David Ohle - The Pisstown Chaos

William Parker Yockey's life has been cut tragically short by a hagfish attack. Vacationing on Square Island, Yockey was asleep on a hammock hung between two posts near the water's edge when what is suspected to have been a hagfish wormed its way out of the water at high tide and attached its tentacled mouth around Yockeys navel, extruded its horned tongue, macerated the muscle, then sucked out enough of Yockey's vitals to kill him.

Somehow the hagfish discharged a great heat in the process, such that there was nothing left of the shrubbery but a burned circle where the two struggled. This latest attack comes as a surprise to marine scientists, who previously stated that the hagfish would never enter the canal system. Now it is feared they will propagate on the slimy bottom, filling their bellies with nutrient-laden sludge.

Such memories of the first big Chaos. Confined to our Hyberhomes, often ten or twelve to a ten-by-ten space, we passed the time making up games to play. There was no room to move, or to scuffle and fight. We became wellorganized and decided it was good to stay calm, to make the air easier to breathe. Some of us stood while others slept, sitting with their arms around their knees and pulling them toward their chests.

Some of us formed a dream club. Before going to sleep we planned to meet at specific dream locations. After a few nights we began to recognize in common a shadowy, poorly dressed figure standing in the shadows of our dreamscapes. We all called him Dewey and we knew that he had come to threaten the peace and privacy of our sleeping world. Reasoning that he would feel no pain, we agreed to murder Dewey during the next round of dreams. We would meet at the Impeteria in Pisstown. Dewey would be there, waiting to haunt and taunt us without let-up. He could brandish a shin in our faces or spit on our dream shoes. We never knew what to expect.

There were nine of us dreaming that night. Dewey little suspected he would be facing organized hostile dream bodies, and when he did he melted away like a candle. We had killed a dream figure by simply wishing it, not as an individual but as a group. The solitary dreamer has little power. It takes a group to have any influence in the dream world

Cora Fry Hooker, pretty nineteen-year-old niece of Reverend Hooker and daughter of Wallace, was found dead in a water trough at her father's home early Sunday morning. Her slender throat had been slashed ear to ear, and her left wrist showed gashes, but the Reverend's physicians stated the death was due to drowning. Cora was to be married at eight o'clock that morning to a prominent Pisstown merchant.

The young woman had been in the best of spirits Saturday night and had gone to bed at her usual time. The household slept and knew nothing of the tragedy until the body was found. In the parlor of the home, the proposed wedding room, the funeral was held this afternoon. Cora's shroud was her trousseau. Saying he was despondent, the would-be groom declined to comment.

Madeleine Mott, noted stinker artist, has survived a near fatal, self-inflicted wound. She did it among a group of laughing children with whom she had been playing in Hooker Park last evening. The game was bargello, the object to kick the inflated bladder ofa hagfish toward and across a predetermined goal line. In the pitch of darkness and without warning she pulled a pocket pistol, and. before her meaning could be understood by her playmates, discharged a bullet into her temple. Taken to the Pasteur Clinic, where a surgeon excised the spent lead, Miss Mott was back at her easel in a matter of days, content to be alive.

Shifted back to Bum Bay, to mate with one Carleton Manson, Ophelia traveled by pedal tram over the monotonous stretch of scrubland with only three or four outposts along the way. It took two full days for her to get there. Before the introduction of the Q-ped and pedal tram, shiftees made the journey on the backs of prairie imps culled from wild herds. They would not accept a saddle and were impossible to control, wanting always to go their own way. Before the rider knew it, an imp would have gone a hundred miles in the wrong direction.

On arrival, however, the imp would be slaughtered, dressed, smoked, preserved in salt, and eaten on holidays for seasons to come. On one well-documented occasion, new arrivals were instructed to bring their imps to the abattoir without delay. It seemed the ice-house had been struck by lightning. All the winter's ice, cut in blocks from the frozen Canal, packed in hay and stored there, had melted. It was important now that all meat be smoked and salted as soon as possible. After the long trip, the imps were trim and the meat light. Slaughtering and dressing was a relatively easy and quick affair. Some of the imps were so exhausted they entered the chute that led to the killing floor contentedly, even briskly. Now, with the wild prairie imp in danger of extinction, Q-peds and trams are used exclusively, but fresh meat is a rarity.

Midway to Bum Bay was the Witching Well, a must-see for passing shiftees. The well, nested at the bottom of a great land-subsidence, was about eighty rods across and said to be bottomless. The water was black and very sour to the taste. The ground sloped at a low angle up from the well to the flat table-land above where hundreds of imps rooted for grubs.

"That's the Reverend's imp farm up there," a fellow shiftee informed Ophelia. "Lots of experiments going on. I read in the City Moon that they've developed one that can give meat without dying. You can cut off all the steaks and ham you want. The next day, there they are, whole again. I've eaten enough starch to keep a laundry in business. Some bloody meat would be a welcome change."

"I would agree," Ophelia said. "I like starch well enough, but somehow it doesn't fully satisfy."

Ophelia arrived in Bum Bay on the warmest day of the year and was put to work within hours at the hair mill, where imp tails and manes were dried, ground into a fine powder, mixed with urpglue and run through machines that spun out artificial hair for use in the doll and mannequin trade. Because the repetitive actions of her single daily task, tying the hair into small bales and packing them in boxes, left her feeling anxiously energetic in the evenings, she began to follow the methods of Yogi Vithaldas. Before eating a light supper, she first performed the Nety Kriya, one of the six processes of purifying the body. She threaded a soft, wet cotton chord into her nostril, then steered it downward by way of the pharynx into her mouth. Then she grasped the end of the chord with tweezers, worked it back and forth and dislodged the night's accumulation of mucus. After that, it was time to clean her stomach by the process of Dhoti Kriya, which involved swallowing a long, wet piece of gauze, then rotating the stomach muscles. Again, it was to dislodge accumulated mucus, which came out along with the gauze. She drank a small glass of her urine every morning while it was still warm, and whenever she had to make a decision of any kind, she threw yarrow stalks out on the rug in her assigned quarters and consulted the I Ching. She kept time the Mayan way, in terms of two permutating cycles. One cycle consisted of eighteen twenty-day months. Its days had names like Pop, Ik, Akbal, Mac and Zac. The other cycle was called the Vague Year, with five dreaded, unlucky, days at the end, days that accumulated because the Mayan calendar had a slight variance with the solar year.

That winter Ophelia's mate appeared on the scene. She met him in Hooker Park.

"Ophelia Balls. Nice name," he said. "I'm Carleton Manson. I'm not a mater, you understand. But I sell suppositories, of my own prime jit."

Manson, a Hookerite, was a scruffy, suntanned little tramp with a knotted beard who smelled like urpflanz and whose eyes appeared to be upside down. He wanted to wholesale a hundred suppositories, his entire lot, for eighty bucks, a good price by Bum Bay standards.