You Are What You're Going to Be

You Are What You're Going to Be

       by Rugless Diemore

                        pray and pray and pray some more

                        then sashay out the front door

Davis lifted the flap of the tent and stepped inside. His fears subsided once the flap ties had been secured. He turned to the icon on the shelf beside his cot and contemplated what to say. He sat on his bed, thought for a minute, and then asked it to pay close attention for the request that he was about to make was both unusual and important.

       "If I have ever asked you for anything," he began, reverent, deferential, careful of his words, attempting not to hyperbolize, "this is the most important request of them all!" He did emphasize, but only because he believed what he had said. Sincerity justified emphasis. Rogo would recognize feigning. Davis himself despised it and rooted it out in his thoughts with diligence.

       "Please, father, grant me what I ask. I do not deserve your care and attention. I know that you frown on selfish attenuations. But sometimes on must go to his divine power to require what the world has denied him despite his every effort." Here Davis hesitated for he recognized in his words a flippancy, a pretense.

       "I don't mean that, exactly," he qualified. "I know that I have not tried everything in order to get this thing I ask for, but I do not see how I could otherwise achieve my goal unless you send it me as a gift." Wishing not to jeopardize his tentative balance of honest prayer he chose to end it immediately. Long-windedness would only dissuade an impatient Rogo.

       "Please, sir, if you have it in your heart to grant this wish, let me know when the Jabwairikakapogo  will attack Groinjaga's village next. Please! I beg on my knees. Grant this one wish." He paused, backed away from the shelf, untied the tent flap, and stood outside in the dark breathing deeply of the night air. He felt great relief with the dreaded request accomplished. The moon hung over the tops of the trees beyond the camp, heavy with light. A dugout canoe, topheavy with coconuts, rested near the shore. In the Panjan thickets across the river a lioness declared once. She was hunting. Davis walked toward the outhouse and paused. He returned for his rifle and then went toward the commode. After that he waited outside by the tent in a folding chair. He felt that something was about to happen. It was in the air. Waiting, he knew of a sudden that Rogo had heard him.

(to be continued)

Washboard's Stage (cont'd)

Washboard's Stage (cont'd)

       by Three Men in a Tub

 I crept forward sensing the smallest rustle of twig and branch, wishing to make no noise, flooded with a tender longing to protect something and to hurt something else hurting the thing needing protection. I heard the sound again, more clearly now, as if someone were struggling in his bonds and calling for help.

       The sound came from left of the path, fifty yards away at most. I fell to my knees and moved in closer with caution and stealth. The damp earth seeped through my denim. Cobwebs tickled my ears and nose. The smell of spring grass and marshy earth lifted itself under my knees. Then ahead of me in a bit of dense foliage I saw a patch of lighter materials, and it moved.

       "Grrringahh," I heard, and ducked down. What the hell, I thought. The voice was male and adolescent, possibly that of the suspicious young man I was following. What if there was more than one bad guy here? What if a gang of young men was up to no good and I was caught spying on them?

       "Luk, Luk, Luk, snoooooowwww," another voice with a new timbre called as if someone had someone else by the throat and was suffocating him while he tried to shout for assistance. I wriggled closer on my belly to improve my perspective although I can tell you that in my heart I sorely wished to be gone from here and sitting in bored innocence before Washboard's stage.

       "Twig, twig, twing, grunt, snaaaaaapppliiiiiing," snapped out of the clearing ahead. Someone was in grave danger I thought. Should I leap up and barge in? Was there some object I might grasp in order to defend myself in case of trouble. I took up a length of deadwood that lay to hand and stood on my feet to get a better look before just running in to be of assistance.

       What I saw made my heart stand still and my pulse flutter. A young woman lay on the ground bound hand and foot, her dress up above her knees, her eyes wide and pleading. Her captors stood above her. There were three of them. One had his pants off entirely and had just turned from hanging them on a nearby branch. Another had just dropped his around his ankles. The third was loosening his belt and zipper. Now was the time to act. I jumped forward shouting.

       "Roarrrrroaaoorrr!" I screamed, sounding as ferocious as I could. "Die, Vermin!" I called in a throaty Darth Vader voice. "I am about to kill you all, you thugs, you scalloping scoundrels! You horrible, vile, vicious, virulent assholes!" I threw at them as I broke through the branches of the clearing. With my black toque and my two hundred and sixty odd pounds and the broken log I carried in my right hand and the wild steps that I trod toward them I must have presented a  fearsome sight. With a terrified interchange the three youths leapt into the air and disappeared in different directions into the woods.

       The muffled cries of the bound maiden before me caught my attention. Not wishing to delay till the return of the criminals, I picked up the young thing in my arms, her light as a feather, the adrenaline still coursing through me, and rushed down the path toward the festival grounds. Her hands and feet bound, her mouth gagged, she could do nothing to hold on or steady herself. I clasped her close so that she would not fall and soon found myself in the space behind the bazaars. Here, feeling safe at last, I laid her gently on the grass, pulled her skirt down to her knees for the sake of propriety, and cut the offending cords.

       "NNNgggggnnnaaaaaaa!" she wailed, the sounds of pain and terror escaping freely now from her fettered lips. "NNNgggggnnaaaaaas!" she called, turning toward me and throwing her arms about my neck. Her gag removed, and between sobs, she spoke to me of gratitude and relief.

       "Oooooo, you are my hero!" she allowed herself to say. I bowed with self-conscious pleaure at her tribute.

       Her name was Ellie I discovered later that day. She is a soft and warm and loving person I also discovered later that night in my tent. Her skin is as precious as dew on roses in the early hours of a late June morning. Her lips taste sweet as ice wine, so luscious, so pretty. I will not ever understand how the ruler of the universe sent me just that hour into the woods to rescue her. I am the happiest man in the world. 

Washboard's Stage

Washboard's Stage

       by Doogleglasses Puggy

              early in the morning

                        just about the break of day

                        early in the morning

                        just about the break of day

                        i couldn't find my baby

                        so i knelt right down to pray

Washboard Hank plays a kitchen sink as a tuba at his gigs. It is stainless steel with abs pipe and elbows for handholds and mouthpiece. The kids love him. He hits a steel plate on his hardhat, he rubs along a washboard tied to his waist, and he strums a guitar belted firmly to his chest. He toots a miniature horn, blows on a kazoo, stomps his feet in time, farts his armpit, leaps into the air, falls to the floor pretending to be dead, rings a bicycle bell attached to his head with a headband, and sings pretty, girlish melodies about two-titted cows, listened to by children but meant for adults who cover their offsprings' ears and blush and laugh.

       At the Trout Forest festival last year while Washboard was playing, I noticed a suspicious-looking young man by the second stage fifty yards from where I sat under a canopy out of the heat. Why did he seem suspicious from such a distance? Especially since I am shortsighted and given to looking for diversions when I have been forced to attend to an entertainment for more than half an hour. It was the fact that I saw him walk out of the bushes to the north of the tent and sit down, but continually checking over his shoulder the bushes from which he had emerged as if he were expecting someone. Then I saw, because he had aroused my suspicions by now, that he got up and walked towards a concession stand that sold festival hats and carved walking sticks, the last stall in the bazaar. But he was not going there to buy anything. I noticed this immediately since he handled items but then slipped around the side of the tent and was gone.

       I got up and walked to where he had stood by the hat stall. He was not behind the tent or near the woods fifty yards away. I pretended to be searching for shade and walked along the edge of the trees till I came to a narrow path leading into the foliage. I sat down, feigning boredom, and listened intently. No sounds could I detect coming from the woods. At least not at first. But, then I heard a muffled call, as if from a person bound and gagged. I decided to investigate. I took a few stealthy steps down the maw of the path and soon found myself out of sight of the crowd. The music wafted out from Washboard's stage. A bell rang, a horn tooted and a guitar strummed, but from a distance and, as it were, adding to the loneliness pressing me about my chest.

              I stood for a while, my former ennui and suspicion turned to a sense of duty. My body acts as a reliable refractor of emotions. When I have no mental sense of where things are at it lets me know of the real state of what's about me. It tells me now of power struggle between that sleeping daughter and that quiet mother in the kitchen, now of hate in the breast of that man at the mic in the political gathering, now of sentimentality gone extreme in the otherwise rational manner of a female student clearly out of the sexual mainstream, now of quiet love in the demeanor of a mother with incipient dementia, not listened to but strong in her heart's knowledge of what she has made and done, now of boredom in my interlocutor who would rather be talking to that bikinied girl by the water fountain, now of stern opinion in the quiet, grey-haired woman who has me wedged into a corner of the bus aisle, now of rapture in that distant suppliant kneeling, and now of ennui in the stage musician pounding his guitar strings but indifferent in his heart.

       I crept forward in starts and stops, sensing the smallest rustle of twig and branch, wishing to make no noise, longing to protect something. Then I heard it again, more clearly now, as if someone were struggling in bonds and calling for help!

(to be continued)

The Ungrateful Domain

The Ungrateful Domain

       by Rouglas Deimer

rover rover in the clover

when yer gonna bark

hover hover little lemman

how'd you get in the ark

give me money give me sweet things

suck the candy till its gone

rover rover in the clover

i've got nothing left to pawn

Sniffing sharply, Rover barked his concern and turned to defecate by the fence, as close to his neighbor's yard as he could wedge his back end so the smell would possibly penetrate deeper into that ungrateful domain. Rover had never forgiven Bob and Wilma Yearly for building that fence. He could now never see them anymore, the boards between them as they were, and force them to acknowledge him with look and pretended gentleness in order to impress upon his, Rover's, guardians, that they liked a dog they hated.

       Yearlåy managed a company called Ye Olde Trailmix. Every day at seven a.m. he left home for the office. Each night at six p.m. he returned. The company had recently declined in viability for one reason or another and Bob had decided to take what money he could out of it and hide it in his back yard in waterproof containers so as to make sure that his retirement was secure. So now, during the month of January then--now being one winter some years after erecting the fence that Rover increasingly disliked--Bob spent each evening laying Tupperware down under the snow in a drift close to the fence between the neighbors and himself. He dug right to the bottom of the drift and laid the containers of twenty-dollar bills on the frozen grass. By the end of January, having done this twenty-six days altogether, he had amassed a substantial sum of money there. Though he had not counted it, Bob had secreted one thousand times one hundred times twenty, for a total of two million dollars. Bob knew that the monthly finances would be completed early in February and so he would have to be finished what it was he was doing by the end of January. He himself did not fully understand what he was up to.

       On January 31, 2001, Bob and his wife ate dinner as usual. Then, when she went out to visit the Seafood Emporium on the corner of Taylor and Waverley, as she predictably did when Bob complained at supper that they never had fish anymore, and coupled the trip with a visit to her friend's house for evening tea, as he suspected she would, Bob watched out the living room window till he saw her car drive away and then quickly donned his parka and took up his snow shovel and went into the back yard to dig up his money. He did that. But Rover was outside, too, dropping a big load by the fence. She barked at him with her usual ou faire couler le sang, barked while she shat. She dug her scat under while he dug his cash up.

       Soon they were both finished and Bob could not resist one final act of revenge. He called the mutt's name in tones at once insinuating and ingratiating, accusing and inviting, and Rover responded with her paws up on the fence boards and a voice as raucous as any irate dog could wish for. Immediately, Bob gave the fence a mighty whack with the back of his shovel, the reverberations so gargantuan that they precipitated the canine onto its back. She lay there deafened and surprised, whimpering, and then lunged up with renewed joie de vive du canine, vociferating more insistently than ever before, furious, raging, aching to get at the man she disliked with such a burning dislike.

       If only she could sink her teeth into him, into this smug human who had outmanoeuvred her, had blocked her in, had forced her into her visual exile, powerless to manipulate the world of the two-legged, entirely cut off from passersby. She raged while Bob loaded the wheelbarrow. She bow wowed unrelentingly while he wheeled it away to his car. She howled in the fury of impotence while, she could hear, he loaded things into the car trunk. And she hurled her crescendoing at the sound of him backing down the driveway.

       Rover lost any chance to hurt him. Bob never returned. Rover did not know that where Bob lived others built fences for him and served him and killed dogs that barked too uncivilly if he indicated his distaste for them. On the western coast of southern Mexico one has many reasons to fence oneself in but almost never because dogs bark at one. As well, it is there unusual for the world to reek of dog shit in spring.