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post bits of your novels here |
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Nov 2, 2015 00:50
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 19:00 |
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“Why, God, why?” Gary the Rhinoceros bellowed, as he saw the bloody carcass of his brother, Todd the Rhinoceros. “I’m sorry, sir,” said Chief Gordon the Rhinoceros of the Rhinoceros police, “but you’ll have to step away from the crime scene until we’re done investigating. We have really huge nostrils which I hear are even bigger than our brains, so we can probably sniff a lot of things.” “Isn’t it clear that elephants did this?” Gary countered, the tears streaming from his small, largely ineffectual eyes. “You would think so, but I’m not sure that elephants live in whatever country it is that we live in,” said Gordon. If Gordon was a man, he could have used wikipedia to answer this question, but since he was a rhinoceros, he would have to be more careful and sniff around a bit to see if it smelled like elephants. Now, you may think an elephant would smell nasty, but that’s only to humans. To rhinoceroses, who use dung as a means of communication, and whose dinner-plate sized nostrils support an infinitely richer olfactory experience than ours, elephants smell kind of like shopping carts. If you don’t know what I mean, the next time you’re in a supermarket, smell the handle of your shopping cart. That’s what elephants smell like to rhinoceroses, except, of course, they’ve never smelled any shopping carts so they can’t make the connection. Plus, if a rhinoceros did smell a shopping cart, it would smell quite different to the rhinoceros than it would to a human. It would be an interesting corollary if a shopping cart smelled to a rhinoceros just like an elephant smells to a human, but, Mr. Smart Guy or Gal, if you’ve been paying attention you would have noticed that I already said that no rhinoceroses have ever smelled a shopping cart, so, for a moment let’s assume we can even talk to rhinoceroses. Even if we could, we still couldn’t ask them what a shopping cart smells like because they’ve never smelled one. And let me tell you, having tried on at least one occasion to bring a shopping cart to the middle of the Serengeti, or wherever it is that rhinoceroses live, I can tell you from personal experience, it’s not worth it if all you have to go on in the mad, beautiful hope that rhinoceros olfactory experience is reciprocal to human olfactory experience. “Well,” said Chief Gordon the Rhinoceros, “it certainly smells like a shopping cart.” “Those loving elephants,” thought Gary the rhinoceros, but he didn’t say anything, because he understood the wheels of institutional justice turn slowly, and that if he said anything, Gordon the rhinoceros might order him into custody to give him some time to cool off, which he didn’t want, because he had a bloodthirsty streak. A little back-story is probably in order to establish why Gary the rhinoceros knew the wheels of institutional justice turn slowly, and how it was that he came to be so bloodthirsty. Gary had been an orphan was the answer to the first part, and had been adopted early in life by a wealthy rhinoceros family with an immense rhinoceros palace filled with big furniture and other stuff that rhinoceroses like. The best part was that you could poop in the mailbox of the rhinoceros palace, because that’s how rhinoceroses communicate with one another. They smell each other’s poop, and on the basis of its digested bouquet, they can determine what they have been eating and how they are feeling. Mostly they just do it in a big dung pile, but the rhinoceros palace had a mailbox, which is much classier to defecate in. It was a big brass mailbox with a small brass statue of a rhinoceros on it. The rhinoceros had jade eyes and a haughty expression which regarded all comers as if to say “You don’t live here, do you?” Of course, if Gary was an orphan, than so was Todd. An interesting explanation for Gary’s hatred of slow institutional justice could be that he was separated from Todd when the Drummonds (the wealthy family) adopted him, and that they promised that Todd would follow shortly after. But instead, after more than a year, Todd still languished in the orphanage, creating a fracture in Gary and Todd’s relationship that would never heal. And it just so happens that this explanation is not only interesting, but also true. The Drummonds had always told Gary that the reason Todd could not come home with them was a paperwork issue at the orphanage, but in later years Gary would come to believe that it was the Drummonds themselves who had forestalled Todd and Gary’s reunion. Gary believed that this was because he had been a problem child and the Drummonds had been unwilling to take on more “damaged goods,” although, in point of fact, Todd was in every way the opposite of Gary as a child – placid, self-confident, and thoughtful. In the end, when a year had passed, Gary had bid a fond mental farewell to his life of wealth and luxury – the swimming pools, the tennis courts, the slim little birds that kept you clean at all times – and returned to the orphanage to be with Todd. And the Drummonds had let him, with hardly a second thought, because Gary had been every bit as difficult as he had suspected, and the thrill of a child ownership had worn off. The big thing now, among their wealthy rhinoceros peers, was stocks. Stocks and yachts without any children on them, where you could have key parties and talk about your stocks and not have to worry about children. Tragically, the Drummonds were on a yacht that sunk after a particularly energetic orgy, about which no more needs to be said other than to reiterate the basic concept of Rhinoceros Orgy. Your imagination can do the rest. And while they had left everything to Gary in penance, perhaps, for their poor treatment of him and his brother, but more likely as a tax write-off, it turned out that all their money was in stocks, and the stocks in question were high risk technology stocks, which had not done well, and Gary had ended up with nothing more than a small monthly stipend, which had barely served to provide him and Todd with whatever it is that rhinoceroses eat and wear for clothing. And so Gary and Todd had passed the remainder of their childhood years as wards of the state, or principality, or canton, or whatever system of government it is that rhinoceroses have. That was why he, Gary the rhinoceros, was wary of institutional justice. As to why he was so bloodthirsty, it was because he was a vampire. |
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Nov 2, 2015 00:54
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