On the Rocks

Roughly 2,000 years after the Tower of Babel Incident.

The sea resembled black mashed potatoes sloppily piled upon an upturned fan by an angry drunkard with his bare hands. It was thick and it was warm and the black sky seemed impossibly close to the rest of the world. It was a dark and angry soup and the littleĀ boat was a tortured oyster cracker growing soggier and soggier.

Across the choppy, black sea advanced a thing. “A thing!” James cried.Ā Was thisĀ torrential hell haunted? The crew of twelve began to panic. Much girlish screaming could be heard between deafeningĀ thunder claps.

“Do not be afraid. I am not a thing,” the thing said, “I am Jesus.”Ā  And sure enough it was.

“What are you doing out there on the water, Jesus?” called a nervous Judas. “Tell me to come out there if it really is you,” Peter shouted.

Jesus rolled his eyes and waved his hand, beckoning the disciple hither. Peter stepped onto the steps of boiling liquid. The seaĀ greedily gobbled up Peter’s right foot, but fearing Jesus would think him a coward he proceeded with his left. The water lapped up his ankles and then angrily splashed his knees like a low-browed prepubescent ginger in a public pool.

“Oh, you of little faith,” started Jesus.

“It’s cool!” Peter hollered excitedly. He began to jump as if the waters were a discount inflatable bouncy castle rented to entertain the younger kids at a quinceaƱera.

TheĀ Messiah opened his eyes. “Wait. What?”

Despite the raging storm the boat was soon emptied of its formerly terrified occupants. They ran, jumped, skipped, and laughed like absurd marionettes. The sea had transmogrified from a menacing nightmare into a quite large and inviting bowl of jello.

“Boingy! Boingy!” jubilantly exlaimed Simon the Zealot.

“Stop that.” Jesus muttered, but they were all having too much fun with this newfound phenomenon to notice Jesus standing alone in the dark distance. The violent waves seemed to be even pushing the two disconnected parties further and further apart. How far away the merry disciples and the boat seemed to be now. Thadeus and Matthew were tossing a giggling Timothy into the air.

It was July 21, 1969.Ā Earth time. God woke up. HisĀ Rocky and Bullwinkle alarm clock had yet to go off, but His dream had given Him a jolt. Groggily He folded His arms and blinked while nodding His head, a laĀ I Dream of Jeanie. A Washington Post appeared in His hands. “The Eagle Has Landed—Two Men Walk on the Moon.”

Stop that.

J. Burrello

The Final Movement

Her toilet had not flushed since February 21, 1997, two weeks after her husband died. Now 79, Marigold Fitzcummings had developed quite the landmark of fecal matter. It began without purpose. The old lady could no longer control her bowels. Incontinence coupled with the out of service lavatory led her to squat in the corner of her screened-in back porch. The BACKĀ porch, because she was a lady.

After so many years the defecation formation had evolved to be the defining aspect of the house. In many ways it had its own personality. It towered and twisted like a hugeĀ earthen chimney imagined by a depressed Dr. Seuss. It was bedazzled with fungi of the most loathsome hues. A buzzing halo of insects incessantly circled it as if trapped in its odiferous orbit.Ā The heat emanating from its core had melted the glass windows of the adjacent kitchen. There was a wreath of dead porcupines, raccoons, and stoats about its base. Many critters, curiously drawn in by the stench, had been done in by the same fatal fumes. The heat had accelerated their decomposition andĀ all but the hardiestĀ were skeletized within a week. The wooden beams and pillars that held the house together had warped away from the heap as if to escape it.Ā There was a humid mist that engulfed a 5 mile radius around the overpoweringly fragrant epicenter. If one entered into this radius one would feel that same sudden hot gust of air one feels when one disembarks a plane in an equatorial country. Piles of bird corpses rakishly festooned the line of demarcation in a near perfect circumference.

One sparkling day in August, Marigold went out to the porch to add to the mound. As she let down her polka-dotted bloomers, the steaming excrement mountain did something new. A delicateĀ poop appendage,Ā not unlike a squidĀ tentacle,Ā reached out and affectionately caressed her, leaving a brown streak mark down her cheek. Marigold looked up at her grandest creation.

“No more,” flapped its featureless Muppet-like maw. It’s voice was a thousandĀ beautiful,Ā juicy breaking-of-winds, yet it somehow managed a whisper.

Bemused, Marigold began to release her waste uncontrollably on the floor.

“You’ve given me so much already,” it belched.

The rotted floorboards creaked and snapped and the enormously denseĀ ordure mound lifted its immense mass and separated itself from the house. The entire porchĀ violently tiltedĀ like a swing whose chain had just been cut on one side. Marigold watched on, unsure of her feelings, as the monstrous dejecta loafed off into the pines—which wilted as it sluggishly passed.

She gazed into the trees for hours, perhaps vainly hoping it would return. Her screen porch now a shambles, she was suddenly exposed to the elements she had previously shunned. Not fourteen seconds after the turd departed, Marigold was shot through the eye by her blind senile neighbor, Bernie Topplebin,Ā who thought he was hunting arctic yaks.

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J. Burrello