Dallas Pimiento, Book Two, "I'm Bronco, Too"

Dallas Pimiento

Book Two, I’m Bronco, Too

Part One

Women Are Lonely

While their husbands were at the zoo, the three women, who were at Fan’s house (where, if the men were successful, they would return with the pangolin), found themselves, without any conscious decision at all, watching TV. The program they chose to watch—again, without any real deliberation—was Pronounced Wolf-Like Attributes, an old comedy from the time when the three women were but girls. They watched it attentively, but allowed themselves the freedom to talk as they did so.
“I used to watch this every afternoon at my grandmother’s house.” Rita said.
“Every afternoon?” Molly questioned. “How old were you?”
“I guess about ten.” Rita answered. She pictured herself at ten, a thin girl in a pale yellow dress with a matching hair band.
“This show has been in syndication since then?” Molly couldn’t believe it. She thought she remembered watching it when it first came out, a nighttime show. Yet she was the same age as Rita. Should that make her feel younger than she thought, or older?
“They put into syndication right after it was cancelled.” Fan told them. How did she know that? The other two wondered. The answer was that Fan didn’t just watch TV, she read about it.
On the episode they were watching Karton, the owner of the drive-in, was anxious about an upcoming date he had with an old flame. He hadn’t seen her in twenty years. Would she think he had gotten too fat, too hairy? The boys from the bunker were as supportive as they could be, give the fact that at the same time their old nemesis Inspector Smedge was back in town, once again trying to pin old Mrs. Doris’ murder on one of them. Thank God for Mandy!
Pronounced Wolf-Like Attributes ended. The next program, Saggin’ Be-Hind, had just started when the women heard the truck pull up in the driveway. They left the TV on and hurried to the back door where they watched Moldin and Ted go to the back of the truck and unload a struggling something wrapped in a length of burlap. Andy went to where the women were.
“Stand back.” He ordered.
“Did you get it?” Rita asked.
“Yeah.” Andy replied. The other two men carried their burden into the kitchen. They lowered it gently to the floor. The burlap was soon removed and there stood the tall, magnificent bird for all of them to marvel over.

An Electrician

I had no studio audience on Saggin’ Be-Hind, the discursive TV show I hosted for two years. When I made my opening remarks each episode, it was to the camera alone I spoke. I interviewed approximately one hundred guests during the run of the show, each one a thorough non-entity. The one that stands out in my mind above them all, however (at least for the purposes of this story) was the poet, Stan Airesdale.
“I’m an electrician, of sorts.” He told me during the course of our conversation.
“Indeed.” I chuckled. “I wonder if you would read something for us.”
“Like what?”
“Like page 72 of your book, Totentanz.” I pointed at the Post-It-marked book he held in his lap.
“If you want me to.” He sighed.
“That would be great.” I said for lack of anything better to say.
Then Airestale read his poem “Shocked Again.” Copyright restrictions forbid my reprinting it here, much as I would like to. Even if I could, your experience reading if would not be equal to mine listening to the poet himself read it in his coarse, uneducated monotone. Not long afterwards our main camera suffered some kind of malfunction, one that threatened to make the rest of our shooting day a more than usually arduous one. Airestale immediately rose from his chair and went to take a look at the camera, claiming that he could probably repair it. While he and a couple of the college students I employed as staff tinkered around, I retreated to the backstage area.
“This show isn’t working out as I had hoped.” I confessed to Conchita, whose exact job on the program escapes me now. I helped myself to a doughnut.
“It’s just a camera.” The dusky girl rejoined.
“No, no, I’m not talking about today’s incident. I mean the whole show, from the décor, which I had envisioned as a 70’s retro thing, with carpet on the walls and an otherwise stark set, to these crappy guests.”
“I fixed your camera.” I heard Airestale say behind me.
“Oh, great.”
“So, I’m a crappy guest, huh?”
“Well, you’re not Robert Lowell or Ted Hughes.” I tried to make light of it.
“Who’re they?”

Driving Me Crazy

Some took it literally. That was a shame, because a guy like me is joking more than half the time. I laughed off their concern, not too derisively, for I might one day need a ride to the mental hospital, and headed down to the lobby.
“You could use some music playing over the P.A. in here.” The man waiting for me told me within seconds of our shaking hands.
“The hell I could.” I snapped.
“You like it so quiet in here?” He was a man as I am a man, but I could see it in his face, hear it in his voice: he liked sports. He was a man who discussed films in terms of how much business they did. He probably felt a barely articulated reverence for religious things, although he hadn’t been to church in years.
“I do.”
“Don’t you think your customers might prefer a little background music?”
“We don’t really have ‘customers’ here, Mr. Gomez. And any that might wander in are, in the main, people that know how we operate. I don’t care about the rest of them.”
Ted Gomez inhaled.
“Well, where does that put me?” He asked.
“I guess you can join me in my office, if you’re still of a mind to do so.”
“Sure.” He agreed and followed me upstairs.
“What a tiny office you have.” He said as we entered.
“It’s intimate. It’s all I need. Really, the whole building is my office.”
“Don’t think I’m trying to insult you, Mr. Ash. It’s just that compared to the size of the rest of the building… well, I envisioned something more palatial.”
“I like it crowded.” I had motioned Gomez to a seat before my desk. After sat, I took my place behind the desk.
“What exactly may I do for you, Mr. Gomez?” I asked.
“Well, um…” He hesitated only a moment, getting his bearings, I suppose, or gathering ballast for what he had to say. “I understand you knew Rectus Aimwell.”
“Yes.”
“Are you aware that his real name was Dr. Lemuel Tennis?”
“Very little escapes me, Mr. Gomez. I guess that’s why I’m going crazy.”
“Excuse me?” Gomez’ eyes widened.
“Too much going on upstairs.” I pointed at my head.

Modesty of the Torn

An old song imbedded in the electronics of the butter dish brought tears to Dallas Pimiento’s eyes.
“It’s so unnecessary.” He managed to splutter before collapsing in the pile of polyester scraps heaped up on the table.
“He’s had a hard day, George.” Benita explained to her husband. “Why don’t you help him upstairs to the spare room?”
“Why, he’s light as a feather.” George Stratagem, that old simulacrum of a farmer, declared as he hefted Pimiento over his shoulder.
Benita wondered what kind of food people subsisted on in the brutal big city of atheists that made them so weak.
Pimiento opened his eyes on the rafters overhead. “This is the spare room?” He thought. He made sure that George was gone before he rose from the crude pallet he had been laid upon and tiptoed to the old trunk. If there weren’t any answers in here, he told himself, he might as well go home and write a book. That proved as unnecessary as a tinny rendition of “Take My Breath Away” that played every time one opened the butter dish, because inside the trunk was the book he had been looking for.
From my position in the cabbage frame I saw Pimiento at the attic window. I waved at him. With some difficulty he managed to get the window open so he could throw the book out.
“Excellent.” I said to myself. The secret history of Ted Gomez’ business operations was now in my grasp. The cover was a little dirty, having landed in the sweet potato patch, but I didn’t foresee that hampering my enjoyment of the product. I had a horse and cart hidden in the woods and to them I now returned, spending the remainder of the night greedily reading the handwritten manuscript by lantern. In the morning, as a supposedly refreshed Dallas Pimiento continued his pilgrimage into the Hercules Mountains, it was an easy matter to casually give him a ride.
“How are you?” I asked him.
“Stuffed.” He said, patting his belly. “We had a big breakfast: blueberry pancakes, fried eggs, cheese grits.”
“Yuck, eggs.” I made a face.
“What did you have?”
“Information.”

I’m Your Friend

Ted Gomez, who had just begun growing a moustache, walked off the sidewalk and down a flight of steps. He entered a low-ceilinged room.
“It’s getting warmer.” He said idly to the two small women at desks to either side of the entrance.
“Yes. I like spring.” Answered one. She motioned with her pen further inside. “Go on back.” She invited Gomez.
“Thanks.” Gomez smiled. Although he would not have mussed his hair if he had walked fully erect, he still hunched slightly. The ceiling was immediately over his head. The old wooden floor, covered many layers thick with thin carpeting, dipped here and there and creaked as he walked. He fingered the incipient moustache. Soon he would be unrecognizable. He liked that idea. At the rear of the room full of filing cabinets and stacked boxes he passed into a narrow hallway running perpendicular to that room and turned to the right, deeper into the building and further away from the street. Posters for various programs offered by the agency whose quarters these were lined the walls, along with other posters of a purely inspirational nature. For example, as he passed by Dr. Suth Demum’s office, he noted one that was an aerial photograph of Solfeggio castle and captioned in big, yellow letters, “Don’t Eat Eggs Without Salt!”
Finally, Gomez came to the room he wanted, the one at the end of the hall. He knocked twice softly and entered.
And here we come to our story proper. I like to put adjectives after their antecedents; it makes me sound fancy. If I have rambled up until now, I apologize. But you might as well get used to it, for there will be much rambling to come. In fact, you might say that all I do is ramble. I don’t really have anything to say. I’m making it all up as I go along. I can admit these things to you. The fact that I, as narrator, am willing to admit that, yes, I am your narrator, gives this extended and discursive narrative a special flavor, don’t you think?
But don’t think for a moment that this has been easy for me. Not at all; it is difficult for me to struggle blindly through this rabbit warren of characters, places, visions, conversations, and ideas and keep some kind of connecting chain running through it all. Have a little pity for me. I’m your friend. At least I try to be. I’ve done all this work for you, the discriminating reader, the reader who is bored with all these ordinary works of fiction, with their tedious concern with plot.

One of My Treasured

It may have been a mistake, but on the thirty-first of that month I began wearing a crown. In a small ceremony attended by a few close friends and a legion of artificially animated puppets and stuffed animals, the last two groups of which were intended to fill up the remainder of the chairs, the crown was officially placed on my head for the first time. Of course, I had already worn it informally about the house, getting the feel of it and, as I had constructed it myself, had had to put it on during the construction process, to make sure it fit.
“You say you made that crown yourself? Extraordinary.” Retchedson said to me at the reception following the coronation.
“What was the method by which you constructed it, and what materials did you use?” Asked Daisy, from the Lance Ash Fan Club. She had a notebook and a pen in her hands.
“The method was make it up as you go along.” I informed her. “And the materials were cardboard, house paint, spray lacquer, and various broken toy parts.”
The man who had placed the crown on my head, Mr. Thorpe, approached me as I took my first sip of punch.
“I’ll be going now, if you don’t mind.” He said.
“Not at all. Thanks for coming.” We shook hands; I slipped him a twenty; and he departed, back to his endless toil, I suppose.
“So, what are you king of?” Dallas Pimiento asked me.
“Nothing, really. I just thought it would be nice to wear a crown.”
“I don’t believe you. I think you’re hiding something.”
“I’m not.”
“Well, I’m going to find out.” Pimiento gulped down his punch and stormed out. Most of the other guests left soon after that, leaving me alone with the puppets and dead-eyed bears.
“This is some party, eh?” I asked Stan Global, an orange puppet with green hair.
“Yes, I had a great time.” He responded.
“Thanks for the honesty.”
I wore the crown to bed that night and in the morning had some difficulty finding it. I finally looked under the bed and found not only the crown, but an old lunchbox I had lost many years ago. On its sides were images from some old TV show that I never got to see. The mysterious nature of these images was all the more evocative for my ignorance.

You Have Violated

It interests me that the goat, which had up until now only been as far as the thin stream that ran between the meadow and the forest, one day decided to splash through the water and enter the unknown territory under the trees. He had not gone far into the woods when he stood up on his hind legs and undid a zipper that ran down the middle of his chest. He stepped out of his goaty skin and hung the skin on a short branch. Standing there naked, he now appeared to be a man. He wandered as far as a little clearing he found in the middle of the woods wherein stood a small cottage. Inside he found clothing and a radio. As he tied his shoes he listened to the news of the outside world.
“The stripper who escaped police custody this morning has allegedly killed again.” The announcer began his broadcast by informing the goat. I still call him the goat, because at this point he still considered himself to be a goat, even though he looked like a man. The news continued for some minutes as he stood before the radio fully dressed, but, as there seemed to be nothing in it about goats or of much import for them, he switched it off.
In the kitchen he found nothing more to eat than a box of Rice Krispies. Oddly enough, one might think, he poured them into a bowl. However, it is not so odd when one considers that he was tying his shoes and listening to the radio only moments earlier. He had to eat them dry as there was no milk. I have not forgotten that I told you there was naught else to eat in that kitchen. The goat-man (we will call him that, for in truth, does he not look like a man in our imaginations?) pulled a magazine out of a stack on the seat of the chair beside his own.
“Hard Brain,” a story by Jon Smuten, caught his eye and, flipping through innumerable pages of clothing ads and political cartoons, he found the story, illustrated on the opposite page in the distinctive macaroni-and-glue images of Per Lambuthnal. He was just getting interested in the story and learning not a few things as well when the black, wall-mounted telephone rang.
“Fuck a pig!” a common expression with him, escaped his lips. He answered the phone, however, in a sweeter tone of voice.
“Hello?” He said.
“Hello, is this Roddy?” An elderly voice asked.
“Yes.” He replied without any hesitation.


Names in Latin

A recurring image with me is a table connected to a disproportionately large head. Such a person was in residence at the Born-Pity Library. Now, it was not I who brought the offering of pine nuts and barbecue sauce to the person, but an acquaintance who told me the story later. His name was Dallas Pimiento. The name of the table-legged person, the precise term for whom escapes me at the moment, was Schadfeld. Schadfeld the Macklin, some called him, but not, as I understand it, to his face or within his hearing.
“Do you ever wear a hat?” Pimiento asked Schadfeld after presenting him with the food.
“I have never found one big enough to fit me.” Replied the talking table.
Nodding thoughtfully, Pimiento too his leave of Schadfeld and walked down to the fifth floor.
“Why didn’t you take the elevator?” I asked Pimiento.
“I needed the exercise.” He explained. “On the fifth floor are shelved all the history books. I hunted through them for any references to Tunapes.”
“Excuse me?” I interrupted yet again. “What are Tunapes?”
“Tables with big heads on them, like Schadfeld. I thought you knew that. Anyway, I found little relevant information until I actually began to relax and enjoy myself. Just as I was becoming engrossed in the history of socialist activism in 1960’s Europe, I found it: a multi-volume work on the Tunapes’ involvement with post-war art.”
“That’s very interesting.” I said. “Was there any mention of Schadfeld himself in this work?”
“No that I could find. Actually, I didn’t spend much time going through it; I returned to the eighth floor to show the three books in the series to Schadfeld.”
“Was Joseph Beuys mentioned?” I asked. Pimiento ignored me and continued with his tale.
“But I never got a chance to show Schadfeld. Approaching the room wherein he lived out his simple life of meditation and conceptual are, I noticed that he now had visitors. He seemed to know these people far better than he knew me. Friends of his, I suppose. I found that shocking at the time. I don’t know why; there was no reason why he shouldn’t have friends. I guess I thought, in my narrow-minded way, that I would be his friend.”
“I don’t need any more friends myself.” I told Pimiento.

To Fight Me

You will need the combined strength of the Honey Bun and Bear Claw Manufacturers Association and the Forest-Dwellers, the Men of the Trees, as we called them in my day, which wasn’t really so long ago, but what with the vast changes that have swept our shared world, I feel as though my day dawned and darkened well before the rise of your precious singularity of electronically extended consciousness. It is your day now, but it won’t avail you any. Your monomaniacal nervous system has no power over me and you will never succeed in getting the pastry people and the tree men to help you, much less work together.
Just to prove my point, I have established an outpost within the traditional boundaries of the Forest-Dwellers’ territory and am even now in the process of establishing one within the Vending Machine Industry’s Domain, which, as you must know by now, is but an adjunct to the above-mentioned Manufacturers Association. My sometime friend and unwitting agent Dallas Pimiento has been charged with this task. Do not wonder that I am telling you these things. By the time you read this I will be long dead and my machinations will have already born the fruit they were designed to produce. Although these words will be under your nose for the entire span of my vulnerable stage I am confident you won’t read them. Why, only this weekend I sat invisible, along with representatives of my collected works, in a convention hall brimming with like-minded freaks. As they socialized among themselves and examined each other’s labors, I read Ionesco undisturbed, a silent non-entity whose foundation-disrupting volumes of text and illustration remained (and yet remain) unread, unappreciated, and unsold.
That last sentiment is mere quibbling on my part. I’m not in this struggle for the money. The booty I gather from the battlefield only goes to further the cause, not to fund endless luxuries. You would not believe the mental outlay necessary to keep it all going. Dallas Pimiento and the various operations he is involved in alone cost as much energy and material as are needed to maintain the existence of Paris in the twenty years following its most recent liberation. Of course, I have many other projects in the works besides those involving Pimiento. He is but one example. And (I know what you are thinking) even if you should manage to turn him against me and add his weight to your side, I should still best you and all that you throw at me, for are you not a tepid little critic?

Kitchen Drink

The kitchen drink, as opposed to the food court beverage, the garden hose gulp, or even the bathroom drink, was uniquely formulated to satisfy the hydration requirements of the sea-going Tunapes patrol. In their bottom-heavy canister-like vessels they resembled nothing so much as jarred spiders, bobbing up and down through the waves. Dallas Pimiento asked in vain his acquaintance Schadfeld what exactly this kitchen drink tasted like.
“I do not know.” Said Schadfeld. “I have never been to sea.”
Nor had, to my knowledge, Mr. Pimiento. Thus it was, on a yet wintry April morning, just after returning to my parcel-chucking job after a good vacation, that I sent him off on a maritime mission. Of course, he didn’t know it was I sending him. It was his immediate superior at the Loath Procurement Ministry, Mr. Thorpe, who handed him his orders. In Pimiento’s absence, I and the ancient Mr. Gravele drove to Pimiento’s lodgings to examine them for signs of continued realism.
“A depiction of you, Mr. Ash.” Announced Gravele. I came out of the kitchen into the tiny nook in which the old man stood gazing at the portrait. It was true enough to life, I admitted, but what I objected to was the representation of me holding a bottle labeled “Kitchen Drink.”
“That bastard!” I growled.
“There.” Interjected Gravele. “In the reflection on the glass of the bottle.” He pointed. “Some sort of creature. A severed head on a table. What could it mean?”
I could not explain to Gravele what it was or what it meant. He was not privileged to know about the Tunapes, nor did I know what it was supposed to “mean.”
A couple of days later Pimiento returned. He duly reported, after which his report was passed through many hands until he reached my own.
“Like unsweetened grape Kool-Aid.” I read Pimiento’s words disgustedly. Of what value was this to me? I got on the phone with the lab. After discussing the matter at length, the head researcher and I agreed that the problem with the report was that we still didn’t know what the fluid tasted like to the Tunapes themselves.
“Dallas!” I greeted Pimiento as he stepped out of his car. I had been sitting on the front steps of his bungalow, waiting for him.
“Lance.” He replied nervously. He had a can of orange soda in his hand. “The place is a mess, I’m afraid.” His lie was transparent.

Broken Doors

Cal Thirsley and his lieutenants stood before the entrance to the disused ballroom on the ancient, derelict ocean liner. “We need to get inside,” thought Thirsley in his methodical way, “But the doors are broken.”
“We need the mechanical ram.” He determined after redundantly pushing at the doors. Mexner, the strongest among the men there gathered, had already applied all his weight to them. “Where’s Wright and the new girl with the big ass?” Thirsley asked.
Sanford glanced at his fellow lieutenants.
“I think they went on break.” He said to Thirsley.
Thirsley studied his watch.
“They’re not supposed to go on break for another hour!” He groaned.
“I could get the ram, sir.” Mexner offered.
“No.” Thirsley shook his head. “By contract only those two knuckleheads are supposed to operate it. I don’t want any trouble with the labor union on this trip.”
“Do we wait?” Sanford asked somberly.
Thirsley, experienced commander of a dozen such trips, decided.
“No.” He said. “We look for another way in.”
Ward, the youngest of the six men, wanted to object. He knew, from looking over the ship’s blueprints, that there was no other way in. Three weeks under Thirsley’s command, however, had finally taught him to keep his negativity to himself. With the others, he followed Thirsley down the corridor to a custodian’s closet.
“Should be an access panel here somewhere.” Said Thirsley, kicking a box over. “A crawlspace, something.” The lieutenants joined him in tearing through the accumulated junk. Ward, still out in the hall, put his head into the room.
“Wright and that new girl are back.” He announced.
“About time.” Thirsley growled. He exited the room. “Wright!” He barked at the giggling man approaching with his partner. “You and her go get the mechanical ram. I want these doors down now!” Thirsley pointed.
Wright nodded casually. He and the girl with the big ass turned around to retrieve the necessary machine from the team’s stores.
“Stupid motherfucker.” Wright complained in an undertone to his friend. “Always wantin’ something done.”
“No time to catch your breath.” Agreed the girl.

Walk Up This Concrete

Unlike the ancient pyramids of the Maya, the great monument of my twin triumphs over whistling and masturbatory guilt was built of concrete. No chance of the jungle reclaiming this structure; I had sprayed Round-Up about its base. On the summit of this massive, derivative pile one will encounter the Temple of Improvisation, the entrance of which is situated so that the first rays of the sun each day will fall upon the feet of the grotesque and gargantuan stone idol I have had erected inside. This idol depicts the god of sequence, whose name is unwritable without the lost font of the dust-pecking birds.
As a tour bus pulled into the parking lot across the ceremonial field lain out below the front face of the pyramid, I had just descended the one-hundred-and-twenty steps from the temple above. Seeing the tourists slowly making their way toward me, I pulled a fake moustache from my pocket and donned it as a disguise.
“Unbelievable!” I declared to them as I passed. “The amount of work put into it is simply staggering!” Once our paths had crossed, I heard behind me the tour guide dishing out such misrepresentation and outright falsehood that I had to laugh. I sneezed as the moustache tickled my nostrilar cavities.
I approached the bus.
“You the driver?” I asked the tall, unhealthy-looking man leaning against the bus smoking a cigarette.
“Yeah.” He nodded.
“I guess you’ve seen the pyramid before?”
“Nah. I won’t set foot on pagan soil.”
“But you’ll drop your cigarette butts on pagan gravel?” Before he could object I had knocked him unconscious with the mason’s trowel I had hidden up my sleeve. I was then permitted to enter the bus, where I hunted among the various purses and bags left in the seats. The turquoise vinyl one! That was the one I desperately needed to open! I could see the ragged line of the tourists through the tinted glass, ascending my self-glorifying monument. I spilled out the contents of the purse on the seat. The wallet: whose name would I find? Rooting amidst the credit cards and personal identification of Mindy Malenkov, I came across a small photograph of the Eiffel Tower. Gazing upon this image, I knew that my piddling pyramid would no longer suffice.

Mostly Out of Fear

I don’t believe in the supernatural anymore. That includes the Christian God, whom I was taught to worship as a child. Despite this, I still fear death. I no longer fear the grim retribution of hell or the infinite boredom of heaven, but I still fear my ultimate, eternal non-existence. Thus it is fear that motivates me to work as hard as I do on my art, be it the writing, the cartoons, the painting, or the guitar playing. I live in dread of having people after I die say to each other, “What a tragic waste of potential, my fellow mourner. He could have done so much, yet he chose to watch TV and languish in the obscurity of the rural South.” I have already wasted so much time. My teens and early twenties were nothing but a void of TV, empty relationships, church-going, shoplifting, and alcoholism.
People will probably still say I wasted my potential despite the amount of stuff I’ve done because of the absurd, abstract, and abysmally crafted nature of most of it. That too is caused by this fear of wasting time. I am no formally trained in anything. Everything I do is self-taught. It all comes out the way it comes out. I don’t have time for planning, editing, or do-overs. It is my hope that the sheer volume of it makes up for its lack of polish, unity of conception, or breadth of vision.
I know the necessary drawbacks to this method. I’m never going to make any money. I’m never going to be considered among those artists who express universality. I can live and die with that. All I really want is a little recognition. I’ll take that recognition in the form of a few fans. Out of all the people on this planet, if I had just a couple of thousand that both liked and appreciated what I do I would be happier than I am right now.
I can’t imagine at the moment the thrill of having a stranger approach me or get in touch with me and tell me how much he enjoyed something of mine. To have someone hear of me through the medium of one of my works would be the crowning achievement. As it is right now people turn away in disgust. I have spoken before of how there must be something I’m doing wrong. There must be some secret signal that is absent in my work, something that would tell my potential audience that I’m OK to like.
That being said, I still won’t change what I do nor how I do it. Better to die knowing that I did exactly what I wanted to do, given what my circumstances allowed, than to have out on a costume and danced.

Shifting the Slippers

Bengy’s shifting of the slippers from their appointed cubbyhole outside the sanctum to a small table piled with Otherworldly literature put more than one nose out of joint. The old Viceroy, never one to indulge children (and certainly not ursine ones), in even minor matters, shoved the slippers back into a cubbyhole (the wrong one, it turned out), and slapped Bengy hard on the side of his head, cursing all the while as angrily as though he was dealing with a grown man blackly bent on the destruction of all that the Otherworldlies held sacred. Bengy ran away howling. Norma, one of the cult’s spinster members, reigned in the old man as best she could.
“Calm down.” She said firmly, but quietly. The Ritual of the Dead Earth was underway inside the sanctum.
“They shouldn’t allow those damn bears in here. I don’t care is they are underprivileged!” Thundered the old Viceroy.
“So he’s a bigot too.” Thought Norma.
After the ritual was over, those members present inside the sanctum filed out, turning to the left to retrieve their shoes.
“My shoes are missing.” Burke gasped. He got down on one knee and peered into all the cubbyholes. “My shoes are missing.”
His fellows in the elite circle of the cult’s membership ignored his complaint; they were still emotionally elevated from the completion of the ritual. They gathered their shoes and put them on wordlessly.
“My shoes are missing!” Burke cried, getting to his feet. “Someone has stolen my shoes!” The good feelings engendered by the ritual seemed to have dissipated in him quickly enough faced with this relatively minor misfortune. The others finally seemed to take note of Burke’s predicament and looked askance at him, as if he was a ten-year-old child that had wet his pants.
Norma and the Viceroy, taking their turn as Functionaries during the ritual, were charged with holding up the Banner of Aces until all sanctum attendees had exited that part of the building. Burke, rescanning all the cubbyholes, but of course failing to look behind the slippers, alone remained.
“Hurry up, will you?” The Viceroy growled in an undertone. His arms were getting tired.
“Where are my shoes?” Burke wailed.
“Maybe that recalcitrant bear has them, I don’t know.” The old man suggested. Norma said nothing, though she knew that wasn’t true.

Chicken and Cheroot

The music on the refurbished Hi-Fi was Oliver Nelson’s “Stolen Moments.” Dallas Pimiento dumped a couple of thimblefuls of Cholula hot sauce onto his dish as he swooned to the flute of Eric Dolphy. He ate his meal doubly pleasured, but its flavor and by its musical accompaniment. He was just lighting up a small cigar as I climbed in through the window.
“What a perfect end to a perfect meal.” He said to himself, unaware of my entry.
“Smoking, Pimiento?” I challenged him.
His belly was too full for the swiftest of responses. Still, he clambered to his feet appropriately enough.
“How did you get in here?” He demanded.
I opened the door to the small nook.
“You’ve gotten rid of the painting, I see.” I remarked.
“What painting?” He said uneasily.
“The one that hung here before you replaced it with this shabby Anthony Green knock-off.” I chuckled looking at it. “Is that really how you see yourself and your household?”
“Get out of here, Lance!” Pimiento snapped.
“Who’s the little girl?” I asked upon looking closer. “I didn’t know you had any children.”
Pimiento shut the door. The glowing tip of his cheroot was inches from my face.
“Let’s have it.” He said. “I know you want something, so let’s hear it.”
“For starters, I want to know why you’re smoking.” I walked over to the table and looked down at the remains of his meal. “And… and eating chicken!” I indicted him. The bones were there as evidence, picked clean by his ghostly, smoke-corrupted mouth.
“Of what business are these things to you, Lance? I know you’ve got some kind of pull with the ministry; what exactly, I don’t know. I wouldn’t tolerate you otherwise, but my private life is my own!”
“Your private life is not as private nor as much your own as you think.” I informed him. “Why do you think you painted that picture of me?”
“I don’t know what picture you’re talking about.”
“What I don’t understand is why you’d paint me in such a negative light.”

The Egyptian Twist

Originally it was a soft drink. Some people thought it was a dance. Those people were usually ignorant rednecks from my parents’ generation and their wretched, overfed offspring. What the name Egyptian Twist ultimately referred to, however, was a specialty brand of small cigars. Made of shredded papyrus soaked in a secret chemical closely related to one used by the ancient mummification experts, once smoked it delivered a powerful, mnemonically-altering agent to the consumer’s brain. When that brain happened to belong to a ghost (I had finally admitted to myself what Dallas Pimiento was), the results were wildly unpredictable, sometimes leading to attempts on the part of the user to create tangible examples or representations of the false memories.
Grown, manufactured, and packaged in the Corollary Zone, they were legally obtainable only there. Perhaps Pimiento had been there. It would be hard to list all the places he had been. Alternately, he may have purchased the smokes from an underground dealer in such noxious luxuries. All I knew was that he had moved outside my inner circle of intimacy. His work had not yet been affected, but if the bones of that chicken he had eaten could walk, I’m sure that they would walk away from him. I couldn’t do that. I still had to maintain contact with him, even if it was through the intermediaries of the ministry’s organization.
I had written a little story that I wanted entered into the files of the Antithetical Department. I headed down to the secret entrance to the lab and was surprised to see Bud Shank standing outside the door drinking a can of Coca-Cola.
“That stuff is poison.” I told him jokingly, though I mean what I said. I started to press the entry code on the keypad.
“Who are you?” Shank asked.
“I’m Lance Ash.” I was stunned. Surely Shank remembered me? Or didn’t he? Perhaps he was one of those fellows that I knew through records and documentation, but hadn’t actually met. Seeing the name fall far from its target, I showed Shank the story. “I’m the author of this.” I said.
Shank took the pages in his free hand.
“‘Saucy Escapades?’” He read aloud. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“Well, I guess not.” I admitted. “I just wrote it yesterday.” I punched in the code.
“How do you know the code?” Shank took a sip from his drink.
“I wrote that too.” I told him before I slipped inside.

Saucy Escapades

There was no time to get caught up in a conversation. Sure, I wanted to tell the old man about the condom I had found, but I knew that if I told him, he would launch into a lengthy spiel about morality, changing times, and historical facts that I would not be politely able to break away from before I had to hop on the interstellar ferry.
“Did you wash that banana?” Asked a different old man, this one quite womanly-looking, as I took a seat and began to peel my healthy treat.
“I don’t wash bananas.” I removed the entirety of the peel—that’s my style—and held the edible part between two fingers. The peel I wrapped inside a paper towel I had been intelligent enough to bring along.
“You know you ca get high smoking those.” The womanly old man pointed out. “But you have to dry them out first.”
“That’s a myth.” I countered. I guess my mouth must still have had some fruity pulp within for my neighbor asked me to repeat what I had said. I did so, more or less.
“Oh, yes it is (true). The peel contains a drug called bananadine. It’s a mildly psychoactive chemical…”
I didn’t bother to hear the rest. I got up from my seat, though the ferry was already in motion, and made my way down into the “bowels” of the craft. The corridor I walked along was dark. The smell of onions frying was strong in the air. I heard loud Redneck laughter and the pounding of the walls, as if the joke was too wonderful for merely verbal response. Past a length of nearly total darkness I came to a doorway to my left. Inside was a small room lit by a single dim bulb. Two short church pews faced each other from two of the walls. On them sat a half dozen rumpled looking-peasants. I took a seat in the middle of the nearest pew. My new neighbors were a silent bunch. They sat staring at the floor. One dumpy woman of middle age sat sewing something. I took out a small book of poetry (how I long to call it a “slim volume”) and began to read.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the man to my left waving a small piece of paper at me. I turned and looked him in the face. Of course he was an old man. I know that old age is coming for me as well, but I refuse to believe that I will suddenly turn into a nosy windbag as soon as my hair goes completely gray. I refuse to believe a lot of things. I criticize theists when they continue to wallow in lies, but my self-criticism is tempered with more humor.

Saucy Escapades II

A man on the opposite bench interrupted the attempt by the man to my left to hand me the paper.
“Don’t give him that!” He said sharply.
I looked up at him. He looked at me.
“He wants to give you his document of lies. Take the truth, if you wish to read.” He pulled a small, tri-folded sheet from inside his coat.
“I’m reading something already, thank you.” I replied, nodding at each man. I held up my book a little. The picture of the author was visible.
“He reads L.E. Sissman!” The man beside me cried. He snapped his fingers at his rival. “Take that, you somber judgmentalist!”
“Perhaps he does not know what he reads.” The man opposite suggested. He turned to me. “Do you accept or reject tri-phase determinism?” He asked.
“Are you asking me?”
“Yes sir.”
“I better go find out.” I said, rising from my seat. I exited as fast as I could without appearing to be actually running.
Up on the upper level again, I sat down far away from the man so concerned about bananas. I did not make eye contact. I put my nose in my book and kept it there until the ferry made its characteristic docking noises. Waiting for the signal to disembark, I turned the book over and looked at the author’s photo. It wasn’t L.E. Sissman at all, but Reed Whittemore. As if one could get the two confused. I liked the man’s face. It was relaxed, humored at the world. My own photographs on the backs of my books were either studies in Eastern European stoicism or insincere efforts at here-we-are-all-laughing-chums. If I could but lose fifty pounds appearances might be different.
I took out an index card and wrote down an idea for a title to a poem: “These Characters Have Names.” The buzzer sounded, indicating that we were free to leave the ferry. I tucked the card in my breast pocket. I watched the old man across the room. I wanted to make sure he left before I did. But he seemed to be in no hurry to get off. It baffled me that he would try to out-wait me, just as it baffles me that this story turned out so poorly. I am sorry that I have wasted your time in this manner. Forgive me.

Lurking in Doorways

Rats, dodging dried beans tossed at them by the hangnail adapter, sang out their traditional coping song. Originally thought to have been written by Henry Rollins, recent archeological digs near Macrosanct suggest that the song may have been developed from ancient breeding chants of the most blatantly populist variety. Once the beans were exhausted, a selector switch inside the aggressive mechanism shut down the operation and sent signals to the overhead lights, turning them on. Bragyard turned from watching the display and nodded to Chip, the errand boy. The latter then opened the door and allowed the representatives of the media inside. As they began to ask questions of Bragyard, Chip slipped outside. His own personal press conference was held under the old palm tree next to the popcorn stand, and was attended only by himself and one elderly reporter from the Glycolorado Post.
“What do you think the rats signify?” The old man asked Chip.
“Hell, I don’t know.” Chip rubbed the sleep from his eyes. His red vest was dotted with stains. His clip-on bow tie was crooked.
“Is Mr. Bragyard fun to work for?”
“‘Fun?’” Chip wondered at the word.
Across town the Dandrum brothers were loading kernels of seed corn into the hopper duct-taped to the intake hose of their own hangnail adapter knock-off.
“Does it need to be dark in here?” Asked Quince, the youngest of the three brothers.
“That’s what out information tells us.” Flagler, the next oldest, replied. He traced the strange markings on the side of the old pay phone they had used as the basis for their illegal machine. What did they say? He pondered.
The oldest of the brothers, Staig, watched the proceedings silently from his place in the cylindrical plexiglass tank of florescent green fluid. “If all goes according to plan…” His misshapen and partially visible brain vaguely formulated the sentence and then, fresh images cropping up within, let the thought go unfinished. His tertiary tentacles were connected to interface couplings that passed through the tank wall, allowing his brothers to draw power directly from the electrolytic formations erupting from his submersion. Staig was happy to be able to help in whatever way he could. As images of his upcoming birthday flashed like old-fashioned camera bulbs in his mind, Staig wondered how old he would be. What a sad commentary on such a mathematical genius.

Knife to a Sausage

The sausage is postal profits; the knife is the psychological pressures so long deferred. In order to understand these analogies, it is important for one to work at the post office strictly in a grunt capacity for at least eight years. If at the end of that time one had not developed the unique insight to see the truth of the above similes, then one is made of stronger stuff than I.
Every day I come to work and try to make of my time something more personally satisfying than the supposed moral joys of a job well done. I don’t do a good job out of loyalty or pride; I just don’t want to get in trouble. The work I do to satisfy myself is purely mental. I walk around in a fantasy world of philosophic speculation. When my breaks come, I sit alone and write and draw stupid stuff like this.
Is the stupid stuff stronger than the strong stuff? Is the stupid stuff stupider than the strong stuff? Look to me for your answer.
Now, getting down to a more graphic exploration of the knife and the sausage (understanding that the images give above are merely a starting point), we see that the sausage is an intestinal casing filling with spices and the ground substance of some animal, usually a pig. The knife is a sharpened piece of steel. The knife is to the sausage as an archeologist is to a tomb.
I used to resent Dallas Pimiento, but now I am glad he is here. Pimiento, on assignment on the outskirts of Macrosanct, infiltrated an archeological dig led by Dr. Fungral. Strapping on his knife, Pimiento entered the ancient theater below the main floor of the tomb. Onstage, a costumed figure delivering a monologue of honesty.
“My friends, I am again sorry, but this is not what I wish to write. I have no interest in this tale, if tale it be. I don’t know how to go on. What a disappointment. What a sad commentary on such a literary genius.”
Angered, Pimiento rose from his seat and stalked to the proscenium.
“If you’re so bored, why don’t you quit?” He demanded.
“I can’t.” The actor in character replied. “I have made commitments.”
“Damn your arbitrary commitments!” Pimiento bellowed and jumped onstage. He struck with his knife and brought down the actor (as well as the character). Bending over the lifeless form, he removed the mask and saw… well, you know whose face he saw.
Part Two

Leeway and Perhaps

Dallas Pimiento called his friend Allan on the phone and simply said the words, “Leeway and perhaps.” He then hung up, secure in the knowledge that two years of subtle brainwashing would do its work. If, however, the programmed task was no completed, it did not matter to Pimiento. He had done his part. Anyway, he wouldn’t be around to hear about what happened. That very afternoon he was leaving for Tomatoville, his new home.
“Moving to Tomatoville, eh?” Asked his soon-to-be former neighbor.
“How’d you find out?” Pimiento watched the moving men putting his possessions into the back of their truck.
“Word gets around.” The neighbor, whom Pimiento hadn’t exchanged more than a couple of hundred words with in the two years he had lived there, prepared to go back inside his house and watch the horse beating on TV. He only lingered to see if perhaps Pimiento would give him something, some item not expected to be needed in the new home. If not, it didn’t matter; he would go over later after Pimiento had gone and ransack the place anyway.
“Yep.” Agreed Pimiento. “I guess so.” He walked away from the low row of bushes that separated their yards. In the now almost empty house he went to the refrigerator and drank what was left of the orange juice. He invited the movers to take what they wanted of the remaining food.
On a impulse he went to the linen closet and wrote his name and the dates of his moving in and moving out on the narrow strip of wall to the inside left of the door. He hoped that when the day came that this was discovered the new owner wouldn’t paint over it. After one last look around he went outside and got in his car.
The moving men were done. They would meet him in Tomatoville; Pimiento didn’t plan to drive alongside them the whole way. He started his car and left. He didn’t wave at anyone he saw on the street. Elvis Costello was good driving music, but, feeling unaccountably sad, Pimiento chose not to put on what could prove to be an emotionally upsetting album. Instead he picked Judas Priest from among the bagful of selections he was bringing with him. Yes: damn them! Damn them all! The music seemed to confirm the way he wanted to feel. What had this shithole of a place ever done for him? Things would be better in Tomatoville.

The Scarf That’s In It

Dallas Pimiento watched the movers unload everything at his new home. He didn’t open any of the boxes except one until after the men left. He watched carefully for this box. Once he spied it he took it aside and opened it. He dug around inside and pulled out a long scarf. This he wrapped around his neck and went outside to look around the yard.
The scarf was brown and red. Characters from the old comic strip Steak Sauce were embroidered along its length. As there were over twenty major characters, this will give you an idea of how long this scarf was. Pimiento hadn’t expected the weather to be so cold. Here it was four weeks into spring and he felt chilled. He reflected that Tomatoville lay in a totally different realm than his last home. That must explain it, he thought.
His new dwelling was a ranch style, steel and glass house built on a partially wooded lot on the side of a hill. As he walked around outside he discovered the remains of a treehouse in the thickest grouping of trees, on the left of the house. This was between him and his nearest neighbor, who even now was surreptitiously observing Pimiento.
“What kind off scarf is that?” The neighbor, Wetch Wice, asked himself as he peered through his binoculars at the newcomer. He was in the attic of his three-story house, looking out a disguised porthole. “Why, it’s got the old Steak Sauce gang on it!” He happily exclaimed. “There’s Navvy, the lovable oaf! And Desperate Delo; she was quite a character. Hell, this new guy might be alright. Unless,” Wice mused, “He’s wearing it as some sort of ironic commentary. Whatever that means.”
“Are you through spying?” Wice’s wife Treblaine asked from the doorway.
“Just about.” Wice turned from the porthole. “He was examining the Nicker boys’ old treehouse. If he only knew the story behind that!”
“Then it is a man?” Treblaine asked.
“Yeah. And alone too, judging by the stuff the movers unloaded.”
“Why would a single man move into that big house?”
“‘Big?’ It’s not as big as our house.”
“For a single person it’s big.” The woman countered.
“What do you want him to do? Live in a lean-to until he gets a wife?”
“He’d never get a wife, living in a lean-to.”
“And who says he needs one?”

People with Kindness

The next day a deputation bearing a banner reading “People with Kindness” stopped by Pimiento’s new home. He hadn’t yet finished unpacking, but this odd welcoming committee seemed not to mind. They handed him a pound cake wrapped in aluminum foil, some religious literature, and a stack of coupons. They would have stayed longer, but Pimiento insisted on leaving to go to the grocery store. His announced intention brought much advice on the subject. They told him what stores were the best in their opinion. As he had never heard of any of the chains these stores belonged to, he wound up following their advice and going to nearest, best one.
This store was called Mojawili and was located only two miles down the road. Pimiento hadn’t bothered to ask the friendly welcomers about local art supply stores. He didn’t want anyone yet to know that he was a painter. Better to ask somebody at the grocery store who would have no idea where he lived.
Pimiento had many ideas for the art that he would create in his new home. He had already chosen one of the spare bedrooms as his studio. The predominating theme for the next series of paintings was to be the slowly forged chain of events that led one another to the formation of a life. How he would represent that he did not as yet know.
The People with Kindness group later discussed the newcomer over coffee at Minerva Squaim’s house.
“I think he’s an artist.” Doug Mebber declared. He told the others that he based his theory on the number of art books he had seen lying about. That, and the overall look of the man.
“Maybe he’s a political refugee.” One young woman suggested. She, like almost everyone but Doug, seemed to think that there had to be more to Pimiento than mere art. After all, who would be just an artist?”
Meanwhile, Pimiento used none of the coupons the welcoming committee had given him. They were for products he never used. The religious material went directly into the trash. He got the name of an art supply store from one of the bagboys at the grocery.
“Are you studying art?” The kid asked.
“I’m always studying.” Pimiento told him. After dinner that evening Pimiento spent a frustrating two hours drawing cartoons.

Roughshed Stoop

Shoveling beans into his mouth as fast as he could, Cranium sat on the Roughshed stoop. Although he had dumped hot sauce into the beans, he couldn’t taste it. When he had scooped up the last bean with his plastic spoon, he tossed the can with the spoon inside at a nearby trash bin. The can hit the rim. It went in, but the spoon landed on the ground. Cranium didn’t bother to retrieve it. He was busy wiping off his mouth. He was waiting for someone.
A man about his age turned the corner and approached. Cranium looked up at him, he hoped without any expectation written on his face.
“You the guy that wants a look around in here?” The stranger indicated the Roughshed with his thumb.
“That’s right.” Cranium stood. He extended his hand. “I’m Cranium.”
“That’s an odd name. I’m Led Jaguin.” They shook hands. Jaguin took out a set of keys from his pocket. He began going through them.
“It’s what they call me. My real name’s Bob Flogger.” Cranium noted with thoroughly concealed contemptuous amusement the other man’s overalls.
Jaguin fitted the proper key into the door. He put his shoulder against the door, explaining, “It gets stuck.” The door opened into a tall dark corridor within. “We don’t get many visitors here.”
“Well, thank you.” Cranium said. “For letting me see it.” He might as well get the courtesy out of the way now. He followed Jaguin into the dark entryway. The air smelled of old things and thick dust.
“That’s funny.” Jaguin sounded curious. “Lights aren’t working.” He flicked a switch up and down several times. “Let’s go check the fuse box.”
Again Cranium followed Jaguin, this time past several doors whose proximity to each other indicated that the rooms behind them must be unusually small, almost closet-sized. The two men came to the end of the hall, which opened onto what Cranium might describe as a normal-sized room, albeit one with a nearly twelve foot ceiling. In the center of the room, occupying most of the floor space, was a tall platform upon which was mounted a large, inanimate creature. Cranium could not make out what it was. He stared at it wonderingly while Jaguin fiddled with the fuse box in the corner of the room.

Intimidated Plant Enthusiast

“I have to confess I feel somewhat intimidated here, Miss Okrea.” Borden, one of many plant enthusiasts in Tomatoville, said nervously as he watched the older lady stab the earth around her potted arrangement of bent metal rods with a hand shovel.
“And why is that, Mr. Borden?” Miss Okrea asked without taking her eyes off her work. She studied the effect her stabs made.
“Well, I really don’t understand non-botanical gardening.” Borden glanced around at the grounds of Trewscale, the private club for dilettantes, at the other members wandering about.
“Mr. Borden, I’ll be honest with you.” Miss Okrea looked the young man in the eye. “If you don’t instinctively understand it, you never will.”
“Oh.” Said Borden.
“But that’s no reason why you should feel intimidated.” Miss Okrea dropped her little shovel into its cinch sack.
“You see, I don’t know how I can help you.” Borden’s confession became more detailed. His hands, made an uncertain pantomime in the air.
“The job is done.” Miss Okrea smiled. “That job. However, I have something else I’d like for you to help me with.”
“Does it have anything to do with gardening? Traditional gardening?” Borden asked.
“As a matter of face, no, it doesn’t.” The lady smiled again.
Borden’s brain allowed him a briefly visible, invented snapshot of he and this not thoroughly unattractive woman intertwined in an act of union. He ruthlessly put aside this thought. He didn’t want any evidence of such imaginings to show on his face.
“No,” Miss Okrea continued. “No, what I would like for you to do, if it’s no trouble, is to give my nephew some lessons in boat construction.”
“‘Boat construction?’” Borden repeated.
“Nothing too taxing. You know my nephew Casimir. Just let him watch you work on your boat and give him some hints.” Seeing the look on Borden’s face, Miss Okrea interposed, “You do construct your own boats, don’t you? That’s what I heard.”
“Not in the sense of building one with my own hands. My family, the family at large,” He spread his hands wide. “Builds boats. Big boats. Far away.” He pointed in the direction of downtown Tomatoville, though the distant ocean actually lay in the opposite direction.

Stopwatch and Purple

Rawley drew out his mother’s stainless steel stopwatch from his special pocket by the watch’s tethering nylon filament. He eyed the face of the watch closely,
“The time is purple, gentlemen.” He announced grandly. “It’s best if I move on.”
“Purple? Echoed several of the children around the short stone table. “What does he mean, ‘purple?’ What do you mean ‘purple?’”
“My work lies elsewhere now.” Rawley took a long stride and was into the next sunlit patch of the garden before the little boy in the red hat had time to ask, “What does ‘elsewhere’ mean?”
“Greetings, Rawley.” Miss Okrea held up a china cup in tribute to his arrival. “Have you thoroughly confused the children?”
“I hope so, Angela. I hope so. I generally repeat things to add dramatic weight to my statements. It’s a trick I learned from watching a lot of bad TV as a child.” Rawley accepted the proffered cup of hot water.
“I believe you have told me how your father disparaged your ability to tell when some character on the small screen was to repeat something in that dramatic manner.” Miss Okrea crossed her stockinged legs.
“Did I tell you that?” Rawley mused. “I must have been babbling idly. I don’t recall having done so. And I don’t see what I would have.”
“It was some time ago.” Angela Okrea told the rather raffish man squatting on his haunches before her. Why wouldn’t he take a seat? “We were talking about out fathers.”
“Are you remembered it? That flatters me.”
The sun twisted about in its seat, easing its old bones. Rawley continued, “But then, your father was a saint.”
“Not entirely. Although I feel it would be bad manners of me to tell stories of his possible inadequacies or failures to others.”
Rawly raised his eyebrows.
“I guess I don’t feel the same kind of reverence or scruples about my parents, or anyone for that matter, when it comes to speaking the truth about them.”
“Does that include me?” Miss Okrea asked.
“You see this watch?” Rawley asked, standing up. He started to pull on the watch’s tether. “My mother used to own this watch. But that doesn’t…” He stopped. There was no watch on the end of the tether.

Visual a Stapling

The Big Stapler, forgotten by the executors of my estate, was unpacked along with Pimiento’s other now-supposedly-unneeded weaponry. Out of habit, he checked the loading alley. It was full of staples.
“Diamond Bees, 1.7’s.” Pimiento observed. He put the stapler on the mantelpiece over the fireplace. He would find a better place later. Returning to the box out of which he had removed the Big Stapler, Pimiento found a photo album. This album, the only one he had that was bound in red, contained photographs of most of the staplings he had done over the years.
Sitting down on the beat-up old sofa, Pimiento opened the book at random. The end of the Dr. Tennis assignment stared up at him. A piece of paper taped to the page next to the photo read, “Good job, Bronco!” Ah, that rancid appellation! He wished he’d never chosen the stupid monicker.
He wondered if a girl named Monica would have a monicker.
Pimiento shut the album in disgust and got out another, this one bound in blue, as were about a dozen others. This one when opened took him back to the reception for one of his early one-man shows. Probably not the first, he considered, looking at the photos. There was Camilla, the manager of the gallery. She had been a hot-looking number, sleepy-eyed and plump, with a scratchy, Northern-accented voice. Too bad he couldn’t have made a move on her. His commitments to both painting and his other work with the Ministry kept him from having the time for a woman. That, and the unusual nature of his penis. Just thinking about that last subject put him into an even worse mood. He flipped the page and saw a photo of himself standing before a canvas that he had done specifically to please an imagined audience of metropolitan connoisseurs. It was terrible.
He shut this album with a bang as well. No more painting what he thought would sell. He would only paint what pleased him. What really pleased himself. One image that came to mind was of his own hand holding the Big Stapler, punching staples through a stack of crappy photographs and paintings, drawing blood and eliciting gasps of panic from everyone who had thought he had Dallas Pimiento figured out. He liked the idea. He had always liked doing paintings within paintings. Now, as soon as the artists’ supply store opened up in this rinky-dink dump of a town, he could begin.

Wicked Trough

“Whose goat are you?” Necrosanct asked as Pantop walked by.
“What impertinence!” Was Pantop’s first thought. That this decadent stranger should address him at all was, to him, most rude. Then, beyond that, the question itself was unseemly. “My own!” Was Pantop’s unspoken reply. He wouldn’t bother replying out loud.
Pantop took another step or two after question had been asked. He had just stopped himself from turning to look at Necrosanct when he stumbled into a trough that he was in later days to describe to friends as “wicked.” He managed to keep from dirtying his clothes too much as he fell down to the bottom of the trough, but this disturbance of his appearance was still the uppermost concern in his mind as he angrily got to his feet.
“I blame that decadent bastard!” He said to himself. He blamed himself just as much, but he was too angry to admit it. This anger evaporated from a scalding bath he had immersed himself in to a heavy cloud over his head as he looked for a way out of the trough.
“No way out, is there?” Necrosanct’s head appeared over the summit.
“I suppose not.” Pantop emphasized each syllable and swung his horned head one-two-three times back and forth like a sassy metronome.
“I’ll try to find a rope.” Necrosanct called down. “Or a leash.” He added as he disappeared.
“Don’t bother.” Pantop said. He repeated this louder. “Don’t bother!” He began to walk down the length of the trough in the direction he had been walking before he fell. He had been heading into town to the Tin Can, a coffee shop and reading room catering to goats especially, though member of most other species were welcome. Obviously, neither the owners not the patrons wanted flies or fleas inside.
“You can argue all you want for insect inclusion,” thought Pantop as he picked his way along the narrow, trash-strewn path, “But at the end of the day they’re still nothing but pests.” He immediately countered his own deepest wish (the extermination of all insect life), as he usually did every observation he made, being his own devil’s advocate, by asking himself how the flowers would get pollinated or how the scavenger work that insects did would get done. When he started to sense, after twenty minutes or so, that the path was veering away from downtown, he asked himself whether he shouldn’t have accepted Necrosanct’s help.

Amusement for the Little Sloppies

The theater was small. It only held about fifty seats, but no expense had been spared to ensure that those seats were comfortable. They were deep, widely spaced from each other, and set in an auditorium painted completely black. The children, whom Ray called “the little sloppies,” filed in without unnecessary noise and took their seats. After they were all in place, there were seats enough left over for Ray, Miss Berretto, and seven others, should seven others wish to sit through a showing of The Keloid
The theater didn’t just show films; there was a short stage upon which a thin man in his late twenties now stood. He was dressed, if not precisely as a clown, then certainly as someone one whom a clown’s character might be based. He looked, as Joe, the most originally perceptive of the children, said, like a rich hobo.
“Invert those syllables and you have boho.” Monica intoned gravely. Joe realized that was supposed to mean something, but, as perceptive as he might be, he had not yet been exposed to a wide enough range of influences to get her reference. That would have to wait until his teens.
“Boys and girls!” Cried the man on the stage. “How many of you know what this is?” He drew out a yo-yo from his pocket.
“Oh, god.” Ray muttered.
Several children shouted out the answer. One or two made fart noises with their lips or underarms during the response.
“That’s right! How many of you think I can make this yo-yo levitate over my head?” The man waited as the children either held up their hands or shouted out “I do!” or “I don’t!” as was their wont. “Who knows what levitate means?”
“Just show the film.” Ray whined through clenched teeth.
“It’ll be over with in a minute.” Miss Berretto assured him.
After the yo-yo trick was finished the performer told a joke or two as he made an elephant out of balloons.
“Ah, balloon folding. Very good. This will be on his loan application, I presume.” Ray leaned over to Miss Barretto and whispered. The young lady did not reply. Ray leaned back and stared at his hands until the film began. He was delighted to see that the children had tired of Mr. Yo-yo not long after he had. The film, a black and white would-be horror movie done in the documentary style, had been a favorite of Ray’s for years. He glanced around at the children. They were becoming restless.
“The little sloppies don’t get it.” He thought contemptuously.

Love Sink in the Vandal Operation

Beneath Clamdigger’s Cathedral was an underground complex in which the Vandal Bean Company (a subsidiary of the Vaguery Church, which owned the cathedral) had set up a semi-secret research lab. I say semi-secret because even though the workings and projects of the lab were secret, several of the Tomatoville residents worked there. Young Albert, for instance, worked as a janitor at the facility, descending each day from a door just outside the cathedral itself to his post, but he could not say with any precision exactly what went on there. All he knew was that he was required to sweep up the floors, take out the trash, wash various items, and occasionally to help move certain things the nature of which was seldom explained to him, and even then without any detail.
“Still,” He told his mother one Saturday morning as he ate breakfast at the family table around which were gathered his parents and younger siblings, “Mr. Kurtchum is nice. He’s a good man.”
“What are you going to do today?” Albert’s father asked him. The older man hunched over his food like a dog protecting its supper dish. He spoke through a mouthful of eggs and toast.
“I’m going to Okraton.” Albert said matter-of-factly (there had to be one word that handily replaces that cumbersome phrase). He feared his father’s comments. Rightly so, for the egg-and-toast eater responded,
“Always got to be on the road! Don’t you?” A piece of egg escaped the black hole of his mouth.
Albert said nothing. He had made his plans and he wasn’t going to change them. Within the hour he was on his way to Okraton, the second of the three towns (including Tomatoville) in the area known as the Mapzone. The third was Corn City, but we aren’t going to examine that town today. Nor are we going to examine Okraton, because instead of following Albert to Okraton, we are going to peek into the Saturday doings at the Vandal Bean Company’s subterranean lab. Nors Richter, a shadowy inspector from the corporate headquarters, was paying a visit. The weekend crew, composed mostly of temps and junior level staff, were showing him around and explaining things. When Richter came to janitors’ closet B3, he peered into the sink.
“Not very hygienic, is it?” He sniffed.
“That’s Albert’s fault, sir.” Said someone. “He’s a sloppy shirker.”

The Near Beer of Roadside Commerce

As Albert drove into Okraton, he passed a roadside stand that sold tacos and a watery beer of local manufacture known as morton. At this stand stood two middle-aged gentlemen named Travis and Troy. Their hats were tilted back on their heads. Each smiled at the other as they bit into their tacos and sipped their morton.
“‘Legrezia.’” Read Travis off the label of the bottle he held.
“Is that the local brand?” Troy asked the man behind the counter.
“Yes sir. Brewed right here in Okraton.” The man turned from looking at the field of tall grass across the road to Troy.
“Well, you’re not actually in Okraton here.” Troy pointed out. “The city limits aren’t for another couple of miles.”
“Troy.” Travis admonished his friend.
“We consider this Okraton.” The counterman explained. “But in truth, I don’t actually live inside Okraton. I live off Boglag Road.” He waved his hand over his head, pointing somewhere behind him.
“You the owner?” Travis asked.
“No. But I manage the place.”
Troy nodded. He was finished eating and he had had enough small talk with this stranger. He pushed his hat down on his head and stepped out into the sun. Travis said “See you” to the manager of the stand, though in fact he probably never would see the man again, and followed his friend. They got into a long, twenty-year-old automobile, Travis driving, and headed the same way Albert did ten minutes before.
Less than a mile after passing the city limits sign they were held up in traffic.
“It’s an accident.” Said Travis.
“Must have just happened.” Said Troy.
Albert had smashed his car into the back of another car belonging to an older woman. He wasn’t hurt to any great extent though he wished he had been.
“I wish I’d had my foot cut off.” He said to himself as he waited by his car for the police to arrive. “Cleanly and so quickly that it wouldn’t have hurt.” He added. The woman whose car he had struck sat moaning and rubbing the back of her neck.
“She’s faking.” Albert hoped viciously.
As Travis and Troy finally drove by the scene an ambulance had arrive to take the woman to the hospital.

He Drank the Steaming Inadequacy

“Take your time.” Whispered a helpful sprite in Dallas Pimiento’s ear.
“No, barrel ahead!” Countered an opposing, but equally helpful sprite.
Pimiento sat inundated by banana fumes, staring at a piece of paper on a drawing board. His greatest secret (and secret shame) was that in addition to his painting, Pimiento also drew cartoons. Or comics; he never knew exactly what term to use in reference to this work. He couldn’t stop himself. He knew he should be using all his available time to paint, but somehow these confused and confusing little doodles obsessed him. In the past, when he had a job, he could claim his breaks and lunches as legitimate venues for the cartooning; obviously, he couldn’t paint at work. But now that the job was history (literally, in certain well-documented instances), what was his excuse?
For all his doubts, he refused to approach this secondary work in anything less than a fully committed, deeply aesthetic mindset, no matter how shitty the results might look to a connoisseur of comics, mainstream and underground. There was something from his childhood that he was trying to recapture, to express. If he could get a grasp on what it was, he might be able to render it. On the other hand, a clear view of what he was aiming for might dispel the magic of its attraction. It was these two ideas that the sprites, Lamar and Joey, represented. But which one was attached to which idea?
Did it matter? Of course not, thought Pimiento. He found satisfaction in many of the drawings he did, no matter how difficult their births. He had dropped the search for meaning within them, or anything else really, long ago. Pure aesthetic relief is what he sought. Since coming to Tomatoville and taking up this new life, he had made the decision to sign his artworks with the name “Bronco.” This was both a rejection of his past with its niggardly engagement and its profoundly vacillating timidity, as well as a rejection of his given name, which he had always hated. “Dallas”—a city in Texas. It made him sound like a would-be cowboy or a hick. “Pimiento”—what a horrible name. Why hadn’t his grandfather changed it when he emigrated to America from the family’s homeland? Unreasoning pride, that’s why. Pimiento’s rejection of… all that was his source of pride. That, and the work he did. He didn’t feel he had the right to change his given name though, for all his aggressive iconoclasty (if that’s not the right word, it should be). However, he felt privileged to sign the Bronco name to his wretched, illegible cartoons.

Submission to Horn-Rimmed Delicacy

Pimiento took to wearing horn-rimmed glasses in public. These were the black kind sported by John Lennon before his adoption of the granny glasses.
“Of course, others wore them as well.” Wetch Wice observed to Ned Feese, a friend of his, as they sat outside the Poppy Seed, a coffee shop within walking distance of their houses. “Uh, there was Michael Caine in A Funeral in Berlin. And there was…”
“You can’t think of anybody else, can you?” Feese smirked.
“Yeah I can.” Wice snapped his fingers. “One of the two guys in Peter and Gordon.”
“Which one?” Feese sipped his coffee and craned his head to see if Dallas Pimiento was still visible down the street.
“I don’t know. I don’t know which was which.”
“I neither. I don’t even know…”
“Wait. ‘I neither?’”
“That’s the proper word. ‘I don’t know either.’ You wouldn’t say ‘me don’t know either.’”
“But you said ‘I neither,’ not ‘I either.’”
“Sounds better. Must be some reason for saying ‘I neither’ instead of ‘I either.’”
“Yeah, but if you’re going to by what sounds better, you’d say ‘me neither.’” Protested Wice.
“It only sounds better because you’re not used to it.” Feese though that this was also a good argument against belief in God, but he didn’t bring that up because he didn’t want to start something with Wice, who was a regular churchgoer.
“I’ll have to look that up when I get home.” Wice finished his tea and loudly dropped his spoon into the cup.
“You do that.”
“I will.”
“Can you think of anybody else who wore those glasses?” Feese asked.
“Not really. I want to say more movie stars’ names, but if they wore them, it was generally only in a movie, not habitually.”
“Cary Grant” Feese said casually.
“Cary Grant!” Wice shouted, as if the name had been a swear word. “That’s the very one!”
“Wouldn’t it be funny,” mused Feese, “If people said ‘Cary Grant’ instead of ‘Jesus Christ?’”

Lord Ivy League Creation

Many were the tales passed around about Lord Ivy League. Everyone knew that he was a fashion designer. That much was an obvious fact. His clothes had been worn by the intellectual class for years. Who was he really, though? That was what those who had heard the various stories with a skeptical ear wanted to know.
“So,” Suzanne Ohio began her interview of the great man. “Lord Ivy League isn’t your real name, is it?”
“It is now.” The Lord’s right leg was crossed over his left, the ankle resting elegantly on the knee, a two-and-a-half inch length of burgundy sock exposed between the narrow-cut gray gabardine of the slacks and the black alligator hide of the loafers. On top of his ankle the Lord vested a surprisingly beefy hand, one not too hairy, and sporting a rather plain silver watch with a black leather band. Other than this functional piece (the Lord was always punctual) he wore not jewelry, not even cuff links or a tie clip.
“What is your birth name?” Ms. Ohio begged.
Lord Ivy League’s handsome face was smiling. He was confident and relaxed enough to smile with his whole countenance. Even his white comb-over seemed to be adding to his expression of mirth.
“I’d rather not say.” The Lord laughed.
“Is it that awful?”
“No, not really.” He mused. “It’s just that that name doesn’t represent who I am today. The person who went by that name dressed in jeans.” A terrible-to-behold flash of violence stirred deep within the pale blue eyes. Mrs. Ohio noted this, but pressed on. She had interviewed many men far more dangerous in her time.
“Not really? You used to wear jeans?” She laughed.
“And t-shirts with slogans on them.” Lord Ivy League joined the woman in her laugh.
“So how did you change? And why?”
The Lord took a deep breath. He turned his gaze into the high opposite corner of the room. What scenes of regret did he see? What journalistic dynamite might he set the torch of revelation to?
“I decided that I didn’t like that person.” He answered simply. “And I didn’t like the era into which that person had been born.”
Ms. Ohio scratched he pen down the page on her notebook.

Boiled Egg Breath

“He had boiled egg breath.” Annie described Pantop to her friend Gomera as the exhausted goat limped into the Tin Can.
“Has he?” Gomera followed Pantop with her eyes as he nearly fell into a chair two tables away. “How do you know?”
“I’ve seen him around. He was at the Honey Bun Awards ceremony last year.” The two females watched Pantop as he ordered a tall drink and picked up a leaflet at random from the pile on his table. They could not hear what was said, however, when a dubious-looking fellow in the habit of a horse moved from a seat near the back of the place to join Pantop at his table.
“You’re late.” The stranger growled.
“I’m sorry.” Pantop gasped. He signaled the waitperson for another drink.
“I mean really late.”
“I fell into a trough.” Pantop began to explain.
“A trough?” The stranger took the leaflet out of Pantop’s grasp. “What are you reading?”
“Yes, a trough. And I couldn’t get out. I had to walk along it until it leveled out, and by that time I was out near the railyard.”
“I didn’t know this town had a railyard. ‘Kinetic Forces of Planetary Movement.’” The stranger read aloud the title of the skimpy, cheaply printed leaflet. He sounded like Jack Lord.
“Yes. So anyway, that’s why I’m late.” Pantop accepted his new drink and put half of it down his throat at once.
“You’re lucky I’m still here.” The stranger informed Pantop bluntly.
“Look, I am sorry. I’ve told you that. I very much want us to conclude out business as arranged.” He paused. What he was about to say next was a lie. “But, if you choose to go elsewhere, I will understand.”
“Don’t be silly.” The other character tossed the leaflet back onto the tabletop. “It’s just that I’ve been sitting here thinking about all the other people I could have reached in the past hour who would be just as eager to obtain this property.”
“Not as eager as I.”
The unnamed fellow mused. “Eager to pay a little extra?” He asked.
“So, what does he do?” Gomera asked Annie.
“He’s a theater producer, I think.” Said Annie.

Memorandum of the Kizmop

The cleaning crew had come and gone. The Kizmop building was empty of people. It remained that way until about three in the morning when Vole Stoddard and Dud Whylte crept in through the basement. The two young men, who worked for Kizmop during the day, made their way up to the seventh floor.
“That memo is here somewhere.” Stoddard said as he dug through the papers on a desk that was not his.
“Maybe the cleaning crew threw it away.” Whylte suggested. He looked about nervously. The silence and emptiness of the building made him afraid.
“No.” Stoddard shook his head. “He didn’t have it in the wastepaper basket.”
“Maybe it was on his desk and they threw it away anyway.”
Stoddard glanced at Whylte irritably.
“You’re fantasizing.” He snapped. “The cleaners don’t do stuff like that. They’d get fired.”
“Not for throwing away something that’s not supposed to exist.” Whylte hissed.
“It does exist. I saw it.” Stoddard took a breath. “I’m not going to argue about this. It’s pointless.” He jerked open drawers and rambled amid the items inside. “The damn fool doesn’t even lock his desk.”
“Maybe he doesn’t think he has anything to hide.”
“Boy, I sure do. I’m always conscientious about locking my desk.” Stoddard looked about at the various papers and photos pinned to the textile-covered walls of the cubicle.
“If you can’t find it, you can’t find it. I wouldn’t worry about it.” Whylte was crouched now beside the chair in which Stoddard sat.
“Look at this.” Stoddard pulled a small photo off the wall, tearing it through the pushpin that held it. “Is that his kid?” He showed the picture to Whylte.
“I don’t know. I don’t know him that well.”
“I think it is. I think he has a kid.” Stoddard tore the photo in half.
“What are you doing?!” Whylte demanded. “Now he’ll know someone was here going through his stuff.”
“To hell with him. If he’s going to piss me off by taking that memo with him, then he deserves it.” Stoddard had intended to leave the pieces of the photo on the desk, but thinking better of it, put them in his pocket.

Goose Tally if Marathon

“What’s the tally so far, Lou?” Doug Mebber asked as he passed the red and black striped booth.
“Haven’t started the tally yet, Doug.” Lou politely, if exasperatedly, answered the portly Mebber.
“Better get your pencils sharpened.” Mebbe advised.
“They are.” Lou said softly. He had learned over the years that controlling his breathing was the key to controlling his emotions.
Failing to get a rise out of the man, Mebber nodded majestically and moved on. His hands wandered over the material of his green sweater, feeling both its soft wool and the girth of his belly beneath. What could he find to eat around here? The festival was not extensive; it only covered the empty lot next to Distributer Park, but there were several booths selling snacks. Mebber smelled many good things. He came across a booth selling some sort of sausage on a stick. He bought one and continued on his way, dipping the sausage into a small paper cup of dark mustard. He was confident that the marathon would be run today.
On the other side of the accumulation of people and booths, the two young lovers Trip Sedgum and Willa Wice, were arguing.
“I’ve been planning on entering the marathon all year!” Trip tried to make Willa see the depth of feeling that she was denying.
“You have not!” Her flat refusal to countenance the truth was infuriating, maddening; Trip wanted to cut her head off with a saw. But, at least she had acknowledged his arguments by responding to something he had actually said. Trip supposed that was progress.
“I have to! After last year when nobody entered, I got to thinking about it. I remember because it was the weekend after the festival that I decided that come next year, I would do it.”
“Well, first of all,” Willa fought back. “Then it hasn’t been a whole year that you’ve been planning this suicidal nonsense.”
“Suicidal!?” Trip ignored her trivial technicality.
“Yes, suicidal. I don’t want to lose you, Trip.” She gripped his arms tightly.
“I’m not going into this thing to get killed, Willa.”
“You never know when the Belowgrounders will take a sacrifice!”

Traditional Display of Integrated Blossoms

Tomatoville’s Red Garland Festival always concluded with the traditional display of integrated blossoms. Treblaine Wice looked forward to this part of the weekend, but her husband Wetch found it boring. Still, he faithfully accompanied Trablaine to the display. He carried a small folding stool and a paperback along.
“There’s Casero.” Treblaine excitedly told her husband. Wetch was not slow in realizing that she was not concerned whether or not he had received the information. She would have done the same if he had been a hand puppet. In fact, it occurred to him that he could walk away and she would probably not notice. Treblaine had long ago stopped trying to interest him in flowers and plants, just as he had stopped trying to interest her in the history of 1960’s design. The only difference was that it had taken him many years longer to realize the futility of his attempts than it had her.
As Wetch set up his little stool and took out his book, Treblaine said hello to Casero, a sleepy-eyes man whose attachment to the festival was ill-defined, but as traditional as the blossom display. After somewhat vacantly acknowledging the woman’s greeting and rambling small talk, Casero turned back to the two people he had been conversing with, one of whom was holding a tiny black dog in the crook of his arm, while the other had a strikingly similar puppet on his hand. The one with the dog watched Treblaine move away. He asked Casero in a whisper,
“Who is that?”
Casero glanced back. He considered a moment.
“An astronaut, a botanist, a progressive wanderer.” He replied in his Captain Beefheart-like voice.
Meanwhile Wetch Wice concentrated on moving closer to the end of Mandate for Change, the book he was reading. He had wanted to read it for some time, over ten years, and now found himself almost halfway through it. It was a real labor; he didn’t care for it at all. It was well-written, there was no denying that. It was just that he would rather be reading something else. Wice got to the end of an auspiciously numbered page: one-sixteenth more of the book and he would have reached the mid-point. He looked up from his reading and looked for his wife. There she was, talking to some abysmal nobody by a particularly frightening arrangement of weeds. How did she know all these people?

Doll Supplied for Intergalactic Overnighter

The Vandal Bean Company didn’t just grow beans. Those who thought of nothing more than beans when they heard the name were just the sort of people that exasperated the executives at Vandal. There was constant talk of changing their corporate nomenclature (to use Harry Shearer’s wonderful phrase) to reflect the company’s modern focus, its diverse fields of interest, but written into the by-laws of the trust fund that still controlled over half the shares of the company was the injunction that the name never be changed. Old Thaddeus Vandal would rise from his tomb should such a disruption take place. Arguments that only the “bean” part need be changed fell on the deaf ears of his descendants.
One of the most exciting of the company’s many realms was its space program. With its wide range of genetically engineered pods it was able to provide transport for both passengers and cargo to several places scattered throughout the Neuronic Archipelago. Though not yet as well known on this planet as the executive board would like, the Vandal Bean Company’s Starways division was slowly garnering a reputation for safety, comfort, and reliability.
So safe was Vandal’s personal pod system considered by Nors Richter that he had consented to sending his daughter Mondria and her friends to Hydrama Extus for her birthday sleepover. Although his wife worried about the trip (she was going along as a chaperone), Richter assured her to his own satisfaction.
“It’s a Vandal product.” He told her solemnly.
At the last second it transpired that one of the girls had forgotten to bring a doll along, important for the girls’ bonding rituals and general silliness. Proving Richter’s faith in his employers, a doll was provided to the girl out of company stores. It was green and somewhat vegetative in appearance, but it would suffice.
“It had better.” Muttered Stan to his co-worker Wanda after the pod had been launched. “They put me through hell over that doll.”
“How bitter you are.” Said Wanda. “Don’t you like making a little girl happy?”
“Not really.” Stan stapled a stack of papers.
“How about a whole bunch of little girls?”
“Even less so.”
“Not to change the subject, Stan, but I wanted to ask you about a rumor I heard.” Wanda spoke quietly. “I heard that the Vaguery Church owns Vandal.”

A Limbo

“I’m sorry, Mr. Pimiento, but, although I like your work, I just don’t think I can sell it.” The gallery owner sorrowfully explained to our titular hero.
“No market for it, eh?” Pimiento asked.
“It’s not that there is no market for your kind of work, it’s just that my clientele tends to be more conservative in their tastes.”
“Can you recommend a gallery that caters to the kind of people who might be attracted to my kind of work?” Pimiento suspected that the man was thinking “mental hospital” and might respond so.
“I would try the Martyr Gallery.”
“And where is that?”
“I think it’s on Blackout Street.”
Pimiento headed there immediately after he had had lunch at a Mexican restaurant. At the gallery he was instructed to leave his packet of photographs of his work. He would be contacted in a few weeks. So he went home and put his concerns about the marketing of his paintings out of his mind. He concentrated on the work itself.
After a month had passed he paid a visit to the Martyr Gallery. Once again he was disturbed to see just how many vintage comic books they had on sale there. He asked if any decision had been made on his paintings being accepted for show at the place.
“You dropped of some paintings?” Asked the young, oddly dressed girl behind the counter.
“No, a packet of photographs of my work.” Pimiento told her.
She looked under the counter, on the floor, glanced at the door to the back room. Maybe help would arrive from that source?
“I don’t know anything about it. Why don’t you come back tomorrow? The owner will be back by then.” She begged him.
Fine, thought Pimiento. Unfortunately it was another week until he could get back to the gallery. The owner was not there.
“Well, could I at least get my photographs back?” Pimiento was exasperated.
“What did they look like?” The woman asked him. She, like the girl before, looked around the place blankly. Pimiento left. He never got his photographs back.

At Least an Indication of Gargoyliness

Clamdigger’s Cathedral was the site of Albert’s suicide. Having wrecked beyond repair his car and received a thorough dressing-down from both of his parents, he returned to work on Monday to find that he had been fired on the recommendation of Nors Richter. By the end of the week Albert was dead. He had jumped from one of the buttresses that overlooked the entrance to the underground laboratory.
“The head priest tells me that the boy worked in the lab.” Detective Calcior pointed to the floor as he reported to his superior, General Washedd.
“What lab?” Washedd took his thumbnail out from between his teeth to ask.
“The Vandal company’s lab.” Again Calcior pointed to the floor.
“Why are you pointing down like that?” The General looked puzzled. He was a stout, round-faced man whose bristling moustache and heavy nostril hair knew no clear demarcation.
“The Vandal company maintains a research lab in the catacombs beneath the cathedral.” Calcior could not believe that the General did not know of these things.
“Catacombs?” Washedd repeated, taking a step back and looking down as if he expected to see the floor open up on untold horrors.
“You didn’t know about this, General?” Asked Calcior.
“I’m not a religious man, Calcior, as you know.” Washedd sniffed. He glanced over at the door through which a couple of policeman, wet with rain, were entering.
“Well, gentlemen?” Asked Washedd.
“We spoke to someone who works in the lab through the door.” Said one of the uniformed men.
“Through the door?” Washedd didn’t like that.
“Yes sir. They wouldn’t let us in without a warrant, and they refuse to come out.”
“Well, what did this person say?” Washedd demanded.
“He said it was a tragedy.”
“It certainly it. Calcior, you handle this. I’m going to lunch.” The General slouched away. He opened his umbrella at the door and left.
“Here comes the head priest.” One of the policemen whispered to Calcior.
“Detective, how much longer will you and your men be here?” Asked the strangely attired old man who now approached.
“I guess we’ll be leaving now.” Calcior answered.
“Good.” The priest sighed. “The noontime ritual of feathering is already late.”

Need to Get Mandate for Change

Somehow Alton Glastonbury found out that Wetch Wice was reading Mandate for Change. This brought out the old jealous, curious, and suspicious feelings that Wice inspired in him.
“I wonder what that book is about.” He mused aloud in front of his wife as he watched Wice from his parlor window across the street from Wice’s house. His wife ignored him.
Later that day, as soon as it was convenient, Glastonbury went into town to the only bookstore he had ever patronized, Stoole’s. He hunted methodically, moving inch by inch along the shelves, starting at the front of the store and moving towards the back. He had barely covered a tiny fraction of the store’s stock when he made his first exclamation of distress. He exhaled harshly, baffled at the sheer multitude of titles to pick through. Another sound, sharper and whinier this time, brought him help.
“May I help you find something, sir?” Asked a matronly woman about Glastonbury’s own age.
“Do you have Mandate for Change?” He blurted out.
“By Flump Retchedson?” The woman queried. “Yes, I’m sure we do.” She beckoned him to follow her, adding, “It won’t be in the young ladies’ romance section.”
“Twenty-nine-ninety-five?” Glastonbury read the price aloud with heat. “That’s over thirty dollars with tax!” He looked at his helper. She adopted a blank expression.
Now wishing he had tried the library first, Glastonbury carried the book to the checkout counter. It was too late for that route now, however: he was already here. He doubted the accuracy of the transaction as the same woman who had helped him rang him up and handed him his change. He was on the verge of saying something, but a laborious toil through mental calculations partially reassured him.
Back at home he sequestered himself with the book and went over the dust jacket twice before beginning to read. The first sentence was as follows:
“Tedium clung to Todd Gurny like a fearful child to the leg of a parent dressed in party clothes, impatient to be away.”
“Good lord.” Glastonbury said aloud. He turned the book over and looked at the author’s photograph again. Flump Retchedson looked a little like Slim Whitman. Glastonbury wondered what he had gotten himself into. Thirty dollars was a lot of money’s worth he would have to extract.

Cards with Inspirational Messages on Them

Next to Stoole’s was Pattersley’s, a stationary and greeting card store. People still wrote a lot of letters in the Mapzone. They had an old-fashioned postal service whose diligence encouraged old-fashioned correspondence. Standing at the window, holding her small paper bag of purchases in her hand was Miss Okrea. She had seen Glastonbury emerge from next door with his purchase which sight stopped her as she was about to exit.
“Something wrong, Miss Okrea?” Asked one of the girls who worked in Pattersley’s.
“There is a man out there I don’t want to see. That is, I don’t want him to see me.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll just wait a minute while he moves farther away.” Miss Okrea was dismayed to see Glastonbury going in the direction she had intended to walk. Oh well, she would just have to go in the opposite direction. After a minute she thanked the attendant girl and left. She had bought a selection of cards with inspirational messages on them.
Seeing one of these cards in the mail two days later, Dallas Pimiento’s first thought was “Who is Angela Okrea?” His second was “Hmm, greeting cards.” For on the front of the card Pimiento had received was a painting of a monkey on a monkey-sized sailboat. The message, “Make of your days a knotted rope of memory,” didn’t matter. It meant nothing to Pimiento. But the concept! Why couldn’t he market his paintings by putting out a line of greeting cards utilizing his work? Of course, he would have to have some catchy phrases. He couldn’t just slap “Happy Birthday” or “Get your shit together, kid” on greeting cards with his paintings on the front.
The rest of the week was spent sporadically fleshing out this idea as well as countering it with others that seemed no more or less flaky. It was fun coming up with stupid messages that amounted to alternate titles for his paintings (which were usually titled with more abstract things like “Analog Jester” or “There was the Stalwart Barber, Hoodwinked”), plus it took his mind off the current series of paintings he was doing. The works in this series were based around what Ron Carter and Herbie Hancock might have been doing on June 19 and September 24, 1968, although, obviously, Pimiento had not actually included images of these two musicians in the paintings, but his usual cartoonish, abstracted, almost bestial figures.
He ate two Moon Pies on the old sofa in his high-ceilinged living room in a fit of restlessness. His guilt over this was a further motivation to get his own shit together.

Riding in Comfort

From out of the east came a gigantic touring sedan. It had just entered the Mapzone and was headed into Tomatoville on highway 439. An observant farmer who happened to be collecting his mail at the end of his driveway saw the car go by and noted the special license plate on its rear that indicated royalty. He headed back to the farmhouse as fast as he could make it and immediately got on the phone to his son, who worked as a reporter for the Tomatoville Comment.
“What else did you see, Dad?” asked Trent Fricker upon hearing his father’s story. As his father reiterated the same words he had already spoken, Fricker beckoned across the room to another man, Bobby Euletide, a photographer.
“Okay, Dad, I’ve got to go. Thanks for calling, I’m going to get busy on this right now!” The reporter hung up and hastened Euletide closer with all ten fingers. He whispered the news to the photographer. The latter rushed to grab his camera while Fricker pulled on his coat and pushed the last bite of his sandwich into his mouth.
“My father saw the car approximately ten minutes ago.” Fricker analyzed as he turned the wheel of his tiny, rusted car.
“Out on 439.” Euletide added.
“Right.” Fricker headed towards the east side of town. “That means he should be entering the city limits in the next minute or so.”
“‘He?’” Euletide questioned ominously.
“Could be.” Fricker raised his eyebrows. “But, unannounced?”
“Just because it’s a car with royal plates doesn’t mean the king himself is inside.” Euletide’s right elbow was out the window of the car. His left hand gripped the camera at his chest.
“Even if it isn’t the king himself, it’s still a story; no member of the royal household has visited Tomatoville, much less the Mapzone, in over twenty years.
Euletide remained silent as Fricker madly tried to intercept the newsworthy auto.
“There it is!” Fricker shouted.
“Are you sure?” Euletide gripped his camera with both hands.
“It’s got to be! Look at it!” Fricker turned like a crazy man and got behind the car.
They followed for nearly ten minutes until the car pulled into the parking lot of the largest hotel in the city. They were ready when the driver’s door opened and a uniformed man emerged.




The Coming Digital Singularity of all Human Consciousness

“Welcome to Tomatoville, your highness.” The manager of the Apricot, the largest hotel in the city, greeted the royal arrival.
“Thank you.” Said the young man in the plain, but exquisitely tailored suit. “This is my assistant, Mr. Tunbridge. He will be handling all of the details of my stay here in your hotel as well as the upcoming conference, so perhaps you had best address yourself to him.” The young man turned away to look around the lobby of the hotel.
Some distance away, Euletide watched.
“Count Bogartine.” Euletide said softly to Fricker as the latter approached. “I never heard of him.”
“Tommy back at the office tells me the count’s great aunt is Queen Stephanie.” Fricker informed his companion.
“So, he’s not a blood relation of the king?”
“Apparently not. I wonder what this conference is about.”
That evening Count Bogartine answered that question at a preliminary press conference and cocktail party.
“This conference, to which I have invited the key minds of Tomatoville, is about promoting awareness of the greatest threat to civilization, if not the entirety of out species: the coming digital singularity of all human consciousness.”
Fricker and Euletide had been invited to the gathering as the official representatives of the Comment. During the press conference portion of the evening, Fricker asked his highness,
“Why has your highness chosen Tomatoville to host a conference on such an important topic?”
“Because, my good man, this is consciousness raising, not consciousness homogenization.” The count answered, amused at himself, then looked at Fricker with pleasant indulgence.
Euletide tugged at Fricker’s pants leg to stop him asking a follow-up question.
“He’s a crank.” He whispered once Fricker had sat down.
Another reporter, this one from the Okraton Questioner, stood up.
“Your highness, what does your uncle, the king, think of this conference?” The haggard man, unknown to either Fricker or Euletide, asked.
“I really don’t know how to answer that.” Count Bogartine looked winded.
“Does this conference, then, not have the endorsement of the royal household?” was the follow-up question.
Fricker stared open-mouthed in awe at the unknown reporter.

Who is Stan?

“Jaguin, this is Phil Calcior.” The police detective said into the phone.
“Hello, Phil, what’s up?” Answered Jaguin breathlessly.
“I need your help with something.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah, it’s in connection with the suicide at the cathedral this past weekend.”
“What’s that? At Clamdigger’s Cathedral?”
“What other cathedral would there be?” Calcior tried to be smart, but that was a mistake with Jaguin, the keeper of the Roughshed and therefore the keeper of the history of Tomatoville.
“Well, there’s Red Cathedral, Wino Bob’s Cathedral, and then there’s the so-called Cathedral of the Three Stresses.” Jaguin still sounded winded, as if he had been moving a piano when the phone rang. In fact, he had been doing nothing more strenuous than drinking a cup of coffee and going through a box of idiosyncratically painted saucers.
“Alright, alright, point taken. I mean a cathedral in the traditional sense, one dedicated to a traditional religion.” Calcior grumbled.
“Phil, the religion of the Docubrites, who assemble at Wino Bob’s, has been around since the days of the Stoner War. That means…”
“I believe you.” Calcior interrupted. “Jaguin, I need to know who ‘Stan’ is.”
“Stan?”
“That’s right: Stan. Who is Stan?”
“Stan who?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.”
Jaguin sighed deeply. He drank down the rest of his coffee in one gulp. “OK.” He said. “Can you meet me at the Roughshed in five minutes?”
After responding in the affirmative, Calcior left his desk and headed to his and Jaguin’s destination. Jaguin was ten minutes late.
“Sorry.” Jaguin said as he walked up. “I was delayed.” He patted his abdomen.
“Shit on your own time, Jaguin. This is police business.” Calcior snapped. The detective followed Jaguin up the stairs and inside the Roughshed.
“Someone has been here.” Jaguin said sternly as soon as they entered.
“How can you tell?” Calcior asked.
“I can smell it.” Jaguin’s nose held a drop of sweat on its tip.

Turn the TV Down

Dud Whylte wished his co-workers would turn the TV in the commissary down. This was one of the main reasons he usually took his lunches and coffee breaks at his desk, in his cubicle.
“Life has certainly deteriorated since television became ubiquitous.” He over-vocalized to the man across the table from him.
“It’s only going to get worse if this Count Bogartine is right.” Brant Borden folded the newspaper he had been reading and laid it beside his tray.
“Computers…” Whylte let the word dissipate like after-shave.
“Just another form of TV.” Borden concluded. “Now, Dud, I’m putting together a task force on the possible religious aspects of these new genetically engineered bean pods. Are you interested?”
“In being on the task force?” Whylte struggled to take it in. “Certainly. When do I start?”
Borden laughed. “Take it easy.” He said. “What are you working on now?”
“I’m still projecting reactions to different colors besides yellow for the packaging of lunch meat.” Whylte finished his chocolate milk.
“OK, you’re off that. I can get you off that. Start preparing your staff for your leaving. I plan to have this task force in operation by the end of the month.”
“Well, thank you.” Whylte felt like crying. “I can’t tell you how… bored I was getting.”
“Don’t tell anybody else you said that. It doesn’t look good.” Both Borden and Whylte fell silent after this. Borden was busy finishing his sandwich, Whylte in looking around the commissary.
“Brant, look at this guy over here.” Whylte pointed to a wooly-headed man standing before a table a few feet away. “Watch him. Now, it’s one o’clock right now.” Whylte tapped his watch. “He’s on break, not lunch. I know him. I’ve watched him before. He’s got fifteen minutes. Now, you’d think he’d sit down and relax, but no, he’ll go in and out of the commissary for several minutes, and even after he decides to stay, he’ll spend I don’t know how much time socializing before he actually sits down.”
“And this bothers you?” Borden asked.
“It offends me.” Admitted Whylte. “Stupidity offends me.”
“You don’t watch TV at all, do you?” Borden said.

A White Symbol on a Field of Orange

The banner that flew over Tomatoville’s old castle waas that of the far away king, Brisbig XII.
“Look at it, Tom—the proud symbol of our ancient heritage.” Tom’s father Finley declared, gesturing upwards at the castle’s keep.
“What is that symbol on the flag, father?” Tom asked.
“Why, Tom, you should know that! It is the popcorn kernel exploded, the symbol of the house of Turgid, the house of our king!” Finley tugged at his cap’s brim as he said these words.
“Is there some significance to the color orange?” Tom further inquired.
“You bet there is, Tom.” Finley’s eyes twinkled. “Orange was at one time thought to be the color of the true king’s blood.”
“But now we know it to be blue. Right?”
“No, Tom. His blood is red, like everybody else’s.”
“Mr. Spock’s blood is green.”
“Good for Mr. Spock.” Finley looked down at his son’s shoes for some reason. “Remember that this flag, and the symbolism behind it, is very ancient. People back in those days didn’t have access to the accumulation of scientific research that we have today.”
“Mr. Spock is a scientist.” Tom smiled.
“Tom, are you mocking me?” Finley turned so that the castle was behind him. In the distance he could see the oldest part of Tomatoville laid out in its idiosyncratic way beneath the hill on which the castle stood.
“No.” Tom shook his head slightly.
“I hope not. Because our ancient heritage is nothing to mock. And when you mock me, when I’m trying to explain these matters to you, you’re mocking our ancient heritage.”
“Dad, don’t you think that as the castle is now a museum, and the king is politically powerless and living over a thousand miles away, we Tomatovilleans should focus more on symbols relevant to who we are today?”
“Tom, I don’t know what they teach you in that school of yours.” Finley turned back to the castle. They stood one hundred feet from the entrance, where a hot dog stand awaited their custom.

Talks to the Issues

“I like Mr. Floorez: he talks to the issues.” Mabel told her neighbor, the saturnine Medrick Grat, man of complex and puzzling feelings.
“He talks to them, Mabel?” Grat smiled.
“You know what I mean, Medrick.” Mabel and Grat stood on either side of the low hedge that separated their yards. “He talks about them.”
“But what candidate does not?”
“Some of them try to flummox you with their personalities or their looks, but Mr. Floorez is actually trying to spell out how matters stand in this city.”
“I know what you mean, Mabel.” Grat looked away. Across the street he could see the Burlap couple erecting a trampoline. “I’m just tired of all the politicians. I may not even vote this time.”
“Medrick! That’s terrible! You must vote! Everyone needs to vote! Especially this election.”
The election Mable referred to would determine Tomatoville’s leadership for the next five years. The current mayor, Trammel Softi, was retiring. His successor, along with the majority of the council that the mayor presided over, would be chosen. Mr. Floorez was just one of many candidates. One of them, the one who was probably going to win the mayoralty, according to most predictions, was Steve Wells. As Mabel and Medrick Grat talked, mentioning him not once, Wells was touring the defunct dog arena in one of the seedier parts of town.
“This place can be converted.” The candidate said.
“Of course, Mr. Wells.” Agreed the man showing Wells and his staff about, a leader of the local community.
“It could be made into a…well, some sort of…youth center?” Wells suggested.
“Indeed, Mr. Wells, it would make a fine youth center. But really, what some of the business owners in the area would like to see is this place fully renovated and converted into a casino.” The man said that last word as if he were naming a well-loved celebrity that could be induced to attend one’s birthday party.
“A casino.” Wells repeated. “That could run into opposition, moral opposition, especially in a neighborhood like this.”
“Such opposition can always be overcome.” Smiled the man.

Lido Kork

It relieves me immensely to get to write about Lido Kork, because not only does it allow me to step outside the self-imposed boundaries of the Mapzone (Lido Kork is a TV character), but also because it gives me (for reasons I can’t exactly define at the moment) the opportunity to re-enter the narrative. I have tried to keep myself out of things (being “dead,” I thought it appropriate), but there is a limit to how much and how long I can remain consistent thematically and true to my initial intentions. As I have said before, “Purism is our enemy.” In addition to all of that, there are only so many things I can say without showing my hand, as it were. Perhaps a better image would be that of a puppeteer giving the audience a glimpse of himself. But then again, that might involve showing a hand.
Thus we come to Lido Kork. Tomatoville has two private broadcasting networks, as well as a government-run one, all of which provide original programming of a strictly entertainment nature. Lido Kork is a character on “The Vitamin Store,” a program on the Mold network. He is not the protagonist of the show, nor the best friend of the protagonist, but a colorful rival for the attentions of the protagonist. As played by Reg Turnblatt, he has become a citywide obsession, a hero to thousands of self-consciously odd, disaffected young men. His fame has even extended to Okraton and Corn City, whose residents can pick up broadcast signals from Tomatoville with special, quasi-legal boosting equipment.
Even I, in my nebulous realm, have access to Mapzone broadcasting, both radio and TV. Among the small amount of programs that I allow myself to waste time on, “The Vitamin Store,” is one. It is a silly show, weighed down with a clumsy laugh track, but the Lido Kork character redeems it to a certain extent. Through the ether transfer mechanisms at my disposal, I have made contact with Lido Kork (the character, not the actor within) for your enlightenment and amusement.
Me: Lido Kork, it is good to speak with you.
LK: I feel similarly in regard to you.
Me: In the few moments we have remaining, could you tell me what you think of Reg Tunblatt’s portrayal of you?
LK: “Few moments?” I thought we had plenty of time.
Me: I’m sorry, this medium is even more restricted than that of a sit-com.
LK: They told me you operated in a rarefied atmosphere, but see it’s the same old snow job.
Your Children Will Be Disappointed

Now liberated from the bonds of silence, I find it hard to control myself and reserve my commentary to the most opportune and discreet of moments. However, I will try to fulfill the terms of the format as diligently as possible while still allowing myself my indulgences. A compromise, but, the way I see it, that’s what the concept of ineinandergreifend entails.
As for Your Children Will Be Disappointed, I would suppose that title refers to the day when my children, grown to maturity, sift through my collected works looking for something publishable, something that will bring them some cash in exchange for the burden of having to keep up with so much clutter. They will find only page after page of drivel like this one.
I just ate three snack cakes (yes, we have vending machines here in oblivion) and now the guilt of that act is only adding to the downward spiral I feel on contemplating my children’s disappointment. If I could summon Dallas Pimiento for a chat I might feel better, but as he is now in the Mapzone, he is beyond my direct contact. Perhaps zooming in on him for a little observational narrative will suffice.
He is in his studio, a bedroom that once housed a little boy and all his toys, books, and collections. He faces a small canvas upon which he has placed four crude figures in the most sketchily devised of rooms.
“So sleepy.” He says to himself. He wants to continue painting, but he knows that he will be cheating the work if he continues in his present state. With an effort, he throws his brush into a bucket of water and seals up his paints. They are kept in old baby food jars.
“I got them from a friend of mine whose wife had had a baby.” He explained to a visitor only the other day. The visitor, a gay man who teaches gerontology at the nearby university, had stopped by to view Pimiento’s work. Pimiento thought he had a possible patron on his hands, but, as usual, he failed to do or say the right thing that would set him on the path to a real career.
“Your figures are rather crude, aren’t they?” The professor has said.
Pimiento took this as a compliment. After all, he didn’t want to be Norman Rockwell, did he?


Worm’s Accommodation Held Indefinitely

Twenty feet beneath the surface lay the Gathygan Hotel. It’s manager, Mr. Holmes, paced the area behind the front desk.
“Midnight, the letter said.” He moaned and wrung his hands together.
“Relax, Mr. Holmes.” The desk clerk said softly.
“Don’t you tell me to relax!” Holmes shot back. “I can have you fired any time I like for any reason! Or, for no reason at all! You remember that.”
Dennis, the clerk, looked across the lobby. A few more weeks, he thought. A few more weeks and I can quit this job. He kept telling himself that he could tough it out. It usually wasn’t so bad, he admitted, but tonight Holmes was here, worried over the supposedly imminent arrival of some important guest.
A mile away, traveling along the subaltern switchback, Minder Rump, a worm among worms, star of the notorious “The Grabber” series of films (The Grabber, The Grabber Mounts the Moon, Coronation for the Grabber, and The Grabber Eats His Words), was twiddling his thumbs in the back seat of a large private transport. He sighed with impatience as the driver made yet another report on his on-going efforts to repair the engine.
“Something jammed in the traverse sprocket plate.” The driver sniffed hard at his runny nose. “I don’t think proper maintenance has been done on this car.”
“OK.” Rump nodded tersely, not looking at the driver. He couldn’t bear to. His exasperation was growing by the minute. He wanted a drink and a hot shower. Finally, he leapt out of the back of the vehicle and informed the driver that he would catch a side from some passing conveyance.
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that, if I was you, sir. You could get stuck with a nut.” The other worm, fat and greasy, warned.
“I’ll take my chances. If you ever get this piece of shit running, continue with the trip as scheduled.”
“OK, sir, but…”
Minder Rump turned towards the road. It was night and not much traffic about, but he soon managed to get the attention of a brightly painted coupe.
“Do you think you could give me a lift to the Gathygan Hotel?” He asked.
“I’ve never heard of it.” Replied the young female at the wheel. “But I’ll find it if I can.”

Chapstick Eaten in Near-Desperation

Although ravenous, uncontrollable hunger had not yet claimed Weston’s mind and body, he caved in to an idea that had come to him about an hour before and ate the almost full tube of Chapstick brand lip balm that he carried in the pocket of his forest green duster.
“It contains natural fats that my body can process into energy.” He told the others midway through the pink column of balm.
“Is there such a thing as an unnatural fat?” Gifwood asked Nadal.
“Candles made of human tallow.” Brad intoned with a striking deadpan that froze any hope of jocular discussion. Brad rose from the empty mango crate he had slept on the night before. “I was there when they ate them. I didn’t see them manufactured, I was out on patrol, but I saw them gag them down. I…I was tempted, but I didn’t succumb. The temptation must not have been that great.” Brad stood in the center of the circle of fairly puckish men.
“It still doesn’t come under the heading of unnatural, that’s my point. By definition, everything that exists is natural, and therefore…”
Nadal cut Gifwood off. “He doesn’t mean ‘natural’ in that sense.”
“Besides,” Brad’s voice was sharp. “That stuff will give you diarrhea.” He pointed his finger at Weston.
“At least now I’ll have the energy to get out of here!” Weston cried, his teeth glistening. He dashed to the locked door.
“It’s the petroleum distillates! They’ve driven him mad!” Someone (supposedly) knowledgeable on such matters shouted as Weston heaved at the heavy bolt that barred their way.
“Stop it!” Tom and Lester shouted as they rushed forward. They grappled with the crazed Weston, tearing his fingers away from the door.
“You fools!” Weston cried. He fell to his hands and knees on the floor. “Don’t you feel it? It’s dinnertime! It’s dinnertime!” He sobbed uncontrollably.
Frank, who had actually been fasting, suggested that if they were all that hungry, why not chew off their fingernails and swallow them?
“We’re not that desperate, Frank.” Gifwood snapped.
“It may come to that.” Brad said ominously. He held up his fingertips to the others, but the scars were too small for them to make out.

False Bottom Restrictions

Many more theories were rejected than I have space to delineate here regarding the phrase “False Bottom Restrictions.” They generally fell into two categories however: those that saw the phrase as indicating restrictions upon false bottoms and those that viewed the phrase as referring to bottom restrictions that were themselves false. There were, in addition, wildly divergent ideas dealing with abstractions and concepts supposedly “encoded” within the phrase, but these were not as numerous as the main two groups.
As it was felt that the public would overwhelmingly interpret the phrase as having something to do with smuggling and the circumvention of customs laws, an additional exploratory panel was formed to…well, explore how all those people who made up the public would react should it turn out that they were wrong. This secondary panel was remunerated for their services at a higher rate than the first, as it was felt that the responsibility laid up on them was far more taxing and the theorizing to be done was of a far more discreet nature. Of course, there were disagreements about this coming from members of the first panel, but, working as they were under the direction of the long arm of the Ministry of Hypothetical Digression, there was little they could do to change matters. A third panel was proposed to sort out any differences between the two, but this was opposed so vigorously by them that the idea was dropped.
Meanwhile, the smugglers, working under the loosest of confederacies, debated little except within the interiors of their own conscious minds. The ones who made use of false bottoms were generally held to be amateurs, except when the false bottom was not in a piece of luggage, but in the hold of a small boat. Then smiles of respect and delight at the professionalism of others were the general response. As the Mapzone did not border any large body of water such as the world-encircling ocean, the subject of boats, big or small, bringing contraband into the area was strictly limited to anecdotes to pass the time away until the next job was to be done.
Thus we see that the entire debate over the phrase “False Bottom Restrictions” was in face a moot one, as false bottoms were not generally used by the professional smugglers, unless, of course, the phrase referred to bottom restrictions being false. Then the debate would be a worthwhile one, for in truth they would be false. But then, if that was so, why the debate?

An Arrival on Rocky Festivities

In summoning the memories of his arrival on Rocky Festivities, Vole Stoddard shook his head at the thought that he still did not know exactly what the name Rocky Festivities referred to. Someone certainly had a surreal sense of humor when he (or she; Stoddard acknowledged that the architect could have been a woman) named the tower in that peculiar manner. Parenthetically, I have mentioned that Stoddard thought of the architect as the bestower of the name. Now, however, reaching for the memory aid, he further acknowledged that it might have the contractor or even the owner who came up with it.
“Does that stuff help you think?” Necrosanct asked, pointing at the hot cup of tea in Stoddard’s hand.
“Yeah. I call it my memory aid. Or, at least,” He paused to consider. “Someone does.” He sipped in what he deemed a thoughtful manner.
“OK, now, Stoddard, you had just arrived on Rocky Festivities. I assume you say ‘on’ because you had to fly up in a craft of some kind and make a landing on the platform near the summit. Then what happened?”
“Right.” Stoddard nodded. “I was flown up in an autobird. We landed on the platform, which is inaccessible in any other way. I’m sure you’ve seen the tower from the ground. That platform is almost one thousand feet up. Scary. There’s no guardrail. There were about six of us in the group; I can’t remember exactly how many.”
“Was the goat with you?” Necrosanct asked.
“A goat? Yes, there was a goat with us. I didn’t know his name. He seemed to be traveling with one or two other people. As I told you, I went up alone. That is; without…”
“A complaining; yes, you told me. And then? Then what happened?”
“Well, we were greeted by some people that worked for Rocky Festivities. They…”
“Were they uniformed?” Necrosanct interrupted.
“Y…es, I suppose they were. They had nametags and everything. I remember one of them was a really good-looking girl. Her name was… oh, god, what was it?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Necrosanct urged Stoddard on. “What did the interior of the tower look like at that level?”
Stoddard considered. “I’m going to need some more tea.”

Organ Brutally Drained of Enterprisingness

“Who can tell us which organ has been so brutally drained of enterprisingness?” Professor Tourne asked the classroom full of grown people. “Anyone? Ned, do you have the answer?”
“Well, I take it you don’t mean like a Hammond B-3?” Ned Feese felt his way. A few in the room laughed.
“I don’t think so.” The professor said. “What’s a Hammond B-3?”
Greater laughter met this question.
“It’s an organ used on a lot of old Jazz albums.” Was the best Feese could do.
“An…organ? Oh, you mean a musical instrument?” Tourne stabbed the air with his fingertips.
“Yes.” Any previous enthusiasm was gone from Feese’s voice.
“Golly, I had forgotten that there was such an aspect to the word’s definition.” Professor Tourne shook his head. “No, not that kind of organ. An organ in the body. Can you tell us which organ in the body was drained of enterprisingness?”
“In this particular subject?” Feese stalled. He knew the spotlight was still on him.
“Yes.” Tourne turned around to the table upon which lay the nearly catatonic goat. “We’re still dealing with this subject.”
Willa Wice spoke up, sparing Feese from further discomfort.
“The brain?” She was confident of the answer, but she added the slightest, questioning lilt to it out of politeness’ sake.
“Very good, Miss Wice.” Tourne seemed to sigh in relief.
Feese, although he wanted to, did not turn his head to Willa and convey his appreciation with a manly grin or a bold wink. He might have merely nodded, but he didn’t do that either. After class was over, however, he managed to work his way to the young woman’s side and begin a charmingly self-deprecating conversation. At the first decent opening he asked Miss Wice out.
“I’m dating someone!” She shot back, as if he had suggested that they murder a random stranger together in violation of her strict moral code. She added an apology, but the flash of outrage (or was it reflexive defensiveness?) had already knifed into Feese. Still, he later admitted, it gave him a better aftertaste than a rejection based on revulsion. It allowed him to hate her instead of himself.

No Evidence of Polydactylism

After the goat subject had expired (from lack of interest in anything, Tourne postulated), a curious thing happened. Normally, the bodies of research subjects were immediately cremated in the basement facility, but on this occasion two men bearing authorization papers signed by the school’s chancellor entered the auditorium and took the dead goat away.
“I demand to know what you’re going to do with that goat!” Tourne had followed the two men downstairs to their waiting van.
“We all have our specialized fields of research, Professor.” One of the men told him. The other grinned and said,
“Keep watching the journals; maybe you’ll see something.”
“Which journals?” Tourne asked as the van doors were shut. “Which journals?” He yelled as the van drove away.
Nearly a year later, having all but forgotten the incident, Tourne came across a paper, not in Spice Times or The Savory Papers, the two journals most closely associated with his field, but in The Clamdigger’s Hamhock, entitled, “Documentation Hidden Inside a Hole in the Sheetrock.” The conclusion of this paper: no evidence of polydactylism.
He threw the volume down on his desk with a bang, startling the grad student and his paramour in the middle of their act of coitus on the desk in the office next door.
“Polydactylism!” Tourne shouted.
“Does that mean iniquity?” Asked the paramour. The grad student’s reply is unknown, for, following Tourne in the full fury of his flight up to the dean’s office, we have neither time nor ears to hear it.
“Polydactylism!” Tourne repeated his shout for the dean.
“What’s that, Tourne?” The dean lackadaisically begged.
“Polydactylism! The goat had five digits on the end of each of his legs.” Tourne leaned on the dean’s desk and pronounced this with all the finality of cosmic law.
“Are you sure, man?” The dean’s mouth gaped beneath his moustache.
“I am.” Tourne insisted.
The dean fingered his moustache thoroughly before asking, “What goat?”

Hazard the Green Island

“Well, Brant, shall we hazard the Green Island?” Old Mr. Thorpe pointed with his cane at the small island in the middle of Trewscale’s pond.
“You can, Mr. Thorpe. I’ve got better things to do.” Brant Borden rubbed his eyes wearily.
“Oh, come on, man. I can’t row myself out there.” Thorpe reasoned.
Borden looked at the old man in his silly, broad-brimmed, white hat and thought how much fun it would be to strand him on the island. That would teach him. With this half-intention in mind he agreed to accompany Thorpe.
“This is paradise.” Thorpe declared, looking about at the well-tended grounds of Trewscale before setting foot in the leather-covered coracle.
“If you say so.” Borden muttered. He held the little boat tightly against the dock while the old man got in.
“I love this place.” Thorpe said. “It was the best thing the Vandal family ever did for this city.” He added when he noticed that Borden wasn’t fully attentive.
“They employ seven hundred people who would otherwise be on the dole. That’s something, I guess.” Borden said through gritted teeth as he struggled with the single oar. “But, on the other hand, they promote one of the most invidious cults around.”
“And Trewscale tips the balance.” Thorpe wagged his finger at Borden pedantically in the midst of drawing on his white gloves. The half-glove finger flaccidly flopped.
Borden glanced at their destination roughly two hundred feet away. “Is that Ramona?” He asked aloud. He had seen a young lady whose nose excited him.
“I don’t know.” Thorpe answered, not looking around to see. “Watch how you’re paddling, Borden; I’m bobbing up and down here.”
“This boat is unbalanced.” Borden growled. “Like the Vandal family’s legacy.” He added to himself.
“Watch it!” The old man shifted his weight in a panic and tipped the coracle up on end. Did Borden assist him in falling into the water? It is to be assumed so, for it is hard to believe that Thorpe could fall in even under those conditions. He had a death grip on the side.
With the coracle once again floating correctly, Borden continued to the island.
“Aren’t you going to help Mr. Thorpe?” Ramona demanded as she took off her shoes.



A Few More Copies of the Leaping Dog

“Albert’s death is a real tragedy.” Mona commented to Frescus.
“He was the janitor, Mona.” Frescus did not take his eyes off the focusing grid of the photonic coil. “It hardly rises to the height of a real tragedy.”
“I feel sorry for him, that’s all.” Mona held a tray of tools that Frescus might need. Each of the two lab coat-clad technicians was perspiring slightly thought the underground lab was cool. The biozorox machine was generating plenty of heated air molecules.
“I don’t feel sorry for him at all.” Frescus fired the coil with a thick trigger under his finger. “He’s dead. It’s his parents that I would feel sorry for if I felt sorry at all.”
“How many more copies are you going to make?” Mona asked.
“Just a few more.”
In the next room James and Bertha were alternately shocking the dog at their disposal by electrifying the floor or holding out irresistible treats on the end of a boom. Each action brought about the desired result: to make the dog leap as high as he could. The two different approaches were necessary, so the current thinking went, to keep the subject (in this instance, a dog) from becoming complacent.
“You see,” explained Dr. Schafftenslap, “Complacency in any test subject is death to the experiment. Unless we are actually testing for that quality. Of course, with a human subject the irresistible treat is one of a different nature than the imported nuggets of whale’s eye, but the idea is the same.”
Count Bogartine, to whom Schafftenslap was explaining these things, nodded vigorously. “Yes, yes,” he said. “It’s extremely important work, as I can see, but can you tell me where exactly this research fits in to the great problem which I have come here to discuss?”
“Well,” Schafftenslap drawled, pulling his long white beard through his fist. “As I understand it, you’re trying to delay the technological breakthrough that will allow all human nervous systems to be linked together?”
“Yes,” replied the Count. “Or stop it outright.”
The scientist looked hard at Bogartine. “You’re fighting a losing battle.” He told him.

Banned Under the Tent

“I’m sorry, sir, but food and drinks are banned under the tent.” The attendant at the door told Ray.
With a snort of disgust Ray threw his bag of chips into the teeming garbage can. Then he passed through the slit in the large tent, wondering to himself why he had not demanded ‘why’ of the attendant.
His unasked question was soon answered. In the middle of the darkened ring inside the tent a spotlight appeared, illuminating a man in black coveralls.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he called out in a powerful voice. “Give me your attention, please! I must ask for your silence and close attention!” The man paused for a moment for the crowd around him to cease talking. “My name is Grib Charters. In a minute my friends and I are going to bring out a creature of immense size and strength. I must ask that you remain quiet! He must not be startled. You have been asked at the door not to bring any food or drinks inside. This is necessary because the smell could drive the creature to a frenzy. Now, if you are all ready, we’ll bring out Incarno, the Beast!”
The man turned aside as the spotlight expanded. Gasps were heard from those near the oncoming attraction who could discern its hulking shape in the gloom. Four men garbed similarly to Charters led in a bear-like creature by leather straps attached to a harness about its torso. It walked on its hind legs and stood approximately ten feet tall.
“Behold: Incarno!” Charters boomed.
“That’s a ground sloth.” A middle-aged man seated next to Ray said aloud in a conversational tone, audible to Ray even amid the collective gasps of the audience. Ray studied the men leading the beast. Their faces were grim.
“That’s a ground sloth.” Ray’s neighbor said again. The fellow turned to Ray and leaned forward, getting his attention. “That thing’s a ground sloth.” He repeated.
“Oh yeah?” Ray responded because he felt he had to.
“Yeah. I’ve read books. That’s a ground sloth.”
“Aren’t they extinct?” Ray raised his voice. The crowd was applauding the beast’s performance of a simple trick.
“No,” said the man. “They got some still alive out in the woods.”

Fudgebunny

Finley, hunting for his son Tom, who had been missing for over forty-eight hours, enlisted the services of the Fudgebunny, a creature in the charge of Randolf Blunt. Finley wrote out a check for two hundred dollars and placed it in the weathered palm of Blunt, who then proceeded to explain how to handle the Fudgebunny.
“Fudgebunny!” He called out to the tall, bipedal, rabbit-like creature. “Follow this man!” He then placed the reins attached to a collar about its neck in Finley’s hands. “He’s all yours now.” Blunt told Finley.
“Well, let’s go.” Said Finley.
“I told you: you got to say his name.” Blunt reminded the distraught father.
“But it’s so silly.” Finley complained.
Beginning just outside the charming little cabaret where Tom had last been seen, Finley and Fudgebunny hunted for tracks or other telltale spoor. No sooner had they picked up on a promising trail than Fudgebunny made a ghastly vocalization. Through inhuman vocal cords he seemed to say,
“Need go baffoom!”
“Go then, you expensive mistake!” Finley ordered. The creature made use of oversized facilities at the nearby train depot.
Once again they set off, the creature’s nose, so like that of a rabbit, sniffing at prints invisible to Finley’s eye. An hour later, exhausted from holding the leash, Finley sensed anxiety in Fudgebunny.
“What is it?” He asked, not expecting a sensible answer. He was surprised the hear Fudgebunny say,
“Nith it!”
They were standing in the cool dawn outside the Mock Boat Maze.
“In there?” Finley asked, pointing at the strangely shaped building.
Fudgebunny’s jerky, eager movements and agitated moans were answer enough. “This is the person you’re looking for, Fudgbunny.” Finley forced himself to say the embarrassing name as he held up a picture of Tom. He released the creature from his grasp and sent him barreling through the front door. Breathlessly he followed, in his haste nearly missing Tom, who was standing just inside devouring a sandwich.

Now I Shall Attempt to Memorize the Proper Use of “Shall”

“I shall open the newspaper and therein will see what is fit to be read.” Easy enough, I suppose, but try putting it into action. Ask yourself throughout the busy day which actions are volitional and which are not. It’s hard to do. After a while you begin to wonder if grammatical orthodoxy is really worth the effort.
How the worth of any effort is calculated is more important than the actual worth, probably more important than the effort. Methodologies consume the better part of my day. That has to change. It should (a form of shall) as confidence grows. To do things surrealistically—that would (a form of will) be the best.
It’s no secret that I am writing this. It should be no secret that the narrative(s) is/are unfolding under my direction. What may not be obvious is that a quasi-surrealist methodology is being employed in the composition of this work, not only piece by piece, but as a whole. That whole can be extrapolated to include the sum of my life, and therefore the universe I live in. My work is a balance between things that happen and things that I make happen. To quote Johnny Cash, “I walk the line.”
Who is lonelier, the puppet or the puppeteer?
The improper use of language (under its own, internal rules) was the only crime that King Brisbig XII felt he still had any authority to pronounce judgment over. As the best of late seventies funk played in the background, Brisbig discussed sentencing with his left and right hands, each disguised as a wooden-headed courtier from times long past.
“These are semantic cesspools, Your Majesty, to use Lenny Bruce’s phrase.” Said the right hand, a nametag on his breast reading Dodie.
“Yes, but they are important to me.” The old King replied.
“Don’t listen to him, my king, he’s obsessed with a sloppy, free-spirited approach to life.” Said Morris, the left hand.
“I’m for getting to the heart of the argument.” Dodie argued.
“Rules, man, rules.”
“I’m afraid I’ve lost the thread here.”
“What was I going to say?”

Her Own Edible Version

“This is Trip.” Willa said just before she bit the chocolate facsimile’s head off.
“Where’d you get it?” Patricia asked. She was eating a light snack, consisting of nothing more than a hard, unsalted cracker and very hot water flavored with a wedge of lemon.
“There’s a place near the Salutation Building that makes them. You bring in two photographs, one taken from the front, and the second from the side and they can make the figure from that.”
“Can I see it?” Patricia asked.
Willa held it out. Patricia made as if to take it, but Willa drew it back.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t want your fingers on it.” Willa said.
“Why, because he’s your boyfriend?”
“Was, Patricia. And no, that’s not the reason. I just don’t want your germs.”
“I don’t have germs!”
“Everybody has germs, Patricia.”
“My hands are clean!”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You’ve got your hands all over it.” Patricia noted.
“I don’t mind eating my own germs.”
“You mean you’re going to eat that whole lump of chocolate?”
“As much as I can stuff in.”
“And then what?”
“Then I’ll throw the rest of it away.”
“I’m sorry, Willa, but you’ve really let yourself go since Trip died.”
“Trip’s not dead!”
“Oh, come on…”
“He’s not dead, Patricia, he’s lost, maybe forever, trapped in some subterranean chamber.”
“You still miss him?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then why are you eating this statue of him so angrily?”
“Because he’s an asshole.”

Macrocompunction

“Gentlemen,” Dr. Schafftenslap addressed the committee, even though it contained two women, “The time has come to initiate the macrocompunction phase of our operations.”
The excitement that met this announcement was visible in the faces of all those seated about the table.
“So soon?” Asked Felton Sharp. “What about the so-called ten year plan?” A couple of others echoed this.
“You know that I would not be saying this unless I had received word from the highest authority.” Schafftenslap pulled a piece of paper out of his briefcase. “I, too, am an employee.” He handed the paper to the man on his left. “Pass this around.” He said.
After reading what the paper had to say, Dot Darkwood asked, “How will this affect our analysis of the sports obsessions of the blue-collar class?”
“That’s your field, right Dot?” Schafftenslap asked. “Well, my reading of the revised time line is that only the most vital projects will be allowed to proceed while macrocompunction is under way.”
“Who determines what projects are the ‘most vital?’” Sharp pushed his glasses further up the bridge of his nose with one, purple-stained finger.
“As senior administrator and chief of research, I will be making those determinations.” Schafftenslap said almost apologetically.
“I most protest.” Dennis Delarado tapped the tabletop with his tapper. “The fact that the ten year plan has been altered, in fact, cut nearly in half, changes everything. The plan was supposedly the foundation of all other research here.”
“Oh, come now, Dennis, we all know that most of the projects done here are time-killers, done more for the sake of keeping our budget as large as possible.” Schafftenslap’s statement hurt many feelings around the table.
“I don’t think that’s fair, Dr. Schafftenslap.” Said the other woman preset, Norita McGugg. “My work with vending machines is extremely rewarding.”
“Well,” Schafftenslap snorted, “What would you have me do?”
“Allow the formation of a sub-committee to determine which projects go on hold.” Advised the hippie of the group, Don Flipwheat, much to Schafftenslap’s disgust.

Stagecraft of the Stegosaurus

The stegosaurus onstage at the Plutocrat Theater was made of pieces of vinyl stretched over a hinged framework of wire and balsawood. Operated from within by three highly trained men, its movements had been coordinated to complement the many speeches it was required to make, these last performed by the man nearest the head. Although at first resented by the other actors in the play, who felt its presence detracted from their performances and distracted the audience, the creature was ultimately admitted to be a stunning piece of work, both in design and execution.
The play, Brother Mogram’s House of Ten, did not originally call for one of the main characters to be played by a stegosaurus, but even the author, once he saw the production, concurred with the director’s choice of casting. The stegosaurus fulfilled the role of Pa Fingder, the old lodger whose trash-strewn apartment hides a secret that will affect the fortunes of two couples.
During dress rehearsal Dr. Spangle, the chief of maintenance for the Plutocrat since the day it opened, watched from the balcony. He chewed his gum as always and said nothing. Cranium, the actor playing the spy, glanced up at Spargle during an offstage moment.
“Dr. Spargle doesn’t like it.” He said quietly. He looked back at Tina, one of the stagehands.
“Who cares what that old man likes.” She whispered. As the scene ended, she rushed onstage and gathered up the stray trash that littered Fingder’s apartment. The stegosaurus lumbered into the wings in its three constituent parts. Ned Feese, the man in the tail section, emerged.
“Look at me!” He hissed. “I’m already sweating! Opening night is going to be hell!” He grabbed a drink of water from the cooler.
“Watch how much you drink.” Tina advised. “Remember you can’t pee yet.” She hustled back onstage to help setting up the next scene, the quiet, deserted grove wherein the poor couple promise each other eternal devotion.
“Faster!” Came the shout from the auditorium. “What’s the holdup? Get that scene set up!” The director turned to see Dr. Spargle beside him. “What is it?” He asked, seeing the look on the old man’s face.
“This is the last show I work here.” Spargle told him.

Brainhumper Led Away

“Another case closed, eh, Detective?” Trent Fricker’s pen was posed over his notebook as he stood beside Phil Calcior, watching two uniformed officers stuff the slump-shouldered brute that the Tomatoville Comment’s editor-in-chief already calling the “Brainhumper” into the back of a police cruiser.
“If you say so, newspaperman.” Calcior turned to look at a couple more of his men who were sealing off the suspect’s residence with yellow tape and orange padlocks. “Hurry up, you guys.” He called.
Although Fricker didn’t like the “Brainhumper” nickname, he used it anyway. It would help further sensationalize the story and sell more papers.
“Detective, could you speculate as to why the Brainhumper, if indeed he is the one responsible for Albert Oncologerry’s death, did such a thing?”
Calcior pinched the bridge of his nose. For the twentieth time in the last six hours he regretted having used the phrase “humped his brain.”
“I have no comment on that topic, newspaperman.” He said flatly. “And now, I’m leaving.” He walked away.
“Thanks, Detective.” Fricker called cheerfully, knowing it irritated Calcior. He then tapped his notebook with his pen and glanced around once more before flipping it shut and also taking his leave.
“Did you buy this ‘Brainhumper’ shit?” Bobby Euletide asked as the two met back at Fricker’s car.
“Doleson does. Calcior claims he does. Isn’t that enough for you?” Fricker got behind the wheel with a groan. Thirty-two years old and he already felt stiff as a board. Euletide got in beside him, but with a grin. He was an exercise enthusiast who regularly climbed the Gonzo Mountains to the west of Tomatoville.
Watching them drive away was the goat Pantop. He fingered his graying beard anxiously. Could he break a police padlock? It wasn’t a question of scruples; he had no respect for rules that got in his way. It was a question of sheer logistics. Not only were the special locks made of a unique polymer and hard to crack, the house itself would probably be watched secretly all night. He decided to come back in a couple of hours with a pair of bolt cutters.

A Sweet Treat from Scuppers

Dallas Pimiento went out to his mailbox at the end of the driveway and found a plastic bag hanging from it. Inside was an oversized parcel containing a sweet treat from Scuppers. He didn’t have to open it to know that. The information was printed on the box. He examined the address of the sender as he walked back to the house. It was from Angela Okrea.
The sweet treats proved to be two dozen delicious chocolates. As Pimiento had give up caffeine, he put the box into the freezer until the day when he knew what to do with them. While he was not eating his treats, he thought about Miss Okrea. He had not met her yet, but she had sent him two thoughtful gifts in the mail. It was time to return the favor.
Going into one of the bedrooms where he kept finished paintings, Pimiento selected one that was technically good, but didn’t mean much to him personally.
“This on will be good.” He said. He looked on the back at the title. “‘Creosote Comes in Barrels.’” He read. “A fine title.” He decided not to wrap the painting, nor to mail it, but to deliver it in person. Ten minutes later he was out the door, heading for the bus stop.
“He’s leaving the house.” Wetch Wice said to his wife.
“Stop spying on that man.” Treblaine looked over the top of her paper.
“It’s important to keep tabs on strangers.” Wice was not apologetic.
“He’s been here three months.”
“I’m going to follow him.” Wetch said, to himself, more than anything.
“Don’t. Please? Don’t.” Treblaine’s pleading was in vain.
“He’s following that new guy.” Alton Glastonbury announced. His wife, Hecta, was watching TV while doing the ironing.
“Are you going to follow him?” She asked.
Alton thought about it.
“No.” He looked at the TV screen. “No, I don’t feel like getting dressed.” He was still in his pajamas.
“Who knows what he might find out?” Hecta said teasingly.
“I’ll just write down what time he left and what time he comes back.”
“Wice might be up to something particularly sneaky.” Hecta purred.
“Will you shut your mouth?” Alton’s toes curled up inside his slippers.


The Dinner of the Half-Sized Men

“Gentlemen, if I might have your attention a moment.” Genrus, the chairman of the Half-Sized Men League, rose from his seat at the high table. “Gentlemen,” Genrus said, hefting his glass, “I would like to propose a toast, gentlemen, to the preceding year, the best year, in my opinion, in the history of the Half-Sized Men League so far!” The other participants at the dinner rose to their little feet as well and downed their glasses at the same time.
“And now, gentlemen and friends, I give you our speaker for this evening, a man whom you all know as a giant among half-sized men, a man whom you may not know is, in addition to being a first-rate amateur pastry chef, a cobbler of no little skill, Mr. Max Soya!” Applause followed Genrus’ introduction as a stout man with a limp and a white flattop haircut rose, shook hands with Genrus, and took his place at the podium.
“Thank you, Cecil.” Soya began in a phlegmy voice. As he launched into a connected series of anecdotes about his days as a boy in the rural wastes to the east, a note was passed to Hedge Funtz, sitting at a table in the darkness at the rear of the rented hall.
“Somebody outside told me to give this to you.” Whispered another member of the league. Funtz glanced at it.
“What did he look like?” He hissed.
“A full-sized fella. Big moustache.” The other man shrugged his shoulders as he headed back to his own table.
“Excuse me.” Funtz whispered to his neighbors. He went out into the gold-carpeted lobby. He saw the man who had sent the note through the glass wall that fronted the building. Funtz didn’t bother putting on his leg extenders. He went out as he was to meet the man.
“You’re Hedge Funtz?” The man asked.
“Yes.”
“You got my note?”
“Obviously. What do you want?”
“I want five thousand dollars.”
“For what?” Funtz demanded.
“For the responsibility of keeping your secret.”
What Had Once Been Perfect Was Now on Diplay

“What is Hedge Funtz’ secret?” My little friend Gumlag asked me.
“I don’t know yet.” I replied irritably. I had been sitting upright all night in a cheap seat on this train. Gumleg, occupying the much more comfortable position of my left hand’s puppet, was still full of energy.
“Who is the unnamed man who claims to know this secret?” The puppet, a basic model made out of a red and black striped tube sock, and bearing a face not unlike William Frawley’s, continued his interrogation.
“Enough!” I cried. “I don’t know yet!”
“But, Lance, how can that be? Surely you, of all the people in the world, must know the answer. Is it to be revealed to you at some point?” Gumlag’s arms, pathetic, empty, and ultimately vestigial, flopped about as he danced an agitated accompaniment to his own words.
“Yes.” I sighed. “That’s it essentially.”
Before Gumlag could pester me further, the old man across the aisle from us put down his copy of Spiegel and turned to me slowly.
“Are you in show business?” He asked.
“Me? Well, no, not really.” In a way, I guess show business includes the traditional arts and making a public spectacle of oneself, but, as a matter of principle, I have consciously put that realm from me. I consider my art to be, necessarily, a private one.
“You should be. You’re very good. Very good with the little fellow.” The old man’s accent was thick, but warm. Swedish? Some Baltic isle, perhaps?
“I’m not a half-sized man, it that’s what you’re suggesting.” Gumlag addressed himself to the man.
“Very clever, yes.” Said my fellow passenger. “But I feel silly talking to a puppet.”
“Feel silly?” Gumlag sounded hurt. He wriggled himself off my hand, and, by way of batteries hidden somewhere in either his underwear or his adenoids, jumped into the middle of the aisle.
“Are you some kind of bigot?” He demanded.
I picked up the old man’s copy of Spiegel off the floor after his departure. I managed to read about a third of it without difficulty.

The Failure of Classic Surrealism to Anticipate Mel Gibson

Ned Feese’s toothbrush had slipped and cut his gum. The next twenty-four hours he suffered when chewing or even when making the odd noises he customarily made at the little duck-people in the dollhouse. Prepared red beans were his meal of choice. While wincing over their mastication he reviewed his notes from yesterday’s class.
“The failure of classic surrealism,” Professor Tourne had said, “Is its failure to anticipate that which defies the surreal.”
“Like Mel Gibson.” Nancine had interjected. There followed a comedic exchange in which Tourne tried to understand how Mel Gibson had failed to anticipate that which defies the surreal. Finally it was explained to him that Mel Gibson was that which defies the surreal. At the point at which Tourne asked how Gibson defied the surreal, Feeses’s notes petered out into a series of doodles and lists of CDs he wanted to buy.
Feese threw the empty bean can into the trash. He had just taken up his textbook for Tourne’s class when the doorbell sounded.
“Ned.” It was Wetch Wice.
“Hey, what’s up?” Feese still held the book, his finger holding his place.
“Have you seen what’s in your back yard?”
Feese followed Wice outside.
“You had no idea this was here?” The older man asked. Standing in the middle of the yard with the upturned earth about its base as if it had been thrust into the light from below, was a large metal catafalque-like box, covered in arcane and grotesque symbols and figures.
“I saw it from my attic.” Wice explained.
“What is it?” Feese asked.
“You’re asking the wrong guy.” Together they approached the object. It loomed over them some twelve feet in the air with who knew how much more still buried? As Feese touched one side of it, a seam appeared. A strangely hinged door opened. Inside was an egg-shaped compartment containing the missing Trip Sedgum. Wice and Feese helped him out.
“Mel Gibson says hello.” Sedgum whispered feebly.

And Then There Was Oprah

Oprah Winfrey, or a cunningly crafted robotic facsimile thereof, paid a visit to Tomatoville within a week of the return of Trip Sedgum.
“It’s too bad Trip is too weak to come to the studio.” She patted her lap rhythmically. “There we have every modern convenience. And an audience that I’m sure would love to ask him questions about his ordeal.”
She spoke to Sedgum’s mother, who sat on a sofa beside her son in her living room. On the other side of the pale and drawn young man sat his girlfriend Willa. Sedgum himself looked out of hollow eyes at the celebrity visitor. He said little more than yes or no when he wasn’t making cryptic statements like “The shadows are the elements of three-phase reality” or “Mel Gibson says hello.”
While Mrs. Sedgum took Oprah and a cameraman on a tour of her son’s childhood room, Willa and Trip remained on the sofa holding hands and talking softly. There were a half-dozen members of Oprah’s crew in the living room besides.
Trup, perhaps emboldened to sensitivity and understanding due to the presence of Oprah, asked Willa if she had been lonely while he was gone. If so, he apologized. The woman began to cry. The keen eyes and ears of producer Chet Grabfus zeroed in.
“Oh, Trip, I’m so sorry. I’m the one who should apologize.” Willa stammered.
“No.” Trip protested feebly. “Dirt’s bell weather is it’s own reward.” It didn’t seem to express what he wanted to express, but it was all he could manage.
“I’ve been seeing someone else!” Willa exploded with sobs.
Grabfus darted from the room. He returned with Oprah.
“Having confession time without me, are we? Naughty naughty.” She signaled the cameraman, who nodded.
“Now, Willa how has it been for you while Trip has been undergoing this traumatizing ordeal?”
“I thought he was gone for good.” Willa wept, barely audible.
“Did you sleep with another man?” Oprah sounded hopeful.

The Films of Gabrielle F*******

Bean Agenda is usually the film that first springs to the mind of an American when the name of actor Gabrielle F******* is mentioned. Certainly, it was his biggest hit here in the land of the fat poor people. However, in his native Italy, one is far more likely to hear of such films as Il Publicano Singularo (The Lonely Accountant), Zututu Graziani Andante (Hasten Towards Charity), Il Peculanum de Mortimus (The Grooming of Mortimer), or Grosso Thermometer Rivulenti (Big Raging Current). Of course, any filmography of more than eighty films such as that of F*******, cannot possibly be thoroughly explored in any paper as short as this one is destined to be, but I will try, in the space available to me, to give you, the filmgoer tired of the obvious and implausible modern American cinema (both mainstream and independent, to tell you the truth) an idea of the riches to be found in this varied and profoundly intelligent body of work.
Mind you, if I had more space to work with I might be able to do more than merely mention a couple of titles (that, to be honest, you probably aren’t going to be able to find at any video store outside downtown Rome). Sometimes it seems to me that these self-imposed rules that govern the writing of my pieces are ultimately just hurting me. But then I think about all the rambling, undisciplined stuff I’ve done over the years that never amounted to anything because I can’t stay focused and I don’t give a damn about some hackneyed old plot, and I realize that, like the homely, untalented girl who dreams of moving to the big city before it’s too late, I’m probably better off where I am.
That said, it remains now for me to complete this piece on the topic stated at the beginning and within the parameters laid down for it. In addition to the five films mentioned above I think we can add Hexofort (Six-Sided Fortress), Il Perpetuo Mechanicalliu (Dusty’s Intriguing Summer), Gamma Signori (Mr. Churchill), and Lumberi Lumbero (Lumbago’s Limbering Effects). Though these are not counted among the greatest of F*******’s films by the ossified cowards of academia, they are actual foreign films that you have to read while you watch so that you miss most of the visual treats of the film and therefore are forced to watch again making it more likely you’ll become familiar with them.

The Adlai Stevenson Pagoda

“Where are we going, Brad?” Kim Kickmore asked her husband. He had insisted on their taking a bus ride together, but told her nothing of their intended destination.
“I wish we owned a car.” Thought Brad, not for the first time. “You’ll see.” He kept telling Kim, who wondered if he was taking her to some secluded spot to murder her. How would she react?
“But then,” thought Brad, “Even if we owned a car we couldn’t take it on this trip.”
“Where are we going, Brad?” Kim asked again as she and Brad got off the bus at the Primary Point stop.
“You’ll see.” Brad told her. “Almost there.” He added, leading her by the hand through the entrance to Primary Point park.
“We’re going to the pagoda?” Kim asked, as it was now obvious where they were headed. “Brad, this is exactly why I hate surprises.”
“You haven’t been surprised yet. You’ll like this, I swear.” They walked into the pagoda, but instead of going to the top, Brad led them through a door Kim had never noticed, down narrow concrete stairs.
“You’re not going to kill me, are you, Brad?” Kim asked.
“No, I’m not.” Brad pulled a small electronic device out of his pocket and put it into a crack in the damp wall.
“Where’d you get that?” Kim asked.
“Kim, Mornadoe contacted me.”
“He did? When?”
“Last week. He sent me this,” Brad pointed at the blinking device, which as he spoke was converting the unseen dimensional portal into a usable doorway, “And told me how to use it.”
“Is that where you were on Tuesday?” Kim demanded accusingly.
“Yes. Kim, it’s wonderful. It’s a whole new world.”
“I still don’t like surprises.” Kim balked as Brad pulled her towards the now open doorway, glowing a sickly green in the gloom.
“Don’t be afraid. It’s just a nice little town.”
“Full of monsters, I’ll bet.” Said Kim as she stepped through.

A Detergent for John Wayne

The leather pants emerged from the washing machine pitted with holes.
“A detergent for John Wayne.” Commented Fansty drily.
“What happened to the pants?” Asked the small boy present at the demonstration.
“That’s what happened!” A certain teacher from my past snorted angrily. The boy backed away, cowed by the cow, but his would not be a repeat of my experience. I emerged from the ethereal pocket vaporizer at the back of the washing machine.
“Hold on a second, you.” I growled thickly, still dizzy from the dimensional transference. I was seeing double at first, but I carried on. “The kid wasn’t asking a stupid question.” I told the teacher. “He’s asking why the strong detergent ate away at the pants. He wants to know how that happens.”
“I don’t know how that happens!” The woman, aged almost beyond recognition, replied testily. I wouldn’t have known her if I’d passed her on the street, though I had been looking for her for nearly twenty years.
“Then why didn’t you just tell the boy that instead of snapping at him so angrily?”
“Who are you?” She looked me up and down.
“He came out of the machine!” Fansty was astonished. “Is that a standard option on this model?” She asked me, though I didn’t at first realize it.
“What?” I said after a pause. I turned to this little shorthaired woman irritably. “How should I know, woman? I’m not the Maytag Man!”
“What’s ‘Maytag?’” The little boy asked.
Him I would indulge. I knelt down. “Maytag is a brand of washing machines. The Maytag Man was a character used in advertising that brand.”
“What did he do?”
“He sat around waiting for the washing machines to break.”
“Why?”
“Christ, kid, I don’t know. I haven’t got time to…” I was interrupted by a knock on the door of the flimsy cardboard set.
“My pants washed yet?” The Duke asked, a towel around his waist.

Edward the Shoe Salesman of Peruvian Extraction

“If you really want to impress a girl,” Edward advised, “You get yourself one of those Rolodex watches.”
“Ah.” Said the new recruit.
“Another thing: if you get really drunk, you can fuck like a machine.”
“I’ll…have to remember that?”
“Yeah, I’m twenty-two now. My friends say I’m getting crotchety, set in my ways. But I guess that’s the price you pay for maturity.”
“I’m seventeen.”
“Oh, you’re still just a kid. You’re lucky you’re getting this good advice.”
The new kid, introduced to not only these eye-opening words, but also the details of the shoe trade, felt himself privileged even while seeing everything with skepticism and humor. Although he would only work at the shoe store for six months, he forever after carried with him the special memories of his days there. From time to time during the next twenty years he would try to remember Edward’s last name and fail, much to his regret.
While reviewing the materials that went into the writing of this piece I came across a ladies’ boot made of a leather-textured polymer in a box otherwise filled with commission slips. As first I was little more than amused that such an ugly piece of footwear was actually considered marketable by the overlords of the Butler Shoe Group. Then, inspecting the boot more closely, I had the good fortune to put my hand inside it. Inside, stuffed in one of those supposedly one-use-only footies barefoot women use to try on shoes was a wad of cash. This is one more example of just how rewarding research can be.
“What are you going to spend your windfall on?” My wife asked. She’s not one of those television wives who demands that you “do the right thing” and turn in found items or search for the rightful owner.
“What do you think I should spend it on?” I turned the question around.
“Reducing debt is always advisable.” She does, however, bear a distant similarity to some of those TV characters.
“I’m thinking of buying a Rolodex.” I admitted.

Eddie and the Reverend

It pains me to have to tell this story, not only because it is from a painful part of my life, but also because I had been hoping to get back into some stories from Tomatoville. The rules governing the writing of this book, however, are strict. I must follow their dictates.
I was working for a temp agency while waiting to join the navy. One of the jobs I was assigned during this time was ditch-digger at a natural gas pumping station. The other two temps were two black guys named Eddie and the Reverend. Our job was to dig several trenches on the grounds of the facility. Each was to be about five feet deep and several hundred feet long. I did the majority of the digging; Eddie the next greatest amount; the Reverend did the least.
Eddie was about ten years older than I. The Reverend was at least twenty years older. Apparently he had actually been a preacher at several churches in the area, but always managed to get fired for improprieties with money, alcohol, and/or women. He still had the gift, however, as he demonstrated while we were supposed to be working. He told many stories of his life in his deep, well-modulated voice. He would dig a little bit, then pause to communicate some further detail of his hardships, at which Eddie would giggle so much he would have to stop digging as well. I was too afraid of being fired to stop working. One day as we were standing about waiting for the next task to be laid upon us, Eddie encouraged the Reverend to give me a taste of his full powers. The older man, leaning on a shovel, thereupon launched into an impromptu sermon about our place in the world. It sounded good enough, but after a minute or two, the Reverend stopped, obviously a little sickened. Perhaps bad memories or disgust made him stop. I don’t know.
On the last day of our assignment, Eddie and the Revered, who drove together in a Monte Carlo, left first. I followed behind. Not two miles down the road, they ran out of gas and I was forced to give them rides back to their homes, at opposite ends of town. My timid requests for gas money were met with promises of future repayment. Of course, nothing came of that. About a month later, however, I saw the Revered downtown. I approached him and identified myself. He didn’t recognize me at first. Before I could remind him of the debt he owed me, he asked me for ten dollars.

Coma Commando

Coma Commando, the latest offering from Tomatoville’s own local, ramshackle version of the Cartoon Network, was lambasted immediately upon its first appearance as a meaningless, cheaply produced show actively malignant to the minds of children.
“What these critics fail to understand,” Said Dallas Pimiento to an acquaintance, “Is that, first of all, the show is not specifically for children, and secondly, Coma Commando is a wonderful example of minimalism, subtlety, and the triumph of aesthetic values over didacticism.”
“You like the show’s graphics.” The acquaintance replied knowingly.
“Of course. I’m a painter.”
The show concerned the adventures of Coma Commando, a bizarrely uniformed man whose reality seemed to consist of dreams within dreams. Was he actually in a coma? This was never answered within the lifetime of the show. It was cancelled after one season.
“Yet another great show gone due to the shallow minds of the masses.” Pimiento complained to Miss Okrea during his first visit to her house.
“Yes, but surely you don’t watch TV all that much?” She questioned.
“No,” Pimiento assured her. “But for a show like that I was willing to make an exception. Imagine: a beautifully rendered cartoon in which very little happens. No violence, just endless mystery.”
“No violence? Then why was it called Coma Commando?” Miss Okrea sat beside Pimiento’s gift of a painting, which she had professed such delight with.
“Well, obviously, it sounded good. I guess they wanted to attract a bigger audience.”
When the visit was over and Pimiento was walking away from the lady’s house, he began the misgivings. Should he have spent the entire time talking about a cartoon? Did Miss Okrea really like the painting? Had he interrupted her in the middle of something? There had been curious sounds coming from further within the house.
He needn’t have worried. Two days later he received a note from Miss Okrea inviting him to a gathering at her house in a week’s time.

Gratootles

Gratootles, the dog, turned loose in the peach orchards outside the old city gate, came across the dead body of a man. Although the dead man’s face was unrecognizable from decay, the image on his t-shirt was still clearly legible. To the dog it meant nothing, but to a fan of The Dodge Tyner Knuckledragger Airlift it would have immediately brought to mind the phrase “Sherbet disaster!” for the image was that of Microcephalic Goose Rampant, a character from the show.
How we laughed at this ridiculous character and how highly anticipated were his appearances, though they weren’t that many. It was wise of the geniuses behind the show (Dodge Tyner was a fictitious character embodying its creators’ ethos) to limit Microcephalic Goose Rampant’s appearances, thereby ensuring cult-like appreciation. It is so disappointing for a fan to have something initially likeable run into the ground in the search for a wider audience. It is equally disappointing to have something one is a fan of achieve a wider audience.
The opposite of microcephalic is hydrocephalic, to my way of thinking, because the mentioning of either word brings to mind the other. Speaking of Microcephalic Goose Rampant, a comic figure, makes me think of a hydrocephalic boy whose photograph I once saw. The tragic aspects (for of course, they are tragic) of this figure are that he was, as far as I know, confined to his bed, but his parents had dressed him as if to go outside and play. I can still remember the photograph although I only saw it for a few seconds. It was passed around in a class I took by the professor, who said he had known the boy’s parents. The boy was dressed in dark-colored pants and a striped long-sleeve shirt. He lay flat on his back. Thankfully the details of his face were obscured. His enormous head was all too visible.
I started this piece intent on providing you with some light-hearted trivia, but my associative memories, undeniable, have led me to feelings I cannot shake off. I imagine the love of the parents for their doomed child. He died in his late teens, so I was told. I imagine the love of the child for his parents. Nothing to do but lie there and suffer without understanding why. Suffering on both sides of the relationship.
The dog Gratootles can remain lost among the peach trees for all I care.

Consult a Physician

Dallas Pimiento had been experiencing peculiar and disturbing symptoms lately, so he consulted a physician recommended by Angela Okrea.
“I’ll give him a call to make sure you’re seen immediately.” Miss Okrea offered.
“Oh, you don’t have to do that.” Pimiento hated to think of the doctor’s other patients being pushed back so that he could go first. They might hold it against him if they found out who he was.
Miss Okrea told him not to worry and made the call.
Two days later Pimiento was given a series of tests at the offices of Dr. Mexican Birdling. Pimiento was not the kind of person who worries about the cost of medical procedures. His thoughts were unswervingly fixed on his impending invalidity, decrepitude, and death.
“Describe your symptoms to me, Mr. Pimiento.” Dr. Birdling instructed the visionary painter and former secret operative.
“I feel that my brain, or different functions of my brain, are deteriorating.”
“Explain.” Birdling said. “Elaborate.”
“For one thing, it’s like I’m developing dyslexia.”
“Do you have any history of dyslexia?”
“None. But, it’s not just that. It’s my memory. I can remember long-term things fine, but short-term, no. I lose my train of thought easily and I can’t remember what I was thinking about.”
“And this worries you?” Birdling tapped his open palm with a rubber mallet.
“Yes.”
“You do realize you’re getting older, Mr. Pimiento. You’re nearing forty.”
Pimiento sighed.
“I hope coming to see you wasn’t a waste of time. Don’t belittle my symptoms. I know my own brain! It’s starting to break down. Little things, around the periphery.” Pimiento stopped talking and stared at the wall. He found it hard to put into words what it was he felt.
“Do you need painkillers?”
“No. I’m not in pain.” Pimiento was disgusted. He went home to await the results of the tests.

Hanging

Pimiento attended the formal hanging of his monstrous triptych, Abandonment of the Cross, at the Tomatoville Civic Center, though his thoughts were elsewhere. He felt he should be at home, getting as much work done as possible before the end came. Miss Okrea had insisted, however, and, as she had been instrumental in getting the city to purchase and permanently display his painting, Pimiento knew he owed it to her to attend.
“You realize this ‘painting’ is anti-Christian, don’t you?” Gary Gimblekin told the new mayor, Steve Wells.
“I try to stay out of matters of artistic expression.” Wells answered. He assumed an expression of concern as he listened to Gimblekin rave. Around them the cocktail-laden invitees circulated warily, wondering at the mayor’s interlocutor’s strong words and whether they should intervene. Luckily for the mayor, a couple of his staff members hustled him away on the pretext of mayoral business.
“The Christians are a minority here.” Miss Okrea told Pimiento when word came through the crowd of Gimblekin and his complaint. “Most Tomatovilleans belong to Amso’s; it’s a kind of mental improvement organization.”
“Well, that’s a relief.” Pimiento said. “I thought we were about to have a little controversy.” He had wondered at the ease with which the Abandonment had been accepted.
“Oh, the Christians still have some political power.” Miss Okrea was quick to add. “After all, they control Christmas.”
“Why do you celebrate Christmas if you’re not Christians?” Pimiento was puzzled.
“Presents.” Miss Okrea explained. She introduced Pimiento to some of her friends. As he was congratulated by them and repeatedly asked “Where do you get your ideas?” Gary Gimblekin approached.
“Sir, you are a blasphemer!” Gimblekin accused him.
“Please,” Miss Okrea interceded. “This is a very sick man, Mr. Gimblekin.”
“He must be, to paint such a blasphemous picture denying the saving power of the cross of Jesus! This is not art!”

Maturity’s Unpleasant Side

Wetch Wice came down from his attic and reported to his wife.
“I think it’s almost over.” He said.
“What makes you think so?” Treblaine was eating a big, soft pretzel with hot mustard.
“That Angela Okrea’s there. I saw her car. Her driver is talking with some other people. The mood seems to be somber.”
“Poor man.” Treblaine wiped off her chin.
“‘Poor man?’” Wice repeated. “Why, he’ll be famous! His paintings will be worth a fortune after he dies!”
“What good will that do him?”
“Well,” Wice pondered. “It’s something. To exit this life knowing that you’ve achieved something. To know that your legacy is assured.”
“‘This life?’ Oh, Wetch, you don’t believe there’s another one, do you?”
“It’s just an expression, Treblaine.” Wice eyed the last bite of his wife’s pretzel. “Mind you,” He said. “If there was another life after this one…”
“What?” Treblaine asked.
“Well, it just makes you think.”
“You need to grow up, Wetch. You’ve got a grown daughter who’s more mature than you.”
“I’m just speculating.”
“Idly.”
Next door Miss Okrea emerged from Pimiento’s house. Her eyes were downcast. Trent Fricker, the reporter from the Comment, called to her from the sidewalk.
“Miss Okrea! What has happened?”
“Dallas Pimiento is dead.” She answered.
“It is the judgment of almighty God.” Gary Gimblekin said when he read the news in the paper that afternoon.
His companion, an automaton of limited mobility named Chris, looked up from his pretend meal of molded plastic food items and asked,
“When you die, will that also be the judgment of almighty God?”
“I have been granted eternal life thanks to my savior.” Gimblekin snapped.






Part Three

Tiny Boat in an Undersized Sea

The sea, for such it was called by those who lived on the surrounding shore (except for old Tom Sleaker; he insisted on calling it his bathtub), was perhaps a half a mile wide. One morning in the last quarter of wretched, spirit-crushing May, when the heat of summer was first making its promise of discomfort and immobility known, a tiny boat was spotted out in the middle of the sea’s supposedly unplumbed waters.
“How’d that boat get out there?” Manfred asked as he sat on his rotting back porch pissing away yet another chance to work on the play he had sworn to see performed onstage before he died.
“Somebody put it out there.” Antoine, standing to one side of Manfred’s porch, postulated.
“Never seen it before.” Manfred made one last comment on the novelty before returning to his interrupted explanation to Antoine of how crackling dialogue is conjured up.
On the opposite side of the sea old Tom Sleaker, padding down to the wet side of his property, also noticed the tiny boat. He kept a compact telescope in the bucket with his bath things. He pulled it out of the bucket and trained it on the boat.
“No one on board.” He thought to himself. “Looks a little big for a toy. I hope nobody’s trying to spy on me.” He then took off his robe, hung it on a hook on a 2x4 set in the ground by the water, and entered the sea naked, towing the floating bucket behind him by a string. “Hell,” Sleaker thought, “I’ve got my own tiny boat!”
The original tiny boat, an automated and partially sentient entity, noted the old man and his bucket, but moved on, heading towards the well-maintained dock at the edge of Mr. Knockmeade’s part of the shoreline. Waiting for him was Mr. Knockmeade’s wife, Andrella. As he steamed closer, the woman waved to him.
“She is wearing the dress I bought her.” Said the boat to himself. As he pulled alongside the dock his thoughts were on the days when, as a bipedal automaton working the mines, he had had money to buy nice things for nice people.
Be Serious About Your Affectation

Talking in an exagerratedly precise voice, dressed as a bookish young man in the year 1901 might have dressed, Henderson defended his mannerisms and appearance.
“Whatever else one might say, one must admit that, in the context of an historical perspective, I do no in the least give the impression of being effeminate.” He fingered the miniature saxophone in his hands and even, and the others in the room assailed him with their cruel words, went so far as to put the end of it to his lips.
“Henderson,” Begley’s voice cut through the others’. “Are you wearing lipstick?”
“It’s mother-of-pearl, an intriguing variation on plain white.” Henderson answered, checking the little sax’s mouthpiece for smudges.
“Let me at him.” Torbold pushed through the half-dozen concerned interlocutors crowded about Henderson in their old-fashioned school desks. Torbold punched his left hand twice, readying himself to deliver a beating.
“No, Torbold, no!” Begley tried to stop the slump-shouldered brute. He started from his desk, but too late. Henderson, tilting his chin arrogantly upward, seemed to encourage any confrontation. As Torbold loomed over him, thrusting out the convex unity of his chest and abdomen, Henderson stabbed at the big man with nothing more than his stiffened forefinger. Torbold bent double with a cry. Henderson changed his stance, prepared should further action be necessary.
“Don’t do it, Henderson?” Begley cried.
“And why not?” Henderson demanded haughtily.
“You goddam fag!” Torbold bellowed. He wrenched his head up, snorting like a bull trying to escape a nest of hornets. He swung furiously, but Henderson eluded the blow easily.
“Why do you associate with this boor?” Henderson asked the others, looking them each in the eyes as he tripped his would-be attacker into the large globe behind him.
“Henderson, don’t you see the way your appearance provokes others?” Begley made one last effort to convince Henderson of his folly.


Bean Pod Wambrough

“It certainly is a big pod.” Charles admitted. He stood with his hands in his jacket pockets, his stance that of a less-than-enthused man.
“Put your hand on it. Feel the surface.” Dr. Poundsign, a rare female among the scientists, urged Charles.
Charles sighed. “If I must.” He said. His heavy college ring reflected the bright sunlamps overhead as he withdrew his hand.
“Yes, it’s warm.” He said. He ran his hand down the side of the green and black mottled pod, as if admiring the lines of a sports car.
“And that’s only partially from the sunlamps.” Dr. Poundsign informed him. “It’s mostly from the organism growing within.”
“The organism?” Charles repeated. He glanced at his palm somewhat as a man who has never before shaken the hand of a Negro does. His skin had not been discolored from the contact.
“Dr. Poundsign?” Came a creaky voice from the door behind them. “I didn’t know we had a visitor.”
Charles turned to see an old, stoop-backed man in a lab coat coming forward.
“Yes, Dr. Fishmeat. This is Charles Wambrough. He’s the investor who’s going to keep the laboratory running for another year.” Dr. Poundsign introduced Charles, who kept his dubious comments about the woman’s words to himself. “Mr. Wambrough, this is Dr. Nils Fishmeat, the founder of this lab.”
“A pleasure to meet you, sir.” Charles said as he shook the old man’s cold, soft hand.
“What do you think of our work, Mr. Wambrough?” Fishmmeat asked, nodding at the canoe-sized pod.
“I think I’m afraid that once people find out I’ve invested in your lab, they’ll start calling me ‘Bean Pod Wambrough.’ Is this the only project you’ve got in development?”
“At the moment.” Answered Fishmeat. “You should have been here six months ago. We had robots and sentient puppets running all over the place.”
“Wouldn’t a sentient puppet be the same as a robot?” Charles asked.
“Your financial investment can help to change all that.” Dr. Poundsign jumped in.

Plastic Lady Bugs

An assortment of plastic ladybugs spilled out of Norma’s handbag. Tucker, motioning me to maintain the silence that I had no intention of breaking anyway, slowly reached into his own handbag and withdrew a plastic spider. He nodded at me meaningfully. I nodded stiffly in return though no meaning had been imparted to me and turned back to the woman whom we were observing through the flimsy one-way cellophane covering our hiding place.
“So many pretty buggies.” Said Norma, prompting me to take the card that I habitually keep in the breast pocket of my shirt and write the word “snicker” on it. Tucker took the card from me and wrote “shh” underneath. He turned the card over and studied it. Proud of any evidence of the peculiar workings of my mind, I allowed him to do so. He pointed at one of the memoranda written there and arched an eyebrow at me. I took back the card and pen and was about to write a terse explanation behind the words “Brother Mogram’s House of Ten,” but events in the zone of observation precluded that.
A man, roughly Norma’s age and wearing a baseball cap and a beard, both of which read “rural dweller,” though in different ways—this man entered the small room and called our subject’s name.
“Norma!” His voice reinforced what his appearance communicated.
“Ward!” Norma had been playing with her plastic bugs as enthusiastically as a child when the man interrupted her.
“I’ve come to take you home to Dallasburg.” Ward announced. He walked on bowed legs over to the table where Norma played.
“But why, Ward?” Norma asked.
“Because of this, Norma!” Ward pointed a finger grimy with automotive labors at her plastic bugs. Before she could make the protest that was burgeoning around her eyes, Ward continued. “And this!” This time the finger pointed at my and Tucker’s place of concealment. I started to write furiously on my card, “Is this part of the test?” but couldn’t finish. Ward tore into the cellophane revealing our presence to all.
Tucker stood up, his plastic spider in hand. He held it in Ward’s face. The bearded man screamed at the sight and fell back. He ran out of the room, abandoning Norma to her fate.

Fludgin’s Amnesiac Defense

“So, you don’t remember, eh?” Turnbridge sneered.
“No sir, I do not.” The man being questioned, Fludgin, an overall-wearing goober, sat in a straight-backed chair beneath a framed photograph of President Agnew. He had denied knowing anything about the mechanical thing that had destroyed most of the colony’s rice stores over the weekend. He had defied all of Trunbridge’s effort to catch him in a lie. Then Turnbridge had hit upon the idea of suggesting that Fludgin did know, but did not remember.
“It’s possible then,” Turnbridge swaggered about the room with his hands clasped behind his back. “That you were involvedin the destruction of the stored rice?’
“I guess anything’s possible, sir.” Fludgin bobbed his head amiably.
“How is it possible you lost your memory, if lost it you did indeed?”
“Well,” Fludgin scratched his shaved head. “I guess I could have banged my head climbing out of this mechanical rice destroyer.”
“So you did operate the machine!” Turnbridge cried, shoving his autocratic finger into the blind spot between Fludgin’s eyes.
“I told you: I don’t remember.” Fludgin’s eyes were crossed as he tried to focus on the tip of Turnbridge’s finger.
“My God, Turnbridge is brilliant.” Mr. P’s voice swelled with pride as he watched his lieutenant grilling the goober.
“I told you he’d crack this nut.” Mr. V replied.
“You said not such thing.” Mr. P snapped.
“Yes I did.” Mr. V sounded wounded. “Don’t you remember?”
“I do not.”
“Ah.” Mr. V nodded his head slowly.
At that moment the door to the observation booth opened and Julia Grimes, the idealistic young attorney for the downtrodden, entered.
“This interrogation is over.” She declared.
“It certainly is; we’ve just got everything we need.” Chuckled Mr. P.
“You tell her, Francis.” Said Mr. V.
“Perhaps you boys have forgotten the constitution?” Suggested Ms. Grimes.

Never Me Sham Abed

If I understood clearly while I was dreaming that I was dreaming, then I think I would be able to remember my dreams better. Somehow, no matter how outlandish they are, I perceive my dreams as reality and therefore don’t really give them the weight of consideration and attention that I would, say, a film. Then I awake and, while groggily groping to my feet, forget what has just transpired.
Not quite as good as dreaming, but often more productive, is lying in bed and having a fake dream. I’m not asleep, but random images assemble themselves into dream-like chains. These are rare occurrences, not only because I usually fall immediately asleep, but because I don’t usually have time to lay around idly meditating or daydreaming (call it what you like).
I know many people who love to sleep. They awake with difficulty. I like what sleep does for me, aside from providing my with dreams, but I loathe the time wasted. I don’t, in general, have a hard time getting out of bed and into the day’s activities. As usual, I see this difference between myself and others as reason to hold them in contempt. I see it as yet another proof of my superior nature. I also suspect, and let us fervently work against the day when this will be objectively, scientifically, graphically, digitally proven, that my dreams are uniquely detailed, supremely fantastic, and estoterically meaningful compared with the stuff that other people’s brains conjure up.
I never have nightmares. A nightmare to me is dreaming that one is at the mercy of forces beyond one’s control. This rarely happens. If it does, I simply wake up. I never wake up screaming, terrified to return to dreamland. Once I had a dream that I was I being attacked by a bull. In trying to escape, I started to climb under the outer wall of the barn. I woke up just as the bull caught up with me. Was I afraid? No, I was exhilarated. I guess at some level I do know that I’m dreaming.
I’ll leave you with one last dream anecdote. Once I dreamed a beautiful melody. I woke with tears in my eyes. I thought that I had unconsciously composed it. Later in the day I realized that it was “No One Like You” by the Scorpions.

How to Separate Auto from Mobile

The planting of the genetically engineered, car-producing trees had taken place when the current generation of scientists were babies. Finally these trees had reached maturity, borne fruit, and that fruit in turn had finally ripened into the semi-sentient cars that were the end result. Of the first one hundred cars “born,” only nine proved to be defective to the point of requiring euthanasia. The remainder, all disconnected from their mother trees within a three-week period, had been promised to major investors and executive researchers on the project. More than a few of these people were dead by now, of course, and those that survived were often too old and infirm to take full possession. Thus, most of the first crop went to heirs.
One man who received one of the new biological cars was Fred Amagro, nephew and only surviving relative of independent film producer Pipo Gramalfin. Amagro had already inherited his uncle’s fortune and memorabilia from a career spanning three decades. The car, while mentioned in his uncle’s will, had yet come as a surprise to the thirty-nine-year-old Amagro. He sat somewhat impatiently through the two-hour familiarization class given by the marketing division of Arborex Motors, dismayed at learning that the car ran only on certain plant matter, which it had to eat, but excited by the idea that the car, since it could feel sensations, could be rewarded for good behavior by manipulation of a pleasure center located on the dashboard, or punished for poor performance with blows and lashings. How often Amagro had longed to beat one of his other cars into submission!
“On the whole I’m pleased with the car.” He told a man from Arboraz who questioned him after six months of use. “I don’t like having to deal with its doo doo, but, since it really doesn’t stink, that’s a minor quibble.”
“Would you recommend the car to the average man in the street?” Asked the questioner.
“I don’t know that the ‘average man in the street’ should own one of these.” Amagro answered. “I see it more as a rich man’s toy than mere transportation. It’s a luxury item.”
“And how often have you found it necessary to punish the car?”
“Oh, quite often. I take out my hatred of the masses on it.”

Hammerin’ Horns

Dake screwed his “hammerin’ horns” into place in the surgically implanted sockets just over his brow ridge. Extensive structural reinforcement beneath these sockets had had to be done as well to handle the heavy blows the head would receive when the horns were used for their main purpose, which was hammerin’, of course. This reinforcement was effected in the main by replacing a large section of the frontal lobes of the brain with concrete. To offset the loss of cerebral matter, some computing operations were shifted to the nerve-rich groin.
Dake looked at himself in the mirror. He massaged his genitals to promote greater visual acuity. The sight of himself in the mirror with his horns on was probably the most exciting sight he could conceive, outside of the splintered remains of some heavy door he had brought down. As he prepared to go out and “hammer home” his brutal message, across town a woman portrait painter was working on an oil painting he had commissioned that would show him at his best, full face and surrounded by a litter of splintered doors and bodies whose heads were bashed in. Although he had rarely killed anyone, and even then had done the job with his cloven monster boots, he liked to think of himself as a hammerin’ slayer of men. The portrait would emphasize this image to the generations yet unborn, to whom the exactitude of history would be less important than its potential as source material for graphic novels and digitally created alternate realities.
“Any fantasy will be better than the nightmare world we are creating for them.” Dake thought to himself as he climbed into the Dakemobile, a customized van topped with painted fiberglass facsimiles of his horns. As he revved the engine prior to roaring out of the hidden entrance to his secret lair, he opened the metropolitan phone book at random and selected an appropriate address to pay a visit, one whose very sound in his head made him fill with contempt and disgust.
“1672 Guinevere Lane.” He read the chosen target aloud. The corners of his mouth turned down sourly. He glanced at his eyes in the rear-view mirror. They were suitably red.

Short-Haired Wiest

“I like Dianne Wiest when she has her hair short.” Knackley observed.
“Do you think the films she did when her hair was short were her best work?” Knackley’s friend Stimson asked.
Knackley considered a moment. “Yes.” He said, sitting up straighter in his lounger. “I do.”
“Her hair was regular length in Hannah and Her Sisters.” Simson pointed out.
“Yes.” Knackley conceded. “That is a problem.”
“Not with today’s digital editing.” Stimson sat up straighter in his lounger. “We can take a digital copy of the film…”
“You mean a DVD?” Knackley interrupted.
“Yes, in common parlance, a DVD. And, running it through our digital editing program we can shorten Ms. Wiest’s hair.”
“Fascinating.” Knackley gazed up at the posters tacked to the ceiling of the large room. “But tell me: that’s not all you can do, right?”
“Right. We can remove the actress completely, and replace her with another. Diane Keaton, for example. Or, on a more zany note, Lucille Ball.”
“That is a fascinating concept.” Knackley admitted. “But tell me: how do you change the voice? Wiest’s voice is as different from Keaton’s as Keaton’s is from Ball’s.”
“In truth, the voice is trickier. It can be done, but the nuances of the human voice are harder to duplicate; any error is easily spotted by an audience familiar with the person. Until further advances are made, it would be far better to use a voice-over artist to mimic the required voice.”
“Still,” Knackley speculated. “That brings up a whole different dimension to the subject. You could replace Dianne Wiest with, say, John Wayne in a film like Little Man Tate, but use the voice of someone like Gene Wilder.”
“Yes, I suppose you could. They say Billy West does a passable Gene Wilder.”
“Does he really?”
“Mmm.” Stimson mused, turning his attention to a motivational poster overhead. It was of a basket of puppies. The caption was something like “Dig Into Life.”
“But then,” Knackley continued. “Wiest had regular length hair in that one.”

Plaster Replicas of Wax Fruit

Angela Okrea was not as upset as some had expected her to be. By the time the posthumous retrospective exhibit of Dallas Pimiento’s works had opened she had found something else to amuse her. Still, there were plenty of people who liked Pimiento’s work who were upset. The gallery directors, with typically conceptual grandeur, had decided to show the works of the sculptor Romero Grubby alongside the paintings of Dallas Pimiento.
“It’s bad enough that he sucks,” Troy Rumph bitched. “But he’s still alive!”
“It was supposed to be about Pimiento.” Agreed Troy Kirby. “It was supposed to be a memorial to his life as well as his work. Now he will forever be linked in the ignorant public’s mind with this flash-in-the-pan hack.”
“Excuse me,” A pretty, slim young lady turned to the two men. “But are you calling Romero Grubby a hack?”
“Yes I am.” Kirby cocked his head to one side.
“And so am I.” Rumph took a half a step forward.
“Well, I don’t know how you can call someone whose work is so vital a hack.” The young woman replied. She gestured to one of Grubby’s pieces displayed on a cubical pedestal close by, then to another further away. “Take a good look.” She said.
“Regardless of whether or not Mr. Grubby’s work is good or not…” began Troy.
“And it’s not.” Travis threw in.
“…it has no place being displayed next to, intertwined, if you will, with the paintings of Dallas Pimiento. And especially not at this show.”
“I don’t see why not. Pimiento is dead. He cannot suffer if his work is panned; he cannot feel victory if his work is praised. Romero Grubby is alive. Life should be for the living.”
“So Grubby deserves the exposure. Is that what you’re saying?” Travis asked.
“Yes. And besides,” The woman winced as she glanced at one of Pimiento’s paintings. “The presence of Grubby’s work cannot help but make these awful, awful examples of self-taught ineptitude look good.”
Troy looked at Travis with his teeth bared.

Sidelong Salmonella

“The hot sauce you put on your beans was contaminated.” Dr. Fungroid explained to Percy.
The latter man nodded feebly. He understood.
“It’s extremely fortunate you noticed your symptoms early and immediately sought treatment.” The doctor with the short, pointy beard continued. “You did the right thing.” He assured his patient as he would a child who has reported the suspicious business next door.
Percy’s wife, standing on the other side of the hospital bed, squeezed her husband’s shoulder.
“What sort of contamination was it?” She asked Dr. Fungroid.
“An extremely rare one, I’m afraid. It’s going to take more than the usual length of time and series of treatments to counteract the effects.”
“Yes, but what’s the name of the toxin or microorganism that was in the hot sauce?” The woman, who considered herself something of an autodidact, pressed.
Dr. Fungroid appeared dubious the she would be able to grasp the information he had. Also, there was a hint of suspicion in his eyes. Why did she want to know this?
“Well, if you must know, it’s called Sidelong Salmonella, a variant of the standard salmonella bacillus.”
“And that’s why it was able to survive in the hot sauce.” There was only the slightest questioning lilt at the end of her statement. She was fairly sure of her conjecture.
“I don’t understand.” Dr. Fungroid’s head rose on his neck.
“Well, from my reading, I understand that standard salmonella is unable to tolerate the combination of vinegar and capsaicin in hot sauce.”
Dr. Fungroid’s eyes dashed about, left and right.
“Mrs. Wolfknot, it is extremely ill-advised to go off…’researching’ on your own. You must leave these matters to members of the medical guild.”
Percy grunted, summoning the attention of the doctor.
“My wife’s no dummy.” He whispered.

Aunt’s Boots

After my grandmother died, the family suggested, and my grandfather acquiesced to, a general cleaning and clearing out of the old home. Going through the room that my aunt, the youngest of the children, had once possessed, a pair of her boots was found.
“I remember these.” My aunt declared. They were turquoise vinyl, with tall heels. They laced up in the front. The eyeholes were white; the laces were a muddy orange color.
“God, they’re hideous.” My mother pronounced judgment. They went into the pile of stuff destined for donation to charity. I liked them, however. They looked to me as if they were part of some early seventies superhero’s costume. I liberated them from their thrift store-bound doom and took them home. I wanted to take the framed print of Venice at night that had hung in the dining room since before I was born, but that wasn’t being removed.
Now, of course I knew the boots wouldn’t fit my feet, but I decided to try them on anyway (in the privacy of my room, of course). I worked my toes down to the sole and pulled the laces as tight as I dared. I was essentially standing on my tiptoes inside the boots. They looked cool. If I had been wearing some complementary costume, like bell-bottom jeans and a pink bowling shirt it would have been perfect. As it was I had on running shorts and a t-shirt. This proved unfortunate, for when the magic powers from the boots began to emanate through my body the matrix formed by the conjunction of my male body, the bland outfit, and the boots themselves allowed me only enough super powers to prance about my room. To leave it would be fatal.
When the time came for the adventure to be over, I had to get my sister to pull the boots of.
“They belonged to Aunt Janet.” I explained. “They don’t fit me. Do you think you might want them?”
“God, no.” My sister recoiled.
“But…” How could I tell her that this gaudy footwear had magic powers? “I think Aunt Janet may have been Planet Girl.” I gasped.
“The super hero from Saturday morning TV?”
“It sound crazy, I know. But the world needs a heroine. You could be that heroine.”

An Instant’s Visible Thought

The fat man with the sullen features looked up from his crossword puzzle at the collection of noisy people gathered around the equally noisy television. In the instant before he folded his newspaper and rose awkwardly from his table, one could, if one was watching, easily read the fat man’s thoughts. He longed to kill every single one of these people who had disturbed his respite from work. As he ambled out of the room, however, his face assumed its usual expression of walrus-like impassivity at the unending difficulties of life.
In his absence the good times continued. The television, watched fitfully, if at all, remained at airport runway volume, displaying the continuing antics of the Football Brothers, whose obsession with sports and devout, if confused, belief in Jesus Christ was but an amplified reflection of the crowd of screaming, hooting morons now seated before the screen. Two women, one in a fright wig the color of pumpkin guts, the other in a faded t-shirt commemorating a family reunion twenty years before, cackled and bellowed their way through a conversation while sitting ten feet apart.
“They say he gonna come back and paste it to the wall.” Said one.
“Who say that?” The other needed clarification.
“His mama and his Aunt Renae. They say he gonna come back and paste it to the wall.”
“What wall he gonna paste it to?”
“I don’t know what wall, Dilledra. I guess some wall in his mama’s house.”
“So, they say he gonna come back and paste it to the wall?”
“As soon as he gets back.”
The next loudest conversation, after this one, providing a basso profundo accompaniment to the first’s trebly warble, consisted of deep, rumbling laughter and humorous accusations of imminent damnation.
“The Devil’s got the pitchfork warmed up for you. A-huh huh huh huh huh.”
“He gonna smoke up your booty. As it say in Isaiah 19:9-17, “the smoke obscureth the eyes of God.”
“Yessir, the Devil’s got the pitchfork warmed up for you. A-huh huh huh huh huh.”

Their Party of Four

“Will these shoes be alright? I don’t want to scuff the decks.” Anna asked Stefan as she and her husband Roy entered Stefan and Melba’s beach house.
“You don’t have to worry about that.” Stefan assured her, smiling heartily and holding a cold glass of something green. “The Blanco Zapato doesn’t have decks in the traditional sense of the word. They’ll be fine. Roy, how are you? Drink?” Stefan greeted the other man and rattled the ice in his glass at him.
“Sure.” Roy chuckled in return.
Melba called out to Anna from the serving window of the kitchen. “I’ll be out in a minute!” Anna entered the kitchen anyway. “I’m coming in!” She said.
Stefan handed Roy a green drink like his own.
“Let me show you the Blanco Zapato, Roy.” Stefan’s face was flushed, both from sun and liquor. He was about forty-five, thin, but with a little potbelly. Roy followed his host out to the small dock behind the house. The craft anchored to the dock was not his idea of a boat.
“Not what you expected, eh?” Stefan grinned.
“No, not at all.” Said Roy. “What is it?”
Stefan downed the remainder of his drink. “It’s a new design.” He said billously. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
The Blanco Zapato was shaped much like the command module of the Apollo program flights. It was larger, however, and made of a molded polymer. Stefan opened a hatch on one side and stepped inside. “Come on in.” He invited. Once inside, Roy was impressed at the craft’s luxurious details. The interior was like the great room of a manor. It was nicer than the living room of the beach house. A catwalk ran around the wall overhead. This was where the instruments and controls were. The cabins were under the floor, below water level.
“It sleeps six, but we can accommodate eight.” Stefan stumbled over the word ‘accommodate.’ “We tried to get another couple, the Heaths, I think you know them, but they’re out of town.”
Anna put her head in at the hatch. “Ray, I’m leaving.” She announced. As Roy followed her around the side of the house to their car, he begged her to tell him what was wrong.
“That bitch got mad I came in her ‘filthy’ kitchen!” Anna told him.

The Quality of Her Husband’s Blood

As the temperature rose Mary became more ill tempered. She was angered to the point of verbally or physically expressing her rage by smaller and smaller incidents, things that in the past she would have either ignored or made a bitter joke about. When her husband came home from work with the news that he had struck and killed two horses with the car that morning, she stabbed him with a chopstick.
Harold staggered back. He pulled the chopstick out from between the third and fourth ribs where it had penetrated and stared at his wife. He longed to take his revenge now, while his fury was running hot, but he knew that the wound was too serious. He began to weep as he went to the phone. He wept from anger, frustration, and the potential loss of this body of his that he had possessed since the dawn of sentience.
“If you’d only get the air conditioner fixed!” Mary, having nothing better to do now and no other way to go, continued the attack.
Harold ignored her. He spoke calmly to the emergency operator, relating the necessary information and requesting an ambulance. He was already hanging up the phone when Mary said, “You don’t need an ambulance. I can drive you to the hospital.”
“No.” Harold sat down abruptly in a chair at the kitchen table. “I want them to see the crime scene.”
“Crime scene!”
“I want the full picture to be…” He paused to breathe. It came painfully. “…seen by the police.”
“The police!” Mary wailed. “Are you nuts? No, no, I deserve it.” She changed tack, but then, like a weathervane in a tempest, turned again. “Why couldn’t you buy a new air conditioner?” Tears spurted from her eyes. She clenched her hands like talons. “I’m going crazy in this house!”
“The oven’s on.” Harold announced.
She looked at the oven. Its display indicated that the proper temperature for baking a cake had been reached. She picked up the other chopstick and stabbed at the air with it.
“The car’s totaled.” Harold told her.

Held Them Together in the Steel

The suit was made of discarded tableware.
“But it’s so soft on the inside.” Bilou purred as he ran his one hand up one of the sleeves.
“The lining is a silk and cashmere blend.” Orthar explained in his game show announcer’s voice.
“Doubly organic.” Bilou’s brother Pan said, as he ran his one hand up the garment’s other sleeves. “I like that.”
Orthar smiled with genuine pleasure, with genuine satisfaction at having given pleasure. He rubbed his fingertips together with a curious motion. It was as if his fingers were cattle, all grazing from the same trough, with the thumbs acting as some kind of walrus-like creatures, pushing the cow’s food up to them. Oh, I don’t know. It was a confused metaphor when Bilou first described it to me and it has only gotten more so in the retelling. At any rate, Orthar asked the two brothers if they were ready to discover price.
Bilou looked at Pan.
“What do you think?” He said.
“I think so.” Pan answered.
“How much?” Bilou asked Orthar forthrightly.
“Thirty-seven thousand.” Orthar put the figure out there with as little emotion as possible. He was quick to add, however, “And that includes all the accoutrements that you see here.” He gestured towards the array of belts and capes lying on the velvet-covered platform nearby. “As well as a lifetime of maintenance and alterations.”
“Whose lifetime?” Bilou asked. “Ours or the suit’s?”
Orthar chuckled. “Why, the suit’s.”
“That’s a lot of green, Bilou.” Pan informed his brother.
“Yes, but I don’t think we really have a choice.” He raised his eyebrows at Pan, asking silently for his final word. The answer came in a twinkling of Pan’s eye that only such a close brother could interpret.
“The answer is yes.” Bilou told Orthar.
“Wonderful.” The man clapped his hands together and summoned attendants to help with the brothers’ fitting.

Tissue of Reassurance

Markus proffered the box of tissues to Glinka, allowing her to withdraw a tissue with her own fingers. However, though her nose was red and running from weeping, she refused.
“I’m not a tissue type girl.” She said.
“Very well.” Markus muttered. He twisted about and tossed the box onto the table behind the sofa on which they sat. He turned back to Glinka and watched her continue to cry.
“I’m missing that Jazz program on the radio I like.” He thought. He wondered how long he would have to sit there. It wasn’t that he felt no sympathy; he was deeply sympathetic towards the woman. It must be extremely painful to receive such grim news.
“Do you want a glass of water?” He was inspired to ask.
Glinka shook her head. In fact, she shook her shoulders and upper torso as well. She was hugging herself tightly, hunched over her lap.
Markus sighed, deciding it was time for him to show some of his exasperation with her. “Do you mind if I get one?” He asked. At her muted assent he rose and went into the kitchen.
He found it oddly organized, as he did everyone else’s kitchen. By the time he found a glass and put it under the tap Glinka had joined him.
“He was more than just a dog.” She explained.
“Oh, I’m sure.” Markus had a fear that the water would taste funny. He could smell the laundry from where he stood. One day that smell would penetrate the whole house. Then it would truly be creepy. He could never come there again.
“On him were founded a cycle of stories that aimed at expressing, well, not just the history of my family, but the human family’s interaction with nature as a whole. Do you see?”
“I guess.” Markus glanced at the curtains over the sink. “I’ve… never actually read any of your books.”
“He represented, to me, at any rate, how we have anthropomorphized nature, making it hard for us to see it objectively, unemotionally.”
Markus wondered what to do with the empty glass.

Colonel the Echo

Forcing their way through the backdrop that served as the northern boundary of their world, the men of R platoon found themselves standing on a ledge overlooking a vast, dark gulf in the midst of which glowed a dull orange emanation much like that present when the heart of the universe first began to beat.
“It’s room temperature.” Larson, the gambler, noted.
Captain Fricker, one day to be father to Trent Fricker, the reporter you met earlier, grunted in acknowledgement. He turned to Hopewell, the scientist, and instructed him to set up the sound equipment. As the latter began to do so, Lockfig, the old sergeant, spoke in Fricker’s ear.
“Right here?” He asked. “Don’t you want to move farther down the ledge?” Lockfig pointed to either side.
“I can’t afford the time, Sarge. Besides, the light coming through the rent is about the only usable light we have. That glow down there isn’t going to be much help after the sun—our sun—goes down.”
Lockfig once again mentally chastised himself for questioning Fricker. He had to admit that that young captain was one smart fella.
“The sound thrower is ready, sir.” Hopewell reported.
“Good. Stand by, everyone.” Fricker took the microphone that Hopewell handed him. He summoned up what he wanted to say, and said it.
“Hello there.” He began. His voice boomed into the gulf. “This is Captain Fricker of R platoon. Is Colonel Fradish there?” He waited a couple of seconds, then repeated the words. This time a faint echo was heard. It did not repeat Fricker’s words, however, but in Fricker’s voice, answered.
“Fricker, my boy. How are you?”
“I’m well, Colonel.” Fricker replied. “How are you?”
“I have no complaints. I’m disembodied, you see.”
“Colonel, the reason we’ve come here is to ask you about Operation Mocker.”
The colonel’s answer was drowned in the clamor of howls from the red-eyed ghouls who advanced on the platoon from either side of the ledge. As the soldiers prepared to fight them off, Larson said aloud,
“I’d have bet a month’s pay there were ghouls in here, but now it’s too late!”

Weak and Uncertain

Like most puppets, Bananus was weak and uncertain without the presece of a controlling hand and arm. As he wandered through the history museum powered by little more than his emergency battery and the nervous energy from a lukewarm espresso drunk earlier that morning, Bananus had no surplus strength to expend on observing the array of artifacts about him.
“The current exhibit is of artifacts found in the recent dig at Okraton’s western wall items associated with the era in which the wall was constructed.” One of the members of the museum’s executive board explained to Senator Grumbach. The Senator belched intemperately, but with a charming indifference. He turned to look at a display of toiletry articles heaped up in a small pyramid, stopping near the bench on which Bananus had collapsed.
“All made of stone, are they?” Grumbach asked.
“No, Senator, they’re wooden.” His host and guide corrected.
“Hmm, didn’t know they made things out of wood back then.” The Senator jerked at the waistband of his pants, easing it back to a comfortable and respectable position.
“Well, it was only about forty years ago that Okraton’s first government began construction on the wall.” The museum man informed the senator. The latter grunted and prepared to move on.
“Is… is that Senator Grumbach?” Bananus called out in a feeble voice.
The Senator turned back reluctantly, perhaps expecting to see some outraged grandmother intent on accosting him. When he saw the flaccid puppet he stepped closer.
“Bananus?” He said. “Is that you?”
“Senator.” Bananus smiled as their eyes met. “How are you?”
“Bananus! My old friend!” Grumbach loomed over the bench. “What are you doing here?”
“Too weak to talk.” Said the puppet. “Put me on your hand.”
“Of course, my old friend!” The Senator scooped Bananus up and inserted his hand whereupon the puppet animatedly told the Senator about the threat to Operation Mocker.

To Discover a Felicity

To discover a felicity is, axiomatically, a happiness in itself. Without starting down an infinite chain of causality and recursion, let us just leave it that Brant Borden was doubly pleased upon first taking up the hobby of metal gardening.
“Do these ‘metal plants’ actually grow?” Asked a friend of Borden’s mother.
“If one is very lucky.” Borden cocked his head to one side and smiled broadly.
“Felicia,” the friend said to Borden’s mother, “I think Brant is crazy.”
“He may be crazy,” Felicia Borden replied, “But he’s happy.” She did not smile quite as broadly as Brant had, but there was no doubting the delight in the woman’s face.
Despite Felicia’s friend’s doubts as to Brant’s sanity, the meticulous care he took with his metal plants betokened an orderly and disciplined mind. One day in June, as Brant was entertaining a guest, he carried on working with his potted subjects as the two men talked.
“Do you use the term ‘sculptural botany?’” Brant’s guest, the amateur poet Hunlick, asked.
“Where’d you hear that?” Borden asked, glancing up. “I just call it metal gardening.” He used his pliers to adjust the infinitesimal development of an oxidized iron wire adorned with a couple of rusty nuts welded to its shaft. It stood upright in a terra cotta pot filled with pale gray soil.
“I read it in an article in last month’s Sticky. Do you know it? It’s a little, homemade-looking magazine put out by some people associated with the university.”
“And you’ve got a poem in it.” Borden intuited.
“No. They won’t give me a chance.”
“Just as well. You don’t want to lose your amateur status.”
“I sometimes wonder if it’s worth it.”
“If it makes you happy, then it’s worth it.”
“That’s debatable. Say, what kind of soil is that in the pot?”
“It’s concrete.”

Enunciation of Motive

When the public’s demand for an explanation became too great to ignore any longer, the mayor himself was sent out to appear on the Weevily Contumeral show to make what enunciation of motive he could.
“Mr. Wells,” Contumeral addressed himself to the mayor. “Thank you for joining us tonight.”
“You are welcome.” Steve Wells did not believe in replying to a “thank you” with a “thank you,” even on a television program such as this where such exchanges were the norm. “I relish the opportunity to set the record at rights concerning these matter that have been so much on the minds of the citizens of this city.”
“And elsewhere, you must admit.” Contumeral added.
“Well, that may be true, Mr. Contumeral, but I’m not the mayor of any place except Tomatoville and the burden of my duties lies with its people, and no one else’s.” This retort went down well with many Tomatovilleans watching the program.
“Well then, let’s get down to the matter at hand. Why has your administration seen fit to lend its resources to aiding this so-called Operation Mocker?”
“I suppose the first thing to do in answering that question is to explain what Operation Mocker is, and to correct some of the misconceptions that are circulating throughout the city regarding it.”
Contumeral made a noise of interest and brought his fingertips together.
“In essence, Operation Mocker is…” Just as Mayor Wells began to make his statement a disturbance off-camera interrupted him. The sound of shouts and violent confrontation were heard. The average viewer at home had sat up forward in his easy chair and was calling out to the rest of his household to come witness the singular events unfolding on the TV just as gunfire erupted and the set of the Weevily Contumeral show was charged by masked men, some of whom were still fighting off the mayor’s bodyguards, but at least one of whom made it to the mayor’s chair and put a bullet in his head. Contumeral, looking stunned, but not particularly afraid, was spared out of appreciation for his many years of broadcasting excellence.




The Vision of the Different

Brant Borden, while wealthy enough not to have to work at some jive job for a living, yet lived quite modestly in a comfortable, but not overly large apartment overlooking Tomatoville’s celebrated Bean Gardens. He had no servants other than a woman who came in every other day and executed some light housekeeping. The day after the televised assassination of the mayor, Borden went to sleep early, having spent the day talking matters over with a couple of friends. As he lay in bed trying to sleep, a vision came to him.
Later he was not to be able to recall clearly which parts of this vision were dream and which a definite visual presence in the darkened room, for he awoke some time before dawn with no memory of having gone to sleep. He was certain, however, that the initial part of the vision was no dream. His friends, to whom he relayed the vision, were skeptical, not of the veracity and accuracy of his account, so much as his interpretation of the vision and its significance.
“Since you cannot be sure if this yellow-robed man was in the dream part or the vision part, how can you ascribe such symbolic weight to his eating of the goat?” Hunlick tried to make sense of it all.
“Hunlick, I don’t think it matters all that much which phase of the experience the yellow-robed man was in.” Borden argued.
“I think it does.” Rollian interposed. “I dreamed, just the other day, that I was back in high school again. Only this time I pushed the teachers around. I hardly think that that means anything.”
“But a vision, a genuine vision, that’s something else.” Hunlick affirmed.
“Why?” Borden helped himself to another piece of toast. The three were gathered in Borden’s dining room for breakfast.
“Because it comes from outside.” Hunlick explained.
“True,” Rollian agreed, “But it still doesn’t mean anything for anyone outside the visionary.”
“You’re missing the point.” Borden insisted. He spread butter on his toast. “The goat emerged from a well. Steve Wells.” He bit into his toast, filling the awkward silence that followed his words with a crunch.

Sharpened Appetite of the Collector

“And what are these?” Markus asked his host. He and the latter man, Hanway of the House of Hanway, stood before Hanway’s extensive collection of dried beans. Markus was indicating a particular group of beans in their plexiglass-covered cubicle with the finger named for such use when he asked the above question.
“Oh, those are the real heart of the collection.” Hanway became visibly excited. “Those are favas from the Lunar Islands, which, as you may or may not know, are considered by many leading scientists to be the most likely home of the original fava bean, the wild favas mentioned in the Compendium of Father Abraham.
“Fascinating.” Markus admitted. Indeed, he was fascinated; he wasn’t just saying that. “Are these then representatives of that ancient species?”
“Genetic testing has not yet shown whether they are or not, but, without much serious doubt, they are the closest relatives of the wild favas still in existence, and thus the oldest known species of bean still being cultivated.”
The dinner gong sounded just as Markus was about to ask if Hanway had gone to the Lunar Islands himself to obtain the beans.
“But, come, my friend,” Hanway smiled his patrician’s smile and took Markus by the shoulder. “Let us enjoy our dinner. We can talk more as we eat.” He led his guest to a well-laid table by a large window overlooking the fields where the horses of Hanway were trained. The two men had not been seated more than a few seconds before steaming platters were put before them.
“I had almost expected to be served beans.” Markus said with a laugh.
Hanway, however, frowned. “I have found the available varieties poor of late. You should come back in the autumn. I expect to have something edible by then. But, no, today we have corn. Simple, plain, modern-day corn.”
“Well, I like it. And I appreciate your hospitality.” Markus replied.
“I thank you.” Hanway poured them each a glass of wine. “Tell me,” He said. “That girl Glinka: did she ever get over his loss?”
“No, sad to say.” Markus tasted his wine. It was stunningly good. “She has taken to drugs.”
“Stupid girl.” Hanway looked out the window. “She should have taken up a hobby.”

His Situation Still

His situation still rankled not only his own sense of propriety and fate, but his parents’ as well. Brant Borden needed something more than just a hobby to fulfill himself.
“Perhaps a job?” Borden’s father suggested.
“Oh, Harold,” Brant Borden’s mother looked up from the toy kangaroo she dandled on her lap. “You know Brant; he’s preternaturally disinclined to take orders, especially from some kind of… boss!” She tittered at the word.
“He could be his own boss.” Harold Borden smiled at the idea. “He could be self-employed. Yes, I believe that’s the term.”
Felicia Borden shook her head as she looked down at the toy kangaroo. She spoke in a kind of baby talk to it and reached into its pouch with two immaculately manicured fingers.
“Naughty girl.” She accused when the pills concealed within the pouch were brought to light. She downed them with the help of a glass of port at her elbow.
“I think I’ll give Brant a call and tell him about my idea.” The elder Borden continued to muse, so taken was he by his idea. He folded his newspaper into a thick, irregular mess and shoved it into the pocket on the side of his chair.
“Do you want anything while I’m up?” He asked Felicia as he made his way to the telephone.
“No.” She danced the kangaroo on her knee. “I have everything I need right now.”
Brant Borden, cleaning his metal gardening implements with a solution of mineral spirits and linseed oil, was slightly irritated by the sound of the phone ringing. Washing his hands would be a five-minute ordeal. He picked up the receiver with an oven mitt.
“Yes, father? What’s happening?” Brant listened as his father conveyed his idea. “That’s a wonderful idea,” he answered, “But I’m afraid I’ve already got a job. Yes, I’ve signed on with the Municipal Intelligence Service. I’m going to be a spy. Isn’t that amazing?”
“He says he’s already got a job.” Harold covered the mouthpiece and told his wife, who nodded merrily.

His Strangest Smile

His strangest smile was reserved for the interviewer who asked him about his time on the old First Impressions show. Frank Vinnegar, the man sent by Rockubus magazine to interview the legendary television actor, wondered at that smile, included a description of it in his story, but returned to his pregnant wife with no clue as to what it meant other than Roosterley’s (the old actor) one remark that “things were different then.” Of course, the editors at Rockubus, and the vast majority of its readership, would be far more interested in Roosterley’s lengthy reminiscence about the most famous show he was on, Atomic Weight. The strange smile and the refusal to say anything substantive about First Impressions haunted Vinnegar, however, and he decided to research Roosterley and the old TV show on his own.
“Maybe I’ll get a book out of it.” He suggested after he had told his wife about his intentions.
“He always says that.” Shelly, carrying their first child, told her friend Babla. “I wish he would write a book. We could use the money.” She ran her hand over her obscenely distended abdomen.
“He has written a book, hasn’t he?” Babla warmed her chin over the cup of coffee in her hands.
“Years ago. When we were first dating. But it never sold. He needs to turn his reporting into a collection of non-fiction pieces. Or write an expose′ about Rockubus. They treat him like shit, you know.” Shelly’s eyes flashed as she said that last bit.
Babla could hear the old-fashioned typewriter. It was such a reassuring sound. She wished her husband did something like write on an old-fashioned typewriter. It would make her proud as well as reassured. But no, Markus was a commodities broker and always would be.
Frank Vinnegar exited his room and sped through the lounge where his wife and her guest sat.
“I just got off the phone with George. They want me to interview Weevily Contumeral! Hi, Babla.” He went into the kitchen for coffee. Shelly pursed her lips and nodded at her friend meaningfully.

Charming Little Ornaments

“It breaks my heart to have to leave.” Buck Roosterley stood in the front hall of the house he had occupied for forty years.
“I know, sir. I can imagine, I mean.” Brant Borden attempted to say the right thing.
Roosterley looked the younger man in the eye. “What is your department’s interest in my moving?” He asked.
“We don’t like the fact that an upstanding citizen and respected entertainer such as yourself is being forced to sell his house and leave town by secrets out of the past.” Borden recited the speech he had been ordered to memorize.
“That’s fine and dandy.” Roosterly commented. “But I’m not telling what I know to you either. My secrets, and those I’ve been charged with keeping by others, go with me to the grave.”
“And to Corn City?”
Roosterley looked down at Borden’s shoes and up at his carefully combed hair. “Yes, I suppose you people know all about where I’m going. You probably already know about the First Impressions show, too. Well, you can figure it out for yourself!”
“About Dan Willoughby?” To Borden, the name meant nothing. He had been told to use it only if Roosterley appeared uncooperative. The old man, however, threw up his hands with a growl and stalked out to his waiting car.
En route to Roosterley’s new home, a modest bungalow in Corn City to the south, the moving truck was detoured by city agents who searched its contents for one specific box. This was confiscated and the truck allowed to continue, its driver and crew being threatened and sworn to secrecy.
Brant Borden was not present when the box was opened in a small room at Municipal Intelligence Service headquarters. Two stout old men went through the box together.
“What do we do with Borden?” One asked his old colleague.
“Put him to work gathering dirt on his rich friends.” The other answered. He reached into the box and withdrew a red ball made of glass covered in silver filigree that spelled out the words “light entertainment.”

The Discreet Cluster

One cluster, all to itself among the array of similar clusters in the vacuum of supposedly-infinite space, was named Turrentine by the team of explorers that first tethered their moon canoe to one of the rocky, coral-like projections that covered some of the outermost agglomerations of junk that formed the cluster. As Captain Solabee clambered across the ladder from the moon canoe to become the first man to set foot on Turrentine he looked down and noted an unusually large concentration of multi-colored plastic beach pails among the cluster’s constituents.
“Lots of pails here.” He commented over the walkie talkie built into the high collar of his jacket.
“Hmm,” mused Dr. Stalking, back on the moon canoe, “That could account for the confusing spectrograph reading.” He turned to Paulson, the missionary’s son. “Grayson’s theory, you know.” He said with a grin.
“Grayson’s theory has never been proven. It’s pure speculation.” Paulson was testy. He kept his eyes on the captain’s white booted feet, moving ever further away.
“You still can’t accept it, can you, boy? Your god is dead! Dead!” Stalking pulled a toothpick from out of the compartment in his wristband made for storing just such an implement and picked his gums contemptuously.
“Enough with that divisive talk.” Solabee’s voice came back to the anxious crew. “Prepare to send across the first group. If all goes well, we may be camping out here on the surface tonight.”
“That crazy Solabee’s going to get somebody killed.” Minsch whispered to his pal Forret. “That cluster could be crawling with fruit flies.”
“Mmm,” Forret thought. “You and I ought to volunteer to stay onboard and guard the canoe.”
“Did you just think that?” Minsch asked. “I mean, did you just think that into my head?”
“Did I?” Forret wondered. “So sorry, man. I didn’t mean to be so rude.”
“No, it’s no problem. I just didn’t know you could do that.”
“I thought I told you.”
“You mean you think you told me that you could tell me your thoughts.”
“What?”