Specimen & Other Stories

Copyright
©
Alan Annand
2015

Published by Sextile.com at Smashwords

Specimen & Other Stories

© Alan Annand 2011

V.11022015

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or
are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales,
or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this
publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means without permission in writing from the publisher.
Distribution of this electronic edition via the internet or any
other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal.

ISBN 978-1-927799-11-6

Bananarama
:
Reformed meat-eater embarks on a 15-day
bananas-and-orange-juice diet, with surprising side
effects.

The Date Square Killer
:
Mild-mannered hit man finds love, social justice and the
meaning of life in non-random acts of murder.

River Girl
:
Middle-aged bureaucrat takes a detour on his morning jog that
leads him to an unexpected rendezvous with Fate.

Specimen
:
A wealthy
butterfly collector visits his twin brother, warden of a penal
colony, who is building his own unique collection.

The Bassman Cometh
:
My night with Margaret Atwood: Hapless university graduate
student in 1975 ruins famous Canadian author's poetry
reading.

The Naskapi & the U-Boat
:
A German U-Boat in WW2 visits northern Quebec to
install a weather station, but a native family compromises their
secret mission.

Cormac McCarthy once said, “
I’m not
interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take
years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth
doing.
” Indeed, like many other novelists, for me the short
story form has been more of a diversion than a devotion, sort of
like a marathon runner taking an occasional jog around the
neighborhood.

These stories, however, reflect the
diversity of my interests and style. Three are humorous, two
involve murder and violence, a sixth is a wry combination of both.
Two are autobiographical, the other four pure fiction. Two are set
in my native New Brunswick, two in my adopted Toronto, two in
remote climes as divergent as the tropics and the Arctic.

Ultimately, this collection is an appetizer.
If you like some of these, perhaps you’ll enjoy my crime novels,
all of which feature heroes and villains with a wry sense of humor
and a lust for adventure in all its forms.

~~~~~~~~~

Many years ago, inspired by the stellar
example of the Buddha, and a bizarre association with one Wild Bill
Periwinkle, an American New Age writer I’d met in the backwoods of
New Brunswick, I decided to become a vegetarian.

It was a sensible thing to do, although
desperation played a part. After years of struggling to make it as
a writer, I was ready to emulate the virtues of any good role
model, and since Wild Bill had already carved a niche for himself
in the publishing world, I figured that if it worked for him, it
might also work for me. According to Wild Bill, if only I’d free my
body from the bad karma of all those hapless animals sacrificed for
my dining pleasure, my luck would turn, and I too could soon see my
name on a book jacket. Equally important, Wild Bill explained,
there were also significant health benefits.

“After years of eating meat, the heavy mucus
coating in the colon thickens to the consistency of truck tire
rubber, becoming a host of putrefaction. As noxious debris seeps
through the bowel wall, the capillaries to the colon suck up these
toxins and distribute them freely among the organs and tissues of
the body.”

Wild Bill took a long draw on a skinny joint
and passed it to me. He was a normally reticent fellow, but as soon
as he had a lungful of ganja smoke inside him, he became as gabby
as a talk-show host on amphetamines.

“Thanks to years of encrusted fecal buildup,
some colons under autopsy have measured nine inches in diameter,
with channels no bigger than a pencil through which one can barely
pass a rabbit pellet, never mind the super-sized leftovers of
yesterday’s fast food meal. I’ll bet you didn’t know, Elvis had 60
pounds of this crap jamming up his exit route.”

“Is that why he died on the john?” I
said.

“To rid your body of all that intestinal
gunk, and pave the way for a better life, both now and in your next
incarnation, you’ve got to undergo a cleansing diet,” Wild Bill
told me in his most seriously spiritual tone.

It seemed like a worthy goal, and although
I’d followed Wild Bill’s advice on any number of other
quasi-mystical regimens that had failed to manifest any noteworthy
benefit, I was always game for another adventure in
consciousness-raising. According to Wild Bill, it was simply a
matter of faith and perseverance before my colon would be running
as clean as a mountain stream.

The program was deceptively simple, as
outlined in
The Canadian Whole Earth Almanac
, a copy of
which Wild Bill loaned me as proof this wasn’t just another of his
crazy ideas, but was in fact endorsed by one of the flagship
publications of the counter-culture. In the best New Age tradition,
with a strong bias for all things cosmic, the diet would start on
the new moon and finish on the full moon. Fifteen days, in which I
should eat no more nor less than nine bananas a day. To wash it
down, I could drink all the orange juice I wanted. And if I needed
to suppress any gas resulting from the consumption of enough
bananas to feed a small tribe of monkeys, I should add three
cardamom seeds to this daily regimen. That’s it, that’s all.

This being my first diet, I decided to keep
it simple. I’d never been one to suffer from gas, so I didn’t
trouble myself with hunting down the exotic cardamom seed at a
natural foods emporium. Instead, I went to the nearest supermarket
and bought a case of almost-ripe bananas, and a gallon of orange
juice. The checkout girl looked at me kind of funny.

“Do you have a pet monkey?”

“Yes, but he’s a naughty little primate, and
I frequently have to spank him. Do you love animals? Maybe you
could help. What time do you get off work?”

She hurriedly gave me change and turned her
attention to the next shopper in line. I shouldered my case of
bananas and headed home.

My first day went something like this: two
bananas for breakfast, three bananas for lunch, three bananas for
dinner and one banana for a late-night snack. The first couple of
days went fine. I liked bananas and they seemed to like me. I
noticed, however, that despite all this volume, my bowels seemed to
have gone on strike. Maybe they were just trying to adjust to this
pH-neutral food that was so good for them that they didn’t know how
to deal with it, somewhat like the aboriginal peoples who didn’t
get it at first that the arriving colonists would, contrary to all
the initial evidence, eventually improve their quality of life,
turning them from itinerant hunter-gatherers into business-savvy
casino operators.

Finally, on day three I had a bowel movement
that should have prompted me to get a photo and/or a witness to
register it for the
Guinness Book of World Records
. It was
the size of a banana-colored anaconda, and took several flushes of
the toilet to banish it to the netherworld of the sewage system. My
inner monkey got quite a primal fright in seeing this snake-like
phenomenon so up close and personal, but after it was gone, I felt
distinctly lighter in all respects. Maybe I was now on my way to
cleanliness of body, soul and spirit, just as Wild Bill in a
temporary lucid state had prophesied.

Around day five, I began to suffer gas
attacks the like of which World War One trench soldiers had never
experienced. At first it was just a minor thing, a bit of
intestinal bloating, followed by a relieving wind that smelled
distinctly of bananas. It had quite a sweetish odor, actually, and
in the volumes being emitted, quickly precluded the need in my
apartment for incense to mask the odor of stale kitty litter or the
catnip my feline friends were fond of smoking day and night.

I rushed out to the nearest health food
store and bought a hundred grams of cardamom seeds. I didn’t have
anything with which to grind the seeds to a powder, so I just
gobbled a handful. An hour later, I lay doubled up on my bed,
nearly paralyzed by terrible stomach cramps.

Meanwhile, it was obvious that the cardamom
seeds had none of their desired effect, and by day’s end I was
discharging gas almost continuously, at an industrial rate of
production. My lower bowel had been transformed into a banana
methane factory.

I called my girlfriend and cancelled our
usual Friday night date. She was miffed but I preferred not to
explain. On Saturday night I skipped a movie I’d planned to see
with some buddies. I didn’t go to church on Sunday morning. I
missed classes on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. On
Friday, however, I had a test in American Lit 409 that was so
important I couldn’t avoid it, so by hissing wind all the way to
the class, and then completing a multiple choice questionnaire in
record time, I made a beeline to the washroom where I cut loose a
wicked one that nearly blew the door off the stalls. Temporarily
deflated, I retreated to self-imposed solitary confinement in my
apartment. Ironically, my reading assignment for the weekend was
Gone With the Wind
.

Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us
stronger
, Nietzsche said, but he never had to go through this.
Suffering in the name of a good cause, however, I maintained a
stiff upper lip and a flaccid sphincter. Four more days and my
colon would be ollie-ollie-toxin-free. Although I desperately
craved pizza, beer, potato chips, pork rinds, salted peanuts –
anything but the sweet mush of another banana – I hung tough. God
in his wisdom had something good for me at the end of all this, I
believed, my faith as unshakeable as those Kamikaze pilots who rode
their planes down to destruction with what they called a divine
wind at their backs. Trouble is, when I looked over my shoulder,
the wind at my back was nothing short of diabolic.

The hiss of gas was a constant background
noise. My upstairs neighbors called the utility company to complain
about a leak. When a technician arrived with his gas monitor, I
told him to go ahead and check the place, I was just going out for
a walk. I hurried across the street and into a cemetery where I
hunched behind a gravestone and liberated some bowel steam.
Squirrels in the trees above swooned like canaries and hung from
the branches with sick expressions on their furry little mugs. When
I returned to my apartment half an hour later I found a note from
the utility man saying everything was fine with the gas lines, but
maybe I should empty my garbage can, which was overflowing with
rotten banana skins and empty orange juice cartons.

On the afternoon of day 15, the full moon, I
was down to the short strokes on this inhuman diet, which by now I
was convinced must have been dreamed up by Hanuman, the fierce
monkey god of Hindu cosmology, as some bizarre rite of evolutionary
progress. No dessert until you eat your vegetables, and no rebirth
until you eat your fruit. I was counting, if not the hours, then
certainly the bananas. 131 down, only four more to go. I could do
it. Before me lay only dinner and a bedtime snack, and then one
last night’s restless sleep, during which I would toss and turn and
billow the bed sheets with enough banana methane to heat a
house.