Storytime: Some Thoughts From a Very Large Animal.

July 28th, 2021

I’m awake at sunrise, same as always.

Awake, but not UP, of course.  I’m too smart for that, even with my brain still cool from the night.  The best of sleep is when you’ve just finished it and are deliciously, completely at rest and unable to think or move, just feel how sweet it is and how warm and soft the world remains and breathe in the gentle snores of Driver next to me, curled against my head. 

So to maximize that time I don’t move an inch and I keep my eyes shut and I don’t change my breathing and I stay in that beautiful place for all of six minutes before That Fucker comes around to my pen and starts loudly asking Driver if I’m awake yet lazy beast come on there’s aa battle to be won abluh bluh bluh bwuh. 

Longer than usual.  Oh what a fine rest it was. 

So away with my rest, up with my body (at the gentle prods of Driver at least, rather than the hasty and careless hands of That Fucker), down with breakfast (cold and lumpy: someone doesn’t want me too content before the fight), and on with the armour.

The armour takes six of them to put on.  Too many buckles in my opinion.  I stand there and watch as the sun goes up and pretend I’m a tree and don’t have to care about any of this and none of it’s my business and today I will live a good dull tree life and NOT have maniacs try to stab, arrow, cut, etc. my face, belly, or legs.

Of course, I’ve seen what these folks do to trees.  Can’t win for losing, frankly.

Tara, tarantatatratatraaaaa.  Alarm, shouting, waving of arms.  That Fucker is here early and is hopping mad. 

Surprise attack!  The sneaky enemy have decided they’d rather fight early over here than on time over there like civilized people.  How deceitful.  How diabolical.  At least I had time for my lumpy breakfast. 

Up my side stomps That Fucker, feet even heavier than usual on the ladder (all that weight on their mind, I suspect).  Then the two bows.  Then the two pikes. 

Then Driver, who is wrapped up in a little ball of armour that’s much less fancy than That Fucker’s but is unconstrained by a need for maneuverability.  Like a baby bird balled up in iron feathers. 

I want to tickle them very badly.  But ah, there’s no time.  The battle has already turned up, and it’s burning down the tents next to us. 

To war! shouts That Fucker.

For That Place We Live In! shout the others.  Death!  Bloodshed!  Defeat (for them, not us please please please).  And so on. 

I don’t get to shout until Driver pokes me behind the ear just so, which happens pretty fast so I guess Driver is as sick of hearing from the others as I am. 

I don’t shout.  I ROAR.

So I do that for a good thirty seconds that feel like three years as I start walking and accelerate and run and then I’m in the battle. 

***

These are the things I saw.

A tent.

A tent on fire.

A person setting a tent on fire.

Two people screaming.

One person running.

Three people standing to fight.

Three people flying away through the air.

Six people fighting four other people while two other people shout at them.

A little bird crouched down low in the grass pretending it isn’t here. 

Someone who’d been swarmed and stabbed in the belly while they were eating breakfast, before their armour was put on. 

Sixteen people braced for a charge.

Eight people throwing away their weapons and trying to run. 

A person screaming – maybe in anger – and waving a very small knife. 

The kitchen and its awful breakfast and twenty people fighting over and around and in it. 

Trampled grass stained red and bile. 

More people. 

A big bright beautiful day turning from golden to blue in the sky. 

Driver.

***

Those are the things I saw in the order I stepped on them. 

***

Driver must have slipped free when the armour around the side of my head took a nasty cut, blowing out some crucial strapwork.  All that weight on them for their own protection dragged them down and off and under my legs where it was no protection at all.

They could have dug in, of course.  They had the prod, and the prod had a big spike on the back.  A real nasty one, just in case I got Ideas.  But Driver never used it.  And so off Driver went.

That Fucker is shouting more than usual.  Probably mad that I’m standing still instead of charging.  But I can’t charge and look after Driver at the same time, so tough shit. 

I think Driver’s alive.  It’s really hard to tell, they’re so tiny.  I need to get all these stupid armour off them. 

Ow.  There’s a pinprick at the back of my skull.  That Fucker is trying to goad me.  Ow.  Ow.  OW. 

Okay, that was a pike.  That Fucker isn’t trying to goad me, they’re trying to have me skewered. 

But I’ve lost some crucial strapwork recently, so I shrug and all the armour and the bows and the pikes and That Fucker slide off and land in a heap and I walk away and don’t even bother trying to step on it. 

I pick up Driver and put them back in their spot as I walk.  Nobody tries to stop me.  I guess they’re busy killing and dying and all of those other things. 

***

It’s not long until it’s quiet again.  Real quiet.  Not sure I’ve been in a place like this since my youth, before I got picked up and hauled off to meet Driver and everyone else.  No little voices.  No fields.  No orchards.  No roads or buildings.  No people. 

Driver doesn’t count.  They’re good for that. 

I pick fruit as I walk and offer it.  Some of it is taken, some isn’t.  We go until the sun starts to drop and I stand and I watch as it turns red over a little river with cool water that tastes like ice against my teeth.

We’ll stay here for the night.  And maybe tomorrow Driver will be okay, and maybe tomorrow Driver will have taken that soft sleep that never stops. 

It will be alright.  The best part of sleep is being not quite awake; but second best is getting there, and it’s a close second. 


Storytime: A Brief History of the Evolution of Life on Yurm.

July 21st, 2021

The Prepaleoplostic Eon

Most nothing, or at least nothing worth noting geologically.  The stones of the planet fart their way together into tectonic harmony. 

The Paleoplostic Era – the Yurtomitvitch Period

Organisms figure out what to use all this boron floating around in the ocean for the past billion years and start constructing the first visible evidence of their presence recorded in the fossil record: very very small yurts.  Construction is incompetent but diligent.  The form of the inhabitants is unknown and presumably they were still mostly liquid. 

The Rufflupogust Period

Organisms discover that boron-based structures can ALSO be used to create structure within oneself.  Immediately life displays two great lineages: the blohardynopsians, who make elaborate internal scaffoldings and then swallow them; and the bunngowlisia, who make elaborate internal scaffoldings and then force them up their anuses.  Both live side by side for entire years before the bunngowlisia abruptly go extinct at the end of the Rufflupogust, about instantly after they first appear. 

The Greater Krimmidgish Period

Often called the ‘glory days’ of the Paleoplostic, the Greater Krimmidgish sees blohardynopsian life spread far and wide through the boron seas of Yurm, becoming bottom-dwelling scavengers, bottom-dwelling grazers, bottom-dwelling predators, and even a brief and terrifying experimental period where they floated just above the ocean floor. 

The Lesser Krimmidgish Period

The inanimate and insensate bacterial mats that are at the base of all blohardynopsian food webs develop the capacity to float at the water’s surface.  The entirety of the blohardynopsian lineage is wiped from the surface of Yurm within mere centuries; their only modern survivors are those little slimy things that try to eat your toenails in swamps. 

The Whorlibord Period

A small and innocuously group of bacterial mat-dwelling creatures develop the snoot, an anatomical wonder that allows both breathing and eating with a simple flex and snivel.  The group, termed innocuopods (after the late Horthord P. Innocuous), thrives and diversifies into a breathtaking array of forms, spreading into many of the old blohardynopsian niches and more besides. 

One lineage of creatures become known around now, although their past remains hazy.  Like the blohardynopsians and the bunngowlisia they use boron structures to keep their internals structured; unlike either they shun housing and don’t creature their internal support externally; instead building inside themselves using little tiny hands on the inward-facing surface of their skin, called creepi.  The animals themselves, creepodonts, will remain a fixture of the seas for a very long time, thanks to their powerful crotchetiness. 

The Lubbery Period

The oceans of Yurm dry up abruptly, forcing most of the organisms in them to stand on their own ten legs for the first time.  Most perish, some grumble, a few thrive.  In particular several of the most powerfully-snooted innocuopods do quite well for themselves – now their snoots can breathe, eat, and loco-mote for them!  Truly a marvel of evolution.  Many bacterial mats discover that adhering to dry rocks is at least as pleasant as a soggy water’s surface, and within ten million years of the Great Drying, life appears quite congenial. 

Then the oceans of Yurm return from near-orbit in the greatest precipitation ever to occur, wiping out ten times the number of species disturbed in the initial hubbub.  The Sog remains the most titanic disaster in the history of life on, around, and generally in the vicinity of Yurm.  We can only aspire to top it. 

The Mezzosorpanoplostic Era – the Quintuplic Period

The Quintuplic is a time of great hardship and great innovation: the few lucky snoot-bearers and bacterial matters that survive go apeshit across the surface of Yurm, sea and water and air alike.  The sky buzzes with a thousand thousand whiny little heliwings; the water is abroil with fierce and chewy creatures from shorks to shirrts; and on land one million different kinds of creepodont-related creepostrophes lurch sulkily across the landscape in great pouts that shake the very ground. 

At the close of the Quintuplic all five remaining continents bump together at once and the resulting shockwave exterminates all of the innocuopods, most of the creepodonts, a bunch of the creepostrophes, and all of the shirrts.  None of the shorks though.  They did quite well for themselves. 

The Phlegmic Period

The violent wobbling of the continents produces a permanently shaky and highly wiggly climate for life; and the Phlegmic is famously home to the dawn of the jiggliest animals ever to swerve their way drunkenly over Yurm: the jauntertrophes.  This extreme branch of the creepostrophe family tree squiggled their way to ever-more-scrambled heights throughout the entire Mezzosorpanoplostic Era, and indeed early scientists refused to believe the most impressive of their kind could even exist on dry land without undergoing fatal and immediate squiggling.  Modern math has proven otherwise. 

The Boddaceous Period

The Boddaceous was a period mostly consistent of lava, and the way life responded to this in many ways determined its future success.  The jauntertrophes shuddered their way above it and around it and a bit to the side of it; crossing entire trans-continental lava fields without so much as wobbling into a single plume of smoke.  The shorks dove deep and ate rocks.  The creepostrophes ate the lava.  And the creepodonts dropped dead. 

Then a very large rock slammed into Yurm and everyone’s ingenuity was at best a huge waste of time. 

The Seeloplostic Era – the Postpaleoplesic Period

The Seeloplostic begins with a much-diminished Yurm.  The jauntertrophes are dead; the creepodonts are dead; the creepostrophes aren’t doing too hot, and the most prevalent type of animal on Yurm were little ugly bug things that ate fast and died faster – a dubious ecological niche, it’s got to be said.  With little competition and a vast, devastated world open to all, they were free to eat faster and die faster than they ever had before.  They were called copeiforms, and they were our ancestors, except for all the ones that died. 

Which were most of them.  Copeiform evolution believed in error moreso so than trial, with such luminaries as Puborre’s Witherbling (which fed entirely upon its own young); the Lesser Mock Skammer (which possessed eight pairs of redundant legs); and the Rippled Wharf (whose courting rituals appeared to consist of building a tiny ball and sealing itself inside forever). 

The Postpostunpaleoplesicish Period

The beginnings of the modern ecosystem are more clearly visible as the Postpaleoplesic gives way to the Postpostunpaleoplesicish.  Copeiforms begin to settle down into the sober middle-management phase of their existence, with the vosperoids and their plain colouration, bland legs, spherical torso, and modest, unassuming little brains reigning supreme in most niches thanks to a great efficiency of effort.  Their exciting and whimsical wuuly competition were reduced to relictual fauna, surviving only in isolated paradise islands whose gorgeous, peaceful serenity and plentiful food left them plump, flightless, and – according to our ancestor’s records – delicious. 

The Now

It falls to us, as examples of the mightiest single species ever birthed upon Yurm, to record its events for all posterity, which will doubtlessly not include us.  As this chronicle is written we are locked into an irrevocable death spiral, having spent the last two hundred years industriously mining ocean sediments formed of dead creepodonts only to realize halfway in that they were filling our atmosphere with deadly oxygen (knew those would come back to bite us, the surly little bastards).  Since changing things is somewhat difficult for vosperoid organisms, our principle strategy has been to resign ourselves to our fates and grimly trudge towards our deaths.  I hope this chronicle of our world’s history of life explains why this was a winning tactic for our ancestors, and so too for us.  Soon this volume will be loaded onto a satellite and launched beyond the farthest limits of our solar system.  May it never reach another organism benighted and stupid enough to read it. 

-Walmpurt Toos, Chief Botherer of Finklefaak United Collegiate Pit.  Esteemed. 


Storytime: Ablaze.

July 14th, 2021

Gary finished his cigarette and he dropped the smouldering stub and he crushed it underfoot and lifted his foot and the rush of air restarted it as he went back inside and that was how fifty people died. 

Not all immediately at once, though.  It went something like this. 

***

The fire roamed the little patch of mouldy greenery outside the backdoor for some minutes as it figured itself out and came to terms with its life outside the old Mortimer Mansion.  Inside was noise and light and reckless danger; outside was the cold night and the damp air that smelled like autumn mould year-round and the branches of the gigantic tree in the neighbour’s yard that overshadowed the entire block and somewhere in the distance an owl absolutely losing its shit. 

The choice was obvious, particularly when the fire caught hold of a little bit of splintered wood off the deck that was covered in some sort of ancient long-since-illegal varnish that might as well have been pure gasoline.  It ate it up in a blink and dove into the basement headfirst. 

The basement was a dour wonderland of unfinished concrete floors, unpainted wooden walls, and uncoordinated and unsatisfying makeouts.  But behind the walls was gloriously flammable insulation the likes of which hadn’t been manufactured in centuries, and so the fire let them be and roiled upwards invisibly, leaving only some wisps of transparent smoke and a lingering odour of burnt mouse feces. 

Above was the kitchen, and as it scuttled its way beneath the sink the fire felt a great and clammy moisture above its head where Jules Mortimer was trying to wash the fucking dishes.  They should’ve used paper plates, but hey, it’d be cool to use the old place’s dishes, right?  Pretend posh.  Well pretend posh was real dirty and the real estate guy was coming over in three days whoops rescheduled to day after tomorrow so guess who had to do the fucking dishes in the middle of a party whoop de fucking doo fuckity doo fuck?  Him.  Because he was the oldest Mortimer on the premises.  Never mind that it had been Katie’s idea to have the party.  Ugh.  It had been Katie’s idea to try and start a paint-snorting competition too.  Ugh. 

The fire crawled all the way up his pant leg and into his boxers before he noticed, so intense was his snit.  Then it gave him a Brazilian and he started yelping and kicking and running and on his way he kicked the sink so hard the tap broke. 

No more water!  Joy!

The living room was filled with bodies and yelling and music and yelling and vomiting and yelling so it was all equally inaudible until Jules ran in and somehow screamed over all of it.  This distracted the partygoers, at first to point and laugh (didn’t work), then to shout and stand there (didn’t work), then to try to stomp out Jules’s pants (didn’t work), then to pour their drinks on him (worked, eventually).

By the time all was said and done laughing, people had finally started to ask themselves questions like ‘where did that come from?’ and it was too late because the kitchen fire had found the old paint tins under the sink.

It made a noise like FWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMP

But much louder and hotter. 

***

By now most of the party was aware something odd was happening.  Either there was smoke drifting through the floorboards, the walls were warm to the touch, they’d just put out a brushfire in Jules Mortimer’s crotch, or an enormous gout of flame had just rocketed upwards through the ventilation system and set fire to the bed they’d been sleeping in.  Also, everyone was yelling “FIRE.”

Several solutions were attempted and beset with difficulties.  The mansion’s fire extinguishers were filled with dried spiderwebs and air; hugging the floor to avoid smoke was complex due to the intricate vomit-and-cotton-candy covering that laced much of the floorboards six hours into the party; and the fire exit was on fire. 

Clearly, improvisation would be needed.  Mercifully, liquid inspiration had been taken.  Sadly, proclamation was outspoken: “THROW THE BOOZE ON IT.”

Which didn’t help much at all, particularly when it vaporized and filled the air with eye-bleeding alcohol fumes and covered the floor in glass shards as people tried to crawl on it.  Still, it was all in good faith and most people were willing to concede it had been better than nothing. 

***

So the evening went on in the spirit of competition, fire against festivities.  The fire consumed the basement and its inhabitants joined the rest of their kind in the living room, where they contributed much confusion and panic.  The partygoers tried to phone for help and the Tinco Valley fire department filed the deluge of reports as spam and said they’d have to verify things first.  The fire feasted upon the discarded coats and purses and shoes in the front hall and their owners retreated up the stairs to the third floor to look for a fire escape. 

And the fire’s humble roots just outside the back door raced up through the gutters and the eavestrough in a snake of embers, until it crept in through the attic window and found the bags and bags and bags of old dry leaves from the autumn of ’32 that Mortimer Senior (dead forty years, god rest his soul) had been keeping for a rainy day.  Like finest tinder they were. 

Things were beginning to get a little bit desperate.  Many were the tears shed and the regrets spoken.

“I wish I’d eaten more than one bowl of chips, and that they hadn’t been nacho cheez flavoured,” mourned Dilbert Dabny. 

“I wish I hadn’t broken up with you ten minutes earlier,” said Daphne Yubo to her ex-girlfriend.

“I wish I’d broken up with you two years ago,” said Daphne Yubo’s ex-girlfriend.

“I wish I didn’t have these horrible suspicions about that one cigarette I had out back an hour ago,” muttered Gary Vorbleck under his breath. 

“I really really wish I hadn’t spent the past three hours doing dishes,” said Jules Mortimer.  At least his arms were still nice and moist, even if they were a little wrinkly.

“I really really REALLY wish you hadn’t talked me into hosting this party,” said Katie Mortimer.

“Excuse me, sir, but you’re a fucking liar,” her brother retorted.

“Excuse and sir yourself,” she said, “but you’re a big ol’ bitch.”
“Language.”
“Motherfucker, do you SPEAK it?”
The fire dropped a beam next to them in a shower of sparks.  Its contribution was misunderstood by its critics, who hastily relocated to the nor’west solar.  Flames were already curdling up from the roof around its base, and the glass of the windows and skylight twinkled merrily in the heat haze. 

There were many uglier places to die, most of which the fire had already set alight.  Bright red tongues and orange hands and the odd blue-and-white licks made outrageous and suggestive statements to the night sky. 

“Well,” said Jean Baltimore, “we’re doomed.”
“Yep,” agreed Sam Winmoore.  “Wanna have sex?”
“Sure why not.”
“Oh good idea!” said Mavis Bacon.  “Hey Claude?  You want in on this?”
“Might as well.”
“People, people, people,” said Jules Mortimer.  “Be REASONABLE.  We’re all about to die; you can’t just have sex!”
“Yeah, not just on the floor,” said Katie Mortimer.  “Have some standards.  Why not use these enormous bedsheets Mortimer Senior (god rest his soul) always kept stashed in the solar’s closet here, for midday trysts with his eighteen mistresses?”
Everyone examined the bedsheets and was very impressed.

“High thread count,” remarked Daphne Yubo, whose father was a tailor.

“Nice patterning,” said Mavis Bacon, whose grandmother was a mural-maker. 

“Could support a whole body with this,” said Boris Murt, who was an aspiring serial killer. 

Everyone looked at him.

“What?”
“Say that again.”
“All I said was oh right.  Huh.  How ‘bout that.”

***

The bedsheets burned away from the windowframe where they’d been knotted just as Katie Mortimer’s feet touched grass, nearly dumping hot coals onto her head as she scuttled away to the streetside with the rest of the partygoers to check out the last of the fireworks. 

They stood there, on the dimly smouldering edge of the lawn, watching the historic Mortimer Mansion disintegrate into base carbon, and they looked at one another in a sort of sobriety that had nothing to do with drunkenness and knew that from now on they would look at life very differently. 

That was when the Tinco Valley firetruck – laden with fifty heroic volunteers, foaming at the mouth one and all – hopped the kerb, tipped crazily onto two wheels for a heartbreaking twenty feet, and skidded nobly into the mansion, taking out it and everything inside it in a cataclysmic eruption of heat and steam.    

***

Most of the Mortimer Mansion partygoers evaded punishment in the days to come.  The public eye was focused on finding a more economical way to budget the fire department; it had been the sixth truck that month. 

Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer certainly weren’t complaining.  That had been one HELL of an insurance payout. 


Storytime: Daily Specials.

July 7th, 2021

A Record of the Final Daily Specials of Old Eddie’s Pub n Grub

*Bean Soup*

A rich blend of sumptuously fatty pork, slow-cooked beans, and caramelized onion, augmented with secret spices from our secretive master chef! 

*Soup de Yesterdaye*

A rich blend of sumptuously fatty pork, slow-cooked beans, and caramelized onion, augmented with secret spices from our secretive master chef and given an extra day or so to simmer and really get all those flavours mingling!

*Crunchy Salad*

Put some summer between your teeth and feel it crack!  Crisp carrot and apple slivers with a selection of seeds and nuts, all hand-washed in a raspberry vinaigrette by our master chef and topped with flavoured ice shavings formed from clear glacier water!

*Mozarella Sticks*

Soft, melty, tasty cheesey goodness, breaded in fragrant herbed bread crumbs.  Get a platter – or better yet, get two!  Or even BETTER, guess what’s coming up day after tomorrow?

*An Old Favourite Returns!*

Try some freshly fried pork crackling hors d’oeuvres tonight topped with a breathtaking variety of mix-and-match sauces, and while you’re at it, ready yourselves for the triumphant return of what you’ve all been waiting for tomorrow night!  Get a seat ready and set your Fridays to FUNdays!

*Bean Soup*

A rich blend of sumptuously fatty pork, slow-cooked beans, and caramelized onion, augmented with secret spices from our secretive master chef!  Don’t miss it this time; it’s never too late to correct a mistake!

*Soup de Yesterdaye*

A rich blend of sumptuously fatty pork, slow-cooked beans, and caramelized onion, augmented with secret spices from our secretive master chef!  Better try it now or you’re just proving you’re uncultured swine!

*Marinated Chicken Skewers*

Poke your nose into Monday tomorrow with a pokey little set of these in your belly.  Chicken soaked in a cocktail of spices and herbs before being threaded onto rosemary stalks and seared to juicy goodness, then placed right on your plate not a minute from the grill!  Almost as good as bean soup!

*Jumbo Shrimp*

The biggest and freshest shrimp in the finest breadcrumbs and the most golden frying but really this should be bean soup.  It’s not bad, but it’s not bean soup.  You could like this sort of thing if you like this sort of thing, I guess. 

*Cabbage Rolls With Cabbage and No Beans*

Why did you not eat the bean soup?  It’s a good recipe, my mother made it, my father loved it, my grandmother passed it down to us all.  It put peasants on the farmland and on the battlefield and in the grave for centuries, and now you think you’re too good for it, is that what’s going on?  Have some cabbage rolls and choke on them dry and flavourless.  Like your souls. 

Your last chance comes tomorrow. 

*Bean Soup*

Eat the soup or eat shit. 

*Now Hiring!*

Our dish of the day is… a career in delicious food service!  Why not step in?  Bring your most mouth-watering resume, and don’t skimp on the references!  We’re STARVED for applicants!

*Fried Basket – NEW CHEF SPECIAL!!!*

We all welcome new hands in the kitchen, and those hands are eager to get to know you too – or at least your stomachs!  Welcome our new master chef by purchasing a delicious fried basket, consisting of everything from wings to pickles to chicken fingers, topped with a delectable fried mars bar!

*Club Sandwiches*

You’d have to be knocked over the head to pass up on one of these bruisingly-good meals!  Fresh crusty bread in FOUR layers, encompassing cheeses, meats, vegetables, and a new sauce on every level!

*Macaroni and Cheese and Bean Soup – NEW CHEF MEMORIAL SPECIAL!*

Put the FUN in today’s funereal special with a salute to our old new master chef and a welcome-home to our old old master chef, featuring both their best dishes: golden and crumbly mac and cheese and a rich blend of sumptuously fatty pork, slow-cooked beans, and caramelized onion, augmented with secret spices from our secretive master chef!  Memorial service from ten pm until we’re all too drunk to stay awake. 

*Bean Soup*

You didn’t finish all the bean soup but you ate all the macaroni and cheese this disrespect will not be tolerated. 

*Donuts*

Try a basket of fresh-fried soft moist crisp and delicious donuts, complete with dipping sauces!  Officers of the law, feel free to stop by!  Very free.  We’ll give you the donuts free.  Please visit.  Please please visit quickly.  PLEASE.  Help help help.

*Meat Pies – NEW MANAGEMENT SPECIAL!*

Try a mouth-watering browned pastry packed to the BRIM with aged, marbled fat cut from the biggest pig you’ve ever met.  From the knife to the table within twelve hours!  Served with a hot ‘Sweeney’ toddy, made with secret house spices.

*Shepherd’s Pie*

‘Meat’ our health inspector’s visit this evening with a belly full of Shepherd’s pie!  Warmed to perfection and left with a hint of steamy simple herbs.  Contains everything that couldn’t be packed into the meat pies, but also delicious potatoes! 

*Ladyfingers – HEALTH INSPECTOR MEMORIAL SPECIAL*

In memorial of our health inspector, whom many of you knew for years, we will be serving ladyfingers tonight.  Juicy, meaty, falling-off-the-bone.  Served with plum sauce, because she would’ve wanted them that way. 

*Long Pork*

Get a piece of the forbidden taste with this most slender and succulent of ‘swine.’  No seasoning or sauces; the point is in the ‘pig.’  Applicants for early tasting come around through the rear alley and don’t look behind you.  Healthy yet plump only, please. 

*Molotov Cocktails*

A sumptuous bottle of vodka, half-drained, filled to the brim with oil and topped with a wick flambé before hurtling right into your lap.  I’ll take every one of you bastards down with me I swear if you can’t appreciate what’s on your plate maybe YOU should be on the plate  MAN IS MEAT MEAT IS MAN MAN IS MEAT MEAT IS MAN MAN MEAT MEAT MAN MAN MEAT MEAT MEAT ME

*Future Site of a New McDonalds!*