David Ohle - The Pisstown Chaos

The next day, Roe enlisted. The day after that he was bivouacked somewhere in the Fertile Crescent, where he nearly met disaster when a railcar, heavily laden and running on the downgrade at top speed, approached a spot where he and other soldiers sat resting. Behind the railcar came a rolling platform carrying a load of porous clay zeer jars. The conveyance was built this way so that the heavy jars might catch the rush of air and thus cool the contents to drinking temperature. As the car rounded a curve, one of the zeers toppled and struck the soldier sitting next to Roe with full force, crushing his skull. The worst Roe suffered was a drenching.

Other than the time he volunteered for a risky mission, the remainder of his military service was unexceptional and dull. Reverend Hooker had come to the bivouac to deliver a message to the newly enlisted troops, who assembled in a large tent. "Listen, men," he said, "striped adders are so thick in a pasture on one of my farms that they have taken to milking my imps. And when they are active at this, there is a distinctly pungent odor. Last evening I found that every imp in a herd of nine hundred had been milked. I camouflaged myself and watched the pasture. Every minute or two, I saw an adder crawl up an imp's leg and begin to milk the animal. And men, let me add that those same imps rarely grin when I palm their teats. Now, the point of the tale is this-I need volunteers to hunt down the adders and kill them. It's dangerous work as these slithery things will strike with deadly effect. Let's have a show of hands, then. Who'll volunteer to save the milk supply?"

Roe volunteered. It promised to be more engaging than sitting in a tent all day and night with the steamy rain pelting down. Taking the next available wagon, he reported for duty at the Reverend's imp farm. The operation proceeded in a straightforward way, beginning with a few remarks from Hooker. "Listen up, men. This is the way this will be done. You'll line up side by side in the nude and you'll cross the entire pasture. Every other man will carry one of these rubber udders filled with imp's milk, letting it hang by his side." He took a full udder from an assistant and demonstrated the best way to dangle it. "When the adders begin to climb the man's leg, I want the soldier next to him to snatch up that serpent with one of these gloves." He held up a pair of elbow-length gauntlets. "And put it in a sack like this." He held up a burlap bag with a drawstring. "Now, no matter what safety precautions we take, some of you will be bitten, some of you will die, a few will suffer lifelong from the effects of the bite. To date no antivenin has been made available. So, in closing, let me wish you the best of luck. I've never seen such a lineup of finely made men."

By random selection, Roe ended up one of the udder carriers. To the soldier next to him, he said, "Please, act quickly, don't let one bite me." As soon as the line moved into the high grass, adders began winding up leg after leg, including Roe's. "Get it! Get it!" he screeched.

The soldier reached for the adder as quickly as humanly possible, yet it was too late. Roe was bitten on one of his testicles. Though the bite caused swelling to the point that he was anchored to his cot for five days, feet propped up, applying cold packs, very little venom had been injected and physicians said he would recover without permanent damage.

An imp herder working one of the Reverend's meadows is fit to be tied. He found his most productive female dead in her pen yesterday. The belly was scissored open, the teats cut, the heart carried off. The herder wants to blame stinkers for this latest raid on his stock. The incident is doubly sorrowful, coming so soon after the same herder discovered the wings of his favorite banty imp nailed to the stump of an oak. Neighbors testify that he now spends his time stalking the reaches of the Reverend's property, pistol drawn, so anxious to shoot a stinker that he has accidentally killed three of his best stud imps.

A stinker using a bow and arrow bagged a wild imp today in front of the Radiola Theater in full view of horrified patrons, who watched him dress it with surgical precision, cube and salt the meat, wrap it in burlap, and run north, leaving behind a mound of gristle and bone.

Because the Reverend believes that music is the fourth material want of the stinker, he has put in effect ordinances requiring them to whistle while they work and to toot kazoos during breaks. Knee-slapping, spoon-rattling, drumming, trumpeting and blowing the short horn are also mandated. As a result, Bum Bay has become a noisy circus of tone-deaf stinkers trying to comply with the ordinance.

A metal pontoon of some kind was being drawn by pedal cart down the main streets of Pisstown. It measured six foot by six. A hole in its outer plating admitted a tangle of colored wires and leaked a pinescented, pleasant smelling gas, one which, if inhaled even at a distance of a city block, brought on a lingering giddiness, a stagger, and a closure of the throat. The cylinder had apparently been at the bottom of the National Canal for some time, judging by the crust of slime and barnacles.

Out of the crowd that formed to watch the strange looking object pass, one valorous soul went up and stroked it kindly, as though it were a living thing. He did this despite warnings from the Home Guards escorting the cylinder at a safe distance and lived only a few moments after the thoughtless act. In autopsy it was discovered that his lungs and trachea were coated with a thick layer of parasites, presumably carried in with the leaking gas, which thusfar has defied chemical analysis.

One of the Reverend's closest held secrets was revealed today by the City Moon after an American businesswoman said she saw a bright globe rise aloft and traverse portions of the sky above a factory which produces chloride of lime, and continue until it paused high above the Bum Bay Straits. She offered to swear an affidavit in substantiation of what she saw. It hovered blue and bulbous, she said, and a sterilizing light seemed to be cast from its underparts.

"I guess the word is out, " the Reverend told the paper. The woman saw a prototype of a small moon that heals, a medicinal moon. My scientists and I have been hard at work on this project for many years. The moon is intended to cleanse the atmosphere of parasite spores. I see these globes someday stationed over every city town and waiting camp in the land. "

Stinkers are said to dote on a mixture of urpflanz pulp and sweetened urpmilk. To that end they have learned to connect a crank with a dasher in a churn and set the container in a pan of Canal ice and salt, to produce a delicious concoction they call ice butter, which they vend from three-wheeled carts at a half-buck a cup, under gaily colored umbrellas.

These peddlers, citizens have been cautioned are rich sources of parasite infestation, dysentery diphtheria and sundry bacterial infections, as most of the ice butter is manufactured in unsanitary homes, with unclean hands.

While most of the household workers had departed when Mildred Balls left for Permanganate Island, two remained: Red Cane, an unreliable and moody man who performed the services of both a butler and a cook, and Reuben Peters, the yard man.

One morning Red prepared lunch in the kitchen downstairs, then brought it up to Ophelia. "I've stuffed a few pastry shells with mushrooms and urpmilk and baked them for you, an old recipe of your grandmother's I found under the cooking stove."

"Thank you so much," Ophelia said, dragging her chair to a window to take advantage of the warm sunlight as she ate. "Look at that. The postman is emptying his bowels again. There's his Q-ped in the driveway. I see him by the pond."

The postman squatted in a thicket of wild urpflanz, whistling as he wiped himself with pages torn from the City Moon.