Paging Rrophets

Paging Rrophets

      by Dougie Dorkheimer the Third

The day is coming to an end. Prepare the way of the Lord. I am not good enough to stoop down and tie the laces of His shoes. I eat wild locusts (There are no other kind, I believe. No one would raise them. No one would attempt to domesticate locusts, would they? For what? Eating? Not enough prophets around. To help out Pharaohs  pissed at slave nations? Nonsense. Now, honey is another matter. Lots of people to help slurp that up.) and wild honey. It's not easy to get. A variety of cultures employ a variety of methods, but in the desert around here the Ibnites tend to smoke out the nests and climb high rope ladders to where they are located. That is how the Dead Sea scrolls were found, in fact. Honey gathering. 

        I have not the advantage of a community so I go it alone. I just distract the bees by spreading a little honey from my private supply on my naked body (carefully avoiding certain parts). I run past the hive a few times till I have most of the bees following me. I let them get close and land and then roll in the sand and kill them all. Walla, no bees! There is an art to this, I know. You learn by trial and error. Locust for protein, honey for sweetness and energy. Today your account will be required of you. Today we live, tomorrow we die. I will cut this baby in two and you each get half. If you study and get your Ph.D you have something at least. Better a plumber with a Ph.D than a plumber without one. There once was a kind father with two children, Hansel and Gretel. God helps those who help themselves. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's. A life is empty of meaning. There is no exit for humans because we are the only moral entities in the universe; nothing else is or is required to be moral. Only man is so saddled and he has no escape because he knows too little. He knows nothing of the future. He is more moral than God. Man is the idiot who thinks he can know. Man will no longer be man by the year 2050. "Mankind" will be over by then. What we need is a man who longs not to be a man. We need someone who is not interested in replacing God once God has--as He has--abdicated. We need someone who is interested in the history of meaning because no other available body of knowledge exists for him to entertain himself with. We need someone who is happy and joyful, and in the thought of his own loss finds most joy. Yes, we need that person and that person is coming. I am not worthy to untie his shoelaces. That person is on his way here because I can hear the thunder of his steps. He neither creeps nor slinks. He is a stranger to careful thoughts. He does not at all revere the secret way nor practice the neat and restrained. He is a singer of sad tunes that make him happy and happifies others, too. He sings, plays an instrument, walks far, likes the thought of lying on grass and looking up at the sky, of lying on grass and looking down at the dirt. He loves dirt, air, water and sun. He is a force to be reckoned with. He has no love of the past for the future has occurred to him. The future irradiates him with its goodness and with its wealth of places to swim. The future is honey on him.

No Tall Tales

No Tall Tales

     by Shortense Hind-Bottom

Bunyans hurt, they say, but have never, praise God, had one myself. It feels as if someone's pulling a fish hook out of the ball of the foot. Or like hiking with broken glass under the heel. Or someone tapping a little hammer on an aching molar. 

        This is how McDairmid started off his Sunday school lesson March 5, 1009, the year Ballyhunagden castle was completed. The year that saw little King Harold the Grunter and his enormous wife, Magdridsdottir, establish their seat in its spacious courts. This was also the year peace finally came to CoMeade on the northeast shore of Bailedonague island. Till then, since the fifth or sixth centuries, wars had inevitably sapped them of energies and foodstuffs. Now, edibles aplenty in the markets. Even early already here in March produce from trade with the English had doubled since the previous year and everyone seemed happier than they had been for decades.

        McDairmid looked around the room of little ones, May, Sandra, Wanda, Wendy, Sindy, Pretzella, Dawn, Carabelle, Joy and Ron and continued.

        "See my foot, for instance," he said. He undid his laces, took off his boot, slipped off his ledderstrempf and raised his right foot, sole up high enough for the group to see it well. 

        "This foot has walked very far.  Thousands of miles has it seen the earth pass beneath itself. It has thought not one thought in all that time. No, not a single conception has it generated in its fifty-three year sojourn. What does that tell you ladies? What can you incidentally glean from that?" The room smelled of his socks and his skin. Everyone but McDairmid felt a little dizzy.

         "'Put your foot down, it smells'?" Or, "'please don't tell us. We pretty ones don't want to know firsthand what an old foot has gone through'? But halt, there is some method to this. I shall now draw a relevance, an interesting moral, from this little display and prelude. May I put my foot down now? Aaahhh, thank you."

        With that McDairmid lowered his foot, took a deep breath and told them the following.

        "Ladies, young generators of future mankind,, I wish to inform you that this foot is happy! Yes! Without bunyans, without corns or rickets, without hideous growths of any sort and without even a serious case of itching callouses it stands erect and proudly before you as an emblem of the joy of thoughtlessness. Do you begin to see my drift?" He further lowered the foot that he had earlier raised for them to inspect. Unblemished, it lay before them as calmly as a sleeping infant, as trusting as a whale pup stuck to the side of its mother lumbering through the deep.

        "Joy is not to be had by hard thinking. That is the moral for today. Joy, however, may be taken through a combination of thought and action. Viz., I run, jump, wiggle toes and so on as action and my foot sighs with relief after what it has had to endure for the previous half hour when it was being held up to my head as a catalyst for the thoughts that I've been expounding before you. So, yes, a mixture of the two works its small delights. Joy may be gotten by a predominance in you of rest and laziness where the foot sees nothing but sky and gorse and bedsheets. That is, sick, sad, resting, lazy, unpredisposed and so on, it lays about in a fallen fashion. Then, too, the foot feels joy and release from care. But, try to make that foot privy to each of your head's concerns, lifting it to your ears each time another fancy hums through the spaces between them, and it will soon complain. It hates such compulsive attention to thinking. So I give you the truth, younglings, that you will derive more joy out of a thoughtlessness than out of a busy intellectuality that engages all parts of you, even ones I have as of yet not chosen to appropriate for my small fables and lessons. That will come. Let's see. What body part should we, Fiona, make the centre of our discussions next Sunday? Well, maybe that will be clearer for you on the day itself. Class dismissed. We shall see you at 10:30 sharp next week of a Sunday. 

None

None

     By DouGlas Er eiMer

       when the sun refused to shine

       when the sun refused to shine

       oh lord I want to be in that    

            number

       when the sun refused to shone

Darkness came, and the sun no longer held the world in light. Now a form crept with care from the old mill house, crossed the yard in the shadow of trees, and entered the church. No canle shone at any window. The dark casements of Église St. Surplice glowed black and still against the wispy lumination of moonlight. A night cock wooed, and from behind the house the Lilburn Wrentit babbled through the mill wheel. Crickets and dogs in the far distance. Cloying hibiscus nearby. Lilac flowers dropping their odors on everything. Dust of the earth needing rain laying on the tongue and in the nostrils. The hour of sacred love had come.

        Her habit about her, Justina, nun of the Whitefrock order, stood at the front of the church, cheerful, and too full of anticipation. Her heart beat quickly, and her hands held each other. When the door opened, and Enry entered, she whimpered loudly enough for him to hear and he stopped in the aisle. He did not feel her fear. He felt, if anything, a great expectation, and her frightened sob encouraged him. He walked easily now, not as he had done in crossing over to the church, and in a moment he stood before her. The alter loomed. Above them a statue of a suffering Jesus in the arms of a tender mother Mary hung high  up in the carapaces of the cathedral. 

        "Justina!" Enry said, quietly, for he was not a boorish man. She said nothing, but mewed again, put her hands to her face and covered her eyes.

        "We are not alone here," Enry said. "Look!" He turned his eyes upward toward the ceiling and there statuary and paintings, alive with the faint light of the faces of throngs of those saved at the end of days, dove and swam in the vaulted heights.

        "I don't think we should go through with this!" Justina said quietly, fearing that her sisters would come to her aid. They slept, all twenty-three of them, young and old alike, in rooms along the edges of the chapel  built there for them by beneficiaries centuries ago. Their sharp ears heard everything. Mice dared not walk too boldly over the stone floors. Bees roused them, arriving at the hive below the eave late after a night of drinking, bumping in accident against their window panes. The nest of dovelets cheeping in their little sleeps, caused the twenty-three to turn and look once about. The twenty-three were a restless nest of lets themselves.

        "None but thou and I shall know of this night's deeds," spoke Enry with strong assurance and he placed his hand upon sweet Justina's breast. She moved from him, and then she moved again, this time into his embrace with a willing forcefulness that surprised him who thought her so lightly driven.
        "Oh Enry!" she said. "Twelve years this need has been on me and now I will take what I may from you to drain it away! The time has come. Now is the day of reckoning!" So saying, she's threw off his hat, pulled sharply at his shirt buttons, grabbed at his belt buckle, and then yanked down his trousers with a suddenness that left him speechless.

        "My! Jristina! What have you done! This is not the way . . . ." His words fell on deaf ears. As suddenly as she had started, she stopped. She attacked her own habit, and before a cock could have crowed twice, she stood there in her natural finery, resplendent, with thighs, stomach, arms, breasts, legs, and throat displayed in the moonlight filtering down from the ponès above. The scent about her was roses in dew. Enry turned to run. But it was too late! She lunged forward and snatched him firmly by the belt. She drew him back toward her with a willfulness out of keeping with the nuns of Whitefrock. She undressed him leisurely, and then took him in her arms, his eyes wild and roving, his hands reaching now and then for purchase. Such dreadful longing he had till now and in all his born days never beheld nor had to endure enacted upon his person. She nibbled, licked, tickled, toyed, pressed, depressed, slid, tangled, felt of, sprinted, sprangloticled, whispered, sucked, prodded, probed, knickered, wumpleed, snumped, pressed some more, squeezed, grabbed, yanked, tore, pummelled, whipped, mittened, handled, dallied, mouthed, and snickpelted with such a will and for such a duration that Enry fell senseless to the floor, deprived of even the feeling now of fear. For the first time in his life he had met his match and from that day forward, notwithstanding the irony of the situation that the cavalier had been outcavaliered, he would have have none of nuns. He crossed the street when he saw them.  He hurried along down allies where he thought not to meet up with them. He seldom attended church except with a bodyguard at his side, and he kept his muzzleloader about him wherever he went, even to the bathroom, for it was especially there, handling himself (as briefly as ever he might), that he felt most vulnerable. He was destroyed. Heavy need had ruined him. Longing of the most unendurable sort had taken him by the horns and found him wanting. He never again saw Justina, but on certain nights of the summer season, when the moon shone steadily down and with modesty, he fancied he heard the cry of a woman in grave danger and urgent hope drifting down from the heights of the church steeple. 

Not Observing Beavers

Not Observing Beavers

         by Duog Riener the Cross

Babbitt the beaver plied his way through the waters off Margaret's Point and took in a strange sight ashore. He saw two men squatting before a strange contraption whacking each other on the back and leaping up and down. Babbitt slapped his tail and the gunshot of it made the men dive for the granite, arms over their heads. When they got up again they looked at Babbit and pulled their guns and fired shot after shot at where he swam. The spurts of water about him made him swim under the surface where they could not see him. Then he rose closer to them where they did not expect him and slapped his tail again and dived and found a spot to hide where he could watch unobserved. They fired randomly into the water here and there two dozen times and then went back to work.

        They took wire beside them and leading into the bush. They bared the ends of the two leads. Then they attached these to the box before them. Babbott watched closely. When they had done this, they reached each of them into his pocket for some wad of some sort to stick into their ears. Then they looked at each other and held thumbs up in the air for a moment, dancing a little, nodding, smiling and generally giving all the signs of affirmation and agreement. Then they crouched before their "thing" and put their hands together on the little cross above it. Not to be nitpicky about the whole mechanism, Babbitt thought, but these two are imbeciles, as complicated as they make a little thing. Why all the exuberance? Before he could think again, the men looked into the forest, nodded once more, and plunged their hands downward, at the same time falling flat on the rock before them.

        A second passed and then a roar to beat the drums of Hades split the known world and orange and yellow light as of three suns blazing filled the bay. Babbitt slapped his tail three times and dove down very deeply indeed into the sound.

        The men, now while Babbitt was not looking, rushed from their spot into the woods and began to search for a safe way over the fallen stone and jagged rock, product of the dynamite blast. When they got to where the sticks had been shoved into a crevice between two huge slabs of granite, what they saw made them hold each other and dance and jump and shout. There before them gaping a crater stood where a tree had once been. A crater six feet wide and seven deep. They leapt inside and began to inspect the rubble. They then shouted again with enough noise for babbitt to rise and tentatively glance about him once before slapping and disappearing anew.

        Gold! They had lots of it! And a whole vein of gold showed where the deep hole was clear to the bottom. Yellow, six inches wide, disappearing north into the hardpack. Quartz white, gold yellow, disappeared into the great pink granite as neatly as Babbitt disappeared into the water. From a distance the two heard insane slapping of tail on water. They stopped, paid it a second's heed, and returned their attention to the new wealth. No one must ever know of this place. No one must never be told. They would have to cart out enough only that they could walk unnoticed about town and city. They could not fill their knapsacks and pockets with it till they bent under the load, for then, surely, someone would ask them what they carried, or a policeman would force them to empty their pockets, and he would see the twenty-four karat rock and know. No, they must forever be discreet and bring out only as much at one time as they could do without suspicion. Could they carry out this act of will? Could they believe in themselves for the long-haul, or would they begin to think, when they were rich and drove big cars, that they were being nitpicky and tell a lover, or a wife, or a friend about some aspect of it? Gold rushes were caused by the smallest hint. The smaller the hint the bigger the goldrush. Tell one person, an invalid, or a person even with eyes set narrow in his face, or one with eyes set too widely there, and men and women would begin to follow them wherever they would go. Canoes would swoop down on them as they canoed. Men with revolvers would suddenly appear out of the gorse as they hiked home and shoot at them if they didn't tell. No, they must keep the secret. In the next installment I will tell you how they proceeded, and what near misses they encountered, and caused both by foolishness and by accident, too.

Others

Others

     by Chevy (the Ax) Reimer

         Do unto others as I would have you doing to them 

         Blessed are the weak for they shall inherit the Kurds

Mississippi lay back on the raft and smoked his corncob. The smoke curled upward towards the stars. A frypan of possum grease and cold catfish at his elbow and a jug of Werner's Best at his other allowed him to stay put and not rouse himself when the need for this or that arose. Sounds of a distant steamer plied by and disappeared around the bend. In his nose the brackishness of tainted fish and wet rough wood tickled. He turned on his side and slept. At daybreak he reached Cairo.

        Cairo coming around the bend got him up at last. Hot night air so thick he could hardly wade to the raft's prow had made him naked. He swooped on his overalls and took up his straw hat. Then he looped a rope over his arm and stood by to leap to the bank. He pulled in at the wharf by a café and a series of slips with other launches. None of the spaces would accommodate a craft of his size, so Mississippi maneuvered closer to the bank until he heard the bottom scrape, then jumped to shore and tied up to a tree.

        The waitress brought him coffee, ham and eggs. He finished these and asked for more. When he was done and had successfully eluded the management without paying, he walked down a Main Street until he came to a station where trucks take on water for their fields. Here he helped them fill and received small tips for his efforts. He returned at end of day to his raft, and with the tobacco purchased he lay aboard thinking that this might be his permanent place of residence. He decided, then, that, in fact, that was just what it would be. He had found his home.

        A policeman came by and asked his business. Mississippi told him and the man left. He wished then to move his bark up closer to the tree to which it was tethered. He heaved and pulled, he huffed and puffed and roared, but alas to no avail. He was too weak to pull that beast up even an inch further. Nothing for it but to leave it where it was. From here he would regard the comers and goers at the café. Yes, he thought, this is the good life. I am so glad that I am Mississippi Jake Jennings of Cairo. He smiled and relit his dead pipe