David Ohle - The Pisstown Chaos

"'Cause they found him under somebody's side porch half-buried under trash and dirt," Spanish Johnny offered.

Percy Chips said, "Me, I started getting stiff when I was playing a lot of poker in a Pisstown slum. Got stiffer and stiffer and deader and deader. Now look at me."

Spanish Johnny told of coming north to pick persimmons, then being shifted to a donor farm, where he succumbed in a desperate state of mind. "They found me in an old wooden water tower. Stunk up the whole town's water most of a year. People went around in clothes that smelled like they'd been washed in a sewer ditch."

"Well, then," she told them, "My name is Mildred Balls. Let's get you washed, one at a time. Take off your clothes, please."

In unison, all three kicked off their shoes, peeled off socks, loosened belts and lowered trousers. Spanish Johnny gasped, but did not cry out in pain when a strip of hide that was stuck to his underpants came off, exposing a swath of moist, red muscle tissue. Another accident occurred when Side Porch removed the snap-brim cap he was wearing and took a divot of scalp with it. And when Percy Chips's trousers fell, it was apparent that his entire sexual apparatus had been excised and the incision left to heal without benefit of stitching. It was an ugly, suppurating wound.

"Yeah, go ahead and gawk," he said.

The others pointed to similar evidence of excisions on themselves. "They took our manhood away is what they did," Side Porch said. "Worse, we're not dead enough to burn yet."

"I got maybe a pound of liver left," Chips said. "I lost my stomach, thyroid, one eye, all my toenails and half my brain."

Side Porch and Spanish Johnny had donated kidneys, spleens, lungs and teeth, they said.

"I'm sorry about all that, fellows, but my job is to wash you on a regular basis. Now, all of you kneel down on all fours and let me get you wet." When the stinkers complied, without objection or hesitation, Mildred sloshed water over their frail, withered backs and began soaping them up, being very careful not to puncture or tear their paper-thin skin. When the washing was done, the stinkers stood in a close circle and let her rub them with scented oil.

Side Porch said, "You got the parasite, Mildred? Is that why they put you way out here?"

"Yes."

"That's bad," Chips said. "By the time they're through, you'll be a bag of bones."

"Hell, I had them bad when I was third-stage," Side Porch said. "Got to where they were coming out in my hanky when I blew my nose. I could feel them moving around in my head. I'd shit a bucket full every morning. Then they went away when I got to be fourth-stage."

Spanish Johnny admitted to becoming infested when he was in the Reverend's Guard during the occupation of Pisstown. "When the Chaos ended, a first-stage female came up and gave me a kiss. That's how I got the parasite. I tried every remedy that rumor delivered to me, including moxibustion and urpmilk enemas, but it just got worse."

Mildred told them she had high hopes of finding a way to cure herself.

When the stinkers put their clothes back on and returned to walking in circles and searching the ground, Mildred could no longer keep her curiosity at bay. "Are you fellows looking for something?"

"No, Miss," Spanish Johnny said, "We like to get dizzy and faint. It's the way we have fun."

"Good day, then."

"There's a full moon coming tonight," Percy Chips said. "We go crazy sometimes when that happens."

"But don't you worry, Miss," Spanish Johnny said. "There's no way any of us could get up those stairs. We're way too stiff in the joints."

Side Porch took a few rigid, awkward steps. "See, most of mine are fused. It's a damn good thing I don't feel much pain, or this would be pure agony."

"I won't worry, then," Mildred said, closing the gate.

"This day'll never dawn again," Chips said.

Side Porch spun around like a top, but slowly. "We'll see what tomorrow brings." He fell to the ground then. Chips and Johnny picked him up.

"He's all right," Johnny said.

"Be very careful when you fall," Mildred warned as she closed the gate. "There are hungry imps in the area. This fence won't keep them out."

When the moon was up and the haze had lifted, Mildred watched the stinkers from her window. They circled the pen dozens of times before Percy Chips crumbled in a dead faint. Moments later, she heard the squealing of wild imps and watched in disgust as two of them burrowed under the fence wire and tore away most of one buttock and part of Chips's face before Side Porch was able to chase them off. "I'm okay," Chips said. "I don't feel anything. I don't see any blood."

Mildred's attention was suddenly drawn to a feeling of pressure, an itch, and a subtle throbbing in her heel. When she sat on the side of her cot and removed the boot, a flattened brown spider tumbled out. When her knee sock came off, she saw a foot that was puffy and enflamed. A conspicuous target-like bite mark lay on that part just beneath her long second toe, and rings of disturbed flesh spread outward from the site. The dead spider was a dark, long-legged one, and there was the unmistakable marking of a fiddle on its back.

Dear Roe and Ophelia,

I am in quite a fix. A poisonous spider has bitten me and my foot is swollen all the way to the ankle. Walking on it is too painful to bear and I don't have anything to make into a suitable crutch. Where am I going to find a physician to cut out all the necrotic flesh that comes with these bites? Here I am, three stinkers to take care of, and I can't walk. Another day or two and their odor will begin to sicken me further. I don't think I've ever been in such a pickle before. This will have to be cut short as I'm growing weak and my fingers are too numb to write. How I long to be home again.

Your Ailing Grandmother

Nowadays, you aren't necessarily sent to Permanganate Island Prison because you ve violated any law. Anyone could be ordered there as a side effect of the shifting process. Because of the complex stochastic methods used in calculating the shifts, some unfortunates have to be "side-shifted, " most often to an out-of-the-way or isolated place like a prison island or watch tower. In urban areas it could be a warehouse, a derelict theater, or an abandoned building.

In a show of sympathy the Reverend spent an hour with a sick stinker yesterday. She had vomited everything for a month except piquant foods. She told him her physician had prescribed aqua chloroformant, spirits of menthol, willywhack and urpmeal Yet she had not gotten better. For eight years before this, she had suffered with arthritis deformans. Her hands were nothing but clubs. I was once very pretty "she said. I was admired by the whole bailiwick for my beautiful hair. "

When the meeting was over, the Reverend said that her complains had led him to reconsider drugless healing. "Since the beginning of homeopathy followed by chiropody osteopathy and chiropractic, drugless healing has taken tremendous steps forward " he said to reporters. "When one realizes there are other ways of healing, they will not be slow in forsaking the nauseating draughts medicine ofers. "

A fondness for pickled lips has led to the arrest of a Kootie Fiyo, a stinker known to be a trader in tooth gold and a vicious biter. Fiyo was just leaving the impeteria in South Pisstown when two Guards entered. The proprietor said, "That stink can eat more imp lips than I can heap in front of him. "

The Guards remembered receiving a report from Bum Bay that a stinker of Fiyo's description was wanted there on an infectious biting charge, and that the suspects most conspicuous affection was for pickled lips.

Fiyo was arrested after a scuffle, during which one of the Guards was bitten on his face, neck and hand and is now under observation at Pisstown's Pasteur Clinic. The other Guard escaped with minor bruises and abrasions. Fiyo was rushed through the judication process at the Templex and just as quickly sent to a dentist to have all his teeth extracted. Should the bitten Guard die, Fiyo will probably hang.