Savage Tales

to think they are, they say to themselves, "Hey, I'm an ANIMAL," and they forget that humans are animals too, highly evolved, survivors despite the fact they don't have the fastest legs or the strongest muscles, they can't fly like an eagle or swim like a dolphin, but you know what, goldarnit? They can think, and no animal can do that so effectively. Animals think things like, "I wonder what I'm gonna eat now, I wonder where I can find a mate, I wonder what that weed tastes like," but they don't think about the orbits of planets or the square root of the pi numerator don fizzly (my attempt at math speak from the POV of a two-dimensional being). No, they just don't cut it. They could use some liveliness in their lives, and I'm glad to provide it.

    Chet
    I can't believe I was intimidated by Uncle Freddie when he came to stay. He would lock himself in his room for hours on end, only emerging to go to the barn and relieve himself, and I asked him one day, "What you needa do that for, Uncle Freddie? We got ourselves a great b-room (bathroom) right here inside the home all modern tech like. Why you gotta go outside into the nineteenth century?"
    He had no answer for me so I said no more and mother only looked away when Freddie went creeping down them steps with a jar of vaseline in his hand – said his turds sometimes needed a greasy path to arch their way out of him, so I let it settle at that. I imagine he crafted quite a ruckus cuz when he did his work out there those barn animals one or nother would always bring a stew of noise with him, like they didn't want to see about his turds neither.

    Jed
    I can't believe she never told me Freddie was doing them things with them animals. Yes, he was our guest, but that don't account him the right to go doing what he did. I was tempted to tan her and pin her in with a horse and show her what it meant and how it'd scar them animals for life, gruesomely, but a long day it was and begging for an ending, not a season of excitement and consternation.
    And what does one do with a brother and how are these matters meted out? You can say it was unnatural and unwise, and I say let the crime fit the punishment. Our father did not intend us to have that kind of bond with the animals around us, for if he had he would have instructed us in the details, which he did not, much thanks.

    Emma
    I can't believe how many years it's been since we've spoken of it. Come to think of it, we never spoke of it. One day Jed just came in from the field early – some part on the tractor had gone out, I imagine – it was always giving us problems – and he went into the barn with that pig a-squealing not knowing what was coming beyond Freddie's dong up its butthole. Jed saw that (as I reconstruct it in my mind, and having married him for eighteen years I think I know his ways enough to etch out over crack of habit and way in his mind) and went for his shotgun in the shed without even having to think. It was an aberration in right living and Jed knew you have to act, you can't sit around and laugh it over while the sap runs out of you and you lose your nerve. You gotta do what the moment calls for.
    I just can't believe how many years it's been, how many years that brother of his and that pig've been stretched out under the ground full of holes and clouded with dirt in their pores, wondering why those bullets descended and what to make of those final moments in that final embrace, so final and everlasting.

WINNEBAGO AND I

    We got two cheesesteaks to go and a pile of battery acid down the throat followed by a massage parlor and a knockabout through the ol' Edgar Allan Poe house, God rest his drunken soul in a frying gutter road latched about with shaving from an eldritch tale to be read no more, amen, amen. Winnebago and I (for that was my date's name) had hardly scratched an itch into the etched corridors of this town, now forgotten. Where were we? Who were we? Our sexualities had blurred to the point of misunderstanding and I couldn't be sure if I was straight or she was gay or both or neither or if we were strangers saddling the streets as mere stop gaps in the hours till we found the perfect hoagie, and what would it be, how would the convenience store operators appraise us and report the damage to the government inspectors, freaks of time and weirs to cobble a message for a future generation of futurists .
    Narco lepsy, I am told, is a cognitive device to ward off the seeming habituations of a