111220

 

Let Them Eat Crow

 

fishing for crows

using succulent cob bait

got a peck! 

black sky over the corn field

scarecrows are obsolete

103020

 

Nurse E tells again

that story on herself

enticing cows

091920c

 

Sewing A New Head

On the scarecrow

she's screaming and yelling

at the crows

who still sit on her shoulders

whispering insults in her ears

pecking at her like she’s

kernel corn, which is

meanwhile growing fast

knee-high, waist high

taller than the trees

ears bigger than watermelons

swelling fat under the

burning summer sun

I'm getting out of here

before they start to pop

 

060420c

flying elbows

the cedar windbreak stops most

the rest we feed to the hogs

042820c

Only the chickens stayed, but that was because they couldn't cross the road.

042020

just like potatoes

on Old Earth except

big as houses

airy as cotton candy

and with a 180-proof kick

120119c

this year
the century fruit ripen
thaw the colonists

092619d

These sunflowers only yield one seed apiece, but a single flower will feed a family of four for more than a week. Thank God for GMO!

082719b

the full moon rises
big and green
fresh food would be nice

071019c

beans every day
we eat just like real
subsistence farmers

042119

On Arbor Day
the Bunny brings bright eggs
smooth and warm
to expectant agriculturalists
bunnies don't grow on trees, you know
like birds do

020719c

tilling turned up potsherds
first year of the colony
odd bones the next

012519c

eat your humans dear
a bumper crop on Earth
made them really cheap

122018c

cornstalks rise

from the native meadow
wildflowers wither

121218c

a good crop
on the eye bush this year
no cataracts

061318b

water in drowned
reflective fields
rain clouds move in

121817

Take it on the Mutton

The City is my usual beat, and I tend to stay there. I don’t even own house plants. There’s nothing green in my office unless I’ve just been paid. However, one Saturday Alma wheedled me into agreeing to a picnic. She knew this enchanting little park she said, right by a river. “Secluded?” I asked, as I slid into the passenger seat of her convertible.

“Completely,” she told me, taking both hands off the wheel and violating several ordinances. “Good,” I said, as soon as I could speak.

The park was quite pretty, I’ll give her that, and the view of the river from the grassy slope we picked for our assignation was what you might call picturesque. However, the level of seclusion was not quite what I’d been promised. I began unpacking the basket, which is a process that is more complicated than you might think when Alma is involved. She had packed us a lunch straight out of The Wind in the Willows: cold cuts, sourdough loaves, pickles, pears, peaches, peanut butter, pistachios, and plenty of stuff from the rest of the alphabet as well. We needed three blankets just for the grub. Luckily, that left very little room for the two of us. Things were just getting interesting when I heard a scream. Well, a P.I. is always on call, so I leaped to my feet, spilling Alma into the grass. “Stay here,” I said, and ran across the grass towards the source of the noise. Just as I crested the hill there was another scream.

In a bowl-shaped valley a pretty young shepherdess stood, clutching her crook tightly enough to turn her knuckles white. She was alone.

“What seems to be the problem, Miss,” I asked.

“My sheep,” she sobbed.

“I don’t see any sheep,” I replied, perhaps a trifle obtusely.

“Exactly,” she snapped, “they’re missing!”

My keen, analytical mind raced quickly through the ramifications of her remark. “Your sheep have disappeared,” I observed, “what you need is a sheep finder.”

“In the absence of such, you’ll do,” she replied. “Go that way, I’ll look over this way. The poor dears just cannot make it alone. They’re utterly dependent on me.” I kept my doubts to myself, and detoured back to Alma. My mind was conjuring up visions of the sheep being led off to slaughter by a mustachioed ruminant nabber, or tied to the railroad tracks with wool made from their own coats. Alma was standing by the picnic paraphernalia, keeping the ants at bay. I explained the situation, and told her that the shepherdess had asked me to help her search for her sheep.

“She’s a fool,” Alma said. “If she just leaves them alone they’ll come home, probably dragging their damn tails behind them. Meanwhile, the jello’s melting.”

“Maybe you’re right, but I can’t turn down a pastoralist in distress,” I answered nobly, and was off on the scent. Or, not being a canine, I actually went in search of visual clues. They were not hard to come by. I’m a pretty fair tracker, if I do say so myself, and I caught up with the errant flock a few miles down the road, in a small and somewhat dilapidated drinking establishment. The sheep were gathered around a table, drinking heavily.

“Your mistress was looking for you,” I said to one, which appeared to be the bellwether. The creature ignored me. “She was worried about you,” I added.

“Baa!” the sheep said. “She won’t leave us alone.” It took another big slug of ale. “We can’t take it any more.”

“Would you like to ... talk about it?” I asked.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” the sheep continued. “She’s always pestering us. ‘Where are you going? When will you be back? You’re not going to meet those shiftless no-good goats down by the tracks are you?’ Bah!”

“She doesn’t respect us as livestock,” another sheep chimed in, “to her, we’re just walking wool. It’s demeaning.”

“We’re adults,” added a third, “and if we want a pint of ale, by God we’ll have one.” It drained its mug and burped loudly.

I let them blow off steam for a while, just nodding every now and then and buying another round or two of ale. “Are you taking it on the lamb?” I asked finally.

“And what if we are?” the bellwether replied cagily.

“Well, how will you survive? Do you know a trade?” It shook its head, and I pressed my case. “You’ll look pretty sheepish dragging back in, hungry and dirty, a few weeks from now. Far better to return now, and make out like you just wanted an afternoon away from the daily crop and chew.” I went on in this vein for quite a while, and must have sounded pretty persuasive, because the sheep soon began nodding their heads and baaing agreeably. Finally, the bellwether drained its mug and set it down heavily on the table.

“Let’s go,” it admonished the herd, and trotted out the door. I watched after them long enough to see that they were indeed headed for home, and then set off in search of Alma. I found her soon enough, but that’s another story.

Reprinted from Nursery Rhyme Noir -- https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/42875

121517

Encounter in St. Ives

I almost decided not to tell this story. No one likes to admit he's acted like a fool. Still, I had the best of intentions. Anyway, try not to judge me too harshly. Alma was gone and I was on my own. She was taking care of her mother, who was recovering from a serious injury that resulted from, well, basically forgetting that she was a little old lady with brittle bones. There, it had to be said. At the time this all happened I had been depending on my own cooking and my own company for a couple of weeks.

-----

After successfully concluding a case involving a large number of fowl, egregious food safety violations, and foreign royalty*, I stopped off in a bar to relax. With Alma out of town there was no reason to hurry home. I chose a place I'd never been before, called the Unicorn Cutlet (obviously a story there**). It was a place frequented primarily by locals. Shopkeepers with their dirty aprons and worn shoes pointedly ignored servants and apprentices of various kinds (their clothing in even greater stages of disrepair), and everyone seemed to know each other. Even a gaggle of geese in the corner were on a first name basis with the servers and with the butchers' apprentices at the next table. Perfect!

Now I'm sitting at the bar, drinking a beer and minding my own business, when I overhear a fellow talking about something that happened to him on the St. Ives highway. I missed the beginning of the conversation.

".... So this guy had a whole crowd of women with him. He claimed he'd married them all. And get this, he said each of those women had 40 cats. Well, there is this crazy old woman on my block who has 13 cats, but everybody knows she's crazy. This guy was talking like it's perfectly normal to have more than three dozen cats. That wasn't the half of it! He also said each one of those cats had 40 kittens." At this point he stopped to take a drink and the kid next to him says

"Holy mackerel! That's like 120, what with the wives and livestock and all."

And then Phil, the bartender, chimes in. "How did they carry all these critters around? It's not like cats will stroll along with you. Did they have wagons? And why didn't he count the horses pulling the wagons?"

"No, they didn't have the cats with them, they just said they had them. Right, Mr. P.?" The young man replied, turning to the first speaker for confirmation.

"Course he didn't have them with him. That would be a herd, for which you need a permit. And everybody knows you can't herd cats. Getting a little dry here Phil." Mr. P. took off his battered fedora, ran his fingers through his hair, and pulled the hat firmly back down over his ears again. Phil handed him a fresh beer and he took a deep gulp. "And it wasn't 80 cats, must've been a couple hundred."

"40 and 40, that's 80." The kid says, and he drains his beer. The state of public education these days! It'll be kids like this running things in a few years, and then the whole city will really be going you know where in a basket.

I cleared my throat. "Actually, wives, cats, kits, and all, not counting whatever he keeps the animals in, that's 64,000." This pronouncement met with a stunned silence. "Well that's 40 cubed, don't you know. Nevermind, that's not important now. What is important is that this fellow seems to be guilty of both polygamy and animal cruelty. Where did you say he came from?"

Mr. P. turns to me and looks me up and down under the brim of his hat. "I didn't say. And who are you again?"

"Deadbolt. Hasp Deadbolt. I'm a PI. But that's not important now. What this guy might be doing to cats isn't right and needs to be stopped."

The kid broke in. "Lookit, Mister, no one's paying you to investigate this, so just let it rest. If there's anything to handle, the authorities can do that."

Well, it was true I wasn't involved. I finished my beer and left. But while I stood waiting at the bus stop, I felt a tug on my arm. It was one of the geese. Actually, it was all of the geese. But the one tugging on my arm introduced herself as Petunia.

"I heard what you said about the cats Mr. Deadbolt," she said. "Now I don't like cats any more than the next goose, but mistreatment of sentient beings is wrong. We are in solidarity with oppressed lifeforms everywhere. And were any of those wives underage brides? Forced marriage, feline slavery, this might just be the tip of the iceberg with this egg stealer. This kind of behavior is a natural outgrowth of the depravity of a hierarchical being-owning agrarian oligarchy, and the sheriff here isn't going to do anything. We want to help."

I guess it figured that socialism would go along with flocking behavior, but I had never encountered it before. "Do you know how to get to St. Ives?" I asked.

"I'm not sure," Petunia said. "Is that near Altoona?"***

"Never mind," I said. "Meet me out by the highway at midnight. We have some investigating to do."

-----

I had not realized that Petunia intended to bring the whole flock. They were not professional sleuths like I am and they were noisy. I ended up sending most of the flock around to the other side of the farm on a fool's errand, looking for some of their wild counterparts, who I assured them wanted to join our cause. Petunia and I ducked under the single strand of barbed wire and went in.

I realized immediately something was wrong. The place was quiet, too quite. Too quiet for a farm that had 64,000 cats living on just a few acres. And there was only one barn. How many cats can fit in a single barn anyway? I'm not a farmer, I don't know the answers to these questions. But I'm certain it isn't 64K. Petunia was no help; she couldn't calculate the volume of a non-cubicle barn with both hands, er, wings. Behind the barn was a pigpen. There was only one pig in there, a young hog wearing a red bandanna around his neck. Before I could stop her, Petunia woke him up.

"Hey you," she hissed, "wake up."

He raised his head, shook it a few times, then staggered to his feet. He trotted over to the fence. "Who are you," he asked. Well, she spilled the whole story, invited him to join the revolution. He shook his head.

"I'm a confirmed capitalist. I think rewards come to those who work. If you gain wealth, it's because you deserve it. There are a few bad apples in the trough, but they are outcompeted by those who work hard, network together, and whose word is bond. But I'm a liberal. Thought about becoming a Unitarian at one time. I believe in your right to pursue your dreams. Of course, what do I know? I'm just a pig. By the way, my name's Freddie."

I was getting impatient. "Look," I said, "I'm getting impatient. We are here to find out if there's anything wrong on this farm. What can you tell us?"

"Wrong? Wrong?! I can tell you plenty that's wrong. Starting with me being stuck in this pen day after day, night after night. Let me out, and I'll help you any way I can." So we did.

"Solidarity," Petunia whispered.

"Enlightened self interest," Freddie whispered back.

"Whatever," I said.

Freddie showed us how to jigger the back door on the barn, and in moments we were inside. We looked around for a few minutes, and then I said "where are the cats?"

"Beats me," the pig replied. "I've seen them around during the day, but I don't know where they sleep. I do know it's somewhere in this barn, because I see them going in here every evening. I don't think I've ever seen 64,000. Maybe two or three hundred at the most."

Just then, Petunia said "look what I found." She was holding a bag over her head. It was about twice as big as she was, and completely stuffed with something. "What do you suppose is in here?" She asked.

"One way to find out." The pig pulled out a pocketknife and reached out to the bag.

"Don't touch that!" I hissed, but I was too late. As soon as the point of the knife touched it the sack ripped apart. Kittens shot everywhere.

Petunia dug herself out from under a pile of sleepy fluff balls. "What did you do that for? You broke the magic bag."

"Magic isn't real," Freddie said angrily, "it's just a fairy tale!"

"Oh yeah!" The goose shot back angrily. "And how do you explain 343 cats in a bag small and light enough for me to hold over my head?"

"How do you know how many there are? Who died and made you an idiot savant?"

"I've got lots of experience counting goslings. Goslings never sit still, you have to learn to count fast and accurately."

"Then that means he only has seven wives," I mused.

"That's right," growled a deep voice, "and what are you doing in my barn in the middle of the night?" A tall man with a big black beard, a pot belly, a t-shirt from the "Cock and Bull Café", and a pair of worn suspender overalls covered us from the front door of the barn with a double barreled shotgun. "And who are you anyway?"

"Sir, I can explain," I began, but Freddie jumped in front of me.

"Farmer Bean," he said, "it's all my fault. I cut the bag. But I don't think it's right for you to keep the cats in there all night. They should have some fresh air every now and then. And what about me? I'm stuck in my pen all the time, don't you think I deserve the opportunity to get out occasionally?"

"I don't have room for all these cats otherwise. The little women, bless their hearts, love kittens so, but kittens grow up to be cats, and they have more kittens and there are only so many mice to go around. I can't have them eating the geese."

"I have to agree with you there," Petunia put in, "but if you keep the people in chains, or in bags, they will rise up and overthrow you. Or at least, they are within their rights to do so." She had noticed in mid manifesto that most of the kittens had curled up and gone to sleep. Just about every horizontal surface in the barn had two or three sleeping cats on it. There must've been 150 of them on the floor around us. "I guess we jumped to unjustified conclusions," she went on, "is there any way we can make it up to you?"

Farmer Bean rubbed his chin. "Well," he began, "do you know anyone who can lay golden eggs? That would really help my cash flow. Farm equipment has gotten so expensive these days."

"I know somebody who knows somebody," Petunia replied, "but I don't know how she would feel about joining a free-market economy. Let me talk to her."

"I'm wondering about your wives," I put in. "I'd like to speak to at least one or two of them. Just to make sure everything is all right."

Farmer Bean scowled at me. "I resent the implications," he said. "But I'll make allowances, because you're an idiot." I opened my mouth, but shut it again. Maybe I deserved it. Something about being away from Alma for extended periods did something to my brain.

"Maybe not a total idiot," he went on. "They must be just about ready, let's go." He led us out of the barn, across the yard, and into the big house. There, six or seven women, I never did manage a definitive count, were laying out platters of freshly baked cookies and pitchers of milk at a long dining room table. One place had a pile of flowers on the plate, and I assumed that was for Petunia. We all sat down to a delicious home-cooked snack. But just then there was a knock at the door, it opened, and the rest of the geese trooped in. After a short pause to put out some more flowers everybody dug in. I apologized to Farmer Bean, told him that detective services would be his at no charge just for the asking, shook hands with everyone (unless I missed one of the wives), and headed home, dropping the geese off on the way.

I didn't hear from any of them again until a courier delivered a big festively wrapped box at the house the following December. A box with air holes. The label read "Compliments of the Bean family."

"Alma," I called, "what do you think about a kitten?"

The end

Source material:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_I_Was_Going_to_St_Ives

Footnotes:

*"Death of a king: fowl play or simply bad hygiene?"

**A horrific tale of love, loss, and cannibalism, for which the world is not yet ready.

***Thanks Walt.

Reprinted from Nursery Rhyme Noir -- https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/42875

102317b

the plow turns them up
walls of skulls border
every field

090617

Werewolves of Kansas

1. Moonrise at the aubergine farm

Farmer Brown sat bolt upright. There it was again, that hideous yowling. The farm lay still under the full moon. He peered out between the slats, shotgun in hand. A cool, moist breeze caressed his face. A shadow slunk across the yard. Farmer Brown fired both barrels. He watched for a long time, but nothing else moved.

2. Green eggs and fritters

"I've said it before, Mabel, your eggplant fritters can't be beat." Farmer Brown pushed his chair back and patted his stomach. "A shame to sell 'em."

"Get along with you," his wife said. "Them purple beauties won't grow themselves."

"All right," he said, "but I saw something out there last night. Almost looked like a ... something nasty and sneaky. Well, I've got to check it out."

"Be careful, Pa. Them felines can be mean when roused." He winced. He had a little cat problem, but couldn't afford a psychotherapist.

"Don't believe in them anyhow," he would say, meaning psychotherapists.

3. Field of nightmares

The fruit hung plump and dark. Huge pear-shaped Black Beauties, phallic Ichiban, and the new ones. Farmer Brown believed genetically modified crops were the coming thing, and he'd invested in a new variety that promised to take every shape imaginable.

He had planted the Baroque on the back row. Several looked a lot like the King, one a bit like Jesus (he might be able to sell that one for a premium), some didn't really look like anything. And there it was. The cat. A big chunk was gone from the end and the tail was missing. Oh, he recognized it alright.

"This ends here," he growled, and pulled out his pocketknife, opening the big blade. He reached for the stem with one hand, and held the knife in the other. The plant seemed to vibrate – he froze. How could it be active when the moon wasn't up? The fine hairs rose on the back of his neck. Sweat beaded his forehead. His heart was racing. Mabel always told him to watch out for that high blood pressure he'd inherited from his pa and grandpa. The knife fell to the ground. He backed away, trembling. When he got to the end of the row he turned and ran.

4. The year of the cat

He didn't harvest any of the Baroques. He let his children and neighbors take what they wanted; the rest rotted. That winter he didn't see a single mouse.

Publ. Daily Cabal 2008