Toothsome
AI-free fiction from Self-Evident: We Hold These Tooths
Toothsome
The decision to eat “it” was a done-deal from the get-go since, basically, it looked good enough to eat. Eaten, and enjoyed.
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Note: The subject of this story’s title, meaning the object itself, is in the process of being “donated to the National Trust,” as the Beatles® memorably described the “soap impression of his wife” carved and consumed in “Happiness is a Warm Gun.”
“Mother Superior jump the gun,” indeed!
But having no remaining suitably toothsome object to make the subject of what follows, the time has come to make something up.
I think here it would be good to go back to our lineman for the county, Brad Penley, whom we met somewhere upslope, suffering from a near-paralyzing case of venustraphobia … and thenceforth well on the way to being cured by dint of romance with line-woman Kirsten Dursten. You’ll want to know they are doing famously, by the way. They’re both slowly getting over their wartime trauma, the post-traumatic stress that so commonly results from being sent into battle, pointless or no as the battle may be.
But in footnote 101 we learned that Brad had transferred from Duke’s® Kansas division to Asheville after the death of someone or something, unspecified. “What,” you have been quietly wondering for, lo, these 49 pages, “kicked?”
It likely had to be something or someone important to Brad, if it resulted in pulling up stakes, loading said stakes in a U-Haul®, and driving fifteen hours and five minutes, nearly 1,000 miles, before staking things out again. A fresh start, in some ways, and yet, the job being the same, at once familiar, but—that said—in considerably bumpier terrain.
We can guess that the object in question was not a woman, given his heretofore total paralysis in the presence of persons of the other gender. And we can be pretty sure it wasn’t a man, given that venustraphobia entails a potent combination of immense attraction to the feminine and the resulting fear of speaking to, looking into the eyes of, etc. and etc. and so forth.
At least not a romantically attached man.
It could have been the death of a sibling or a parent, perhaps. Yes, a parent—care of whom had fallen to Brad and more or less tied him to Wichita, caring son that he was, thenceforth liberated to follow his star.
Or, contrariwise, it could be (because we haven’t made this part up yet), that it was in fact the death of one parent in Asheville, with the other—likely Mom, given that women generally outlive their spouses, all things being equal—needing a hand, and caring son that he is, decided to head home. She, still healthy enough to remain independent, might have been living yet in the family home where he grew up, now too big and too empty, and he, being the eldest sib, took up the task.
But no. We learn in this paragraph that both of his parents are long departed [RIP1], and actually, he had returned to his hometown, Wichita Falls, after Desert Storm had knocked the stuffing out of him. As he related on page 75, he had witnessed the U.S. bulldozers burying retreating, unarmed Iraqi troops alive, just running them over as they screamed in pain … and if that wouldn’t knock the stuffing out of you, I’d prefer that you closed this book and went away. [And good riddance.]
They were retreating, unarmed, along a route the U.S. Command had dictated to them.2 [There are times it is very hard to be proud to be a United States taxpayer, given our past and present. Predator drones, anyone?]
But back to the story. We’ve eliminated a spouse’s or girl-friend’s or boyfriend’s or parent’s demise.
(Buriolestes shultzi in its prime. Credit: deviantart.com)
Was it a pet? Losing a dear companion animal can often be a nodal point in a life, particularly for a loner whose dog or cat was the brightest light extant. I think we can be relatively sure that it wasn’t, say, a houseplant. I mean, we houseplant aficionados do talk to our plants, or most of us anyway, but the death of a plant, under normal circumstances, wouldn’t be a major thing.
A pet, on the other hand, is considerably more interactive than, say, an aspidistra, and therefore more likely to create a sort of bond with the hand that feeds, if not with the whole unit. It surely feels that way with, say, Chomsky, who invariably greets me when I come home—almost as if he were waiting there in a chair by the door the whole time, though I deem this unlikely. [To my Substack readers, Chom died at age 17, two years after I wrote this story. He’s pushing up an azalea out front.]
The sense of being loved is even stronger, I suspect, more visceral, with a dog who slobbers all over you when you magically reappear. Say a basset hound. Irma [AKA Irma Burger,3 mentioned on page 19 … and, as pinky-sworn, I am now back to her story] was a cocker/lab mix, and not much of a slobberer, but she was a real sweetheart.
The “Burger” in her name she came by honestly. We [I was part of a “we” at that time] had taken some items to a Goodwill® drop-off, and on that day a local Burger King® franchise was doing its civic thing [and obviously driving traffic to the shop] by donating certificates to Goodwill® good for one free burger, one of which went out to each donor. So we headed over to the burger joint and, while standing in line to stake our claim, overheard a teen in a booth sobbing and sobbing and telling her friend that she had to take the puppy to the vet to have it put down.
Just the day before, some very dear friends of ours had told us that they’d decided their children were old enough to have a pet dog. They thought maybe a Labrador retriever, since those had a reputation as gentle and tractable. [This was one week before Christmas, by the way.]
We spoke to the teen, who told us that her parents wouldn’t let a dog in the house, that the mom-dog, a cocker, had the puppies in an unheated garage and that the previous day’s cold snap, sub-zero, had frozen four puppies ... and that her parents had demanded she have the other one euthanized.
Some people.
We asked, “A cocker spaniel?”
“No. Half Lab.”
Ding!
We went to her car with her and an adorable black puppy wiggled and wagged and practically leapt into my arms.
Ding!
This was clearly the dog Santa was going to deliver to our friends’ home on Christmas morning!
So we tended to the pup until the big day, tied a bright red bow around her neck, snuck into our friends’ home while they were all asleep, put the cutie in the bathroom, closed the door and slunk away, imagining the immense joy that would blossom when the door swung wide.
The reported excitement exceeded all expectations. The little boy and little girl were gaga, the folks immediately knew we were the Santas and immediately phoned to thank us. The gift was perfect!
Except.
The home they then inhabited—and still do some forty years on—was then owned by his mother, who lived next door. The previous tenant had been his brother, who owned Great Danes.4 The over-size dogs in a modest-sized house had done considerable damage and Mom, unmoved by the tykes’ excitement over their new friend [her grandchildren for goodness sake!] announced, “I said no pets!”
So we took her back, though we were cat people and hadn’t planned on a dog. She turned out to be a wonderful companion for all of her fourteen years. Oh, and grandma’s name was Irma, so we cheerfully adopted the name—Irma Burger— forgetting that my own grandmother [dead before I entered the scene] had sported the same name, leading to my Dad’s only half-joking, “Are you calling me a son-of-a-bitch?”
Okay, pinkie-promise delivered, so can we get back to the story now? Thank you.
We were talking about Brad’s loss, or I guess we’ve so assumed. It could well be that the death that motivated his move was not, in fact, a loss but acted on him in some other manner. I think a basset hound was a good guess, actually, but … wrong.5
Speaking of basset hounds, the reason that particular breed was top of mind this morning, has, once again, to do with teeth and skulls and dinosaurs. I know this has self-evidently come to be kind of a “theme” in these pages, but I warned you about tooths at the start.
Yesterday’s New York Times® contained a story about a basset hound-sized dinosaur lately discovered in Brazil, and you know what they say about dinosaurs from Brazil.
Then, too, this morning [true fact], the archival NYT crossword I ingested with my coffee (Friday, Aug. 26, 2016, edition) included this clue: Hare-hunting hounds. BASSETS! [Sometimes the real world simply dogs one, does it not?]
Judging by the skull structure, the brain to body-weight/size ratio of this little dino-rascal greatly exceeded that of the giant dinosaurs that came after. Here this welterweight6 canineish critter with a nice set of felines7, maybe topping out at 40 pounds, was smart as a whip, but Buriolestes shultzi’s heirs and assigns grew enormous without maintaining their smarts. This doggy-size beasty was the progenitor of a family line that ended up,—a mere 100 million years later—80 feet long and weighing up to 80 metric tons but with brains the size of tennis balls. The scientists who analyzed the size and shape of the bassetosaur—as I’ve come to think of him/her/it one whole day later while composing this sentence—believe it had a brain design similar to that of T-rex & Co.—yes, the ones that ate the massive vegetarian types like brachiosaurus and diplodocus for lunch.
Then, as now, it wasn’t easy being green.
A friend of mine [true fact and you know how I am about facts] who is a licensed naturopath told me that the sickest people she sees in her practice are vegans—food, as they say, for thought.
As one of the researchers involved in the study noted regarding Buriolestes’ brain, which was much larger than its heirs and assigns, “Probably this change is related with the feeding habits changing … Carnivorous animals generally need more cognitive capabilities.” [More food for thought.]
But Brad had neither Buriolestes shultzi nor basset, and therefore had lost neither.
What demise, then, triggered the move? At this point it appears that we’ve run out of reasonable triggers for a life-change as big as a thousand-mile hegira from one’s hometown.
There he was in Wichita Falls, still hanging out on weekends with guys from high school who hadn’t moved away, going to the same restaurants, the same theater, the same bowling alley, the same supermarket, living in the house he grew up in … a pretty stable situation … predictable, unremarkable even ...
Honestly, I’d run out of reasons for him to emigrate until I stumbled on a quote from Hunter S. Thompson. “Freedom is something that dies unless it is used.” [Full disclosure: Being stuck for ideas I did a Web search for “something died.”]
Of course, that’s it. Brad felt stuck in a lifetime rut. His freedom had died, or all but.
So he used it.
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Note per footnotes: Substack renumbers when I post, but footnotes sometimes refer to previous super important stuff in the print version, so originals are in [#].
1 [182] Irony, as we recall.
2 [183] You really cannot make this stuff up. Except, obviously, that a “Brad Penley” actually exists, who is a lineman and fought in Desert Storm. But the rest, I regret to remind you, is absolute fact.
3 [184] Who, I believe, I failed to mention upslope would be Dog4 betwixt these pages. Correct me if I’m wrong
4 [185] The warnings previously voiced per Russian wolf hounds on page 79 apply here as well.
5 [186] This would have been Dog5, but no banana.
6 [187] As dogs go.
7 [188] Long teeth, as we recall from page 18, et al.
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