Picnic Table on the Front Lawn

 Picnic Table on the Front Lawn

        By Mme. Rouge de la Reimer

            wango walker went to work

            early in the morning

            he felt the sudden need to shirk

            take him without warning

"Separatists be damned, I say!" said Sammy, the tailor. Sammy owned a little shop off Henry Street in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He made a meagre living sewing suits for older clientele. In his breast he longed for a shop with air-conditioning, central heating, shiny floors, big windows, and trees outside on the front lawn where he might sit with a cup of coffee during coffee break and lunch just to watch the traffic go by and know that he was well-heeled. 

          One day, when he was not expecting anyone because the sky, gray and heavy, dropped showers on the street, the bell announced that someone had entered the door so he left his back room and came to serve. He saw no one. He shook his head. He had no sooner turned his back to go to his sewing machine when he heard a loud voice calling for assistance. Sammy looked but still saw no one. Then he noticed a hand on the counter and he hurried to look over it and there stood a man of three feet height smiling at him.

        "You thought you were mistaken, didn't you?" The little fellow said, and laughed a great hearty laugh.

        "What do you want?" Sammy inquired, feeling slightly insulted and disinclined to tolerate viterbutation from a small person. The small man laughed again, then drew a pistol from his great coat pocket that he pointed smartly at Sammy's head.

        "That's what I want!" he said. I wish to kill you immediately, but I will wait for a moment till I have enjoyed the sight of your discomfort as well as your intense fear." The floor beneath the little man with its mucky appearance took Sammy's eye. The ragged wall with its torn paper and no insulation to prevent the seeping cold did too.

        "Good! Finally! Someone with the guts to make an end to my miserable existence! I've been waiting for you. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! I am so glad that you have come! You see, being a firm believer, a Catholic, I cannot end my own life. But, I have been living in such awful poverty for so long and have made so many enemies in the tailoring business that I have long desired nothing so much as a cessation to this tedium. Thank you for coming to help me end it so that you will have to face eternal punishment and not I!" So saying Sammy leapt over the counter and sat down with his back to the little man, a huge smile on his face. He waited. Nothing. He turned around and looked back at the person holding the armament.

        "Well, what are you waiting for?" He glanced about the room and checked his watch, as if worried time would interfere.

        "Come on!" he said and stood up and took the little man by the collar and shook him a little. He sat down again and waited, his back once more offered up. He hummed a ditty about a bird in a tree that gets hit by lightning. The smell of his tailoring practice, old sweaty suit pants never washed, overcame him and he almost wretched. Nothing.

        "What? Art a coward?" he inquired suddenly, a ferocity in his voice past all show. "You're a snivelling coward. Someone ought teach you a lesson!" With that, Sammy jumped up and in a trice had the little person by the collar and in a vicious headlock. He pulled him up off the ground to the height of the light above, turned him upside down and let him fall to the floor headfirst. His skull cracked and made a noise as of china crashing. The little guy moaned and, the gun still in his hand, attempted to point it at the man before him. He could not hold it steady.

        "Still reluctant, art t'ou? Well, we'll see about that!" Sammy grabbed his assailant by his ankles and twirled him rapidly and with increasing force around his head until he felt dizzy himself.  He turned him six times and let go. The body of the three footer flew straight for the door. It smashed through the glass and landed outside in the snowbank. It lay there motionless. A trolley bus came by at that moment and the wheels on the curb-side rolled over the quiet form and squished it shapeless. Sammy came to the door to see, noticed that all was up for his customer and, shaking his head, returned to his back room chair and his sewing.

 

Stanley's Valuable Lesson

(Pardon the font shift in the middle; I have a problem with my iPad formatting)

Stanley's Valuable Lesson

       by Double-breasted Doug

slake your thirst when you first come to an oasis

    render hunger helpless when you see an all-you-can-eatpress yourself on the affluent and cause them to invite               

               you in 

extricate yourself from the wallow into which you have 

               fallen

In Mozambique women used to go around with no tops on. Their breasts showed to great effect. Well, not quite that way. Their breasts leapt about unhindered when they ran, or sat there pensive and immobilized when they were at rest but for the wind and rain to operate on as they pleased. This is true of Guyana, French and British New Guinea, Cape Horn, South Africa and all the Dutch colonies too

        I have it on good authority that Dr. Livingston felt some shame when he first encountered nakedness. He got right to work to encourage women to cover up and men to keep their eyes directed toward proper objects. Stanley was not so disposed. He enjoyed the license of free-floating upper torsos. Back home his wife had done the same. 

        She started by exposing herself to him alone in the bedroom, when they been married a scant couple of years. (Till then she felt shy and asked him to enter the room only once she had donned a nightdress and lay under the covers.) But never mind. She Learned well the pleasures of taking all off. After another three years, Stanley's journals tell us, she began to appear in public in somewhat of a state of dishabiliament. Not a great deal of skin showed at first. Once, however, when they walked to town (they lived in the country on a lane called the Fats Road and it was a mile into the business district) she said that the sun beat down so mercilessly on her that she might have to remove her cardigan. It would be alright, she added, because she wore a camisole underneath and would be able quickly to put on her sweater if need be, the said article of lace and linen being a bit transparent. She looked so fine there in her dark nipples faintly showing that Stanley requested after some three hundred yards further that she might wish to let the sun shine right on her skin. 

        "But how will I do that?" Adelaide said, interested though unimaginative. "Someone would see if I removed it." Stanley nodded his agreement. He did not seem to be too concerned.

         "What are you saying!" She said, ruffled and irate in appearance.

        "Well, dear, I am not saying anything, but it strikes me that we are quite alone here and not a house in sight. Could you not comfortably lift up your shirt and let the sun fall directly on your nipples and no one but I would see?" The sun agreed. The birds about them seemed unlikely to observe. The ditches with their grasses nodded agreement. Adelaide hesitated, but then lifted the hem of the garment and soon, what with the heat glowing on her midriff, she took the courage to lift it higher and there it sat above her lovely breasts as she walked. They jiggled and sprung about. They seemed so much independent of each other in the open air. Stanley made as if to reach and touch them, but his wife demurred and pushed his hand aside before he could get to them. 

         "No, dear, let's just walk." She said these words with kindness written all over them. "I am nervous about being seen and discontented that we might not be as alone as we think." She looked about her frequently and kept her arms at the ready to cover up if she needed to. A peasant in a field nearby worked his hoe up and down, unaware of the sight sloping past. Later, a field or so further down, a wagon with a farmer's daughter at the reins, hied along a lane and came into sight. She waved, but did not seem to have noticed anything amiss. Adelaide took the courage from these experiences to remove her shirt entirely. Now she felt finally free and this freedom paid Stanley handsomely, too. He reached, he partook, he rubbed and pinched (not quite gently), and then they came to town.
         Many years went by. They walked into town often. Each time, if the sun shone and the temperature invited them to play thus, she removed her top and walked with increasing abandon along the road. The peasant began to look forward to these times. The farmer's daughter, too, rode her hayrack ever closer and closer. Birds began to notice them. The ditch grasses nodded sagaciously. Nature approved of the sight and kept the woman and the man free of any shame. Indeed, Stanley learned a valuable lesson on these walks and never forgot them.

Staying Away From People

Staying Away From People

         by Ba Ba Reemer the Redeemer  

Once when Johnny and Frank went to Kenora to purchase supplies they almost gave away their secret by accident more than stupidity. The stupid happens, we all of us humans know that. Take for instance my advice many years ago to my sister when she wanted my sage opinion, which at the time was not to marry the man whom she ended up marrying. Accidents happen too, we miscreants are more than fully aware. When my Pentecostal aunt Diane drove to Pensacola in 1963 to attend a conference on the religious right in America, actually intending to again meet and finally consummate an affair that had been brewing between herself and a Southern Baptist youth pastor (incidentally black and whom she had met and admired at an international church picnic two years earlier), on the first and only time she got into bed naked with him, the hotel attendant who brought them Champagne room service as they lay there under the covers was none other than her nephew from two streets over back home, new to his job of three weeks. 

       Johnny and Frank met with similar bad luck on June 27, 1984. They were shopping in a mines and minerals commercial only outlet on Frank Street near the waterfront for a Geiger counter. Why on earth, you might ask, would they have been interested in one of these devices meant to find metals when they had already discovered their gold, and a whole ton of it too. The answer is simple and a little embarrassing but, since we have been talking about human nature, not at all surprising. They soon became aware that the gold in the vein that had become exposed because of the dynamite blast that they had set off for the express purpose of getting at the said vein, had displaced the amount of gold that would have run through the six by eight foot hole that the explosion had caused. They wish to retrieve it. They wished not to lose a single penworth of the precious metal, and for that reason had come to town to purchase a metal detector in order to scour the surrounding forest near the load hole to find any and all pieces of the yellow material scattered about. It was pure and simple avarice that drove them to be so nitpicky. They might have been satisfied with the six inch wide vein of gold that showed itself so brilliantly disappearing into the pink granite and that surely represented enough wealth to do them and their offspring into the distance historical future. But no. They would have the gold out of hiding. And they did. And they almost gave away their secret. This is how it happened.

         Benjamin Gay sold items in the mines and minerals store. He handed down a geiger counter from the top shelf and Johnny took it and handled it and passed it about the room before various objects of metal, enjoying the singing of the notes that crescendoed as it homed in near steel or chrome or aluminum or brass.  

         "Hey eh eh eh eh eh eh hey!" Frank brayed his pleasure with each approach Johnny made to another new item of metal in the store. They were careful not to go near their backpack with its twenty pounds of gold chunks. They carried that pack sack with them in case the solution should come to them how to successfully trade it in for money without getting all the world flying after them in search of their lode. 

       "We'll take it," Johnny said suddenly.

        "Yeah!" Frank agreed, and they handed it back to Mr. Gay who took it from them with a frown still on his face and began to ring it up. He lifted it and sighted along it stupidly and deliberately tapped one end of it against Frank's head. Frank let him know what he thought of him and Ben turned on the Geiger counter and passed it back and forth over Frank's head to determine if it contained deposits of iron. It did. Or so it appeared. It began singing very loudly and very much more loudly than it had heretofore at the presence of any of the metals the two prospectors had tested it on.

         "Hey!" Frank said, warning the proprietor to back off. But in the heat of the oddity of Frank having a metal head, Benjamin passed the machine over the knapsack and the source of the burst of song became clear. The detector went mad. Frank leapt back and Johnny stepped in front of his partner to intercept Benjamin's forward movement.

        "You've got something in your pack!" Mr. Gay shouted. "You must have gold or something in there!" He stopped and looked accusingly at the two.

         "No, you moron!" Frank sang out. "Are you stupid? We are going to look for coins on the beach. We haven't got any gold here. Geez you're an idiot!" With that they paid the bewildered scorekeeper and got out of there as fast as they could. Over a beer they agreed that they had to stop carrying the pack around. They could not afford another accident like this one. Other events over the years also nearly cost them their privacy and in consequence their lives, but twenty years later they were still digging out gold and hiding it here and there in places they carefully noted in a book that they had for the special purpose of tracking these hiding places.

          Lambing about town now and then cost them each time a great deal of stress. They came eventually to the conclusion that Kenora must be out of bounds. It was there that most of their missteps seemed to have been taken. Stay away from large centers they began to say with certainty of knowledge. Stick to the forest, unless there is a great need to go into town, and then just to Sioux Narrows or to Fudge Creek. So it became a way of life for Johnny and Frank to dig and hide gold but to keep away from people.

The Dull

The Dull

         by Rockon Devilled

Brandon had been branded the dullest person in his high school year. But that was all to change. The year he graduated he took up a new identity and headed down a new road on an adventure that was to last the length of his life.

Savoury Friends

Savory Friends

       by Dee Are

         douglas reimer was a fraud

         douglas reimer caught a cod

         some thought douglas reimer odd

         others likened him to god

         I can tell you he's a clod

         still, if you're one who gets awed

         know he's worthy, though he's flawed

If you are ever in the River Heights neck of the woods you will notice that people here have unusual physiognomies. In most respects they are normal. Their bungalows are ordinary, their lawns neat, their cars shiny and their children smartly behaved. They eat three meals a day, go to the office for their day jobs, and have carpenters in to do repairs on their buildings. Yet, oddly, they look unlike the residents of Transcona, St. Norbert, Fort Rouge, Charleswood, Tuxedo, or Wolseley.

         They have bigger heads of hair, their torsos have a squat fullness about them, and their feet splay curiously as if each and every one of them studied ballet as a child. Most distinctive, however, are there butts, or "asses" as some of my less savory friends would say. I have these, ones with whom I am obliged to continue relations. I encounter them at billiards, in the curling rink, at the Montcalm beer establishment, at the Assiniboia Downs, in the liquor stores, and in a few other places. I got to know Wayne Teflon as a high school teacher. He taught science. He became my friend when I was still too shyly new to the community. Since then I have had reason to wish to forget about him, but he phones me when he's in town and we go for beers. Jackson Simplot, a greens keeper for the Fort Garry Country Club, never passes up a holiday without contacting me to see if I wish to go for a few and watch the strippers. 

         I dislike the Montcalm now, being fifty and not all that active in imagining the female body anymore. I have, furthermore, an aversion to drink and when I've had two I resist the others that men like Jackson press on me. Beckenridge, first name Simms, is in the used iron business on Panet Road. His acreage is contained by an electrified wire fence and inside it at night are three dogs of large size and fierce attitude. He phoned me a few days ago with the offer to purchase a two year old Honda Accord, fully loaded. He said that he'd let me have that "low mileage number" for twelve thousand plus. I thanked him but declined politely. William Kelp Jr. is in clothing retail, Borden Grishman sells automobiles for Car Canada, Spinmann Sweatman is unemployed, but always on the verge of something, Guy Banderbout drives transport along Highway 6. There are a few more but they do not call me as often. 

        Riverheights butts tell a tale of white-collar employment and few kids. The men work in offices and the women stay home for the most part doing this or that but not too much of it. They tend to stick out further than the average. If you take a perspective against a house that one of them is walking past you will notice that the butt temporarily is visible alone without any other part of the body in sight on this side of the house edge. Other butts in the other parts of the city that I mentioned have a shoulder or an elbow or some piece of the anatomy still in the frame. The butt is never alone. 

       Big butts do not fascinate me. Some Africans, I am told, or Africans generally, like a big butt. They like the swing and dip of it as it undulates to the beat. I don't see why they would, but then I am a caucasian. I like (or liked before my operation) a neat and small butt of the sort sported by the Alison Krausses and Gillian Welches of the world. Long legs, slim waist and a round, compact posterior, these did turn me on. A skirt on the same region, a bit short, maybe, or swaying and kneelength, did nothing to detract from the picture. I wished always to be able to lift one of these little numbers a bit and touch the warmth of the thigh and the back of the knee, but I never did, for we are trained, are we not, to leave the beautiful alone and not stick our hands and fingers where they are not wanted? Keep your hand out of plackets, selah. 

         You can have all the butts I have ever seen in River Heights. As far as I am concerned, they none of them interest me. Take them. They are yours. Enjoy. All too soon our lives are over. I concede them to you, every one, and wish you the best with them that can be. God speed. Uncover them as you will, taste them as fully and as often as you wish, make a pig of yourself in their presence, I will not be offended. Spank them in play as well, if you are so inclined. They offer themselves to you that way by their very station. Have them sit, stand, walk, slide, boogey for you and giv 'er hell. Bon voyage, my fellow pilgrim.

The Purchase of Scotch

Purchasing Scotch

      by Doodoo Right Dougie Lanyards

Poe ushered in a new era in literature. No one had done the horror thing before with any persistence. Frankenstein may have been a model for him. A woman wrote that. Not too likely that a woman would make a life of writing horror. It must have been Byron who wrote it. Or, as I am about to asseverate, a male acquaintance of his.

          A decade ago, round about, in England for a visit to my wife's people, I ordered a bottle of scotch and sat down in a library to read. I got tired of Poe, and then tired of Dickens, Crabbe, and Boroughs successively. What might I do that would be of more interest. I went up to the sixth floor by lift and walked about in the stacks. I came, eventually, to a dark corner where light drained in from a distant bulb. I sat down on the floor itself, dusty, unattended, hardly ever visited by the feet of visitors. With the help of my electric torch, a small pencil type that I keep with me at all times, I scanned the titles before me. The library in this remote corner of nowhere bore a silence not unlike that of a dungeon or crypt. I pulled my bottle from my pocket, set it down on the floor beside me, and thought how cozy this moment was. A Christmas carol filtered through the dust and distance. "Oh holy night, the stars are brightly shining." I drank, and shone my light over the titles of books not seen or held for many, many a decade. I pulled out one or two and thumbed through them. Belleville, the Marquee. Torture in the Dungeon of the Castille. "Vous a vous la Trois frer te ma votre," I read, uncomprehending. And next, Samuel Taylor. Come For to See, 1893. And after a while, the scotch warming my insides, this: Frankenstein, by Percy B Shelley. 

           "What?" I thought to myself. This cannot be! The authorage is incorrect. I opened the book, read the text, noticed how immediately variations appeared from the Mary Shelley text so well known to me, and became absolutely riveted. This was not the book that I had heretofore known as Frankenstein. Surely, this must be an imposter. Someone had deliberately attached the poet's name to the text that, for all the world knew, Mary had written, though, often thought, with the help of her husband. I felt suddenly a tingling sensation along my arm. This is an affect I experience when something is not as it should be, when something big and very strange is in the making. I put my bottle away, I picked up the book, and I gave it to the attendant to ask from the databanks when the last date of its withdrawal had been. He checked. A frown crossed his brow. He finally spoke and said that it had never been borrowed by anyone before. He looked surprised as he handed the slim volume back to me, shaking his head as if to clear it, and then went back to his work.

        I did not sign out the book, but went back in the direction from which I had come. My intention was already clear to me. If, in fact, this was an unknown version of the text, signed by the poet, then it would turn an entire literary history on its side. Courses would never again place great emphasis on the superb fact that in the mid-1800s a woman wrote the first great novel and as a result today women have a fine place in the annals of literature. I did not mind at all having women in the center of literary tradition, but not if they did not deserve to be there. Nevertheless, all this was only a niggle in my mind. I knew that a good reason existed for my spiriting this text out of here so that I could gain the reputation accruing to it and its discovery. I took the lift up to the sixth floor, returned to my remote corner of the building, looked about me for a window that I might pry open and, sure enough, found one casement that lifted after some effort. Below me a meadow, and a parking lot to the right. I could see my small red truck where I had parked it. I knew the general location and would be able to find it again. I searched about me until I found a paper bag and loaded it with pages from some old volumes that I thought no one would ever wish to see again. I threw the bag out and watched it fall. The book landed rather roughly in a bush. I closed the window and left the library. I found the text and recovered it. It was not damaged, to my great relief. I drove away. I now am a tenured professor at the University of Wallingsford, near the home of Shakespeare. I teach the odd course at Oxford. My reputation has been built on the fact that not Mary Shelley but her husband Percy wrote the famous novel with which we are all so familiar. This life suits me. I meet with students once or twice a month and they usually work at subjects related to this business of literary tradition.

Bidding on Ukeleles

Bidding on Ukuleles

      by Barry Pitch

Cukes and ukes. And dulcimers. Yep. Goddamned dulcimers. Anyways, as I was saying, Jill jumped on Jack and did for him what his name always inspired her to do and he resisted not in the least, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming of the little rise in crescendo that he achieved on his dulcimer when he picked it up after a grueling day at the car wash.

       They were in a berry patch picking cukes when she, Jill, took it upon herself to approach Jack with a proposition of an altogether diverting sort and he, Jack, not loath to try new things, gave in at once, and at once she undid him till he was in a state of readiness for a ministration of the best kind, in a berry patch, in township such and such, in Canada, in North America, in the Western Hemisphere, in the wide, wide world, in the solar system, in the universe.        

        So, Jill pulled out Jack's dulcimer for him and played on it a lively tune, as tunes go when played on a lowly dulce, correctly and expertly fingering all the stops. Lively, yes indeed, for Jill was still young and able, fifteen and quick, unlike her mother who was already in her middle forties and showing signs of the perversions the old are privy to: languishing before a television set sometimes until one or two in the morning; eating barbarous quantities of either halva or tortilla chips, depending on which she held in her hand, Coke or Sprite; ironing and folding her husband's clothes and laying them out as neatly as for a military inspection of her house, though not a guest expected, and all this with great regularity as if grand something depended on it; and never, under any circumstances, stepping out of doors unless it was to chuck a bag of old cat litter on the front step for Jill to escort to the garbage container behind the garage.

       This was their crisis: when Jill had played two or three simple ditties on that dulcimer of Jack's, a traveling musician, happening to wake up from a night spent under the influence of a jug of red biddy under an Alamour tree with such wide branches spreading that he had felt none of the rain that the night had brought, awoke from his deep dreams, and saw, near to him, peeking over the tall grasses as he was, wary of intruders, having himself watched Easy Rider in the days of yore, within the compass of his natural room, a movement of limbs and grass nearby that he neither mistook for danger, animal, nor angel but for what it was, two young people in the act of making music of great sweetness and lightness. 

         Jill was not nearly finished; she felt as if until this point she had only been fiddling with a few crescendos and decrescendoing distaffs. Her real forte, the strength she brought to any musical composition, remained so far untested in the present circumstances. When up jumped this gumbuck and helloed to the billy brook and down came the Wambaughs one two three. Partially clad, and susceptible of observation, Jill felt conspicuous as the hobo traveled quickly to their sides, and without so much as a howdy doody grabbed Jack's dulcimer from Jill, and making energetic forays on its person elicited wonderful notes of the highest sort from first the instrument and then Jack himself. Jill stood dumbfounded, staring at the dulcimer in the musician's hand. Never had she been able to bend it's bow so cleanly, nor produce arpeggios of such exquisite order and command. She sate her down and wept for her lost past. She appreciated her mother more now, in this moment of loss and confusion, than she had ever done before. Jack altogether forgot about Jill then and turned his attention from that moment onward to music and the travellers who played it best. 

        That is what he thought in those times. Later, after the death of Jill at a tender age and like Emily Dickinson, never attached, a rose without a thorn, Jack lost his youthful interest in music. One day he looked back and realized that he had not played his dulcimer in quite some time and as far as he was concerned he would sell it for a song to the highest bidder.