The Tuberson family farmhands had started picking potatoes after dusk to beat the arrival the next day of an unusually hot Indian summer. By four in the morning, Joy was standing in the middle of a field at Arbor Ring Farm trying to figure out what went wrong with the haulm topper and harvester.
Too many rocks near the surface? She wondered. Both pieces of machinery had failed in spectacular fashion. She knew better than to try to fix them in the dark. She’d wait until dawn.
A rooster crowed. The yawning mid-September sun rose golden over the fields, illuminating a wasteland of scraped and scattered glowing yellow bones—all that remained of a decimated family of skeletons violently aroused and dismembered overnight.
Missy and her clique of morbidly skinny bitches were all that stood between her and the front door. Joy could tell from the tortured looks on their wasted bony faces that they resented her full-bodied beauty and voluptuous curves.
But they were no match for Joy Tuberson, whose family had deep roots in their small farming community.
Pandemonium: A Mr. Funny Bones Days of Our Past Lives COVID-19 Reunion, first appeared on Facebook on May 11, 2020.
“Pandemonium, the palace of Satan rises, suddenly built of the deep: the infernal peers there sit in council.” —John Milton, Paradise Lost
“Dammit, Janet! Intubate!” “But Brad, intubate what?! He has no organs!”“You have two options, kitten: me or the clown with the orange hair.”“You bet I’m back at work. I have a family to feed. I can’t sit at home and play dead forever.”“No, kitten. Regardless of what the orange-haired clown says, bleaching your bones won’t protect you against the coronavirus. All that’ll get you is access to the nice country clubs and a spot in a display case in the history museum.” “We don’t foresee any issues with our social distancing policy either at corporate or here in our showrooms. We’ve all been six feet under before.”“SKULLY’S HAS TOILET PAPER !!”“Super Spreader? Isn’t that what they call you at school, Missy?”“All indicators point to this crock-pot of creamy chipped beef and cheese as the proximal origin of the virus, Chief.”
“Good gravy! Is it contagious?”
“We’re not sure yet if it’s gravy or if it’s contagious, Chief. We’re forensic scientists, not gourmet epidemiologists.”
If 16th- and 17th-century European genre paintings could talk, what would they say today? How would they say it? How could they say it in a language everyday people would understand? And if a painting talks in a museum, do the other paintings hear it? And if the other paintings hear it, what do they say? And do sculptures hear it, too, or do they only hear their own kind? Now, at the present time, more than ever before the time just passed … hm hm hm time passages doo doo dee doo (Al Stewart) … art appreciation even in its basest form is most rudimentary, nay, necessary.
“Into the Vulgate” first appeared on Facebook in early November 2015.
Missy and Coco left the market area and headed for home. For the afterlife of her, Missy couldn’t figure out why someone so sensible and smart as Allie would have blindly sided with religion over science when confronted with a straightforward afterlife-or-second-death decision.
Months later, Missy learned something so disturbing she would’ve fallen apart had it not been for the amulet in her tiara that she had fashioned out of the single, perfectly-shaped semi-precious gem left at the site of Allie’s fatal spawning. During a routine dental visit, Dirty Rich the Clown Dentist (Missy Impossible, Chapter 5), while high on his own laughing gas, revealed to her that it was he who, disguised as a priest, had persuaded Allie to reject the advice of the ichthyologist and to spawn instead of have her gonads surgically removed to save her afterlife. He only did it, he said half jokingly, because he wanted to drill her.
Lying supine on the bed of leaves with her arms extended, Allie gave in to the agonizing pain radiating outward from her inguinal area to her caudal fin. “To be only half a monster is insanity!” she cried out, repudiating the only way she knew how and with what limited strength that remained her accursed hybrid condition and damned post mortem existence (cf. Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, Book 8, Chapter 4). How did she not see it coming to this? What had she done during her previous lifetime to deserve her hellish afterlife as half skeleton, half mermaid? What perverse god in the heavens thought it just to hand down such a cruel and capricious punishment? Hers was no gift.
Lying supine on the bed of leaves with her arms extended, Allie gave in to the agonizing pain.
At that very moment, a searing pain around her anal vent overtook Allie so forcefully that her garbanzos popped out of their sockets. She started releasing what felt like fifty thousand and one eggs, all of them atretic and the last one of a crystalline composition more perfect and of an appearance more dazzling than centuries of alchemy and sorcery had ever produced. (No. 11)
Forsaken on her leaf mound which, dear reader (and there’s probably only one of you out there), covered the very spot where Allie’s parents had thawed and dislodged her from her icy manger years ago, Allie took one final breath and re-died. (No. 12)
At some point before dawn, the seafood vendor’s cat extricated Allie’s remains from the mound and carried them off, leaving her uninseminable eggs to the rats and the elements (No. 13). The vendor thanked his kitty for the gift and then buried Allie’s remains deep within the trash so that the cat couldn’t retrieve them. (No. 14).
Blind Allie’s Dolores Street (a.k.a. Way of Sorrows)
No. 1: Allie becomes aware that the time has come for her to spawn (4:3)
No. 2: Allie accepts her fate (5:1)
No. 3: Allie flounders for the first time (5:2)
No. 4: Allie sees her mother in a vision (5:2)
No. 5: A shopkeeper helps Allie advance towards the market by propelling her with the jet from his hose (5:2)
No. 6: A Veronica’s Unicorn Rental delivery van washes Allie’s face with a splash from a puddle as it passes her in the street (5:2)
No. 7: Allie flounders for the second time (5:2)
No. 8: Allie is lifted from the gutter by two women from town (5:2)
No. 9: Allie flounders for the third time (5:2)
No. 10: Allie is stripped of the skins covering her chickpea eyes (5:2)
No. 11: Allie releases her eggs (5:3)
No. 12: Allie dies on a mound of leaves (5:3)
No. 13: Allie is removed from the mound by the seafood vendor’s cat (5:3)
