Unidentified Funny Objects 2

by Silverberg, Robert

  “Ted! Lisa said you were going to call.” Dating a fortuneteller has its upsides. “She warned me to charge for unexpected extra-dimensional complications.” It also has its downsides.

  “How quickly can you come over?” I asked, watching the disposal burp a purplish bubble with a striking red shimmer. Looked fairly carnal.

  “I’ll be over in the morning.”

  I ate dinner out.

  GLIP TURNED OUT TO be a wizened little old man carrying a leather satchel half as big as he was. When I opened the door, he stepped past me, sniffing the air.

  “Gazpacho? You didn’t mention gazpacho.”

  Apparently, neither had Lisa.

  “Can you fix it?” I asked.

  Glip ran his finger along my mantel, right below my second-place trophy from the 2002 Little League World championships—or, as my mom called it, my loser’s place trophy.

  Glip examined his finger in the light at the window. He frowned. “Gazpacho is a problem you have to fix yourself—I can just tell you what you are in for.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. I prefer to delegate my extra-dimensional complications. “What am I in for?”

  Glip went back to the kitchen, setting his satchel on the table. From its depths he unpacked a half-dozen pots, a dozen unlit candles, and a red snakeskin purse. From it he withdrew a magic eight ball.

  “Reply hazy, try again,” Glip read. He settled into a kitchen table chair. “What makes the blender special?”

  “My grandfather always said it was haunted by the ghost of tomato paste.” I retrieved the olive-green blender from the counter where it still sat, full of crushed tomatoes and a mysterious mauve slime, and set it in front of Glip. A piece of masking tape stuck to the back read, For Ted. “But I checked the wiki-daemonum before I started, and tomato paste spirits are benign and non-influential on this plane of existence.”

  Glip traced a symbol around the blender’s base, then retrieved a mozzarella stick from the snakeskin purse and waved it over the blender jar. The cheese turned into a mouse and scurried away. Glip shook his head. “Tomatoes past. It’s haunted by the ghost of tomatoes past, not tomato paste. One’s benign and non-influential. The other is soul-devouring and poltergeistic.”

  Glip repacked his satchel. “I’ll be back tomorrow. You make gazpacho.” He pointed a candle at me. “The ghost is upset, and if I clean this before you work things out, you’ll be calling me in half-an-hour with some new manifestation. You need to make gazpacho again, but this time make it right.” Then he left, leaving a fifty-dollar invoice for “consultation.”

  I waved goodbye. I couldn’t afford to hire him, but my faucet had just started to sing the theme song to Different Strokes, and the book club was coming in twenty-four hours. I couldn’t afford not to hire him—Lisa’s mother was excited about the event, and Lisa was close to her mother.

  When I’d made the offending gazpacho, I’d worked off my mother’s recipe, a terse note typed on a three-by-five card filed in a grey metal recipe box sent with me to 2009 spring training. I’d been cut from the team, but kept the recipes.

  Her note read:

  (Tomatoes + Bread + Onions + Cucumbers) * Blender + Oil + Vinegar = Gazpacho

  My mother was a left-brain thinker.

  The blender came from my grandfather on my father’s side, so maybe that side of the family’s recipe held the solution. I dug out my father’s cookbook, which had fallen behind the spice rack and smelled of turmeric. Originally a sketchpad, the book was bound with rough hemp ties, each recipe hand-written and illustrated with a flowing fountain pen. The gazpacho recipe was inscribed in the spiraling petals of a sunflower, the ingredients listed on its leaves.

  Fadai Special Gazpacho

  Start with tomatoes sliced from the vine with a silver scythe by a full moon. Add bread, baked on the glowing coals of a resurrecting phoenix. Mix in garlic crushed by the weight of humanity. Add onions chopped without tears. Blend. Add diced cucumbers. Add equal parts olive oil, infused with sighs of despair, and vinegar born of sour love. Chill on ice, then enjoy.

  My father was a right-brain thinker.

  THE GARLIC, OLIVE OIL, and vinegar I found on Craigslist. It wasn’t difficult—there is enough crushing humanity, despair, and sour love on the Internet to go around. The onions and cucumbers I got at Safeway. The bread, available via the Firebird-o-rama phone app, materialized the instant I clicked buy.

  But the tomatoes required legwork. The celestial bodies were aligned—tonight was a full moon—but I didn’t have a tomato hookup.

  The farmer’s market around the corner from my house was famed for its authentic ingredients. I generally avoided the scene, as my life was authentic enough already, but it was my best lead.

  The market was well under way when I arrived, a crowd packed along the thirty-odd tables lining the platform of an old railway depot. A light drizzle kept the crowd under the platform’s canopy.

  A drooling undead attendant manned (zombied?) the first booth, selling organic compost labeled Perfume for the Previously-Alive. I passed up the opportunity, stepping around a young woman pushing a stroller. I pretended not to notice that the child in the stroller strongly resembled a kobold; parents don’t appreciate when you point out things like that.

  The second booth sold raw cheese and pickup lines. “Free sample?” asked the young cheesemonger. He wore a black turtleneck and a matching scowl.

  “No thanks. I like my lines pasteurized,” I said, elbowing past a teenager dumping change onto the table.

  The third booth held more promise. Traditional vegetables lined the table; broccoli, carrots, brussels sprouts, and a whole basket of tomatoes. A note beside the tomatoes read Certified Humanly Raised and Handled. A woman in overalls sat in a rocking chair, chewing on a piece of straw and trying a little too hard to be authentic.

  Maybe the book club could invite her to read Catcher in the Rye—a genuine phony.

  “Can you get me tomatoes harvested with a silver scythe by a full moon?” I asked.

  She pulled the straw from her mouth and twirled it, her eyes narrowing. “You don’t seem like a silver scythe kind of guy.”

  “It’s what I’m looking for,” I said, miffed at her stereotyping. My flannel shirt and jeans were nondescript and timeless.

  She chewed on her straw, then nodded. “Well, if you’re into that stuff, I know some folks who’d love to fix you up.”

  She scrawled something on a scrap of cardboard. “Meet me at this address at sundown. Bring fifty bucks and your own silver scythe.”

  “Thanks.” This gazpacho was getting expensive.

  I BORROWED A SILVER scythe from a friend of a friend, whose daughter had been the Grim Reaper in a school play.

  “Silver-plated,” the friend of a friend clarified.

  “Close enough,” I said, hoping I was right.

  The address led me to an abandoned lot squeezed between a car wash and a YummiMart. A spray-painted sign read Urban Farm and Spiritual Center. A couple-dozen scraggly tomato plants grew in lines scratched in the dirt.

  My new farmer friend pulled up in a pickup truck about an hour after sundown. She rolled down her window to take my cash and wave at the plants. “All yours,” she said as she drove off.

  The moon came up. I sliced free a tomato.

  Something soft hit the side of my head. “Murderer!” screamed a voice. I turned, and another projectile squished into my forehead. My vision turned red.

  “Get him!”

  I ducked behind a tomato cage. Someone was throwing rotten tomatoes at me. I peeked. It wasn’t someone, it was a crowd of someones, dressed in flowing silver robes and sandals, bearing signs reading PETANQUE STANDS WITH THE OPPRESSED.

  I raised my hands. “Wait!”

  The incoming tomatoes stopped. I stepped out from behind the cage, hands in the air.

  “I think there’s been a mix-up. Who are you?”

  A silver-robed man stepped forward from the mob. Hi
s bald head gleamed in the moonlight. “We are the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Nightshades, Quetzalcoatl, the Undead, and Elephants. We have witnessed your despicable act.”

  “I picked a tomato? So?”

  The crowd booed, surging forward and surrounding me.

  “Tomatoes are the most glorious of the nightshades. They are not for humans to torture and murder for entertainment,” their ringleader said.

  “Wait. You’re throwing tomatoes at me because I was picking tomatoes?”

  “These tomatoes, picked humanely, are giving their lives for the cause,” he said, gesturing at his basket.

  “Willingly?”

  He turned and waved me off, saying, “Harvest him.”

  Hands grabbed me from behind. I struggled, but my head was wrapped in a towel smelling of camphor, and everything went black.

  WET SANDPAPER RUBBED MY cheek. I opened my eyes to a black cat licking my face. I struggled to sit up. The moon hung lower in the sky, illuminating a small, grassy park. I didn’t recognize the neighborhood. A figure, shrouded in dark red, stood behind the cat.

  “Are you prepared to play for your fate?”

  “Huh?” I scrambled to my feet. “What?”

  “You have been delivered for judgment.” The figure opened its palm, revealing a small silver glowing ball. It threw the ball some ten yards into the grass. “We now play petanque for your soul.” Another ball, tomato-sized and glowing red, followed the silver one. The red ball fell a foot from the silver.

  A small silver circle appeared around the figure’s feet, and the figure stepped outside of it.

  “Your throw.”

  Still a little lightheaded from the towel’s fumes, I stepped into the circle. Three green balls sat beside two red ones.

  “I’m supposed to toss my ball as close to the silver one as I can, right?” A coterie of old men played petanque, a lawn-bowling game, in front of the railroad depot on Sunday mornings, espressos in hand. Lisa had once asked if she could take a picture of their bocce balls, resulting in an brief education in French swear words and a lecture on the trivial, but apparently vitally important, differences between bocce and petanque.

  “One should always strive to be close to the truth.”

  Was this game getting metaphorical? That’s why I avoided literature in favor of targeted self-help. Too much metaphor is bad for one’s health.

  I picked up and hefted a heavier-than-expected green ball. I lobbed it, overshooting the target by at least two yards. The cat, sitting beside the figure, licked its paws.

  “Throw again.”

  My next shot, an improvement, dropped beside the red ball and a nose closer to the target. I stepped out of the circle. Maybe I’d get out of this in one piece.

  “Who are you?” I asked, as the figure stepped into the circle to throw.

  “I am the ghost of tomatoes past. The time has come to end your family’s careless blending of my nightshade brethren.”

  The phrase “soul-devouring and poltergeistic” echoed in my mind. What had my gazpacho gotten me into? The second red ball dropped behind the first. My second ball was still a nose ahead.

  Then the third red ball dropped, chipping my lead off into a bush.

  The cat purred. I shivered.

  “I don’t suppose I can cut a deal with you?”

  “The time for deals is past.”

  I hefted the last green ball. I could do this. I imagined I was re-pitching the final inning of the Little League series, only this time Mom wasn’t signaling me to walk the guy. I could do it my way. I threw my best fastball. The ball hit the target, knocking it up in the air. Clunk. The target ball fell against the green ball from my first throw.

  “How about now?”

  I WAS ALLOWED TO go home. When I got there, I made gazpacho, my gazpacho, not my mother’s, not my father’s. I made it with beets. I didn’t need nightshade oppression in my life. The soup came out great, although a little purple.

  With my blender appeased, Glip cleaned the kitchen in no time flat. He finished just as the book club arrived. Glip stuck around, contributing unexpected literary insights. The book club was a success. Lisa gave me a smooch. Her mom asked for my recipe.

  Next month the book club is reading Fried Green Tomatoes.

  I suggested they do it at Glip’s house.

  Story notes:

  The opening line of “The Haunted Blender” came to mind while I was watching a band my partner said reminded her of “Smelly Cat” from the TV show Friends. I’d thank them for the inspiration, but they might not appreciate the publicity. From that line grew the further adventures of the character introduced in “The Day the Repossessed my Zombies,” my story in the first Unidentified Funny Objects anthology.

  K.G. Jewell lives and writes in Austin, Texas. He has never lost a cage match. His website, which is rarely updated, is lit.kgjewell.com.

  THE RETGUN

  Tim Pratt

  If you find yourself squatting over a pit toilet while wearing stiletto heels, you’ve made a few bad choices at some point during the evening. I could have taken off my shoes, but then I’d be barefoot, in the woods, in the half-light of a lantern dangling from a tree branch, standing in whatever you can expect to find on the ground around an artisanal hand-excavated poop hole.

  Apparently there was a fashion for high-and-low cultural juxtapositions in this particular dimensional node, hence a full fancy-dress party being held in and around a homemade earth-and-sod house lit only by torches. The hors d’oeuvres were processed cheese foam sprayed on mass-produced crackers, served on silver platters passed around by leggy supermodels dressed in hair shirts and stinking rags, plus prune-wine brewed in a ramshackle still and passed around in crystal goblets. Let me tell you something: prune wine goes right through you, so I didn’t even have to pretend I needed to use the facilities when the time came to get in position.

  The pit toilet was well back in the woods, some distance behind the sod house, but it nevertheless came equipped with a scrupulously polite bathroom attendant—he was standing on the lowest branch of a nearby tree—dressed in a green velvet tuxedo and prepared to offer towels, breath mints, and cocaine on demand. Interdimensional travel is often way more boring than you’d expect, but this was not one of the boring times.

  Earlier, when I was mingling among the partygoers—the worst human beings this node had to offer—a guy wearing a moth mask had lunged over to me drunkenly, tried to touch my cheek and slurred, “Your skin… so beautiful… like porcelain…”

  I’d knocked his hand aside and said, “My skin is like the stuff toilets are made out of?” Proving that I’d had a way overly optimistic idea about the quality of the local toilets.

  My business done, I scuttled away from the pit, tugged my rather ephemeral underwear back up around my hips, and pushed down my iridescent black dress, wondering how long I could plausibly pretend to be adjusting my garments before the attendant got suspicious about my loitering. Then I heard the sound of a human badly imitating an owl, which was both a good and a lousy signal to use in this node, since owls had been hunted to extinction here in a weird sports-and-dining craze some years earlier.

  I reached into my purse for a can of aerosolized knock-out gas and sprayed it into the toilet attendant’s face. He fell over, spilling cocaine and mints everywhere. Before I could blow out the lantern, a man wearing a skintight rubber outfit that covered his entire body except his crotch and ass appeared from around a tree, coming to avail himself of the facilities, and I sprayed him, too. Luckily the nostril-holes, which were the only openings in his mask/hood combo, allowed sufficient airflow to knock him out, too. He fell upon the unconscious attendant in a way that formed a rather suggestive tableau, but I mean, how could he not?

  Then I blew out the lantern, and my light-compensating contact lenses (acquired in a better universe than this one) kicked in, giving me creepy green night vision. I could clearly see my partner and our prisoner approaching
through the trees. (Okay, senior partner, but I refuse to be called “sidekick” or “assistant” or “Gal Friday” or “padawan” or any of the other crap Kirtley tries on me).

  Kirtley was presenting as female tonight, mostly, with blown-out blonde hair and significant bosoms, but with a little five o’clock shadow, too, just by way of fucking with the gender binary essentialists. Kirtley comes from a world where body modification is pretty much as common as dying your hair, and Kirtley claims not even to remember Kirtley’s own original birth sex—if it even fell firmly to one side or the other—and always marks “Not Applicable” on forms that ask for gender, generally just prior to setting the forms on fire, because seriously, you think we go around filling out forms? (In case you’re wondering, the only acceptable pronoun for Kirtley is “Kirtley” so get used to seeing that word. Kirtley Kirtley Kirtley.) Kirtley was frog-marching the party host, a brutal pink-haired warlord named Princess Stephanie, who’d dressed for tonight’s celebration of conquest in a gown of shimmering green silk accented by a string of “pearls” carved from the bones of her vanquished foes. Stephanie was groggy, presumably drugged, but not so insensible that she couldn’t carry her own weight, more or less.

  “Portal, please,” Kirtley said, and I tossed the marble into the pit toilet and counted “one-two-three.”

  The telltale “pop” of displaced air told me the portal was open, and when I looked into the pit I saw a shimmering blue horizon, thankfully above the level of the pool of pee-and-poop at the bottom of the hole. I jumped in, emerging in the wrong orientation and rolling through the tall grass as my momentum sorted itself out. I was followed a moment later by the jumbled tangle of Princess Stephanie’s cattywampus limbs. Kirtley managed to sort of sidle through the portal and didn’t even lose Kirtley’s balance in the process. Annoying as hell, but Kirtley had been at the interdimensional-secret-agent thing a lot longer than I had. I’d get the knack of being smooth in all situations someday.