God wants me to go to church.

Somewhere in 1990. 

When you know where the cameras are, you can bend and twist in your sexy catsuit, slink in the vid-shadows with your pants full of paper. Sometimes you have to walk backwards. But this is what you do when you’re a ramen-chested college student and your partner in crime has a card key to the Supercomputer Center with all the sweet sweet photocopiers and paper cutters. We walk in with a single sheet. We walk out like lifers taped with Nat Geos in the chow line. 

But this was only Phase One of the op. Phase Two hit the library. Here it isn’t about being sly but about being fast. We have a lot of paper to distribute—pull a book, finger-slide a deep page, set the trap, snap it shut. Back on the shelf and then some permutation of Fibonacci down and again. And again. And—like any new repetition the brain resists with initial clumsiness—You want me to what now?—before giving in with a sigh and allocating stupid amounts of processing to a stupid task. Loop it like a head bob. We roam the stacks, stairs of floors, and end up with empty hands and sore fingers. Birthing the unseen, we give the world the things we cannot find. 

30 years later. 

A lucky, COVID-inflected meeting with my college mentor professor, retired now, but still writing as all writers must, and for some reason still interested in whatever it is that I’m up to. We say all the usual things leftists say to each other, how the taking of guns and eating of babies gives us painful erections, the kind that can only be dispelled with gay Satanic rituals. We make sure our antifa tattoos line up, clubhouse rings turned to ready the poison needles in case one of us is a doppelgänger. Books are paraded like children, some destined to be doctors, others as opium den mattress weights. Coded papers are exchanged. But you know this if you vote in God’s blindspot. Then finally, this: “I was doing some research on Tolkien for a paper, when I came across something... interesting,” he says as he slides a perfectly-pressed half-sheet across to me.

“I’m pretty sure it’s not from 1946—but it made me think of you and I thought you’d appreciate it.”

Dolly-zoom.  Dolly-zoom again.  Dolly-zoom with a Batman angle.  This is what happens when the universe bends back on itself and ouroboroses into a timey-wimey Spaghetti-O™.  I taste the tomato-y sauce, the catfood meatballs.  I hear the jingle through a tinny, creeping van speaker.  Bugs burst from chrysalides.  Mushrooms waggle and curl at dusty edges.  Cherry trees blow like fireworks.

And I know in that moment the split-second of the unlucky bomb maker.

God's Own Editorial Cartoon

From time to time when the wind shifted at the back door I caught the unmistakable whiff of rotting flesh. It was but the faintest hint, like a long-gone lover's perfume, gently nudging a memory to life but not stroking long enough for arousal. I'd get yanked backwards out of the Internet, look up from my laptop and coffee, scrunchy-faced and think, That smells like... must be something under the greenhouse... and then the wind would shift again and it would be gone.

Just as quickly I'd be back to work, some slowly submerging part of my mind figuring it would either get dramatically worse or nature would just kind of sort it all out.

Repeat at odd intervals for weeks, and then dolly-zoom on yesterday:

We're in the backyard grilling and I catch the scent. That submerged memory rises and bursts in my mind like a viscous swamp bubble. Something under the greenhouse. I wander over to the far corner where it meets the fence and the neighbor's wild growth of enormous greenery and get socked in the head by the odor. I bend down to look under the greenhouse and the stench abates. I rise and the volume cranks back up to breakfast-wrestling. Puzzled and nauseated, I cast about, homing in on the epicenter of—

There are moments where you see things so painfully clear, it's like God's Own editorial cartoon, where an enormously fat man in a diaper wrestling with two hookers on a pile of money somehow encapsulates 30 years of socioeconomic history in a few deft strokes of the pen. A maximized fullness of understanding rendered with the absolute minimum of material and effort.

Momentarily stunned, I say aloud, without turning, "I have to clean up something truly horrible." I do my best to convey you don't want to know with word-choice and tone. I don't move, shielding the eyes I know will be summoned to my back by my voice.

My wife hesitates, words and tone doing the trick. "What—is it?"

"You don't want to know." Then, "I'll take care of it." I turn and stride into the house trying to figure the best—and quickest—way to handle it. Garbage bag, no, two, double-bagged, like a giant glove, gonna have to be hands-on, lift slowly, don't pull...

I am suddenly jerked backwards to The Night of the Great Pooting, where the dog was extremely excited about something in the dark but returned almost instantaneously and with a great stink. It billowed and rose through the house, waking all within and making us fear for the amount of de-stinking labor we'd have to suffer before sleep take us again. Luckily, the dog appeared to have been merely grazed, somehow dodging the shot, at the edge of the cone of stink rather than at the center. At the time I thought it a great boon of luck (and not caution or skill on the part of the dog) but now I knew that it was only because the dog was not the target. The thing had pooted at Death itself in a vain attempt to drive the Grim Reaper off.

The possum had been traversing a mildly treacherous section of fence, one where a hand-span gap narrowed to nothing in a long V that terminated, unfortunately, more than one possum-body length above the ground. Here, human enterprise, entropy, physics and a primitive brain all conspired to do the poor beast in. With footing lost, he fell head-first into a puzzle he couldn't solve, at least not before Death would have him. So he hung by the neck at the bottom of that V, scrabbling and pooting, pooting and scrabbling, then menaced by dogs as he pooted every last ounce of poot he could muster.

What was left, weeks later, demanded to be photographed, at least by those at a safe remove; but for me and the requirements of the task at hand taking pictures was the last thing on my mind. I wanted it over with, and now.

It looked, felt, sounded, smelt and tasted exactly like you'd think, only knobbed up beyond 11.

I can still see the cartoon stink lines.