Saint Velcro™ and the SwanIt had been, by the saint’s
count, a thousand years or more since the last tour passed through—Attila
and his Hunnic Horde, their hardy ponies pulling an endless cavalcade
of Airstream trailers that stretched to the sunrise.
“I’m a martyr,” said the saint. “Martyrs don’t shoot back.”
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The Return of the Orange Virgin
The stone heads—Cow, Goat and Manticore—were malign at first
glance, the distillation of a dead craftsman’s nightsweats and horrors.
The Orange Virgin rose and transferred a kiss from her fingertips.
“Fare-thee-well, friends. Keep my secrets. We go to perform great works.”
Goat’s lugubrious striped vanilla tongue lay across the floor; the Cow’s
blind eyes stared at nothing.
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The Song of the Rice Barge Coolie “My sister, is she dead?
Go and give her a poke, would you?”
The great white presence that was the Lady Mother of the Long Walkers
indicated the row of captive queens on their dais beneath her, deferentially
lower.
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The Runaway Bungalow
“Arrgh! See me neck, lad?” Theophrastus Bigelow’s head hung
at a grotesque angle from where the long executioner’s knot had settled
at the base of his skull. Randy held his mother’s mop, set to dry in
the sun, between himself and the pirate. Bigelow succumbed to gales
of laughter. “I didn’t die from the drop; I swung and strangled. Whadda
ye think o’ that?”
“I think it’s rather nice that you didn’t die all at once,” Randy said.
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Cherokee Purple
Thelma blew herself away as she sat on her high red upholstered
stool supervising the cash box at the White Street Billiards and Snooker.
A symphony of flaccid flesh, she hit the floor like she had fallen out
of an airplane, no parachute, and her pistol went bouncing toward Ed
Seitz and me
We did not look up; there was a fiver riding on Ed’s shot.
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The Moose in the Noösphere
Ben Neptune saved his potato water; there was no waste in
Ben’s house. Fingers of frost had joined in a tight interlacing across
the surface of the stewpot. Even in death, Ben looked to the future;
he had frozen with his potato water close at hand.
“Had he been depressed?” they would ask. Depression, suicide resulting,
would appear on the coroner’s report. Case closed.
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The Last Teddy BearThe Bayberry Bear arrived before the
baby. Frankie and Steve named Young Henry’s new teddy-to-be Gandolfini
after an actor in their favorite television show, The Sopranos. The
teddy bear, Gandolfini, came in the mail toward the end of Frankies
third trimester.
“Tony Soprano is the definitive alpha male,” said Steve Jelinek, his
hand in a bag of taco chips.
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E Pluribus Human“YO, BABE!” A man’s voice blared at Grenadine
McKenzie, “SURPRISE, YOU’RE PREGNANT.” A craggy male face bloomed before
her.
The face was a hero’s face, Lance Davenport from Rights of Spring. There
was an odor of patchouli.
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The Francher
An odor of mint attracted the francher to an unpromising
patch of brown scrub. It spread its fetlocks, a legacy of embedded Przewalski
horse genes, and arched its neck down to feed. It munched contentedly
for some minutes then collapsed. The francher’s nostrils flared as it
gulped at the thin unsatisfying air.
Under the brilliant glare of the high, dry sun its knee joints cracked,
emitting soft popping sounds. An Andean vulture circled closer.
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