i meant to write, when i posted this, that i'm interested in any criticism of this short story...
A bovine puzzle
Five years ago I would have been woken by the scratching of the needle as it carved a new groove in the centre of my favourite album. Or it might ave been the clicking of the tape deck as the primitive mechanism determined to play out a cassette which had long since finished. Not today. Today my slumber was safe in the hands of my deck's auto-reverse. If I'd been conscious I would have remembered listening to the same Zappa album 11 times. As it was, I barely remember hearing the end of the opening line. I glanced at the clock long enough to confirm that it was 12.02 (I didn't register if it was am or pm), struck a deal with my hangover (which I should have known to avoid), and drifted off for another hour.
My hangover secured payback sooner than I had hoped. With a violent heave, I stumbled from bed to bath and endured another violent heave. Wiping the saliva from my chin into my hair, I straightened my spine and pitied myself in the bathroom mirror. I'm not going to seek sympathy but the evening had started innocently enough- 'only one' pint at our local bar. It wasn't my idea to try to break the world record for alcohol consumption...
Anyway, I didn't have to search long for a cigarette butt and, drawing long and strong on my one true friend, I waded through the apartment in search of some sense.
What I did find was a single shoe in the kitchen. I ask you, who leaves a party with only one shoe ? Perhaps somebody arrived with one shoe and left barefoot - I'd never know.
The apartment was in a pretty bad way but my immediate concern lay elsewhere. My first priority was to take liquids on board before I dried out like a prune. My second priority was to find out why there were more bottle caps lying around than there were bottles. The only solution I could come up with was that the one-shoed man must have brought a pocket full of miscellaneous bottle caps with him and sprinkled them liberally around the apartment through the course of the night.
I put the kettle on, spilt some coffee in a cup and shuffled through to rouse my room mate.
Nothing could have prepared me for what I found there. I'm not sure how to describe this so, like a barman out of soda, I'm going to give it to you straight.
There was a cow in my room-mate's bedroom.
It was just standing there, kind of keeping him company, while he dozed. I'm glad I found it first - he would have certainly died of shock if he'd woken to see a cow standing guard by his bed.
It wasn't a real cow obviously. Well, it was real in the sense that it did exist - I could touch it. If I was stronger, I swear I could have picked it up. If I'd felt inclined, I could have painted itpurple and sold it to some myopic art aficionado. In this sense it was real. In another sense, it was not real at all - if I'd tried to milk it, I'm pretty sure I would have broken something and it wouldn't have mooed if I'd stuck a pen up its arse - basically I'm saying that if somebody was waiting for this cow to come home they would be waiting a very long time indeed.
I decided to wake my room-mate who, due to the fact that he was tightly wrapped in his beige comforter, resembled a giant human samosa.
How the hell do you wake someone and bring to their attention the fact that there is a huge fake cow in their room - I wish my teachers had taught me this at school - who the hell needs to find out the length of one side of a triangle given the other two (lets face it, some people couldn't find out the length of one side of a square given the other three but that's irrelevant). I opted for the direct approach:
"Marky, there is a fucking cow in your room" accompanied by a light tap on the centremost lump in the covers had little effect.
"MARKY, THERE IS A FUCKING COW IN YOUR ROOM" accompanied by a tennis-racket to the head seemed to do the trick.
"Where the fuck did that thing come from ?" was the rather predictable response. He was an hour and a half behind me so I forgave him this temporary lapse of originality.
"I have no fucking idea" was my response. There was no denying it, my retort was just plain boring.
Marky was up and sitting on the edge of his bed by this time, and I had to admire his enthusiasm. We called Mark "Marky" as a nickname because it seemed to roll of the tongue more easily - we certainly were not in the running for the Nickname Innovation Prize when we thought that one up.
After a considerable period of consultation (over pizza while we watched the ball-game) we decided we had 6 options: keep it; sell it; return it to its rightful owner; release it from captivity to fend for itself; give it to Gary Larson for Christmas; destroy it.
We could not keep it as our lease specifically ruled out the keeping of mock farm animals. We could not sell it as we could not come to an agreement about under which heading to advertise it in the want-ads. We had no idea where it came from, and we had no intention of letting the owner know that somebody had stolen their cow in a drunken stupor, so returning it was shot down; we were certain it would come to grief if released in urban Boston. Finally, Gary Larson politely declined.
We destroyed it.
Fairly easily it turned out with the aid of a saw, over the course of 3 weeks and deposited it in sections in the trash - the trash men may have wondered what the hell was going on but they never said. All we have left are our memories and a residue of cow-dust on Marky's carpet - he never vacuums so it's probably there to this day.
Today is Tuesday.
alasdair
A bovine puzzle
Five years ago I would have been woken by the scratching of the needle as it carved a new groove in the centre of my favourite album. Or it might ave been the clicking of the tape deck as the primitive mechanism determined to play out a cassette which had long since finished. Not today. Today my slumber was safe in the hands of my deck's auto-reverse. If I'd been conscious I would have remembered listening to the same Zappa album 11 times. As it was, I barely remember hearing the end of the opening line. I glanced at the clock long enough to confirm that it was 12.02 (I didn't register if it was am or pm), struck a deal with my hangover (which I should have known to avoid), and drifted off for another hour.
My hangover secured payback sooner than I had hoped. With a violent heave, I stumbled from bed to bath and endured another violent heave. Wiping the saliva from my chin into my hair, I straightened my spine and pitied myself in the bathroom mirror. I'm not going to seek sympathy but the evening had started innocently enough- 'only one' pint at our local bar. It wasn't my idea to try to break the world record for alcohol consumption...
Anyway, I didn't have to search long for a cigarette butt and, drawing long and strong on my one true friend, I waded through the apartment in search of some sense.
What I did find was a single shoe in the kitchen. I ask you, who leaves a party with only one shoe ? Perhaps somebody arrived with one shoe and left barefoot - I'd never know.
The apartment was in a pretty bad way but my immediate concern lay elsewhere. My first priority was to take liquids on board before I dried out like a prune. My second priority was to find out why there were more bottle caps lying around than there were bottles. The only solution I could come up with was that the one-shoed man must have brought a pocket full of miscellaneous bottle caps with him and sprinkled them liberally around the apartment through the course of the night.
I put the kettle on, spilt some coffee in a cup and shuffled through to rouse my room mate.
Nothing could have prepared me for what I found there. I'm not sure how to describe this so, like a barman out of soda, I'm going to give it to you straight.
There was a cow in my room-mate's bedroom.
It was just standing there, kind of keeping him company, while he dozed. I'm glad I found it first - he would have certainly died of shock if he'd woken to see a cow standing guard by his bed.
It wasn't a real cow obviously. Well, it was real in the sense that it did exist - I could touch it. If I was stronger, I swear I could have picked it up. If I'd felt inclined, I could have painted itpurple and sold it to some myopic art aficionado. In this sense it was real. In another sense, it was not real at all - if I'd tried to milk it, I'm pretty sure I would have broken something and it wouldn't have mooed if I'd stuck a pen up its arse - basically I'm saying that if somebody was waiting for this cow to come home they would be waiting a very long time indeed.
I decided to wake my room-mate who, due to the fact that he was tightly wrapped in his beige comforter, resembled a giant human samosa.
How the hell do you wake someone and bring to their attention the fact that there is a huge fake cow in their room - I wish my teachers had taught me this at school - who the hell needs to find out the length of one side of a triangle given the other two (lets face it, some people couldn't find out the length of one side of a square given the other three but that's irrelevant). I opted for the direct approach:
"Marky, there is a fucking cow in your room" accompanied by a light tap on the centremost lump in the covers had little effect.
"MARKY, THERE IS A FUCKING COW IN YOUR ROOM" accompanied by a tennis-racket to the head seemed to do the trick.
"Where the fuck did that thing come from ?" was the rather predictable response. He was an hour and a half behind me so I forgave him this temporary lapse of originality.
"I have no fucking idea" was my response. There was no denying it, my retort was just plain boring.
Marky was up and sitting on the edge of his bed by this time, and I had to admire his enthusiasm. We called Mark "Marky" as a nickname because it seemed to roll of the tongue more easily - we certainly were not in the running for the Nickname Innovation Prize when we thought that one up.
After a considerable period of consultation (over pizza while we watched the ball-game) we decided we had 6 options: keep it; sell it; return it to its rightful owner; release it from captivity to fend for itself; give it to Gary Larson for Christmas; destroy it.
We could not keep it as our lease specifically ruled out the keeping of mock farm animals. We could not sell it as we could not come to an agreement about under which heading to advertise it in the want-ads. We had no idea where it came from, and we had no intention of letting the owner know that somebody had stolen their cow in a drunken stupor, so returning it was shot down; we were certain it would come to grief if released in urban Boston. Finally, Gary Larson politely declined.
We destroyed it.
Fairly easily it turned out with the aid of a saw, over the course of 3 weeks and deposited it in sections in the trash - the trash men may have wondered what the hell was going on but they never said. All we have left are our memories and a residue of cow-dust on Marky's carpet - he never vacuums so it's probably there to this day.
Today is Tuesday.
alasdair
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