David Ohle - The Pisstown Chaos

One, then two imps left their wallows on the banks of Bloody Creek and stationed themselves in the shade of the barn. They remained still momentarily, making their final calculations before venturing out to feed on Charity.

"Looky there," Ratoncito said, aiming his finger at one of the imps pulling flesh from the stinker's abdomen.

"Our friends are hungry today," Peppard said. "Now, let's go on in there and give them sons of bitches a rude awakening."

When the two Guards entered the house, they found Mildred sleeping on a bare mattress, Dewey and Harp on the floor.

"Rise and shine," Peppard said, holding up the gold bar. "We've all got a date with the wig."

Dewey raised his Sharps and tried to curl his sleepnumbed finger around the trigger. But Peppard and Ratoncito stopped him short with eight shots to the body and head.

Harp sat up, terrified.

Peppard said, "We're taking you in for possession of tooth gold and for malignant neglect in the death of the blacksmith. And we've got a stolen wagon, destruction of property, and arson. State your name. Who's that old woman?"

"I'm Ray Harp. That's Mildred Balls. It's her gold, not mine. I'm an innocent party in all this. I was just a passenger."

The Major stepped closer to Mildred. "She's a damned deep sleeper, wouldn't you say?"

Harp clasped his hands behind his back. "She's very tired. We're all very tired. A lot of sleep was lost."

Ratoncito went closer, touched her forehead. "She's stone cold dead, Major." He placed his hand near her mouth. "I don't feel no breath, neither."

"Well, Mr. Harp, looks like we'll be taking you in all by your lonesome," Peppard said, rocking back and forth on his boot heels. "But first, I want you to give that old dead woman a kiss, right there on them lips. Don't be ascared."

"Not on the lips. I'll just give her a little peck on the cheek."

Peppard raised his weapon and cocked it. "You heard what I said. Ratoncito, what did I just say?"

"You said for him to give that poor dead woman a decent kiss."

"On the lips."

"Yeah, you said that."

"Get to it, Harp. We got a hard ride back to town."

"Isn't kissing prohibited? What if she's infested?"

"We'll all get 'em sooner or later. Eventually, why not now. Ain't that what the Reverend says?"

Harp bent over slowly and lightly touched his lips to Mildred's, which were far colder than he expected they would be, so cold that his head snapped back in reaction.

"Well," Peppard said, "let's get on back now. We'll leave these two for the critters."

Ratoncito snapped a pair of cuffs onto Harp's wrists.

There is rising demand among Hookerites for the construction of a cinderblock wall, thirty feet high, stretching from Indian Apple to Bum Bad a distance estimated to be one thousand miles. "We want a community we can call our own, " said a spokesperson representing the group. There are more stinkers now, the group believes, than fully living persons. "Many Hookerites, " the Reverend recently observed, are angry when they read the City Moon and are told the same tiring lie, that there are more of us, the uninfested, than the cumulative sum of stinkers. "

As evidence of the growing problem, Hookerites cite news accounts of American settler populations dwindling before the influx of stinker immigration to the Fertile Crescent. According to recent investigations, stinkers in the area now number some sixteen thousand. Because the Crescent is the most luxuriantly rich and abundant land mass on earth, and thusfar relatively parasite-fire, widespread infestation there could bring Chaos to a land where peace, prosperity and order were the rule.

A stinker widow in one of the bailiwicks went into business making her own pure imp sausages, which she served to neighbors on an urpmeal bun. She had learned how to make sausages when she worked at Zeus Bologna Company. Before her husband was put down, he had built her a screened-in lean-to off the side of their trailer. It wasn't visible from Dunvant Road, and that's just the way the widow wanted it. She wasn't as clean or as careful as required by ordinance. There were worn gears in her grinder, which indirectly caused some tooth breakage when customers bit down on a piece of bone.

The widow was in violation of at least ten meat sanitation laws. She was ordered to stop production. "But people in the bailiwick depend on my sausages," she told the City Moon. "They send their kids over whenever I've got a batch ready. And they always know when that is because I hang a fresh-made sausage on my clothesline. They come running over with their little sacks and fill them full for a buck or two. They take them home and the family lives off them the rest of the week. "

For as long as they could, neighbors learned to ignore the putrid smell that rose up off the meat in the summer months. It was kept sitting in an open tub, fly-covered piles of it, wormy and ripe. When a number of children took to their beds with taut, rounded bellies full ofpar- asites, and one nearly died, the neighbors' complaints were given a hearing and the widow was ordered to cease the production and distribution of her tainted sausages. Ignoring the intent of the order, she simply began making the sausages at night after the air cooled down.

But she used gel cans for light, which brought bugs around by the hundreds and they often dropped into her meat and urpmeal mix. Still, hungry for meat, the children came. And again, they were taken sick. After repeated warnings from wigs in that jurisdiction, the widow's sausage-making continued until, weeks later, two Guards came to her trailer one evening and exercised a warrant by standing her up against the side of her trailer and shooting her in the back of the head.

Its the latest fad among third-stagers. You see them wearing canvas suits, coiled in rings of breathing apparatus, bobbing belly-up in the canals like poisoned fish. They tangle in water hyacinth, which strangles the canals every summer, then free themselves and float on, city to city. The afternoon sun returns blinding spikes from their goggles, scaring children and animals along the bank. On average, every summer, just under a hundred and fifty of these aquatic stinkers are eviscerated by hagfish.

News from the Permanganate Parasite Facility is that a component of the venom of the humble fiddleback spider has been shown to be a potent anti parasitic. Several cases of spontaneous expulsion of the parasite have been reported and many of those confined on the Island are being released. Patients there had been kept in isolation to prevent the spread of infestation. In the end it proved not to be the isolation that halted the spread but the presence of the reclusive fiddleback in many of the Island's remote living quarters.

A star is dead here, requiescat in pace. Mitsuguro Bando, noted Kabuki actor, has died of hagfish poisoning at a restaurant in Pisstown. After his performance at the Flickerama, he dined with fans on roasted hagfish at the Palace Orienta. Upon remarking about particularly tasty hag, he suddenly collapsed, his cheeks engorged and pathologically distended.

Bando's body, once preserved will be kept in a curb stand made of opalescent material and illuminated by concealed lamps. During the day the stand will look like any ordinary glass structure, but when darkness comes the lamps will be turned on and the famous actor will be bathed in a ghostl}t fluid light.

Once known as the Iron Duke for his ability to eat metal, glass, and stone, Wallace Hooker will announce his retirement from that practice at the Bones Jangle tavern Tuesday night. It was a nearly deadly meal that hastened his decision, he revealed in today's City Moon. During a public demonstration at the Gons Hotel, he dined on imp brains until the kitchen was out of them, then ate his plate, his drinking glass, and coffee cup with saucer. After eating the tablecloth, he sucked twenty starch bars through a napkin. Then he went downtown, entered an antiquary shop and took bites from a tin sitz bath. "On a butcher's scale," Wallace said, "My stomach would have weighed fifty pounds. I had gone too far. "