First published in Caketrain 07, 2009. Copyright 2009 by Tetman Callis.
Lines of force delimit hexylresorcinol, the ever-resourceful organ unpronounceable of crystalline phenol used as a persuasive bluer, an antiseptic, and an anti-something-else that would have to be looked up.
No, the congenital fiance said, it’s not an “anti” anything, it’s anthelmintic, which, he conceded, would still have to be looked up.
He resented the limitations of the lines of force —they filled him, these lines, their limits, with resentment. Whippy though he often was, on this occasion his cycloid being was enhanced. Keen on bandeaux (about which we shall hear no more) our fiance has always been, and if not always, then at least since some months after conception (we shall hear no more of that, either). Part and parcel, stock in trade of his juvenescence, hand in glove with a barely disguised, and in fact tumescent syndicalism about which he knew nothing and understood less, was that which was sure to leave him trapped in a hoist of his own low-slung petards.
And with that, our fiance spat.
Turning inboard, our congenital fiance fluffed his collieshangie’s multiple value. A good collieshetland, play-by-play, was more than worth its goggles. Our fiance would need his own goggles, too, were he and his pup to continue their frolic with the hexyletcetera.
They looked up, our fiance and his pup. Always a mistake, ask anyone. Spangled across the banner sky, red and blue-black lines of force embattled cyborg cutlery.
It’s time to duck, our Balaamic bridegroom said to his dear collieshaddock, recognizing as he immediately did the dangers of a sky filled with magnetized robotic forks, knives, corkscrews and spoons.
The dog did not need to be told twice.
He (the cong. fiance) and his cousinage (the colliesh.) vectored down a cosecant until they were completely lost. This lossage, being so complete, was accomplished either instantaneously or never, which amounted to the same thing. Our fiance rattled his collieshtetl’s costume jewelry, extemporizing as all of us would in such a confusing situation.
Lover, he said, disciplined oeuvre sparged thin-skinned as a jabiru’s hopes could be the dish to dish up now, as in front of our tired, begoggled eyes, do we not see the exquisitely unpronounceable diethylcarbamazine, its crystalline citrate deployment just the thing to control your roundworm?
To which question the collieshangie (settled for the time being on being such) could offer up no reply other than a diffident wag of tail.
The congenital fiance looked up. The lines of force had faded from the sky. Spoons were scattered about. The congenital fiance, juvenescent and growing ever more so by the moment, said to his collieshangie, Baby-dog, I don’t know what any of this means.
The cousinage, the baby-dog in reference, never knew what to say, but knew where it could be looked up. But never knowing what to say, the collieshangie kept the referenced referential mystery mysterious, at which silence our congenital fiance buried his face in his baby-dog’s furry coat, laughing and weeping and smearing sticky substance all around, decreasing the collieshangie’s myriad valences of value. And of course, there’s always the roundworm.
And of further course, there are no lines without limits.
And completely off course, there is the remorseless remora, into whose precincts neither we nor the congenital fiance shall stray, though the collie seems to have wandered off.