It was a snuffle-snort sort of situation, until blessedly it was snot, but that would take time. As cute as the dog was, I was going to slather and roast this creature and devour it with the help of my best friends while throwing whore’s shoes in an outdoorsy, afternoony sort of setting. My neighbor, the pup’s owner and master, a sweet fellow by the name of Ordwello, would be pissed.
But the social gods are fickle and demand offerings. I tried to appease my friends with a sack of rice, but it turns out I’d suffered an otic malfunction. Thus I was forced to proffer a blinding magnitude of blazing bunnies (which are a lot like kettle kittens and church dogs, but burn brighter and bluer). Even with this, I was threatened with a charge of Improper BBQ Etiquette, a crime that finds itself punished via the slickening sight of neighborly sickle-to-the-gut-coils. I was pre-unraveling inside my grey slop when I heard the familiar bark.
Of course! I’d burlapped Ordwello’s pooch this morning when it attempted to landmine my lawn with noxious dog tootsie.
On presentation of the bagged canine my friends holstered their cursed sickles and the one filling out the citation put away his clipboard. They backed away as Ordwello burst through the fence to reclaim his pup, the cream inside his blue egg such a delicious odor it practically demanded a hatchet to the forehead.
But Neighbor Brains were a Sick-Maker, however delicious and piquant, and I hadn’t the proper BBQ outfit to keep his meat blocks leaking an hour of sticky stew. Bad prep was no prep at all, and that’s per the long-running President of BBQ Trackademy. Ordwello should have let the dog go, and let peace fall upon all of us via greased esophagus. Instead he invaded by means of yard-wounding fence-breakery and cries of, “Move the damn dog earthward, Dickface!”
The metal plates on his back opened wide and I was tempted to lob in a grenade of warm hospitality and festive cheer. My thought being, “Why kill your evil neighbor when maybe he could just join the party?” But the clot in my right temporal lobe had been on blood-thinners for weeks, its running regimen having remained dirigible, and it chose that moment to break through. The doctors later said the blood flow destroyed parts of my ventral prefrontal cortex, removing any constraints I might have had for anger.
Ordwello thought he was pissed, but when I was through with him he would be omicturated!
Only biting my tongue kept it from crawling out of Tooth Town, past the Vermillion Border, down my adrenaline-twitching torso, across the mixed fescue lawn, and up to Ordwello’s throat. But using the Constrictor Feature I’d had newly installed in my mouth-meat would have ruined the show I’d planned for later, and I’d made too many hard-boiled eggs to let that agenda collapse.
Instead I crouched to the ground, crab-scuttled back a stretch to the garden, and grabbed a spiked philosopher’s stone. Then, noticing that Ordwello’s back plates had now extended above him in a three story V, I shouted, “Adulterer!” and gave the barbed boulder a mighty huck.
I’d heard that, against the wishes of his docphors, he’d had second tots on the eve of his third skelephant removal. It was a good thing for me he hadn’t gone through with it, I thought, watching my mighty thought-bender pass between his second and third plate of beans (Why he carried his food around on his back was anyone’s guess). As the stone slipped between his vertebrae and passed into the spinal fluid he normally filled his lighter with, my friends cowered in the pool to avoid the blast of reason when it went off.
I was not so lucky. Ordwello had told me of his voluntary Gumball Punctures before— all of those extra holes meant that the spinal fluid would be improperly pressurized. The explosion would be as vast and luminescent as a deep sea fish that learned to break-dance.
And, lo, it was! A personal-size purple mushroom crowd rose from his back. And I knew my only option was to tell it a clock-clock joke.
“How many clock-clocks does it take for a Zen Master to…”
“Woof!”
Shit! I was still holding his wriggly non-cooked pupkin, who had just startled the briefly mesmerized nuclear blast. And knocked over my iced tea! There would be hell to pay (or purgatory to rent, at a minimum) if I did not act fast.
These little nuclear crises do flair up from time to time and are usually not apocalyptic. I tried to reason with her. “Clearly, madam, I am an amalgam, much like what the dentist uses to fill your teeth.” I was in a hurry and couldn’t think of anything else to say, but she stopped expanding and I seemed to have her attention so I continued. “To indicate otherwise would trigger other whys you don’t want answered. With that said, may I suggest that our friend Ordwello is not worth getting all hot and bothered over. Certainly not while there’s a nice pool in which to cool your heels and refreshments to be had.”
The great cloud hesitated, and so yes, I confess to raising public spirit at the point of a gun. With my non-pupkin-yielding extra sticky paste-hand I reached for the flare gun tucked away in the cottony wasteland of my E.T. Eliot brand waist-band.
One pull on the trigger unleashed a trolley of chugging Acquiescence Bullets.
“All aboard my positive suggestion!”
I flopped flat to the ground, semi-mindful of my fistful of pupkin as bullets knocked chunks out of the cloud’s cheesecake smile. Twelve purple swirling death’s heads nodded in agreement.
“A swim does sound lovely,” they multi-phonically remarked.
My guests never predicted nuclear boiling annihilation, otherwise they surely would have posed in more pretty-making fashions, chasing the ever-present ambition to be the most becoming of the dead.
And so it was that the lobster-pot frenzy of hidden guest, chlorinated water, and pleasant atomic expansion met in a millisecond of accidental malice and made mist of prior problems.
With no one left to please, and no need to produce roast pupkin, Ordwello and I found ourselves death-quenched with little else to make of our evening. Noting the regrettable mess in my pool, I phoned the Queen’s Service and employed several hirsute servants to fill the body bags.
After that, all was balmy evening and low-spoke words as we de-jawed the memories and made marionberry pies from our crumbling hearts.
“Woof!”
O, pupkin!
The symmetrina is an intriguing and challenging fixed form for prose narrative. Invented by Nebula/Bram Stoker/Pushcart/World Fantasy Award winning author Bruce Holland Rogers, this form follows so many complex rules that only a tax lawyer with a degree in physics can fully comprehend all of its facets.
Despite this challenge, I was honored to team with Bruce in creating an epic nine story meditation on ghosts and loss titled “Faded Into Impalpability” (a thematic Joyce reference added for bonus convolution!).
The following story is the centerpiece of the symmetrina and as such is the only story included which was written collaboratively. I hope you enjoy it, and that it points you toward Bruce’s fantastic fiction (including his unique story-a-week service shortshortshort.com).
Oscar worried about the dog. Bay Boy was thirteen years old, arthritic, and blind. Walking pained him. Even standing up was hard on him. But he was uncomfortable lying down, too, so his life was one of standing up, turning in a slow circle, and lying back down with low, resigned groan.
It was past time to put Bay Boy down, but Oscar couldn’t face doing it. He told himself that it was because of his back. Bay Boy probably weighed sixty pounds, and Oscar didn’t think he had the strength to lift him into the cab of the truck for one last drive to the veterinarian.
Bay Boy came into the living room where Oscar was reading and lay down with a sharp, high-pitched whine. Somehow the sound was more heartbreaking than anything a human could produce. Oscar understood why people started letter writing campaigns anytime a dog was hurt on television. They could stand hundreds of artificial human murders, but a dog’s televised suffering, that was an abomination.
Bay Boy whimpered again, shifting one stiff leg out from under his substantial girth.
“You’re having a hard
night, aren’t you?” Oscar said.
From the other end of the house, Evangeline called out, “You ought to just take that dog into the back yard and shoot him. Better for all of us.”
All of us. Everything she wanted was always for the sake of “all of us.” Oscar wondered how many of the millions that died under Stalin heard, “Better for all of us,” before they caught their bullet. Oscar tried to picture himself putting his rifle to Bay Boy’s head.
“Don’t you worry,” Oscar whispered to Bay Boy. “I’m not going to do that.” He looked toward the darkened hallway. Years ago, Evangeline had insisted on getting every room of the house painted lemon yellow. When she watched TV, the lights had to be off in her room and in the hallway. Her end of the house glowed with the sour lemon light of the television flickering across those walls. “You ought to!” she said.
“She doesn’t mean that,” Oscar said.
“The hell I don’t!” Evangeline shouted. “You ought to shoot him. Better for all of us.”
He wanted to tell her that the neighbors would call the police. And there were so many security cameras, in the neighboring back yards, electronic eyes that would catch the muzzle flash. Although none of those was his real reason. He just wasn’t ready to say goodbye.
It was better not to argue with Evangeline. Let her have her say, then ignore her. That was the way he had learned to handle things. Otherwise, there was no telling what she might do. Medicine or not, she was a little unbalanced.
When he argued with her about his cigar smoking, back in the days before he retired, he came home one day to find that she had cooked a full dinner: roast chicken, salad, corn on the cob. It was more effort than she usually made. For dessert, she brought out a pie. “What kind?” he said. She just smiled and served him a slice, let him see for himself. She had cut up all of his Ashton Double Magnums, soaked them in water, and baked them in a double crust.
He was almost too shocked to be angry. He stared at her abominable pie. Oscar’s anger always took a while to rise. It emerged when he calculated the cost of her stunt. “That’s almost two hundred dollars!”
“I know,” she had said. “Disgusting waste of money, isn’t it?”
He looked to his fork and for a split second he imagined it planted in her neck. Just as quickly he pictured his fork diving into the pie, bringing back a shovel-load of flaky pastry and limp tobacco to his mouth. He’d show her. He’d eat it!
But before he steeled himself to take a bite she headed back out to the kitchen and returned, smiling. She carried fresh corn muffins, his favorite, sans cigar filling. And later that night she kneaded his cramped shoulders in her hands and softly kissed the back of his neck. Always just enough honey to make her meanness slide down.
He never did smoke cigars again. When he’d walk by a neighbor’s house and catch a sweet drift of smoke he’d hang his head low. It was like watching replays of a crucial game that he’d lost.
One by one, Evangeline had hounded the pleasures out of his life. He couldn’t work on the car in the garage—she was disgusted by the sight of oil on his fingers. He couldn’t go to the gym to relax with a pleasant swim—she hated the smell of chlorine in his hair. They’d been having sex in the exact same missionary position for over fifteen years now because any other variation gave her cramped calves and headaches. Finally, even that was too much for her.
One by one, Oscar’s pleasures were removed to the kingdom of “Better for All of Us.” Little by little, she reduced him to a ghost of himself.
Evangeline had been impressed by his rough-and-tumble take-charge attitude when they’d met at her parent’s ranch so many years ago. He’d been a seasonal hand, bucking hay under hot sun and drinking away back pain in the cool evenings. One scorcher of an afternoon, the kind where you sweat so hard that you lose a couple of belt-sizes as the day rolls forward, Evangeline had brought out lemonade—great cool glasses of real fresh-juiced lemonade with big ice cubes and a mint leaf in each. Their casual flirting had started that day. And the way she’d looked at him then, the spark he’d put in her eye, he wished now that he’d seen it for what it was—the farm girl in her had spotted a horse worth breaking.
“But I’m not broken yet, Bay Boy. Not completely.”
The dog didn’t twitch an ear towards Oscar’s whisper. Probably close to deaf by now, too, Oscar figured.
Evangeline hadn’t always been so particular. But something happened when she hit menopause, something none of her doctors could pin down. She tried to take hormone replacement pills but her friend Clara told her about how they cull baby horses to harvest estrogen in the mama horse’s urine, and that didn’t stand with her. Shortly after she dropped the pills, she needed a hysterectomy. After that she changed. She went through a “dark time” and she could barely function until the doctors found the right combination of drugs. Nowadays certain smells gave her pounding headaches, certain colors made her nauseous. She always turned off the TV when there were children on the shows or commercials.
“Why are they always laughing?” she’d complain.
She complained about Bay Boy, even though Oscar took care of everything the dog needed. He stank, she said. He whined. Why was he always whining?
Oscar turned his gaze to Bay Boy again and was surprised to see the dog staring back at him through milky-blind eyes, his gray doggy-eyebrows squinted towards the center of his face in confusion, as if to say, “Where did the puddle underneath me come from?”
Oh dear, Oscar thought. That again. Well, he could clean the floor before Evangeline knew.
Bay Boy stood up with another grunt, still looking to Oscar for answers.
“Oscar! What in God’s name is that awful smell? Do you smell that?” The voice from the end of jaundiced hall demanded answers, but Oscar couldn’t let her know what was happening. Evangeline detested the smell of urine. Any urine. Oscar had to scrub the toilets with bleach on a daily basis. One time he’d even noticed her pinching her own nose shut while doing her business. Until that day he hadn’t cried for three years, not since his brother Dale’s funeral. But seeing her sitting there like that, so disgusted by herself, sent him out of the house to cry for both of them.
His tears were the sort of thing that somehow kept him close to her on the days when she demanded he give up another enjoyment for the sake of “all of us.” He hated to call it martyrdom, but the thought had occurred before.
Oscar yelled back down the hall. “I don’t smell anything. Maybe the neighbors forgot to seal the lid on their trash. You know how they are.”
He cleaned the mess and put the piss-soaked towels out to the right of the back porch. He could launder them when she slept.
Bay Boy was harder to clean because Oscar had to get down on the floor and hand scrub the dog’s belly and paws with a soapy towel. He couldn’t risk taking the dog down that hall to the bathroom with the tub.
As Oscar scrubbed his dog’s belly he was happy to hear Bay Boy’s whine descend into a pleased panting. Once he dried the dog he rubbed behind the dog’s ears and hoped the old mutt would slide into sleep.
Soon he heard Evangeline begin to snore. He laid his hand on his dog’s soft warm fur and felt the chest slowly rise and fall.
There, alone in a house overcome by sleep, Oscar stared at the rifle sitting in his gun case and wondered about how to use it.
“What,” he wondered, “would be best for all of us?”
Including a six thousand word second person crime story set in your hometown—and quite overtly displaying your James Ellroy obsession—takes some moxy in the first place. And putting it early in your collection where anti-second person readers are likely to be popped right out, that’s pushing your luck.
But real hubris would be to include a twelve thousand word “Director’s Cut” version of the same story, right?
Well, yeah.
But, for the folks who dug the first version, these are two different creatures. The first is pure STORY, trimmed as lean as I co
uld take it, gunning for that Ellroy telegraphic prose style (and a length that would serve novella-shy readers). This latter takes a slightly more leisurely approach, including more character development, Portland flavor, Shaun Hutson references, a vagina dentata nightmare, and a smattering of prostitutes.
You know, the good stuff.
Don’t act surprised. Now is not the time for you to shake your bloody fists at the night sky.
You’re the one who chased this down. Take a look at yourself. Figure out how this happened.
Help is coming—maybe a little reality check can keep you seething until it gets here. It’s better than slipping into shock.
Face the facts.
You’re laying there in the evening chill, broken and breathless and cold on the dewy suburban grass because of a basic truth:
You’ve always been a sucker for love.
And while you’ve also always been alert enough to know that about yourself, you’ve never quite been smart enough to do a goddamn thing about it.
Since day one, you little punk, you’ve had it in your genes.
Age seven: All Mary Ashford had to do was smile at you. You kicked over your chocolate milk. She skipped away and shared it with that red-headed oaf Mikey Vinson. They laughed. Held hands, even.
You rube.
Age fourteen: Sarah Miller actually asked you to the last dance of the year. Like a date, she said.
Why wouldn’t you help her with her algebra homework? It was an easy down-payment on a guaranteed post-dance make-out session behind the modular buildings to the south of the school grounds. Maybe you’d finally have a reason to sniff your fingers on the ride home, in the back of Scotty’s mom’s mini-van.
We Live Inside You Page 17