Todd Straus: October 2010

Last July, the week after the big ball at the palace as a matter of fact, Iggy Bugner spotted a hare squatting under the Chevy truck in the lot next to the Shell station on Kettner. Iggy manages the convenience shop at the station. He sits out front between customers, and so he gets loads of chances to get a good gander at the critters in the empty lot where the Chevy’s parked.

Iggy Bugner was hardly the only local with his eyes peeled for unusual goings-on round these parts. The talk from Highway 7 on one side of town to Coburn Mall on the other was the weird appearance of the Prince’s Prime First Assistant Lord and his entourage parading around town on a fifty-foot float made from one hundred thousand sunflowers arranged in the shape of a giant slipper. According to the paper, the reason for this rolling spectacle was the Prince’s search for a “fabulous debutante with hair the color of straw and a size 4 and a half foot”. It wasn’t clear to Iggy Bugner or any of the rest of us from the article whether the Prince had met such a woman and somehow misplaced her or if he just had a thing for those features and was having a tough time finding a young female who fit the bill. Foot fetishes have never been uncommon, and, besides, we’d seen weirder from our Prince.

Iggy then noticed a slow-moving boulder. At least that's how it appeared to Iggy the first few times he spotted it. Truth be told, at first he thought the Chevy had moved a little. But the Chevy had no tires or battery. Then he realized. albeit temporarily, that it was the boulder that was making its way across the lot.

Finally, it dawned on Iggy that it wasn’t a boulder at all, but a tortoise! There’s a reason why some people manage mini-marts. Iggy proceeded to chart the tortoise’s progress, and by July, the creature had made it all the way into the shade under the Chevy.

One day, much to Iggy’s surprise, he noticed that the tortoise was reading the paper. The tortoise’s right front foot was on Marci Homes’ For Women Only column. His belly lay on the Horoscopes and his other feet were picking stocks. He looked pretty tortoisy excited. “Wow,” exclaimed the tortoise, as he perused the coupon section and Iggy listened in, “the supermarket over in Martin Grove is selling lettuce at a penny a head! That’s the lowest price of the season!”

Now it just so happened that a middle-aged, slightly balding and recently divorced hare had taken up residence in the well once occupied by the truck's carburator. He was chewing on his front left nail nubs at the moment in question.
The mini-mart manager couldn’t quite make out whether the tortoise was addressing the hare or if he was talking to himself. He’d just finished with a customer who’d gotten a fill-up along with a half-gallon bottle of the local brand of cola for his wife who won’t drink the major brands because they’re “too cola-ish”.

Iggy Bugner was sure about one thing though. And that was that the hare got the message. And before you could say “Dumping by Permit Only” the hare had hatched a plan to high-tail it over to that Martin Grove supermarket before the tortoise had a chance to beat him to that penny-a-head lettuce. Iggy thought he heard the hare say “So long, ucker!” as he was pulling out. Yes indeed, the hare took off lickitysplit in the direction of Martin Grove. Later we suggested that it must have been “So long, sucker!” that the hare had actually exclaimed, but Iggy, who also insisted that Neil Armstrong had actually spoken of “one Bryant step for mankind” while leaving the first footprint in the surface of the moon, was unconvinced.

Jean Rafferty saw the hare cross 3rd Avenue over by Big Lane Bowling and Bistro.

Jerry Valentine nearly lost control of his tractor because of that “fuckin whorehouse of a rabbit” who freaked out his dog Asswipe near the Presbyterian church. The Garvey twins disagreed on what they’d seen. Nathan Garvey thought it was a giant gray lima bean and his brother Marvin saw it as a bucket seat. Over in Martin Grove, Miss Abernathy’s shoe, which she’d just removed, suddenly jumped about sixteen feet. She suspected it was a sign from God. Then the hare tore past Brinkley Park and ran straight through a wolf who never saw the supersonic hare coming as, at that moment, the wolf was skipping away from a repulsive odor through a patch of flowers when the hare blew through his hip area.

The odor in question wafted from a 13-year-old ideofluxic who, once, twice, maybe thrice upon some time(s) was loved by everyone, but most often of all by her grandmother who lived outside of town or, as her granny put it “just downwind enough”. Talk about a granny’s granny! There was no gift that she had not given the girl, and therefore the child loved her granny back. So they didn’t need to see each other much, and therefore when they did get together, the grandmother looked to the girl the way a piece of paper looks after you unwad it and the grandma, forgetting that the girl breasts were sprouting, noticed each time that the girl’s breasts were sprouting. One of the presents that the granny felt compelled to give the girl was a little Chinese made Annie Langevin designed faux red velvet riding hoodie knockoff, which the youngster took such a shining to that she never took it off. Consequently, people began calling her ‘Little Rank Riding Hoodie.'

On the morning of the day when the hare blew a hole in the wolf, the girl’s mother had been in no mood: 'Come, Little Red Riding Hood,’ she’d said, that being what people called the girl to her face, ‘here is a TripleBaconPounder with cheese and two jugs of Pinot; take them to your granny who is down to 43 pounds despite her 5 foot 10 inch frame. They will do her good or finish her off. Six of one, half dozen of the other. Set out before the air quality plummets, and on your way, do not leave the path, or you may fall on top of perfectly good burger, and then your grandmother will blow a friggin’ gasket.”

Little Rank Riding Hoddie had heard all this as

“Mocha Ed Dining, peel a Nipple Bounder with doo pugs of Keno Dr. Phil and gnute tenant’s Clark bar her mood’s spooky bugger’im and Peter Falk the friggin’ tasket.”

Which, aside from causing her to wonder why she’d never heard of the “doo pugs of Keno”, had struck the girl as a perfectly straightforward statement regarding her mother’s ongoing battle with exema.

Little Rank Riding Hoodie attempted to hug her mother goodbye, but the latter had suddenly needed to sweep the kitchen floor downwind enough away in the far corner of the kitchen.

The grandma lived out in the wood where the air was fresh, half a league from our development, and just as Little Rank Riding Hoodie had entered the wood, the wolf, had met her. The girl did not yet know what a wicked creature he was and, moreover, she saw no reason at all to be afraid of a melon.

'Good day, Little Red Riding Hood,' had said the wolf. Little Rank was almost certain that this greeting had to be a compliment on her spoken French, a language which she had dropped after two weeks in high school. Ideofluxics have a hell of a time with foreign languages. They make wonderful prison guards. She’d thanked the wolf.

‘Mercy Bluecough,’ she’d replied in an attempt to use what she recalled from the introductory lesson. She couldn’t remember the word for melon so she called him Mademoiselle, whose meaning she was pretty sure covered “agricultural products”.

‘The wolf was not up on his expectoration colors, and the girl looked well enough, so he felt free to continue.

'Whither away so early, Little Red Riding Hood?' asked the wolf being careful not to enter the girl’s personal space. Little Rank thought the imposing figure before her -- to you and me a 7 foot gnarly yet peculiarly well-spoken beast -- to be a prize winning honeydew, and she was relatively certain the melon had asked where she kept her Creamy Italian.

Ideofluxesia affects visual as well as audio perception. Lewis Carol was an ideofluxic. So was George W. Bush. Thus, the WMDs and Dick Cheney.

'My grandmother's,’ she’d exclaimed jumping eagerly toward the luscious green fruit.

'What have you got in your basket, skunk piss and human remains?' Here the girl had heard the words the melon had just uttered as ‘If the average American were not eating as compensation for his existential emptiness, what would he avoid and why?’

‘Leftover Burger and pinot,’ said Little Rank. ‘I am taking them to poor sick grandmother to make her stronger. You know, like.'

Ideofluxics successfully avoid injury and public humiliation and understand most of what others say thanks only to their extraordinarily developed sensitivity to the need to speak almost exclusively in meaningless clichés so that the Average American understands what she means whether or not she means it.

'Where does your grandmother live, Little Red Riding Hood?' he asked while avoiding the use of his very large nasal passage. Wolves have twenty thousand times our sense of smell. When given a whiff of a dead South American peroqueet, one laboratory wolf was able to name the toothpaste under the front seat of the military transport vehicle that ran over the bird’s cousin Coochie’s tail feather. Thus, given Little Rank’s putridity, the wolf’s brain might have been processing at overload capacity such information as the exact species of the malodorous fungus from the lining of Little Rank Riding Hoodie’s hoodie were it not that wolves’ brains process fifty million fewer impulses per minute than ours.

Little Rank had heard this question as “How do you solve the problem of an ignorant populace electing car dealers and the like to Congress?” She answered “Education is the answer, no matter the question.”

The wolf was thinking to himself:

1. ‘What a nice, plump, tender young creature! She will be better to eat than the grandmother! I must act craftily!’

2. ‘That burger smells like Morgan’s hole!' A reference to Morgan the Squirrel, a friend of his who’d died at home at the beginning of July and was aging nicely.’

The wolf, whose extremely fine sense of smell was the product of the longest olfactory canal of any creature in the wood, skipped well off into the field of flowers, grabbed a scented bouquet, desperately plunged his snout into it and said: 'Yowie!’ And then breathing freely again: ‘Mocha Ed Dining, Dracula, Gingrich, Plankton, Satan, ” Or: ‘See, Little Red Riding Hood, how pretty the flowers are about here! Why don’t you put down your crap and………..

That’s when the hare swept through the wood ripping all the petals from their stems and a hole in the wolf the size of a supersonic 1200 degree hare.

The hare didn’t stop. Not even once. He didn’t stop by the side of the road or rest or sleep or take a nap or take a break or take a breather or enjoy a pause or lie down in the shade of a willow tree or slow down or hesitate or slow to a trot or jog in a leisurely fashion or walk or skip or look left or look right or enjoy the scenery or get distracted by the Prince and his entourage parading through the streets of Martin Grove with a size 4 and a half glass-slipper-shaped float or get cocky or lost or sleepy.

He just ran like a bat out of hell on the shortest line between the abandoned Chevy and the Martin Grove supermarket. He arrived at that supermarket in record time. The trip hadn’t taken him more than three minutes.

But when he got inside the supermarket, Sally Woback in produce had bad news. The tortoise had already bought up all the one-cent lettuce. There was none left.
“What? That’s not possible!” exclaimed the hare.

“Well sure it’s possible,” replied Sally. “He was here last Thursday, the first day of the special!”

Todd Straus

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Bob

Sunday, October 10, 2010

The Tortoise and the Hare

Thursday, October 7, 2010

No Why