see it now if you like.” The old lady, whose dowdy attire belied the great wealth she controlled, replied. “I just thought you’d like a little something after coming all this way.”
“And we appreciate it.” Randolph smiled. “It’s just that we are on a tight schedule. As you know, we must be off the island by sundown.”
“Very well. Mr. Wartman, are you ready?”
“Yes.” Wartman answered through the last bite of his waffle. He had eaten the whole thing, adding yet another spoonful of marmalade. He took a last swallow of coffee before rising from the low table along with Mrs. Stalegg and Randolph.
Together they two men followed Mrs. Stalegg down a sunlit corridor to a small, but high-ceilinged room. There, on an enormous easel, stood Potato Man Triumphant Over the Gods of the Vine, one of the three or four unquestioned masterpieces by the late Nancy Cow.
Randolph’s breath, momentarily forgotten by even his autonomous nervous system, was suddenly drawn in with an audible vulgarity as his mouth dropped open. He stared unbelieving, nearly falling to his knees, but for Wartman’s supportive grip.
“What do you think?” Mrs. Stalegg asked, her eyes filling with tears of a joy twice manifested.
“That’s a big painting.” Admitted Wartman.

Which Beer Is Best For Weight Loss?

“I’ve explained all this to you.” Nils snapped. He drew the drapes shut with one muscular sweep of the tentacle that had replaced his lost right arm.
“I know you have, Nils. But I still don’t understand the why of it all.” Vickie, the earl’s niece, wrung her hands. She hated disappointing anyone, most of all Nils, her uncle’s business partner and telepathic consort of nearly thirty years.
Nils took up his heavy mug of coffee and held it under his upwardly pointing chin. “The only why you need to understand is why coffee smells so good but tastes so bad.”
Vickie knew it was useless to try to get any further explanations. Nils had gone into one of his trances. He stood there inhaling the aroma of the expensive coffee and staring at the collection of framed photographs on the opposite wall. Vickie made her farewell bow to the man she had known from childhood until just before the earl’s death only as a mysterious, mostly silent presence in the manor. She walked downstairs to the waiting carriage, mentally going over the members of various rock groups in order to remain calm.
“Follow that carriage.” Ordered the new earl of Comberfui. His driver obeyed, putting the genetically engineered, wheeled creature they sat inside of into motion. The earl, Bruce Mamurphy, settled back into the sumptuous cushions next to his mistress, Rhoda Namperous, and chuckled.
“Happy, dear?” Miss Namperous asked.
“Indeed.” Mamurphy acknowledged. “The old earl’s niece is bound to be headed for a rendezvous with the leaders of the anarchists’ league. And once I know who they are, I’ll be able to destroy the last obstacle to a long and peaceful life.
“Isn’t the girl related to you?” Miss Namperous asked.
“Only by marriage. Still, she does have an arguable claim to the title. Luckily, she’s feeble-minded.” Mamurphy’s exposition was cut short by the sight of two groups of masked men emerging from the porno theaters on either side of Vickie’s carriage. They pointed primitive, projectile-launching weapons at the driver and seized the reins of the draft animals.
“What’s Nils up to?” Mamurphy wondered.
Rhoda Namperous wondered too. She hoped that Mamurphy would at least begin to audibly offer theories. The recorder hidden in her tiara was running.

What You Wearing That Hat For?

Secure in his tiny, armored box, Lyndon Franker traveled the ten thousand leagues from Base Eight to Legumopolis, the box strapped to a sledge pulled by three of the giant two-headed tarbeasts of Appelyum. Twice a day during the long journey a trusted servant poured a nutritive juice into the feeding tube that ran through one of the iron-plated wooden walls of Franker’s box. This juice and the bed of sequentially illustrated magazines upon which he lay were all that sustained him.
“And what became of his wastes?” Asked the perceptive Prince Simmeraldo, son of the third Pigpesh emperor, upon hearing the beginning of the tale of Lyndon Franker’s journey to Legumopolis. Thus from a child’s simple but obvious query was born the Commentaries of Good Value, from which sprang the School of the Obvious, and are collected in the Wikaxpedus Minor, that ancient book which no scholar of any ambition or repute would be without.
The general trend of modern thought on the subject is that no waste removal system was necessary due to the unique nature of the nutritive juice, the recipe for which is, of course, lost to us. However, one would have been quickly rebuked should one have speculated so in front of Lyndon Franker. He remembered the discomfort of having to make his daily eliminations into a small chamber hidden in the floor of the box, as well as the chore of then having to grind up his fecal material by means of a hand crank, thereby allowing the dirty business to fall to the road to be trampled by the legion of soldiers that accompanied Franker, box, sledge, tarbeasts, and the rest of His Majesty’s staff on the trip. The urgency of His Majesty’s summons and the great delicacy of the errand that Lyndon Franker was to undertake on his behalf obscured the more unpleasant details from the immediate inclusion in contemporary records. I alone have uncovered the truth. In a cache of artifacts unearthed in the process of digging a latrine in my backyard for the neighbor’s children I found the whole story laid out in Franker’s own messy hand. Subsequent reenactments of the journey by the Department of Ecology at the University have given credence to this version of events, though the exact recipe for the nutritive juice remains unknown.

Stricken For Chicken Lung Champion

“It could have been so much better.” Thought Lyndon Franker as he finished reading a sequentially illustrated story in issue 27 of Walkoff, the magazine for delinquents. Probably he would have elaborated upon his initial criticism, had not the distinctive sounds of his box being opened reached his excited ears.
“Can we be there at last?” He asked himself. His question was answered in the affirmative as the unique bronze key that only the Chief Steward of His Majesty’s household possessed turned in the lock and the box was opened in one of the interior forecourts of the imperial palace.
All bowed to the great Lyndon Franker, special agent of the emperor himself, as he stepped unsteadily out into the dusk. Only the Chief Steward remained unmoved. He merely nodded at Franker in recognition of an equal in the hierarchy of the court.
“Special agent Lyndon Franker will be escorted to the Room of Affectation.” The steward cried. A half dozen servants in uniforms whose designs denoted exactly their positions and functions helped Franker through a portal into the interior and to his quarters. There a different team of servants prepared his bath, helped into new clothing, and served him dinner.
As Franker lay down in the comfortable bed he allowed his mind to run ahead to the next day’s meeting with the emperor. As he speculated about what his great employer would ask of him, he allowed himself the luxury of nervousness. But only for a moment. After all, he was a highly disciplined man.
However, there was to be no meeting the next day, nor the next. In fact, although Franker spent the next seven years in the palace complex, becoming used to its routines and involved in its intrigues, he was never summoned to meet with the emperor. Obviously he saw the emperor on occasion, during certain court gatherings and celebrations, but he was never allowed to speak privately with him. All his entreaties disappeared into the palace mail system, unanswered.
“This is growing intolerable.” Franker said one day to Laird Foxfur, who had become a close friend during the years of life in the palace. “I’m wasting my life here.”
“Have you thought of leaving without permission?” Asked Foxfur. “I know I have.”

Bury My Knee at Hounded Wart

“The problem with kangaroos,” Gary mused, “Is their tails. But why?” He tapped the fencepost under his hand with his signet ring that had belonged to his father. This ring was a reproduction of the one that had been lost when his grandfather drowned in the wreck of the Apple of No Great Sweetness nearly fifty years before.
“In fact,” Gary informed Gibito, the monkey, suddenly realizing it. “Next week will be the fiftieth anniversary of grandfather’s oceanic demise. We must commemorate the occasion! Solemnly, of course.” He added, as the little monkey scampered about, throwing his own feces against the wall and spitting out mouthfuls of the luscious fruit of the caramel tree.
Gary started walking towards the main house, his head full of visions. He was halted by the voice of his personal rancher, old “Bushwire” Bill. “Hey there, Mr. Stuntwhimper! What do you want to do about these kangaroos?”
“I’m leaving it up to you, Bill.” Gary Stuntwhimper called over his shoulder. “I’ve got important business to attend to.”
“Leaving it up to me, is he?” “Bushwire” Bill said to Chad, the brain damaged lad who served as his assistant. “Well then, I’ll do what I want with ‘em.” The tough old man reached a leathery hand into the back of his golf cart and withdrew a rifle of ancient manufacture.
“No, Mr. Bushwire, no!” Chad begged in his thick, nasal voice. He tugged at “Bushwire” Bill’s arm, but was flung away to land in a pile of Gibito’s droppings.
“Get off me boy.” “Bushwire” Bill drawled. He fed cartridge after cartridge into his evil-looking weapon, muttering all the while about the weak will of his employer and the weak heart of his assistant. “Going to do what they should have done at the freight yard when they unloaded these godawful things.”
It was in the kitchen of the main house that Gary found his wife.
“I’ve just had the most wonderful idea, Azalea.” He spoke quickly, as he did when possessed by a new idea.
“And what is that, my dear?” Asked Azalea Stuntwhimper idly.
The sound of gunfire outside drew Gary to the window.
“I hope that’s not thunder.” He said.

His Schematic Partakes of No Dialogue

Rudd Inferno could barely hear the TV. He stood at the back of the large, so-called “break” room holding a thick, greasy sandwich that dripped down his arm and onto the floor. “What’s going on?” He asked himself. “The Slaughterer,” a favorite program among those who frequented the break room, was clearly being displayed that very moment on the screen, yet the sound was turned down (a great part of the show’s appeal was the almost constant gunfire and tribal rhythms that accompanied its scenes of high fashion and brutal death) and, stranger still, no one, except for the half-crazy Korean woman who swept the hat racks, was watching it.
Inferno took a seat and bit into his sandwich. He stared at the other people in the room, all of them gathered in a group about one man who was reading aloud from a newspaper. Inferno hadn’t seen the man before. He appeared to be about thirty years old, a scalawag in the Jude Law vein, wearing a heavy coat with a sheepskin collar.
“What happened to the TV?” Inferno called out.
A couple of the people gathered about the stranger looked up at him angrily, but quickly turned their attention back. The stranger stopped reading the story of his escape from the lighthouse and asked, “Who’s that asshole?”
“That’s Rudd Inferno. Never mind him. What happened next?”
“Well,” said the stranger. “Here the paper gets it wrong. I wasn’t armed with an old service revolver, but a wax replica of the standard shepherd’s crook. As the first wave of zombies broke over me, I stuff about a third of the…”
“You mind if I turn the TV up?” Inferno asked loudly.
The stranger roughly folded the newspaper. He rose to his feet with smooth, impressive mechanics.
“What’s your problem, buddy?” He demanded.
“I came in here to watch TV.” Inferno held the last bite of his sandwich aloft like a candle in the midst of an abyss.
“TV?” The stranger barked with contempt. “Here’s what I think of your TV!” He jumped atop the long table and skipped down it until he came to the large unit mounted on the wall. With a powerful blow of his heavily booted foot he smashed the screen, bringing down the wrath of all present upon himself.

No Time to Prepare

Enough has been written about Ken Brainwave’s brutal murder to fill an encyclopedia. The various political and cultural ramifications of the killing have proved to be an apparently inexhaustible source of new angles for historians, subject matter for novelists, and speculation for theorists. Not being one to step willingly into a muddied stream, I am going to write about something totally different from the Brainwave murder, something that has nothing to do with it, but, as this piece is intended for inclusion in the Ken Brainwave Murder Twentieth Anniversary Anthology of New Literature, I will leave it in your hands to make the necessary correlation to some aspect of the above topic. As always, I trust your judgment in this matter.
Winko, the elephant with two trunks, was only about as tall as an average-sized American male. Some scientists theorized that Winko had not grown to full height because of the extra outlay of energy needed for the proper development of his second trunk. Others simply didn’t care, preferring to reserve their powers of theorization for something truly worthwhile. As this latter group sat around the lab throwing wadded pages from out-dated research papers into the giant snail’s cage in a kind of impromptu game, they listened to Dr. Larsom’s tape of Christmas favorites and complained to each other about all the media attention being given to trivial labors of certain other scientists.
“How is the subject of all this formidable thought these days?” Asked Dr. Chee bitterly as he hit the giant snail squarely on the shell, earning himself twenty points.
“They say he’s meeting with the president tomorrow.” Answered Dr. Pzychawicz.
“What, of the United States?”
“No, dummy, of the university.”
Indeed, Winko did meet with the president of the university the next day. Dressed in robes of the finest Dacron and a novelty bow tie of stupendous proportions, Winko stepped nervously into the president’s office.
“Winko,” said the president, extending his hand. “It is a pleasure to meet you at last.”
“The honor is mine, sir.” Replied Winko, taking the proffered hand in both trunks.
“Perhaps you could help us with our on-going fund-raising activities?” The president broached a topic dear to his heart.

You Have Made Me Happy, Lord Brain

Taking one of each of the brochures on display in the lobby of Kirby’s Bean Museum and Statuary Park, Laird Foxfur looked about nervously and sat down to wait in the rickety chair by the gumball machine. As he thumbed through the brochures his mind was temporarily taken off its abiding preoccupation on coming across one advertising the educational delights of The Postallarium in nearby Dairy Corners. Foxfur allowed himself to drift back to his early days of manhood, slinging mail at the Church Creek station. Oh, the characters that worked there! Fat Mitlow, the dog breeder; Peasmud, the clown; the endless numbers of devout Christians; and Sedge Henway, who for many years been his model for how an old man should talk and act. He didn’t miss any of them.
While Foxfur passed the time in this way, Dean Kirby, the snake-eyed son of the owner of the Bean Museum, stole another peep through the hidden viewing portal.
“Well, he’s still waiting for you. What are you going to do?” Kirby addressed himself to Rita the cleaning woman and sister to Foxfur.
“I’m just going to have to make a run for it. You’ve still for that old hovercraft out back, right?” Rita stubbed out her cigar in the gutted grapefruit half lying on one of the plates at her elbow.
“Yeah, but can you handle that thing?” Kirby wanted to know.
“She’s not taking the hovercraft.” Dean Kirby’s father croaked from his wheelchair.
“Oh, please, Mr. Kirby.” Rita begged.
“I’m not going to let an employee become the focus of attention for this family, eating up resources and mental energy best put back into this museum.”
“This museum,” interrupted Dean, “Doesn’t attract one tenth of the business it used to. Miss Nancy’s Kitten and Puppy Rodeo gets twice as many people in a week as we do in a month. I’m telling you, if we focus on the buffet…”
But the elder Kirby would have none of it. “I didn’t open this place to become a restaurateur!” He said, his face becoming as red as a cranberry. “I’m an impresario.” He finished with an effort.
“He’s going to have another stroke.” Rita warned, getting out another’s cigar.
“Dean said nothing. He rubbed his brow. Through the wall they all heard a sharp noise followed by a muffled one. Dean peered through the hole. “Your brother’s chair’s collapsed.” He reported.
“Lawsuit!” His father gasped fearfully.

The Experience Left Him Embittered

Recently, Habramel had taken to walking through the park after his mid-day repast.
“I don’t like the word ‘lunch,’ you see.” He explained to the young acolyte who had joined him on the day that I am now reviewing.
“Why not, Enlightened One?” Asked the acolyte, who was eager for knowledge. His name was Merle Boogersby. He came from one of the farming communities at the foot of the Dungwash Mountains.
“It rhymes with bunch.” Replied Habramel. “Makes me think of bunch of grapes.” He walked through the first fallen leaves with his hands behind his back.
“Your hatred of grapes is legendary, Enlightened One.” Boogersby intoned. He would do anything to ingratiate himself with Habramel. Later, as they reached the end of the park, where the enlightened one usually took a cab back to his starkly furnished townhouse, Boogersby offered to give him a lift in his vehicle.
“That’s very kind of you, Boogersby. Service is the first hallmark of congratulations.” Habramel nodded, agreeing to the arrangement.
“Is it?” Boogersby asked excitedly, hurrying away to get the vehicle.
“Or is it the third?” Habramel wondered, digging a soft, labor-ignorant hand into the unkempt garden of hair around his mouth. He continued to wonder as he waited for Boogersby’s return. This wonder turned to bafflement as he saw the big walking machine stop before him.
“This is marvelous, Boogersby.” Exclaimed Habramel as the acolyte helped him to secure his seat belt.
“Have you never traveled by walking machine, Enlightened One?” Boogersby asked.
“Never.” The bearded man of visions admitted.
“You’re not as enlightened as you could be, are you?” Thought Boogersby, though he immediately chastised that perverse part of his brain responsible. He put the walking machine into gear and asked Habramel, “You live on Pelikan Concourse, don’t you?”
“Yes, that’s right.” Habramel responded. He was fascinated at the array of controls before him. He knew enough, however, not to touch anything. He also knew to worry about the yawning hole in the street just ahead. “Look out.” He said calmly just before the walking machine tumbled into the hole. As they fell down into the endless tunnel to oblivion, Boogersby realized they now had more time to talk.

Try What the Plumbers Call Fetish Analysis

Taped to the back of Mr. Fugwooger’s chair was the simple appellation, “The Devourer.” This adequately described for all those under Mr. Fugwooger’s direction, their feelings towards him. Some bold individual, certain of not being caught, had put that crude piece of signage there, little realizing how it would appeal to Mr. Fugwooger’s vanity. The word stayed, but the one who had put it there, hunted down like a missing screw, was dismissed.
“Now that everything’s in place,” thundered Mr. Fugwooger through his bony hands cupped around his mouth. “Let’s see some action!” He gestured like a magician at the large, but crudely constructed soundstage, his gesture causing a dozen men in astronaut costumes and a dozen women in green body paint and pointed ears to come to life.
“I say, commander,” Said one of the men. “Could those be the life forms our ship’s mechanical brain detected?”
“If they’re not,” Responded the one addressed as commander, his fists planted squarely on his hips. “I’ll still take them over any toxic fungi!” His large teeth were bared in a many smile and his men followed suit with hearty laughter. One, whose uniform was adorned with a red bandanna, even yahooed.
“Invaders, Princess Asstrella!” Said one of the green women. “What should we do?”
The princess, easily identifiable by the Art Deco crown on her head, replied in a haughty voice, “We will defeat them as we always do, Titstania, with our wits! Prepare to fire!” She cried. At her command, all the women bared their bosoms, each well-formed breast topped not by a nipple, but by a laser cannon.
“What’ll we do, commander?” Asked an astronaut. “Their… their things are guns!”
“Easy, son.” Advised the commander. “Remember, we have guns of our own!” As he began to undo the buckle at the front of his spacesuit, the sky overhead flashed. A puff of smoke accompanied by a sound of thunder appeared in the middle of the two opposing groups. When it cleared, there stood Jesus Christ dressed as Groucho Marx.
“Stop!” He cried, arms upraised. “There is a better way!”
“Cut!” Bellowed Mr. Fugwooger. The astronauts, aliend women, and messiah all turned toward the approaching director. “Johnny, that sucked.” He said to the man playing Jesus/Groucho. “If you can’t do better than that, you’re out of here!”

The Commemorative Relaunch

Pasted to the side of the old Sedan chair was an advertisement for Luke’s Admonitory Salve, a defunct product that yet carried a cachet of hope and confidence in the rural area in which the sedan chair; its occupant, Gragginbag; and his two servants, Mifter and Nubblin, found themselves.
“Yes sir, with this on display,” Said Gragginbag a week earlier, stroking the freshly applied label, “We’ll have no trouble with the natives, I assure you.” He stood in the courtyard of his family’s traditional seat of power, Grabbingabbers, a colossal estate house of stone and discordant furnishings.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, Rex.” Moldy Virgil, Gragginbag’s old college chum, downed his wine in one gulp and placed the empty glass on a tray held by a nearby servant.
“Oh, don’t worry about me, Moldy.” Gragginbag tilted his head back so that one could see his nostrils for the gaping holes that they were. He brought his head back down upon uttering his next sentence, so that his eyebrows faced Virgil like twin bumpers on some particularly determined automobile. “It’s you whom I’m worried about.”
“Why’s that?”
“Your film career.” Answered Gragginbag. “When are you going to get back to doing funny films? That’s your strong point, not this rambling, existential melodrama.”
“You don’t understand.” Replied Virgil, growing red-faced. “I have to go lie down.” He muttered, dashing from the courtyard.
“I’m right, you know.” Gragginbag reiterated to Mifter and Nubblin, who were also standing in the courtyard, having their boots and leggings adjusted for the journey ahead. They merely raised their eyebrows in acknowledgment, smiling indulgently. Neither had seen a film in his life.
“Such high-minded crap isn’t for me.” Mifter confessed during a discussion of the arts one night in the manor’s kitchen.
“Nor for me.” Agreed Nubblin. “The puppet shows at the temple have always been good enough for a laugh.”
“Not just a laugh, Nubblin.” Mifter added, taking his hand-carved pipe from his mouth. “I think they make you think too.”

Horse Consumes Master’s Costume

“Another man might have been intimidated.” Agreed Orbis LeGregg, lifting the lid on the stewpot with an old hat wadded up in his hand to turn the spoon about one or two times in the stew and sniff deeply at it. “Almost done.” He commented, as Lyndon Franker responded to LeGregg’s statement about another man.
“I’m glad you see it like that.” Franker said, his left foot high up on his lap, the better for him to massage its big toe. He had nearly lost it to frostbite six months earlier. It still pained him. “What have you got in there?” He asked, nodding at the stewpot.
“I don’t think you want to know.” Said LeGregg, smiling.
“Oh, come on, now. I can take it. Remember what I’ve been through.” Franker tapped the arcane symbol on the back of his left hand.
“Well,” LeGregg sighed. “We have a little olive oil, a little black pepper, some broth I’ve had since last Christmas’ feast, and, well, my mother’s wedding dress.” With these last words LeGregg looked up at Franker questioningly.
“I’ve eaten worse.” Franker assured him.
“It’s made of silk,” explained LeGregg, “So it’s organic, and therefore, I figure, boiled down, edible.”
“And probably nutritious.” Mused Franker.
LeGregg smiled broadly.
“An educated man!” He pronounced delightedly.
Franker looked at him curiously.
“You may not think it look at the place,” LeGregg gestured about him at the dim, dilapidated one-room shack. “But I’ve a number of books hidden here.”
“Indeed?” Franker wondered. He watched LeGregg get up from his stool and limp to a plastic bucket full of rusty nails in the middle of the room. He moved this aside, revealing a small trapdoor set in the floor. Once he had this opened, LeGregg reached inside and pulled out a half-dozen volumes. He handed them to Franker.
“I’ve loads more down there.” LeGregg informed him. “I read them when I’ve time.”
Franker examined the books, saying their titles aloud. “Mr. Eddington’s Visions of Stalemate, How to Photograph Hats, The Purple Uncle, My Own Sarsaparilla, Take Him Back to Doggy World, Bean-Eater. Hey!” He exclaimed upon reading the last title. “I’ve read this one! It’s really good!”

No Ice Cream for Breakfast

Leaves of multi-colored construction paper fell to the ground at the first heavy step of the giant goat into the artificial forest.
“Something is amiss here.” Said one of the three ape-like creatures riding on the goat’s back.
“‘Amiss?’” Mocked Tonko, the second of the creatures to speak in our hearing. You and I are a thousand miles away, watching these events on the telenet screen in the office we share. You have a bag of crullers. I want one, but will not let you know that. Even if you offer me one, I will refuse. I find strength in my contempt for your interest in the telenet’s offering, which is greater than mine. I am only watching because it is our job to watch.
“This woodland scene doesn’t seem quite genuine.” The first creature, whose name is Nichol, stared intently at the painted trees.
“Why don’t you talk right?” Tonko demanded.
“Someone might be watching.” Nichol answered, urging the goat deeper into the forest. “I don’t want them to think I’m a dumbass.”
“You don’t want them to know you’re a dumbass.” Tonko retorted.
“Please!” Moaned the third creature, which I will tell you was named Foster, since you seem unconcerned with checking out the supplementary material. The third creature to speak sat between the other two, holding his left arm. It had been badly mangled in an incident that occurred some time before their appearance on our screen. The exact nature of this incident is unknown to us, but we can guess something about it from Nichol’s next words.
“The venom is putrefying his flesh. We’ve got to get him medical attention.”
“‘Medical attention?’ Why don’t you just say ‘get him to a healer’ like you normally would back home?” Tonko was angry. His wife had recently lost her job.
“Please!” Foster begged again. “Your bickering only makes my arm hurt more!”
“We’re not back home!” Nichol hissed, turning around to face Tonko. “When are you going to get that through your thick skull? Something happened and now we’re… wherever this place is!”
“Do you want a cruller?” You ask suddenly, holding out the bag to me.
“Sure.” I reply, cursing myself for my weak will. I’m supposed to be on a diet.

A Tinpot Satisfaction

Inaccurate assessments of the demand for biscuits led to shortages throughout the impromptu village. When General Desquith heard of the situation he was buckling on his sword preparatory to a walk down to the recently opened library. He turned to his fellow generals, Oscoot and Bebley.
“I say,” He said to them. “Is that American biscuits you’re talking about?”
“Yes.” Oscoot replied. “The little fluffy things one puts butter inside of.”
“And jelly.” Bebley added. He was a stout man, but a good soldier.
“Oh. For a moment I thought you meant biscuits, what the Americans call ‘cookies.’” Desquith shuddered at the word.
“Oh, no, no.” Laughed Oscoot. Bebley put the fingertips of one hand to his lips as he began to consider cookies as if he had forgotten about their existence until now.
“Well, as that’s settled,” concluded Desquith, “I shall go to the library.” He descended the precarious 2” x 8” that led from the door of the generals’ quarters to the street, passing by two grubby men of miniature proportions as he continued on his way.
“Look at him.” Muttered Stanchez, one of the two dirty little men. “Bet he doesn’t go wanting for a soft, hot biscuit with his morning sherry!”
“I think General Desquith is a teetotaler.” Groston, the other man, disagreed.
Stanchez looked at him with a scowl of disgust.
“That’s what I’ve heard.” Groston protested.
Stanchez turned his gaze back to the figure of the general walking with a authorial bearing towards the newly opened library.
“Let’s follow him and see where he goes.” Suggested Groston, eager to get back into the good graces of his companion. “Maybe he knows where some biscuits are.”
“Maybe he’s gone to get some.” Stanchez’ eyes grew wider. He slapped Groston’s chest with the back of his hand and started after the general.
At the library the two men entered with trepidation. They jerked their caps off in a confusion as to the proper way to behave in this strange, quiet place.
“It’s full of books!” Hissed Groston.
“Do you see Desquith?” Asked Stanchez.
“No. Let’s ask that lady if she saw him.” Groston pointed. On being approached, however, the librarian immediately informed them that all books containing biscuit recipes were already checked out.

Directionless League Travail Ends in a Single Teardrop

I dragged Dallas Pimiento into one of the larger galleries in the bean-shelling district. He complained that he had better things to do, but I pulled him firmly by the sleeve of his overcoat before a large, heavily framed painting. I dropped his arm and gestured at the painting with both hands, looking at him expectantly
“What?” He asked with a blank look.
“Don’t you recognize it?” I asked
“No.” He said.
I sighed and turned him about so that he faced another painting, this one also large and exquisitely framed. “What about this one?” I asked.
Pimiento stared for a moment and shook his head. “No, I don’t recognize it.” He answered. I sighed again. “I don’t know what you’re getting at.” Pimiento insisted.
“You painted it.” I revealed. “And that one.” I pointed at the first painting. “And that one and that one.” I pointed at several more in the room. “In fact, you painted all the ones in this room.”
“I don’t think so.” Pimiento chuckled, backing away from me a step.
“I thought for sure you’d remember these two at least. They meant a lot to you.”
“Oh, they did, huh?”
“Yes, they’re full of symbolism related to your various adventures.”
“What adventures?” He demanded. He flung out his arms so that his overcoat parted in front, revealing the red t-shirt with the picture of ZZ Top on it that he wore underneath. “Look at me!” He laughed. “I’ve never done anything! Oh, sure, I’ve dreamed of doing things, planned many ‘great projects,’ but I’ve never had the balls” Here he gripped his right hand tightly in a fist. “To do anything!”
His voice had risen and attracted the attention of a gallery attendant about my age. She approached us and asked could we please keep it down?
“Hey, let me ask you a question.” Pimiento addressed her. “Do you recognize me?” He turned his profile to her. “Do I look like somebody you maybe should know?” The woman considered him a moment.
“You’re not… Dallas Pimiento, are you?” She said.
“You see, I told you!” I said triumphantly.