 |
Only tell stories while snakes are sleeping - By Bill Beaver |
|
Only tell stories while snakes are sleeping It's better that way. They can taste a story a mile away. Don't want no snakes around. No cottonmouths curled like fat ropes under a bridge. No rattler twisting through dawn passing under your piss stream. No six foot dancers. Hear any snakes? I don't ... time to tell a story ... GREYMAW lives in a cave under a small hill near town, used to be further away but ya know - growth & all. RETREAD lives in a cave also, but on a mountain, not near people. He likes his privacy, never bothers anyone. Not GREYMAW, seems she's been eatin' children. Jus one or two would be OK but she's been eatin a whole bunch. So many that people are getting upset. Hurts real estate values. Nothing but old people around, can't have a nice family sort of place with GREYMAW eating all the children. So the developers, car dealers & missile repair people they all go to the Mayor say "Yer Honor we've paid good money for you now you gotta do sumthin!" & the Mayor has no idea what to do. He is gonna get diselected, so he sends a delegation to ask RETREAD for help. They climb up RETREAD's mountain. It is steep but they climb & climb finally pausing before the entrance to his cave. There they bow their heads & whisper a plea to the darkness before them ... Oh RETREAD! Him that made us. Made the World out of a container ship full of paper cups. Made his People out of crank case oil, battery acid & an old sofa. Save us from GREYMAW who is eating our children, lowering land values, creating quality of life issues & destroying carefully conceived notions of our being an upscale infotainment destination! RETREAD sighs. He's sick of this bunch & their whining. Should send the lot of them to Solid Waste Disposal ... but ... still ... those land values. He owns some prime parcels in the Valley ... better help these losers ... A few days later workers gather at the Wallmart parking lot. They clear out all the RVers living there, all trees & concrete curbs. Make the area flat. At it's center in a quiet ceremony they bury upside down a lime green Nokia 8260 cell phone, the kind Lucy Lui uses in Charlie's Angels. Then semis arrive, surrounding the place but leaving a small entrance. They roll out a kick-ass sound system, a rapping DJ, walls of speakers. People gather & the dance starts. Bass throbs they stomp & wail. The ground shakes like a drum. GREYMAW is sitting on top of her hill chewing on a chubby 6-year-old. She hears the music, starts moving ponderously toward it. She enters through the gap in the semis. People retreat. There is a pause then the music commences, louder than ever. GREYMAW starts dancing taping rhythm w/all ten thousand of her feet. She dances 24/7 the moon waxes & wanes a month goes by a season she gets real thirsty but still dancing she drinks keg after keg of Bud cases of Ripple Mad Dog 20/20 & Black Jack smokes thousands of stinky sweet cigarettes still dancing she gets real hungry they bring in heaps of triple bacon cheeseburgers bathtubs full of French fries & slaw shoals of fried fish burgers still dancing they wheel in 300 whole stuffed turkeys w/all the fixins 50 pumpkin pies she eats every one including the bones still dancing but slower now they setup a super wide screen TV turn on the Big Game this finally slows her down she falls into a heap fast asleep ... Working fast they attach her to cables, use 23 D-9 dozers to drag her back to her cave. They've lined the cave w/old tires - use a block & tackle to pull her inside - stack in tire after tire - form a chain gang hoisting tires like they are building a levee. They cover her & fill the cave, blocking the entrance. Then they set the whole thing on fire. GREYMAW awakens to flaming tires. She turns herself into dense smoke pushes a hardened point of a tendril like a root tip up against the roof of her cave. It starts to crack, opens up. She seeps out of the hill but then RETREAD appears. He steps on the crack but he got stuck in traffic so some of her escapes. Another story. She stops eating children. Land values soar. The town gets so tony & upscale all the poor people have to live in their cars on the outskirts. RETREAD retires back to his mountain cave to clip coupons & gather annuities ... & if there are any snakes listening ... well ... it's too damn late! This story is over. - Bill Beaver 2001
|
