Leila Allison

Welcome Back to Saragun Springs: 2025

Happy New Year! Here’s hoping that you are not starting 2025 off in a jail cell or any other less than desirable location, and that you did not heed any “creative” ideas suggested to you by Tippleganger Ghosts, who live for New Years Eve.

Big doings in the realm this year. To open things we are writing an on the fly book that will appear a little at a time everyday (except Sundays, my Fictional Characters are unionized and do not work on Sundays) until it either satisfies brilliantly or keels over dead. We proudly call it The Oz Exception. It begins tomorrow with the prologue, which is followed by the first section on the 3rd. Those are the only pre-written parts of the opus. After that each entry will be written the day before it appears. Call it a bold move, biting off more than we can chew or a cheap gimmick to attract readers who are not obviously spam AI’s. Call it whatever as long as it is not late for happy hour.

Speaking of such, we are confident that your bail will be posted soon.

Your servant,

Leila

Amy and the Fabulous Felinespy: A Feckless Fable of the Fantasmagorical

We close another year in the Springs with a bit of a wild Feline party–Leila

Amy is a long haired, owl-eyed Calico who distrusts everything that doesn’t align with her worldview. Her son, Maxo, is a yearling Orange Tabby whose personality is closer to that of a Golden Retriever than that of a Cat.

You cannot fully appreciate Amy’s coat of many colors until you see her in the sun. Every known pattern and hue in Catdom is present and never repeated in Amy’s quilt-like fur; yet away from the window she comes off reddish brown. Maxo is a standard Orange Tabby, his color is comparable to that of a creamsicle. Amy is small, mostly fur; whereas Maxo (despite a diet large enough to sustain three cats) has yet to grow into his long, gangly frame. Imagine one of those once adorable child actors who hit puberty while the show was on hiatus and you will understand Maxo’s appearance. But since he has recently been “fixed,” the vet opined that healthy young Master Maxo should soon expand like a self inflating raft.

Mother and child share the same house with two humans, a pair of Roborovski Dwarf Hamsters named Lucrezia and Zippy, a tamed three-legged rescue Squirrel known as Trey, a smart aleck Parakeet whom the people call “Dotty” but “self identifies” as “Diamond Dixie,” as well as a recent addition “gifted” to the people by a friend: a Gecko who is under the false impression that she is a “Karma Chameleon”–call her Christine.

All animals can perceive and interact with human “Spirits” (Spirit being yet another case of persnickety “self identification” in defiance of common courtesy). Most humans lack the belief in their own senses to do the same. Although everything that lives eventually leaves a ghost (and that means everything, plants, microbes etc.), only human ghosts wander back into this reality. Not all or even most do that; mainly, it’s the annoying ones. Those who insist on being called a Spirit.

Although all animals see Spirits (whom rodents refer to as “Ghosties”–much to the chagrin of the lofty Spirit ego), some Spirits are attracted to certain species more so than others. Some even to the degree that they go to great lengths to be seen by one kind of animal only. Such is the case of the Fabulous Felinespy, a powerful yet essentially useless phantom who approaches Cats late at night in order to create mayhem in a sleeping household.

As you may have already guessed, Amy is not overly popular in a home that contains three rodents, one bird and a bite-sized lizard. Maxo is beloved by the others in the menagerie because of his eager to please personality. Amy grew up rough; abandoned at a young age she became a street cat until she was three. Amy is Unforgiven–in the sense that she has “killed everything that walks or crawls at one time or another”–but to be fair, she did it out of necessity. Now well fed, spayed, mostly humanized and somewhat spoiled, Amy, despite her unrepentant attitude, has given over the thug life. But it doesn’t mean she gives a yarked hairball about what others may think of her. Thus, Zippy, Lucrezia, Christine and Diamond Dixie refuse to have anything to do with her; and Amy is so embarrassed by Maxo’s supplicating eagerness to please that she avoids him at all cost, save for the occasional lecture. And yet Amy has an unlikely friend, Trey the three-legged squirrel.

“Will your ghostie come out tonight?” Trey asked Amy recently, a bit after midnight. Everyone else was abed, including that fanny-smooch boy of hers, all cozy with the piebald slave humans.

Amy sighed. She admired her fellow “hard case”—a creature who’d spent most of his life free–but there were times when Trey had all the mental acuity of a walnut. I guess you are what you eat, she thought.

Mammals, reptiles and amphibians do not “talk” in the common sense, but they do have a universal language of pantomime and facial expressions that get them across to each other. Their senses are so keenly honed that their form of communication (even between species) is superior to speech. Birds, however, have more spoken languages than do humans, one per species; but they also have something called “Commonbeak,” which allows wildly divergent Birds, such as Sparrows and Kingfishers, to have conversations. Squirrels and other tree dwelling varmints usually learn Commonbeak via osmosis, and serve to interpret what birds have to say to creatures who do not know it, like a Cat. Trey usually edits Diamond Dixie’s observations on Amy for the sake of tranquility.

Amy is a Cat of few words. She seldom miaows, purrs, hisses or chatters. But she gets herself across quite clearly with subtle gestures and her owlish eyes, which, like her coat, contain several colors but not one more than any other. She usually converses only with Trey; and although she says more to Maxo, those instances are more along the lines of a one-sided lecture than an exchange of ideas.

Although much has passed since Trey posed his question, Amy eventually nodded, “Yes, the Fabulous Felinespy will come tonight.”

Trey, who had lost his front right leg to a cruel human trap, and was rescued by the male slave, slapped his “knee” with his left, twitched his bushy tail, winked one eye twice and the other once. “Will I see the ghostie?”

“Umm, no, Trey,” Amy replied, with uncharacteristic patience, by briefly swishing her own bushy tail and issuing a series of blinks and slight tilts of her head. “She’s the Fabulous Felinespy, not a Sensational Squirrelspy.”

Trey shrugged, said goodnight and tri-podded off to his bed in the bookcase. Amy admired the way the guy could run and climb in such an altered physical state, and was glad they hadn’t met during hard times.

Amy felt no similar warmth for the goddamn bird. Fucking thing screeched from sun up until the female slave placed the cover over its cage at night. It would have been a pleasure in the old days. Amy had no feelings whatsoever about the little Hamsters–or Rats or whatever the hell they were supposed to be. And though she didn’t much care for the Lizard’s immature attitude, reptiles were chewy and hardly worth the bother.

Someone pushed open the bedroom door. Amy hoped that it was one of the piebald slaves coming out for a snack. But, no, it was Maxo. She had vainly wished that he’d sleep through the upcoming Fabulous Felinespy revelation, but, since Maxo was a Cat, that was an awfully tall wish.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Don’t embarrass me in front of the Fabulous Felinespy.”

“I won’t–”

“I mean it,” she said. “You do any of that disgusting friendly dog stuff I’ll prove that you aren’t too big to be buried up to your neck in the litter box.”

“Aw, Mom.”

“God damn it, you’re a Cat. We don’t take shit from anyone, especially other Cats–and yet there you go with that hangdog ‘Aw, Mom’ nonsense. Next you’ll be fetching or lifting your leg to pee…”

Amy ceased the lecture when an eerie green light suddenly shone in the room. It’s source was the female piebald slave’s Kindle, which lay on the coffee table. No, Kindles are neither known for producing eerie green lights nor forces strong enough to spontaneously flip open their covers; but unknown to the slaves, this particular device had been formatted as a doorway for the Fabulous Felinespy.

Now we run into a bit of trouble. Only Cats perceive the Fabulous Felinespy, so only Cats can describe one. Unfortunately, your author isn’t a Cat, and the Cats ain’t telling. Even a friendly and eager to please sort like Maxo is elusive on the subject. The best you get from him are laudatory 80’s YA adjectives inferred as nouns: “awesome,” “radical.”

But your author does know Catfooney when she sees it. And upon gaining “instruction” from the Fabulous Felinespy, Amy and Maxo proceeded to “craterize” the living room. Everything that had stood now lay, and all that had lain now stood. Maxo managed to take down the drapes and Amy raced about the room toppling everything she touched.

Fabulous Feline inspired acts of Catfoonery take somewhere between thirty and forty-five seconds to complete. That is usually how long it takes for the slaves to awaken and rush into the living room.

The crashing and thudding had also awakened the Lizard and the Mice-like whatever-they-ares in their glass enclosures, but none seemed to be all that concerned. Trey sat munching a walnut atop the too heavy to move (but mostly denuded) bookcase, as though he were at a ballgame. When the light came on, Maxo sat next to him, up there, doing his best to feign innocence.

Amy had somehow shinnied up the pole to the goddam Parakeet’s cage, knocked off the cover and was attempting to worry the door open. Whether you call her Dotty or Diamond Lil’ you knew that the Bird was awake due to the angry squawking she began as soon as she sensed Amy’s approach. The angry squawking was a robust string of Commonbeak expletives. Trey understood them, and he related such to Maxo, who tilted his head in amazement.

Although books and bric-a-brac all lay everywhere, the slaves weren’t overly excited by what had happened. For in this apartment the Fabulous Felinespy came around on average twice a week.

The male calmly detached Amy from the Bird’s cage. Any other creature would immediately feel her wrath upon such insolence, but Amy maybe had a thing for the guy, so she simply bit him for the sake of appearances (a nip, hardly enough to draw blood) and leapt from his arms.

After settling everyone down and recovering the cage, the female said something about going back to bed and that the mess would keep till morning. She called Maxo down (who incensed his mother by responding to his name) and carried him into the bedroom.

The male attempted to coax Amy into the bedroom as well, but she wouldn’t have any of it. “Have it your way, fiendette” he said, “just leave Dotty be, or you’ll have to sleep in the laundry room. Goodnight.”

The amazingly nocturnal Trey tripodded down from his spot on the bookcase and sat down beside Amy. “That’s sure some ghostie.”

Amy nodded. “Say, what was that shit the bird said about me?”

THE AMORAL: A CALICO CANNOT CHANGE HER SPOTS, STRIPES, POLKA DOTS, PLAIDS, OR PINSTRIPES.

Merry Christmas, Charleston CLAWS

You can touch Shax, but only by “appointment.” First you have to establish eye contact with the old tom and at the same time make a “scratchies” gesture with your index finger. If you correctly spy permission in his imperious gold eyes, then, and only then, may you apply a “scratchie” to the surprisingly short distance between his ears. Any failure to comply with this procedure will result in a personal math system based on the number nine.

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The Woodpecker Telegraph System

(Happy Thanksgiving Day to America and to the World in General. Jim and Alice will return on Christmas Day–so, till then good tidings from Saragun Springs-Leila)

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Elmer Fudd’s laugh speeded up ten-thousand times comes close to describing the sound of a woodpecker beaking the holy hell out of a metal chimney cap. A pneumatic “uh-huh-huh-huh-huh,” with a little “phu-bub-buh-tuth,” thrown in for variety, gives you the soul of the thing. Wikipedia calls this behaviour drumming.

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Blessed Are the Little Things

(Happy November From Saragun Springs. This month, we will visit our friend Jim and Alice once per week, with another at Christmas–Leila)

There were only four tables in the cafe, and I saw that my date was already seated at one of them. I had figured this out by the process of elimination (there was nobody else in the cafe except her and the young woman behind the counter), and the stretched possibility that my date bore a slight resemblance to the younger, fitter, and brighter-looking person in her profile gallery. A “helpful hint” on the lonely hearts’ site says that you can judge your match’s interest level by the amount of preparation she has invested in meeting you. Interestingly, the lady had gussied herself up to a point which lay between rushing to the convenience store at five in the morning for coffee filters and awakening in a dumpster. And she seemed oblivious to every atom in the universe that wasn’t displayed on her iphone.

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Happy Halloween From Saragun Springs: The Customer Is Never Right

A few nights ago, Jim identified the great, distant sun Naazar in the autumnal sky, and then attempted to sell me tales of its splendor and glory. This had caused an old memory to trip my inner As If Alarm. Some claim my inner As If Alarm underscores the ever-suspicious side of my personality; all things considered, I find it a useful and necessary device.

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Welcome to Saragun Springs Outro

(It seemed appropriate for me to end this collection of Saragun Springs Books with what song writers call an “outro.” In the next few months new stuff will be coming–again, fair warning–Leila)

Outro

I met the Boss at the spring at three AM. This happened “the other day”–the most useful time reference in all literature. You can say it ten years from now in either direction and it will still be its effectively vague bad self.

She was seated at the picnic table, and the stench bubble encapsulating the evil water glowed green in the Pinglight.

Three A.M. has its own truth; but it doesn’t translate well to daylight. Maybe it is the lingering last call in the voice, or steady hands that lose their firm dexterity after a night of uneasy sleep, which then flop like a docked Halibut until you mercifully push the Fish back into the 80 proof sea. In Saragun Springs we call that activity “Hook of the Halibut that docked you.”

“So, you finally finished a three week project in just under two years,” the Boss said.

“Art is infinite–it knows no time limit. The same can be said for unagented submissions sent to reputable publishers who actually pay for the work instead of soaking you for every nickel,” I said, as I sat on the other side of the table.

“How so?” Her voice had a Gordon’s edge to it, and “smelled” like a cross between tobacco and jumper berries. Since we have similar habits, I did not make mention of it.

“Well when you cast an unasked-for, non-touted opus into the structured world of, say, Knoff, you never see it again. It speeds on toward infinity.”

“Are you suggesting that the ‘pending’ notifications at Submittable aren’t as candid as they should be?”

“Not at all,” I said. “Hell, the apocalypse can honestly be categorized as pending–yet something tells me that we will hear about it long before we do Doubleday.”

She looked at me for a long time. “I guess it’s pretty hopeless.”

“Of course it is–everything worth a damn is hopeless. And you should let it get you down as long as you don’t stay down,” I said.

She thought about that, and I could tell that the fifty or sixty things wrong with my statement were running through her mind. She sighed. “I don’t want to end this book on a philosophical note–let’s lay down a story for the road and adjourn to the bar.”

“Now you’re getting the hang of hopelessness,” I said.

I knocked on the fourth wall, just the other day, and left a message you will be reading, about now.

“Hi reader, here’s a little something for the road. A little ode to the upside of being involved in a hopeless cause.”

Only a Jellyfish Would Live Forever

The Scenario: Part I

He crushed two pills between his teeth and swallowed. That made four in an hour. A stomach that wanted to stay alive would have objected; but for once there was consensus. He believed that two more similar doses within the next thirty minutes should punch his ticket to the Undiscovered Country. Perhaps such an important event as flirting with self destruction should come accompanied by an unfilched metaphor, but when in doubt go with Shakespeare–Besides he’d used up all the sparklers in his suicide note. It was a fine suicide note. Well written, streaked with effortless pathos and humor. It was the best thing he had ever written. “All show, no tell,” he’d said after lighting it on fire and watching it curl to black in the kitchen sink. “Best punched ticket ever.”

He repaired to the drawing room because ever since childhood he liked to think that better than “let’s go to the front room.” In happier times, when he had friends, he even said “Let’s repair to the drawing room,” often, too often. It was one of the small things that people disliked about him. He got it from the vividly colorful Hammer horror movies, which starred Cushing and Lee and ran endlessly on Saturday afternoons when he was a boy. Upon sitting down in the easy chair where someone would find him, he wondered for the first time in all those years if he had heard it wrong; maybe the actors had said something else other than repaired. Maybe he had got it wrong the same way that people who speak more than write put down “should of” instead of “should’ve” on the rare occasions in which they must write. For anyone else it might have been awfully late in the game for such a banal triviality–but as it had stated in his burned suicide note, “I’m not like other people.”

Although his head was getting fuzzy, he opened his phone and Googled “repaired.” He felt ignorant until he thought to Google “repair(ed) to the drawing room,” and found it proper. Then he Googled “Hazel Court”–a Kapow! “Eyes Up” British actress who appeared in Hammer’s version of Frankenstien, as well as some of Roger Corman’s Poe pictures. He wanted to see if Hazel Court was still alive. She wasn’t. He then immediately Googled “Barbara Steele,” another Kapow! “Eyes Up” sort of actress from the same era. She was alive. Although knowing that Barbara Steele was alive came as happy information, it didn’t gentle his grief for sudden loss of Hazel Court.

He opened Word and wrote: “Dear Someone: I refuse to live in a world without Hazel Court in it. Thus I have repaired to the Eternal Drawing Room. No offense to Barbara Steele.”

The trouble with attempting suicide via happy pills (which were the nature of the unnamed stubstance) is pausing too long during your deliberate overdose. This allows the pills time to show you the reason why people get addicted to them. He had come across such during his suicide research. He figured that Kurt Cobain used the shotgun soon after injecting enough heroin to drop a boy band because of the drug’s charming effect. He figured that Cobain had foreseen such and had taken the preventative Hemingway measure, just in case the smack coerced him into changing his mind and calling 911 to get help for the overwhelming amount of heroin in his system. Shotgun blasts to the head change your brain, but not your mind. Not with the organic computer needed to do that dripping–

“No! No! No!” He said, snapping off each “No!” like it was also a gunshot. He was in the habit of snapping off three No’s whenever his ever incessant mind took an image too far.

The First Intrusion

The preceding scenario has been freshly concocted by me, a Pen Name. The Pen Name appears at the top. The reason for this intrusion, and for the others to come will be made clear to you, by and by. Vanity tells me that the appearance of my name might be the reason why some of you are reading this. It could also be the reason why more of you aren’t reading this, which, of course, renders this sentence meaningless. If the latter is the case, I humbly beseech the ones who are reading this on the strength of my name to deliver a message to the others who avoid the piece for the same cause. Tell them I said “I know who you are and it’s high time you learn that I only scan your stuff and check the categories before I phony up a seemingly high-minded, positive comment on your behalf.” You see, the main reason why Pen Names exist at all is to catch the hell-fallout produced when the real person behind the veil exercises the fallacy called Free Speech.

Wait a second–veil gives me a big idea. Let’s return to our unnamed, insincerely suicidal hero and see what he can do with it.

The Scenario: Part II

He had researched how many happy pills it would take to kill a man his size. It was a mathematical, time dependent equation which had factored in the prevention of vomiting, and had a tipping point of no return. Whilst in the chair where someone would find him, he envisioned himself running blindly toward the end of a great cliff, then coming to a devil may care skidding stop, just standing there with his toes hanging over the crumbling edge, only one forward urge of weight standing between him and eternity. There are things further from the truth than what he had imagined; mainly, he was actually more like a man on his hands and knees creeping up to the safety rail at the rim of the Grand Canyon.

Still, the pain caused by his incessant mind was real enough. Since he was eleven he had been plagued with a horrible twisted perversion of something called “Cherophobia”–the fear of happiness. Whenever he got too happy or witty inside, a dark amorphous shape that he uncreatively but accurately named “Black,” would rise from his subconscious and negate the positive with a hellish image. Although there is nothing funny about Kurt Cobain’s suicide, his little touches of “enough heroin to drop a boy band,” and “Shotgun blasts change your brain, but not your mind” had helped. But the visualization of the ruined substance that had created Come as You Are “dripping” from the wall behind Cobain’s exploded head was the work of Black.

Usually, the conditions present in his Black attacks were much wider set apart than what appeared in the Cobain thing. Instead of getting nipped for whistling in the graveyard, a true Black attack would manifest itself when he’d be doing something like joyfully opening a birthday present and then suddenly remember the time he had entered the kitchen and saw Mom’s latest insane, grinning boyfriend holding a bread knife to her throat. And a great shame would encompass him, as though he had done something wrong. That’s an example of a major Black attack. All Black attacks great and small always ended with him biting off “No!” aloud three times if alone, and in his head if in public.

He had grown up surrounded by hellish images not of his own creation. His beautiful, mentally ill mother attracted abusive men. Although no major event such as murder had ever happened, the threat of such was always there. He was a caged rabbit housed between a wolf and a stoat enclosure. Funny thing was that none of it was really anyone’s fault, or so he had reasoned. But the worst part was how everything had a way of falling to normal afterwards. Not ten minutes after the bread knife episode the three of them were eating dinner as though it was just another day.

Over time he developed a defense called a “Tuesday Dream.” There is a metaphysical, non linear reason for the name. Yet nothing felt truer. He once theorized that Tuesday was the one day of the week in which things were at their most settled. Unlike most other children he feared the weekend, for that was when alcohol was added to the craziness. And in that sort of world, the weekend begins where Thursday gives over to Friday, and leaves too big a stain for Sunday to hold on its own, so it dribbles into Monday.

A typical Tuesday Dream required a brightly lit, bizarre yet sense-making vignette of his own creation to take shape in his mind. It had to be comedy, made by him, thinking up the Marx Brothers didn’t help much. You must slay your dragons with your own goddamn sword. No! You must hit the villain in the face with a pie you baked. He considered the last two items, and although the pie thing was truer, the dragon one sounded better.

He sat up in the easy chair and said, “Betcha’ ain’t heard this one. It’s a real side-splitter, an aisle roller. Imagine uptown New York on a sunny day in 1962. And imagine looking at it as though it were a movie. Then the camera catches the ogling reaction shots of men in the streets. Each guy catches a glimpse of something that turns him into a human boner–even though something that crass was only inferred back then.

“Anyway, you get a low back shot of the commotion in a skirt as she goes up the front stairs and enters an office building. She’s a Kapow! ‘Eyes up’ sort of girl, who does things to an arch business suit that are unholy. She really swings it. And how.

“You then see the Kapow! ‘Eyes up’ woman passing out more boners when she gets on an elevator inside the building. All the guys–including the elevator operator–a balding guy wearing an organ grinder’s monkey type of suit–gawk at her even though her face is hidden by a light colored veil that obscures her face. The few Plain Janes around glare at the woman with jealous contempt. The Kapow! Woman in the veil seems oblivious to all of them. But she knows. She knows. This role usually went to Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield when the producers didn’t have Monroe or Mansfield money. This time the mystery actress behind the veil is Miss Hazel Court.

“Anyway, there’s a cut to a shot inside a plastic surgeon’s office. The plastic surgeon is played to the hilt by Tony Randall. And you know that he’s a plastic surgeon because of the witty repartee exchanged between Tony and his nurse/receptionist who is either Eve Arden or Thelma Ritter.

“For plot reasons it is necessary to get it across that the plastic surgeon is bored with his family man life. Maybe he does this during a phone call while he’s seated at his desk. Then Eve or Thelma buzz the doctor and tell him that his appointment is here…

“No-wait! Tony buzzes the desk to ask if his appointment is there and the next shot is of Eve or Thelma wryly looking up at the veiled mystery woman. Eve or Thelma says ‘Yes. And how.’

“Tony gets an erudite boner when he sees her. There was nothing boring about the shape in front of him. After the perfunctory stuff is out of the way, Tony says, “How may I help you, um, (he consults her name written on something on his desk) Miss (he says hopefully) Aphrodite?

“Her cultured, flirtatious, yet oddly muffled English accent comes from behind the veil and informs Tony that it’s ‘Just Aphrodite.’ Before he can respond she speaks mystically into his soul. ‘I am the Goddess Aphrodite. Immortal and all powerful in love. Yet, alas, this mortal shape I occasionally must take currently requires the services of someone like you.’

“And as she unclasps the veil she says, ‘It’s been a thousand years since I last took this mortal form. And as you already must know, dear Doctor, the ears and nose never stop growing.’ The veil falls away.

“Jeezus! Get a load of the look on Randall’s rubber face when he gets a load of her and her thousand year nose and ears. She’s about as likely a boner passer-outer as a Mrs. Potato Head…”

Then he faltered. The animation in his voice and form dissipated. It was as though he had become unplugged. The imagined image of Hazel in prosthetics reminds him of Mrs. Doubtfire, which immediately dissolved into the thought of Robin Wiliams with a belt around his neck…

“No! No! No!”

Second Intrusion

The notion that people might be characters of writers’ invention is as old as thinking; I suspect that it came about the week philosophy was invented. Writers taking up the safety of the nom de plume is nearly as ancient. There’s nothing philosophical to be found in that. At one time there used to be physical penalties dealt out for the trap called Free Speech. A head in the basket here, ten years’ hard labor in the gulag there. Although getting dragged out into the cyber-public square for a virtual stoning proves that the soul of intolerant stupidity travels from age to age as immortally as the Plague, most nations now have laws against inserting heretics into the iron maiden. But maybe that would be more merciful than nailing a Bad German to a cross planted in the never-never wasteland called Social Media.

There isn’t an even distribution of pain and happiness in the Universe. There is an equal amount of those two qualities in the Universe, but it’s pain that is found everywhere whilst happiness tends to be found in globs which are separated by eons of spacetime. Most of those thoughts, too, are hardly original. Still, like the inclusion of slavery at the founding of the United States, the uneven distribution of equal amounts of pain in the Universe is probably a condition that could not be eased prior to the start of the Universe, lest there be risk of there being no Universe at all. A compromise, however, was hashed out between unknown factions. One side wanted an even distribution of both pain and happiness. The other said they preferred the concept of cause and effect. As it goes with political compromises, everybody shook hands and announced a Great Accord; which meant that one side gave up on its principles and returned home smiling and reassuring and waving a document as empty as that brought back to England by Neville Chamberlain, after he’d been sold a pot of magic sauerkraut by Adolph Hitler.

All the preceding gobbledygook results in as good a definition for the meaning of life as a human being deserves to get. Cause and Effect. Plain and simple. Life is like floating through a sea lightly, yet always poisoned with pain, and very few of us run into the widely interspersed islands of happiness. Such is the case of the “he” in our scenario. His life has been a horror show put on by Cause and Effect. But something, if not new, at least rare is going to happen to our anonymous, hapless hero. He is going to run smack into a glob of happiness. For I am the Pen Name who created him and his history and pains and his various strangenesses, and have endowed him with a will, if not exactly free, is, at least, had at a steep discount. Unlike the gods real people beseech for help, I am going to take responsibility for this guy I have created today.

I could just go in and change both his nature and nurture, but since he believes that he has accrued his scars honestly, it would be as unfair an action on my part as was my drawing him up out of boredom because I could not think of anything else to write about in the first place.

The only difference between a hallucination and reality is the ethical, if not moral, choice, if any, made by the god or Pen Name in charge of a particular person or persons. The preceding sentence is of the kind you have to read ten times for it to almost make sense once, for it is similar in flavor with this current sentence, which is about to end, without actually saying anything useful, right now. With all that left rattling about like ghosts summoned from the grave only to discover that their necromancer might be high on something, and that she has no idea why she had called them forth from their cozy holes, I exit and present a implausible/plausible happy ending for this nameless soul conjured by my indiscrete scribblings. Since I drew him up I feel responsible for his well being. Alas, I don’t want to deal with him much further, so here goes with the implausible/plausible happy ending. It’s an open ended happily forever after. All writers do such as means to get the reader’s imagination to do their work for them.

Scenario Happy Ending

Too many happy pills too soon tend to make their takers dozy. Many honestly suicidal people who consume them as a means of discovering the Undiscovered Country pass out before they have paid the sufficient fare. They usually awaken confused, many hours later, perhaps half-wondering why the Afterlife has the same stuff in it that they have at home…

Sincerity-Challenged Afterthought Intrusion. Or: A Pen’s Attempt to Cover Her Ass

Suicide is plain wrong. It is a preventable tragedy. Although it seems like people care more after the fact than they did before, and tend to lay dollar store votives and fake flowers in the typical barn-door-after-the-cows response inherent to the human race, trust me, doggone it, people care. Giving a fuck about the pain of others is what people do. So, don’t forget to wipe and stay off the pipe, take your vitamins, say your prayers, take everything you read literally and give obsequious props to whatever geographic-dependent god your ancestors told your family to believe in. It’s gonna be (: (: (: (: (:!!!

Happy Ending Continued….

Such happened to our hero, who finished four tablets shy of Nirvana. Whilst he had been studying Hazel Court’s image gallery, he fell into a sleep so profound that his building’s fire alarm didn’t stir him when it went off due to a neighbor’s misguided attempt at cajun-style blackened chicken. Although the First Responders put the fire out quickly enough, there was much smoke and confusion. The EMT’s went from door to door with a master key provided by the building’s super to check out unanswered knocks.

As he slowly came to with the aid of an oxygen mask, he saw a beautiful angel with red hair and green eyes in a Torqwamni County Fire Department uniform. She was holding the mask to his face. She shushed his first attempts at speaking. Her name tag said V. Aphrodite. And she gazed into his eyes, glanced at the vial then back at him, then said, ”Do you know that the nose and ears grow forever?”

THE END

October’s Spa Sunday: Ping’s Complaint

(I had this one lying around–LA)

Ping Beams of Jim

No matter what type of dimension you inhabit, watching and hearing a Moon roll noisily toward you from the sky is an odd thing. Such happened the other night as I was out in the Barnyard shooting the evening breeze with Daisy Cloverleaf the Pygmy Goatess and my Lead Imaginary Friend and second in command of the realm of Saragun Springs, Renfield.

“Ping’s coming down,” Renfield said.

“You hear that? He’s making a noise, like thunder,” Daisy added.

Renfield held a hand to her ear. “Yeah, I think you’re right, Daisy. He sounds like a rolling bowling ball.”

“Hope he’s not attempting a three pin spare,” I said. But I had been expecting the visit.

Ping is the realm of Saragun Springs’ newly acquired Moon–his brother Pong is our Sun. There are also two-hundred-twenty eight stars in our sky. One for each Fictional Character (FC) in the realm. (They are of varying magnitude, much to the consternation of the dimmer FCs.) Ping glows greenish-purple and is self luminous; unlike regular Moons Ping does not reflect sunshine–or in his case Pongshine. But he isn’t star hot; his cold light resembles that of a glow stick and never wears down. Scientifically speaking, Ping should not be able to sustain an unaided everlasting glow, but ever since the Discworld realm briefly passed through our skies during the Sargun Springs’ birthday celebration to honor the Disc’s creator, the late Terry Pratchett on his birthday (coincidentally the day Ping first rose), we assumed that Ping was the recipient of a glowing, yet otherwise useless magic spell of some kind. Of course, once more scientifically speaking, no Moon should be able to roll down like a bowling ball, either. So maybe there was a little more to that spell than what was initially observed.

Ping eventually arrived where we were in the Barnyard. While up where he belongs, Ping, like his brother Pong, is the size of a blueberry held at arm’s length. In person he is the size of a yoga ball (no one knows Pong’s real size). He stopped and hovered near us about three feet above the ground. You cannot mathematically deduce Ping’s distance from the floor of the realm because the laws of nature in Saragun Springs are affected by my limited knowledge of science and infinite capacity to ignore the few laws I do know. All the little places on the ground are always “‘bout a mile away” at the farthest. The Saragun Springs world/dimension is only partially flat and is as over all amorphous as one of the asteroids not big enough to gather itself into an orb. So Ping could be a hundred feet away when in his normal station or at the otherside of the freaking galaxy as far as anyone can guess. Studying the process depends greatly on how much of your sanity you want to invest and watch go down the swirly. The smart ones quit early and sing Kumbaya.

Both Pong and Ping are sentient, but until Ping began pissing and moaning, they’d kept to themselves. Little sun Pong does pretty much as he damn well pleases between “the lit sixes” which is the interval of daylight of every Sargun Springs’ day. He rises precisely at six A.M. and sets exactly at six P.M. on the dot. He shines for exactly twelve hours, but traverses the sky in a wandering sort of way that is impossible to predict. Sometimes he will just stand there–other times he’ll speed here and there and mess with the shadows. Pong sets wherever he wants and makes a game of it because he appears to know that the residents of the realm “Pongspot”–a gambling activity in which you predict exactly where Pong will go down on the horizon behind the Nameless Hills. North, south, east, west, west by east west–whatever. He’s liable to land anywhere–and often fakes setting one place before dashing to another. But one thing is for certain, exactly twelve hours later he will dawn at the precise point he had set the night before behind The Nameless Hills that encircle the realm. Except for whatever mysterious places Ping and Pong go when off duty, nothing exists beyond the Nameless Hills–you can go there and climb one but the second you approach the crest, you are instantly transported back to where you began the journey.

Ping works the “dark sixes.” He always rises in the south at precisely the instant Pong sets wherever, then our little Moon staggers north, weaving to and fro but still plugging along, and manages to sink kinda-sorta in the north at daybreak. We figure he spends the day rolling around behind the mountains so he can rise in the south the next evening–due to an incessant yet distant rumble of daylight thunder. Recently, Ping began voicing inarticulate comments from the night sky. Wolves in service of the Witch HeXopatha (A powerful Fictional Character–or “FC” in the realm–whose star shines brightly indeed), conversed with Ping. Theirs was an echoey, howling discourse that didn’t make much sense; sounded like a bunch of drunks bellowing show tunes in an empty parking garage.

After a few nights of this, I asked one of the Wolves what all the noise between them and Ping meant. He just looked at me and said “Huh-woo-woo-hooo.” All FC Wolves are extreme capitalists, especially HeXopatha’s, you can’t ask one the time without first greasing a paw. I rented the venal bastard’s loyalty with a bag of That’s a Good Boy Treats (“So Smelly You’ve Just Got to Roll in it” flavored). I asked him to spread the loot around with the pack and to deliver a message to Ping: “Come down and tell me about it, or shut the hell up.”

The bribe hadn’t gone to waste.

“Hello Ping,” I said. “You must know that I am Leila, the ruling Penname of Saragun Springs. May I present Miss Daisy Cloverleaf and Renfield, our second in command.”

“Hiya, Day-field. and Renzy, a treath-zure,” Ping said with a voice juiceingly like my grandfather’s after he’d return from the bathroom for the fifth time in forty-five minutes whenever his 12 Stepper brother, my Great Uncle Errol, visited the house accompanied by whatever temperance thumping “harpy” Errol had taken up with at the time–he sure knew how to pick ‘em up at the church social. Ping didn’t show us a face, but he made the voice which matched quick greenish purple pulses of light that flashed across his shape.

“Sounds like you’ve been hitting the Pingshine,” I said, wondering how he drank–but also glad to see that they serve alcohol behind the Nameless Hills, in case I needed to visit.

“Ye wood tupe, i’ youse hadda bruther li’ my-yun.”

(The preceding are the only remarks that will be written as Ping had enunciated them. The rest is edited for sense and not altered other than for the sake of it. Fortunately, I am fluent in drunken gibberish.)

“Great,” I said, “we got a Ray and Dave Davies’ sibling beef going on in our sky,” I said.

“Just like the Gallaghers,” Renfield said.

“Do they smash watermelons?” Daisy asked.

“Um, she means Oasis and not the late sledge-o-matic comic, Daisy,” I said.

“I see,” Daisy said, with a bit of frost in her voice, for she doesn’t like to be corrected.

I smiled at Ping. “You guys are never in the sky at the same time–except the day you were born. Never behind the Nameless Hills at the same time, either. How can you get on each other’s nerves?”

“Pong’s an egotistical snob,” Ping said. “He’s always messing with my things while I’m up at night. And he leaves me self improvement suggestions.”

“I see,” I lied. “So, you want me to ground him for touching your stuff?”

“That would be an idea.”

“No can do, Ping, things would get a bit dark around here, and the drunks wouldn’t know when to pass out. But, I’ll tell you what, since my life isn’t hell enough already, Miss Renfield and Daisy will figure out a solution, then tell the Wolves who’ll send word tomorrow night.”

The Delegates of Hell

Did Pilate dry his hands after washing them? Did he use a blower or paper? Or did he just wipe them on his toga? What did they use for sanitizer back then? Beats me, but if Heaven is as dull as it sounds, and on the extreme off chance that the standards are low enough to allow me entry, I figure it’s a good idea to bring fresh conversation starters.

If I recall my Jesus Christ Superstar correctly, Pilate first attempted to delegate the Jesus problem to a Herod who resembled the late Robbie Coltrane, topless and in a mini skirt. But the Son bounced back to the Roman prefect, and, well, anyone who’s seen the film knows the rest.

Such is the trouble with delegating tasks to individuals who have Free Will. All the Fictional Characters (FC’s) in Saragun Springs are abundantly rich with Free Will. So, whenever I arrogantly assign them a task instead of first asking nicely, such as sloughing off the Ping complaint on Daisy and Renfield, I get what I deserve.

The downside of blackout drinking is the return of the reality you temporarily avoided but can never escape. It’s sorta like one of those botched rocket launches you see on YouTube.

I always wake at 3:00 A.M. no matter what. My Creator gave me Free Will, too–except she wired me to be up at three because she has to be, and so should I, damn it. That’s the baseless logic of gods if you ask me. Still, no matter what dimension you are in, one of the primary features of 3 A.M. is darkness (unless you are at an Insomnia latitude). Yet when I came to my desk, beside a mostly killed fifth of Jim Beam, I realized something was wronger (a three o’clock in the morn’ word) than usual. It was as bright as mid-afternoon out the window. For a moment I thought my Creator had at last come to her senses, or had died,; but a quick glance at my phone confirmed that it was three in the morning, as always, as freaking always.

Passing out with a bit left in the bottle is a blessing. Things being the way they were, I put down the last two fingers of Beam and lit a cigarette. As I consumed, I had dimly hoped that the unexpected daylight would go away without my having to do something about it. No such luck. In fact I heard a bunch of voices out in the Barnyard once my head cleared some. Though clad in sweats and my cleanest dirty bathrobe, I figured I was dressed well enough to see what hell lay on the other side of the door.

I went out in the Barnyard and saw about twenty FC’s yammering excitedly. Along with Renfield and Daisy, there were Tallywhacker and his wife Taffypuller the Berkshire Hogs, various Black Cats and Rats in service of HeXopatha (who represented the missing Witch who is never seen at the same time with Renfield around and vice versa), Gordon Cormorant, the Ghost of my Great to the fourth Grandfather, Judge Jasper P. Montague, and so forth. Every one of them was a daily Pongspotter, and they were wagering like stock brokers smelling blood (except Pie-Eyed Peety the PDQ Pilsner Pigeon who was passed out on a haystack). No one noticed my arrival.

I looked in the sky and saw both Ping and Pong toward the north, a few degrees above the Nameless Hills, circling slowly, like gunfighters, sharing a common axis, holding a separation about the width of my shaky hand.

“Hello, Miss Leila.” Daisy appeared at my feet. “Would you like me to tell you what’s going on or do you know more about that than me, too?”

“I’m sorry, Daisy–I didn’t mean to infer that you know less about a subject than I do, the other night. I have no doubt that you are far better versed in useless knowledge than I will ever be. And in that spirit, everything you know about what’s going on here is superior to my understanding of it, which is absolute zero.”

Daisy is as bright as she is reluctant to let a perceived insult go; you can’t lay it on too thick without risking an increase of her singular passive aggressive rage.

She blinked and I could tell that she had decided to review what I had said “later.” She showed that sinister little grin of hers and explained.

“After you dumped the Ping and Pong issue on us, Miss Renfield decided that their beef should be decided in the wrestling ring.”

Renfield popped over, she had been listening, as usual. “Now that you are up, darling, we can begin the rumble.”

One of HeXopahta’s Owls flew off, and soon a bell rang in the tower on HeXopatha’s estate. This ended the wagering and Ping remained north while Pong dashed to the south. The bell tolled again and they flew at each other. I was half expecting a shower of Moon or Sun stuff to result from what was certainly going to be a high speed collision.

Instead they came within the thinnest separation and began to spin wildly around together like one of those black hole arrangements in deep space. I didn’t know it until later but the brothers have different magnetic properties and cannot touch. This caused them to spin a tight bright circle from which a series of paisley aurora replicated themselves in the sky. Soon the entire sky looked like a loud necktie.

Then Pong broke off, took what he must have thought to be a victory lap above the Nameless Hills. The Pongspotters began wagering on where he’d go down. Whoever picked southwestish, won. He went down and rose there about three hours later; hence it was dark as it should be a bit past three in the morning.

Ping stayed up, but there was a weird yet perceptible boastfulness in his attitude as he resumed his course north that suggested that he thought he had won. The gamblers argued about this but I had stopped listening to them because the thousands of paisley auroras in the sky did not fade away. Even after Pong had set, they glowed and could be clearly discerned. In fact they are still up there–day and night.

“Great,” I muttered, “now what are we going to do about a paisley sky?”

“Wear solid colors,” Daisy said. “Unless you already know that too.”