Waggles, the Piddling Pup

Waggles, the Piddling Pup

       by Plays-With-His-Pudding

Waggles sniffed at herself and stood up to follow Milky who went down the stairs, out the door, to the grocery and back again with a half pint of cream for his porridge.

       "You can't be too careful nor too full," Milky lisped. Waggles agreed. She ate some of her dried food and went to the window to watch garbage pick-up along the ally. Milky put all the cream in his bowl, ate his cereal and dressed for work.      

       Waggles did little all day except wait on Milky. By which I mean that he waited for Milky. That is the same thing in the dog world. When one waits for, one waits on. Waggles planned all day long how she would greet Milky at the door. Would it be with a puddle of piss? Would she have that day's daily paper torn and wet? Would she be nice this time and simply stretch and yawn as if she had been sleeping and was contented? She had about five hundred options from which to choose and she sorted through them all each day at leisure, in time settling on just the right one to pleasure herself when her master arrived back at the door.

       She was doing what a woman does who wishes to please her boss for a series of days and weeks so that he will either give her more work if she is an ambitious employee, or less if she prefers to spend her time talking and doing little. Either way, she plans her entrances and exits. Entrance one: high heels, short skirt, red lipstick, red fingernails, big earrings, a flower in the hair and a low cut blouse opened a few buttons. Boss notices. Exit one: bend down low enough, when he comes to the door a few minutes after closing time, for him to see well down her blouse and then to notice up her legs as she takes off her pumps and puts on her after-work shoes. Skirt hiked, garter showing. White under black.

       Entrance two: boss comes in. She is on a ladder cleaning a high window with a cleaning spray and rag, reaching high, reaching low. No nylons. Bare legs. Visibility up to the crotch. Exit two: changes in the bathroom with the door opened a crack, boss looking out of his opened door watching her hidden movements. And so on. Entrances and exits three, four, five, six, seven, and all the way up to twenty if need be. Lots of time in the work day to plan these, and to think about just the right combo.

       Waggle's subject possibilities--i.e. large general strategies--for when Milky came home included manipulation in these categories. Barking: running about the apartment in a state of high agitation, barking insanely, difficult to catch and exhibiting apparent malevolence; easily offended; intermittent sharp growls, especially when close to Milky.

       Sickness: weak-looking, body flagging and spent, hunkered down not on a comfortable chair or couch but in an unlikely corner on newspaper as if she were about to throw up and had taken thoughtful precautions to keep Milky from experiencing any disease and extra work just on her behalf; eyes lidded and veiled, not in anger but exhaustion; fur disheveled (gotten by licking herself the wrong way and against the grain, as well as by rolling on the dusty basement concrete shortly before Milky's arrival.      Indifference: not noticing Milky's entrance nor his happy inquiries about her health;  sleeping unperturbed under the table and not moving a muscle when Milky asked what she had been occupied with all day. In this state she had to stay for many hours to be effective and so she chose it seldom. It required too much of a sustained effort, something that she had a distaste for most weeks.

       Intelligence: looking smart when he came home. surrounding herself with opened books and newspapers neatly spread, the editorial pages or world affairs pages visible; squinting intently and with a busy eye at Milky when he inspected her for symptoms of something or other; barking politely in greeting and not muzzling or rubbing up against his legs, but instead returning to her fretful movements over the papers and books as if she still had a great deal to study before the day was done.

       Waggles had much toil each day simply deciding which of these strategies would bring Milky to a certain height of daily interest in his dog's state of affairs. Waggles won with wicked regularity this game of "Remember me, I have many desires."        

Stone Back and the Smelly Flowers

Stone Back and the Smelly Flowers

       by D. B. A. G. B. J. H. A. Z. Reimer

Childbirth makes us all grow up. Till then, we idle in adolescence and spin in youth's early dawn, spin in summer. Penelope spun in the death of the suitors she'd wearied of. Man of the house, long gone, now back, spun out the thread of his own life a few years, lengthened the imaginary life of his in sealing the love of his woman and a promise to be more faithfully home from then on. He spun out the length of his death line a good many years by having later to spin yarns about his killing for her. He killed for her who missed him at home. He swiftly took the lives of fifty useless men with his deadly bow and then, appeased, she let him into her bedroom once more even though he'd been gone ten years too many.

       When I am gone two hours too many my wife has plans for my return and her revenge is sweet to her and puzzling to me. When or if I'd be gone two months too long the loss of my foreskin at least would not seem unreasonable. To her. Ten years and then her having knit and reknit the same abominable chunk of tapestry all those nights and days and not take serious soothing? I don't think so.

       Odysseus left soon after again because she could not stand him home. Gone a second time, no one has thought to write about it because beneath notice. Once those first two gones are over and the tenacity of the need to appease and reduce to appeasing are satisfied, nothing remains to tell and a man may retire or die for all that story cares. A woman, too. She then finds herself knitting things for other's babies. And, she discovers herself discovering autoeroticism in a nonchalant way. She then occurs only, coming to awareness of this or that, planning such and such a party, remaining loyal to him or her, sleeping in a snoring way with him or her, rescuing Tanya or Herbert from an orphanage, slipping into nighties that many see and many don't wish to see, buying sixty dollar pairs of panties of the same effect, peeing, eating, bundling, whipping, saturating, scolding, lamenting, loving, halting, and swimming, each for big reason and no notice, all for nothing.

       Stories ever only concern the first two leavings and comings and then are over.

       Wyhdbum left home when he was thirteen and went to sea. His father scolded him for it and promised disaster, but Stilther listened to no word of it. His mother he kissed and ran from in the midst of her blustering. He made his own story long by spending many years landbound, surrounded by ocean at a locale many weeks from his native Scotland.

Ambitious and handy both, he invented housing, food, powder and shot, storage, reading, nautical engineering and navigation, ship masonry and a good many other disciplines useful to his stay there. When he saw sails at last and hailed them to him, he felt a sharp regret to be rejoining humankind, and he returned to his distant solitary stampings as soon as ever he could some years later--this time with no intention of being left marooned and helpless--and after making peace with his father, love to his mother, and money for his future. Not a year following his return to his island, his dog died who had been such a loyal companion there on Wyhdbumland. This loss did discourage him and for a long time, but eventually, at the age of eighty-nine, Stilther purchased of another canine, one with feline features and a missing hind leg and one missing front leg, and with this creature at his side he toured the world.

       Once when attacked by pirates he helped his Sniggles out of a jam by accosting the bandit what had the poor beast aholt by his front leg, and so hurt him over his pate that that miscreant let go of the valiant Sniggles at once and ran for good measure. Another time, when engaged in peeing against a good old cottonwood of enormous size and girth, a few miles from Headersville, Kt., a group of girls harmed the mongrel in their inappropriate inspection of his undersides. They had just completed some operation on him with a sharp object, and were feeling of him in voluptuous ways when Stilther intervened and strongly advised to leave that poor puppy alone unless they wished for the same to be done to them, and poste haste at that. They agreed they wouldn't mind and he obliged them unwillingly, afraid that Sniggles would be gone by the time he had given each of les jeune fille Headersville a proper turn.

       Sniggles showed his observant nature in that instance, however, because he stayed close to the six of them, and once or twice when his master came up on top he, Stilther, saw that canine's enormous eyes glued to their bottoms, and watching with more than obvious interest the ins and outs of their oifings. Stilther remonstrated sharply with Sniggles, calling for him to step away for honor's sake and to leave them to their business, to let them to themselves without a third pair of eyes on them, but the clever dog, sensing Wyhdbum's predicament without any hands free to reign him in, stood his ground and throughout the ordeal barked and whined as if hurting himself. He received a severe thrashing when the spectacle was done but he did not mind and thanked his master by licking him about the mouth and nostrils afterwards and for many days to follow.

       He was a good dog, a fine animal, a remarkable cur, and Wyhdbum never regretted, except for once, the acquisition of so beautiful a specimen. That once occurred when Sniggles came loping up to Stilther barking just as that fellow was spying on a young lady of his choosing as she was getting into the shower at her own home with the blind up and thinking herself alone and unobserved. Startled, limped by that limping loony, Stilther roared out his surprise and got caught in the act by the father of the girl who himself had a set of binoculars strung around his neck and held in hand at the time he noticed the intruder and, careful to keep his voice down, resolutely sent Wyhdbum in shame from the premises. Sniggles received this time not only a tongue but a hand lashing that he would remember, accompanied by inconsolable whining, till the end of his days.

       The occasion he brought his wagon to the yard of a farmwife who was planting Chrysanthemums, Wyhdbum entirely forgot because it did not speak well of him, and by this I--his neighbor's wife, randomly choosing him as the subject of a brief narrative biography for a class in remedial English required in order to enroll in an undergraduate program at the University of _______--mean the following. Wyhdbum found the flowers smelly and distasteful. Not only that, when it became clear that he would not be touching the hands that touched the flowers she had given him on his departure from the yard, he felt a strong resentment against all flowers and flung them into the shrubbery by the roadside where the hapless wife later saw them as she rode by with her husband in his new wagon and fine team of horseflesh. The blooms were like children lying there, Elizabeth thought when she saw them discarded. I wish I had them, she thought, back in my hands and had never given them to that shameful vagabond. Wine tonight is what I need to help me forget about human ingratitude, she reflected. With that she fiercely whipped the team, barking for them to hurry up, and when she looked at her husband she told him in no uncertain tones to stop that oggling of her at once if he knew what was good for him.

        

A Tragic American Manhattan Project

A Tragic American Manhattan Project

       by Cornelius the Bombast

at first he thought

i don't think

the thing will work

it won't do what we intend

it's just too weird a thought

how can a thing explode

and take with it

in that one conflagration

all the world

or all the world

in some square miles

so he went on and thought

that he would think

it through some more

and so he did

till hiroshima

When Oppy (his wife called him that) made the bomb work well enough to ignite (or whatever it is that bombs do) she kissed him next morning and asked how they could find out for sure because she had been thinking about the mechanics of the thing when she woke.

       "We're going to drop one from the air on an uninhabited part of Death Valley and cross our fingers that it actually goes off," Oppenheimer said and kissed her back with equal energy. He ate cheerios, brushed his teeth, got into the striped gray suit Skyreens had laid out for him, entered their 1944 Dodge sedan and drove off. The clouds overhead wiffled and sighed. Gerkus trees on the other side of their ditch waved goodbye with their delicate branches and their elongated leaves in clusters and the tall hay grass beside the road ducked to get out of the dust and wind the car made.

       "This is the day, this is the day, that the Big O made, that the Big O made," Oppie sang as he drove along. He felt unhappy about it all, sick really, but he had not been able to find a balance for his emotions and so he sang songs such as this and made odd remarks full of absurd optimism as a sign to himself of his own volatility and wicked goodness.

       "O rejoice, o rejoice, for today is the day that my Lord will come," he intoned. He would be on the plane that would drop the first bomb and because he himself had never flown in an aeroplane he wondered what he would have to do, wear, say, think, feel and communicate about in the process. I hope I get to sit by a window so that I get to see the bomb drop, he thought. After all, I was an important person on the team! He snickered at his joke.

       Snickers, he thought. Hmmm. Snickers. When they got into the plane he had a window seat at the back but in front of the bomb cargo where the bombing person sat. Oppy turned toward him and asked him a question or two about procedure but the guy did not respond and O thought that he must be deaf or shy or concentrating, or maybe repeating to himself the tables by which he accurately dropped bombs onto targets. The wind rushed past O's window; he could hear it. The plane lifted off and they were in the air. O enjoyed it a lot, this lifting off and suddenly being suspended in a wobbly carousel of immobility. Flying is great, he said to himself. Flying is great, yes it is, yes it is, he intoned to the melody of an old Sunday school hymn. No one was paying him any attention, the pilot, co-pilot and bomber all busy with their eight hour shift, so he pressed his face at will against the window and enjoyed the sight of the ground slipping by in all its variety of color and thing.

       City gave way to country where his house nestled somewhere below. Country lay next to forest where he had once gone with his father and mother on a picnic among bears and trees and rocks and all things wild. Southern Pine region gave out onto scraggly swamps and endless hills covered in furz, and finally there ahead swelled the telltale signs of desert, tan-coloured expanses visible on the horizon and growing ever closer as the plane charged onward.

       The target approached slowly. Death Valley was a huge area that should have been called Death Zone, or Death Region, or some other such name that  countries give to unimaginably endless tracts, since after an hour of flight they still had not reached their destination. When they did after an hour and forty minutes, O wondered at how little life he had seen below him. He could see well enough the little details on the ground. Now a gigantic boulder shouldered up out of the sand. Here an ancient and abandoned mine headframe. There a dry gulch through which dry water meandered. Now and then an outcropping of rock that might have been called a little mountain. Mainly sand, though, and where it was sand he could not differentiate one place from another. When they reached the target area. not having seen signs of humanity for hundreds of miles, the pilot turned to O and said,

       "This is it." O was startled. No one had spoken for three hours.

       "Oh," he said. "Where does the bomb drop?" The pilot turned from him and pointed downwards.

       "There," he said, nodding, too. "That old farmstead there." Below O the buildings of the farm came into view. Sand dunes between house and barn, in a wasteland as broad as the face of moon itself, without tree or lake or road or grass field around, there it stood.

       "What!?" O shouted. "We're going to bomb a farm?"

       "Yep," the pilot said, "we are." He flew, he banked, he approached, he lifted his thumb to the watchful bomber at the back, he pulled his thumb down in a sudden motion, and O heard the sound of the bomb hatch opening and emptying, and looking down he could see the bomb dropping, straight toward the target.

       "Kablam!" O said to himself even before the bomb hit. Then all he saw was light and nothing else.

       In the old barn, Bubba Wassermann, a high school dropout, sat smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. He was fortyish, single, had never had a date, hated himself, wished for a better world, thought highly of himself at times, ate whatever creatures he could find, and drank whatever liquids he could lay his hands on. He had discovered an ingenious way of collecting dew overnight and so he had a gallon of water each day that did him quite well.  He collected also cactus plant juice and brewed both wine and tequila from it. Tequila was wine distilled and a bit of snake oil put in for flavor. At least, that is what Wass had heard and what he had tried and had grown to like. Just now he was drunk and happy. His mule had died and that was good.  He hated that mule. His dog was gone to rattlers and he didn't mind. Dogs needed too much food and love. So, Wass had only himself to look after and he did that, day by day.

       When the bomb hit it wiped out the farm and did the dishes for Wass. He had not done them for a week, partly because of a chronic shortage of water, partly because he had no woman to impress or drive him. The bomb painted his buildings for him (they'd needed painting for ever so long), it dug both his outhouse and his dugout (accomplishments Wass had only dreamt of, though he had fantasized about hiring someone to do that for him). All the small jobs on the farm were finally done now and he would not have to think about projects anymore.