Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Presents Flush Fiction (9 page)

“Against insectoid opponents, he dragged the combat out as long as he could, counting on their inefficient oxygen diffusion to do them in. For amphibian opponents, he used grappling techniques, seizing them in complicated holds and letting the constant dermal stimulation dehydrate them. For beings who lacked eye structures, he covered himself with blood from the prior combats, to fool their olfactory senses, and hugged the walls so the crowd noise masked his movements.

“I don’t really understand this stuff either, Dutch, but he wrote that part down for me. Here, see? And it’s not important, anyway. The point is, he won. The whole enchilada.”

Dutch interrupts me to theorize, reasonably, that I’ve flipped my lid. He’s determined to humor me, though. Where’s Ricky now, he asks.

“Well, he’s kind of a celebrity, you know, out there.” I point upward. “But not his own man, by any stretch. He had trouble just getting permission to come back long enough to tell me what happened. Still, he has it pretty good, all things considered. As champion, he only has to fight in the final round of each tournament.

“You know, like in
Karate Kid Part III.
”

By now Dutch is sizing me up for a straitjacket, but at least he accepts that I believe what I’m saying. His last-ditch strategy for restoring my sanity is to poke a hole in my story. So if Ricky’s tenure as galactic champ is ongoing, reasons Dutch, why should I ditch my title? They wouldn’t need a second earthling, so I’m in no danger, right?

“Ricky came back to warn me. Apparently they want to change the format, freshen things up.” This, Dutch understands. As entertainment, wrestling, real or fake, gets stale easily.

“For the next tournament, they’re switching to tag teams.” And I drain Dutch’s untouched vodka in one swallow.

Courtney Walsh

W
hen Sister Agnes first set up her mission north of Pyongyang, she didn’t know what to expect, only that she wanted converts to the Lord Jesus and that she wanted to train members of the first North Korean biathlon team. After graduating from Notre Dame, she had enrolled as a novitiate at the new Sisters of Mercy athletic convent in North Bend. There she earned her habit and her rosary beads and her Karhu 10th Mountain Mountaineering skis and her Walther P22 with back strap. She trained and she trained until she could recite the New Testament from memory and get four out of five bull’s-eyes shooting from prone, sitting, and standing positions.

The first to approach her when she got off the plane were twelve of Kim Jong’s Happy Girls in their olive-drab uniforms, each with a tiny red rose in her hair. They bowed and chanted in unison,
Great Leader send high regard and greeting to Poopy-San
.

Poopy San
? That was her, apparently. She bowed in return, and one of the Happy Girls put a lei of red roses around Sister Agnes’s neck. Then they all stepped back and admired her.

“Thank you, thank you,” Agnes said. “Now I have something for you.” She reached into her rucksack and took out a dozen little New Testaments bound in red leather.

Oh, no,
said one of them, her eyes wide with shock,
Chairman Mao!

No, no, no,
they shrieked.
Against fatherland. Against Great Leader. Total nuclear wah!

Agnes laughed good-naturedly, “These are Bibles, dears.”

They glanced at one another, their anger subsiding.
Bible
? one of them said tentatively.

Jesus
? another suggested. There was a murmur among them.
Matthew,
another one said. “Good,” Agnes said.
Mark
, said another. Luke, John, said yet another. Agnes clapped her hands in glee, and then they put the names of the Gospellers into a chant,
Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John
.

“Very good,” Agnes said, and one of them tittered, which caused the others to giggle, too, until they sounded like delighted hamsters.

The one who had put the wreath around Agnes’s neck told her,
Great Leader say you teach us to be Olympic billiard champions.

“Billiards?” she said.

Six ball in side pocket
, said one.

I shoot mass shot
, said another.

Suddenly, Agnes had a brainstorm: Suppose, instead of targets, pool tables could be set up at intervals along the ski course. They would race to the first table, run a rack, and then race to the next one.

Did they have pool tables when Jesus was growing up? She pictured Jesus with his beard and his long white robe, walking around the table as he chalked his cue, calling,
Combination off the six.
Wump, wump, wump: three balls in one shot.

It would be like the Stations of the Cross.

Or cross-country billiards, an entirely new Olympic event.

Agnes clapped her hands. “Take me to your leader!”

William R. D. Wood

E
veryone remembers where they were the day magic returned. Personally, I’d been at it all day, sitting in the little conference room, interviewing applicants for the one opening down at Mega Pest Control. Times were tough and the competition was heavy.

The television in the corner was full of impossible images. Unicorns wandered around Times Square. A dragon batted at airplanes on a taxiway at Reagan International. Huge serpents swam Nessie-like down the Mississippi. And a swarm of fairies—
freaking fairies
—chased children in a schoolyard in Topeka.

I thought it was an elaborate hoax, like the one in the pretelevision years by that fat radio guy, but as the day wore on, the news coverage continued on every channel. Whatever force borrowed or stole the magic eons ago had paid it back with interest.

I scratched at one of several nasty bites on my neck and shuffled applications and legal pads on the table. The day had been long and I was ready to pack it in when Sue leaned in the door, her faced scrunched in an expression I didn’t quite get. “Oscar, you have one more…applicant.”

Oh, well.
I deal mostly with the trades: HVAC, plumbing, extermination, and the like. A little overspecialized, maybe, but I’ve got a knack, I’ve been told, and that’s why they hire me again and again. I’m just good at matching hardworking applicants with eager employers. Call it a gift. Not rocket science. You just have to watch for the signs and trust your gut.

I sighed and settled back into my chair, swatting at another of the monster flies that had been pestering me all day. Biggest bugs I’d ever seen. “Send ‘im in.”

The floor shook once, then twice.
Good God. Were those footsteps
?

An ogre stepped into room, his head hunched to avoid the drop ceiling.

I scrabbled to my feet, almost falling backwards over my folding chair. My heart pounded. Something programmed deep into my genes wailed at me to flee high into the trees or into a dark hole too small for it to follow. When he didn’t attack immediately, I forced myself to breathe slowly, gaining my composure. These were different times. Aside from being big as a gorilla on growth hormones, he could have passed for a 1980s Arnold Schwarzenegger. Except for the tusks.

He’s just another applicant, just another…person…looking for a job.

He looked down at me, eyebrows raised over his big green eyes. He tilted his head to one side, and I was reminded of the distorted cats and dogs on the calendar in the corner. I hate those things. Another bug buzzed by, colliding with my forehead and spiraling off wildly across the room.

“Okay,” I said, straightening my tie and easing down into my chair. “So, uh, you’re looking for a job?”

The ogre grunted.

“Excellent, excellent.”

Wood creaked as he sat on the floor just inside the room. An odor began to grow, like wet puppies and moss. The bugs sure liked it. A dozen flitted around the ogre’s head, but he was oblivious.

“So…this interview is for an exterminator. Mega Pest covers the whole range of vermin. Until today, I suppose.” I chuckled, but the green eyes just stared. “Yes, well. Mister?”

The ogre grunted.

“I see. How do you spell…” I let the question trail off and took out a blank application. “What are your qualifications?”

He reached into a leather bag at his side and flopped a heavy object onto the table. I flinched. A grimy rope threaded through the eye sockets of a dozen animal skulls. The big one in the middle could have been human. He followed my gaze and casually tried
to turn the bony stare facedown on the table. But nothing with hands the size of holiday hams can move casually, and I had to fight the urge to leap through the privacy-glass window behind me.

“I see,” I managed.

Some of the bugs had grown bored with the ogre and resumed dive-bombing me, zooming in, snatching at strays hairs on my head, scratching at my ears. One hovered, bouncing in the air in front of my face like a hummingbird. A glint caught my eye before I could smack at it.

No way.

She was a tiny woman by shape, with dragonfly-style wings, her body covered in glistening, glitter-size specks. Cute, except that the head was wrong. Bulbous eyes, faceted like a fly’s, and a wide grin filled with needle tips. The bites on my neck and arms throbbed.

Well, I’ll be.

The ogre grunted.

I snapped my attention back to the hulking creature and his macabre collection of endorsements strung across the table. “You certainly seem able to handle the, uh, larger varieties, but the world of pest control is always changing—vermin of the day, you might say. What unique qualities do you have to meet the needs of Mega Pest?”

The bug-girl nipped at the back of my neck, drawing blood, and flitted away beyond my reach. One of the ogre’s eyes tracked her for several seconds. A tongue flashed from his mouth, snatching her from the air and into his waiting maw with a satisfying crunch.

I dabbed at a bleeding bite with a Kleenex. Worse than any wasp sting.

I looked into the applicant’s eyes. He stopped chewing, the corners of his mouth attempting a grin and almost succeeding. “You’re hired.”

The ogre grunted.

Robert Perchan

T
here was a blind woman who fell in love with a stout sailor from a distant land. He was a good man and did not touch her, though she wished him to in her heart. He was a stranger to her city, but he took her out to various eating houses and described for her blind eyes the rainbow colors of the food set on the table before them. But it was an exotic culture to him, and the hues were subtle and beyond his range of language, for the blind woman and the sailor spoke to each other only haltingly in a crude lingua franca.

Sometimes they returned together to her narrow room above the seamstress shop where she made her living stuffing scraps of colored cloth into pillows for the rich. He drank beer there and snacked on the dried fish and dark sausages that she prepared for him from memory. The sailor was a fat man, a man of the gut, and did his thinking and feeling down there in the labyrinth of the guts. He broke wind one evening, leaning close to her as he provided a sluice for the gas to escape. (You know what I mean.) The blind woman smiled and he saw her smile. “What was that?” she asked, knowing full well. “That is the sound of a man who loves you, when he is near,” he answered. The blind woman liked the pure idea of the sentiment and invited him to lie down with her. He followed, both thinking:
What is there to lose
?