Outside Bozeman - Southwest Montana's Outdoor Journal

Disclaimer: This document has not been edited by the Outside Bozeman editorial staff. Any typos, misspellings, or other errors can be blamed completely on the authors themselves -- who, given the foolish nature of the assignment itself, could probably care less.

2009 FOOLISH WORDS

Ryan Cassavaugh

Ryan Cassavaugh is a founding member of Equinox Comedy Death Match, writer/performer on the TV sketch comedy show "The Pizza Show," stand-up comic, puppeteer, and playwright. His plays include "Last Kings of America" and "Waiting To Be Taken," which recently took home best production honors at the 2009 Equinox One-Act Festival.

Once, when Gilbert was nine, he had accompanied his parents to a dinner party after the babysitter had canceled at the very last minute with a case of the mumps. While his parents cavorted with the other adults, Gilbert crawled up on a pile of coats in the master bedroom, and promptly fell asleep. When he awoke he was in the back of the family station wagon headed home. For a moment his mind struggled to bridge the gap from bedroom to moving vehicle.

This was like that. Only much, much worse.

Gilbert remembered, quite clearly, standing in the frozen food section of Albertson’s trying to decide between the Turkey Dinner or Salisbury Steak ‘Bachelor Meals For One’ when there was a noise and a bright flash of light. And then he was here. Standing on a packing crate in the middle of a very large, very gray, warehouse with a semi-automatic pistol in his left hand, and an amulet in his right. On the floor, scattered around him like discarded coats at a dinner party, were about two dozen men and women in black lab-coats. They were all dead. Each with a neat hole, like that produced by a semi-automatic pistol, in the center of their foreheads.

His first thought was to panic. I would like to say that a cool, action-hero-like sense of propriety was responsible for the fact that Gilbert did not simply start running around the building flailing his arms like an inflatable Uncle Sam outside a used car dealership in a heavy wind and screaming “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God…”; however, in truth, the only thing that stopped our hero (and let’s get this straight right now people, Gilbert is, indeed, the hero of this story!) from a full-blown freak out was the very simple fact that to panic Gilbert would first have had to accept that this was actually happening.

Gilbert did at least gain enough control of his basic faculties to look more closely at the amulet in his right hand. It was large, about the size of a compact disc, and made of a dark, heavy, gray metal. In the center was a raised image of a goat's head, and around the edges were a series of letters that Gilbert did not recognize. A long chain was connected though a loop near the bottom of the amulet, so that, when worn, the goat’s head would be upside down. It’s just the kind of thing one would imagine looked quite nice around the neck of a young Christopher Lee.

And now, as if things were not bad enough, Gilbert’s ass seemed to be vibrating.

Placing the gun in his front coat pocket, Gilbert reached behind him and located the source of the tremors. A cell phone. It was black and long, almost old fashioned-looking in its simplicity. There was no screen, no keyboard, not even numbers for dialing out, just a large green button in the middle that said TALK. He pushed it.

Joseph Menicucci Jr.

Joseph Menicucci waxes poetic about our national pastime at http://www.baseballfaceoff.blogspot.com. Currently an instructor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at MSU-Bozeman, Joseph is presenting his paper, The Old Man and DiMaggio, at the Popular Culture Association & American Culture Associations 2009 National Conference in New Orleans, La.

“GILBERT!?!”

“Mom? MOM? How did...”

“GILBERT!!! Finally! Have you been avoiding me?”

“No, I haven’t been avoiding you (and why would I avoid the person who, in her infinite wisdom, decided to name me Gilbert Nathan Sullivan?)! How did you...”

“If you loved me, you’d answer your phone when I call.”

“Mom, how did you get...”

“If you loved me, you’d call me more often.”

“Mom, how did you get this number?”

“Beth gave it to me.”

“Woah, woah, woah, woah...you talked to Beth?”

“She’s lovely. You should call her!”

“Ma, we broke up a year ago. Please.”

“Well, I think you should give her another chance.”

“Ma, I gotta call you back.”

“No. Absolutely not. No. I’ve been trying to call you on your old phone for a week. But I call your new number and THEN you answer. You’ve been avoiding me, Gilbert. I raised you to be a nice young man. Nice young men call their mothers more than once a month. Nice young men answer their mother’s phone calls. Nice young men...”

“Ma, I’ve got to call Beth.”

“Well that sounds WONDERFUL! Call me and tell me how it goes! Good luck!”

Gilbert’s mother loved Beth for her wry smile and her willingness to gossip about anything. They would often have breakfast together the morning after Beth would spend the night, and no topic of conversation was sacred. One morning, Gilbert walked into the kitchen to hear Beth describing every detail of the night before while his mother laughed hoarsely, cigarette dangling precariously out of her mouth. A week later, Gilbert moved in with Beth.

Now it never occurred to Gilbert that Beth might have been unfaithful, but it soon became apparent by the unexpected late night phone calls, cryptic messages on the answering machine, and Beth’s many lunch dates with friends Gilbert had never met, let alone ever heard about.

Oh yes, there was also the time Gilbert walked in to find Beth underneath a mass of bulging biceps and chiseled torso.

“He was the world’s premier Hungarian male model, what was I supposed to do? Say no?”

So, then, it was with much reluctance, that Gilbert pulled out his other phone, and dialed Beth’s number.

Sally Belk King

Sally Belk King is the author of 4 books and spent 16 years in New York as an editor for Bon Appetit, House Beautiful, and House & Garden magazines. Most recently, she served as an editor for Big Sky Journal and winereviewonline.com. She has been in Bozeman for 10 years, and has absolutely no intention of ever moving back east. Unless someone offers her a lot of money, a Park Avenue apartment, a house in the Hamptons, and a really cool job. sbkproductions.com

“Hello?” a craggy voice answered.

“Um, is this Beth?” asked Gilbert, trying to keep his cool.

“Yea, who is this? It’s 5 in the morning!”

“It’s me, Gilbert. I just wanted to talk to you for a few minutes, you know, catch up and see how you’re doing,”

“Jeezus, Gilbert! It’s too early to have that kind of conversation, PLUS….I have COMPANY and even if I’d had a latte with six extra shots of espresso from Rockford, I wouldn’t be able to chat right now. Call back some other time,” she snapped, then slammed the phone down.

Gilbert began to pace and repeat the “F” word over and over again as he walked around and around and around. Calling Beth was a mistake. It awakened all his sadness and anger about their break-up….He THOUGHT he’d gotten over her, but, no. Maybe he would always have feelings for her.

He looked at the strange phone again. Why was his MOTHER on the other end of the line when he pushed the green “talk” button?

Very bizarre. So bizarre, that he began to pace again.

Although it was only six A.M., he popped the Salisbury steak frozen dinner into the microwave oven, and—in typical bachelor fashion—poured ketchup all over it –even on the shriveled green peas--and ate the entire meal standing up, perched against the kitchen counter. The generic frozen dinner was horrific, but he ate it mindlessly.

“I’ve GOT to get over to Albertson’s,” he mumbled to himself. His cat, Obama, looked at him as if he understood. He loved his new cat….he’d gotten the feline at the Humane Society just a few weeks earlier when he realized—for the first time in his life—that without Beth, he was, well, kind of lonely.

Obama purred and did figure-8’s around Gilbert’s legs. “OK, Obama. Here you go….have at it,” he said as he put down the congealed gravy in the microwavable dish.

He gave Obama a loving rub behind his ears (Obama was a sucker for that) and got dressed.

It was a really cold morning, so he layered up. He looked on his dresser and there it was: the amulet.

“How did this get here?” he wondered.

He tucked it under his down jacket….the one he’d gotten on sale at Northern Lights just a few weeks ago. Then he fondled the amulet….for some strange reason, it gave him a feeling of power, even though he didn’t know what the writing meant.

Gilbert drove to Albertson’s and made his way back into the storage area, which was used as a warehouse for all those frozen bachelor meals and everything else not yet on the shelves.

That’s where it had all happened….the bright light, the vibrating phone in his back pocket, and the gunshot.

OMIGOD. Where’s the semi-automatic pistol? He checked the pockets of the down coat, and breathed a sigh of relief. Whew. There it was, hidden away.

“What are you doing in here?” asked the security guard, who had obviously seen Gilbert go into the warehouse area via some sort of security camera.

“Um, I was, Um, just……….

Susan Andrus
Susan Andrus is a student, a mother, a reader, a writer, a procrastinator and irresponsible. She is also the creator of The Consortium of the Creative Nudge—you can learn more about that at www.creativenudge.org .
“Well…?” The security guard had an extremely authoritative and disapproving tone that made Gilbert feel as though he should immediately find the nearest corner and put his nose in it.

“I, um… I’m sorry?”

The men stared at one another for a moment.

“And…?” The security guard raised an eyebrow and drew his chin down. His chin, showing a remarkable propensity for asexual reproduction, became six or seven chins. Gilbert held back a giggle.

“And I, uh, I mean, um… I won’t do it again… sir.”

The security guard sternly stared. Gilbert slid his right foot around a little and looked down at the floor.

There was something wrong with this floor. Something was different. Aside from the distinct lack of about two dozen bodies Gilbert felt like there was definitely something different about the floor. In fact, now that he thought about it there was something different about the door too. And the light fixtures. And the warehouse had gotten decidedly smaller, as well.

“This isn’t where it happened!” Gilbert blurted.

“Where what happened, son? Are you on some kind of drugs?”

Gilbert started to walk toward the door, but he froze when he felt the amulet slip from the waist of his pants where he’d tucked it.

Too late.

The amulet shot down his leg inside his pants, popped out of the leg opening and clanked onto the floor.

“What the heck is tha… oh!” The security guard had started to walk toward Gilbert, but had stopped abruptly when he saw the amulet. He dropped to his knees.

“I’m so sorry, sir… Melvin Archer, sir. At your service.”

“Wait…” Gilbert squinted his eyes a bit. His mouth opened and closed. “So… you, you know what that is?”

Heidi Lasher
Heidi Lasher is a freelance writer and editor and communications strategist. Her countless reports, papers, and articles can be found on dusty bookshelves all over the world. She's also been known to craft beautifully-written, long-winded emails and fabulous thank you cards. She has two kids, a marvelous husband, and an unrelenting cat.

“It’s a zodiac goat talisman,” bowed Melvin, tucking his chins deeply into his chest. “Made in China.”

Gilbert looked only more confused.

“May I?” gestured Melvin. Gilbert tossed him the amulet, now convinced it was just some cheap plastic piece of crap that came from WalMart.

Melvin caught it with two hands and inspected it. “The goat talismans were originally hand-carved by seriously scared and pissed off mothers in China to protect their sons from the invading Japanese. After Pearl Harbor, they became popular among US soldiers as well. Thousands—maybe millions—were manufactured and usually passed on from mother-to-son, but very few remain. The originals—the hand carved ones—are said that they are very powerful. The cheaper manufactured ones less so, but it kind of depended on the mother-son dynamic.”

“Why the hell do you know about it? Are you some kind of history buff?”

“Naw, my grandfather was a veteran. Served in Okinawa. His mother gave him one of these when he enlisted. He said it kept him alive during the war. I used to sneak into his room and play with it, but I stopped…” Melvin looked off into the distance. Gilbert thought he saw him shudder, but then again, the warehouse was cold and Gilbert wasn’t too astute an observer.

Melvin’s eyes eventually drifted back to the amulet. “Anyway, looks like you’ve got yourself a real one here. Hand-carved, reverse loop, Mandarin characters.” He ran his fingers across the letters and then handed the talisman back to Gilbert.

“At your service,” he repeated again, bowing.

“You’re freaking me out, dude. What’s with the bowing and scraping?”

“You’ve got yourself a pretty powerful trinket there, mister. I’m not gonna get on the wrong side of it OR your mother,” and with that Melvin stood up and basically vanished into the shelves of frozen food. Or at least that’s how it appeared to Gilbert who (like I said) tended to miss things.

Gilbert swallowed the particle of Salisbury steak and bile that had re-entered his mouth. He studied the mysterious amulet before jamming it into his pocket, annoyed that his mother was, once again, somehow involved in the only thing going on in his miserable life.

Terry Cunningham
Terry Cunningham’s specialty is driving local publications out of business. His column “The Flatlander’s View” ran in Explore for 10 years before the magazine’s sudden demise. His outdoor articles appeared in Tributary until it too went belly-up. To date, Montana Quarterly and Carve have somehow managed to avoid the Cunningham Curse.

Gilbert walked in a daze into the Albertson’s parking lot, mindful that the two things in life that irked him most were: 1) unexplained phenomena and 2) the word “doily.” Early morning sunlight peeked timidly over the Bridger Mountains. After opening the door of his 1996 Toyota Tacoma pickup, he patted his pockets. Had he acquired anything during his “dark period” other than the amulet, the pistol and the phone that resembled Captain James T. Kirk’s communication device?

Checking the back right pocket of his tan Carhartt pants, he noticed that his wallet, normally as thin as boarding house soap, was bulging at the seams. Inside the wallet were twenty-five crisp $100 bills and a business card. Printed beneath a Prudential Realty logo was: Tad Moore – Licensed Broker. Everyone in Bozeman knew the name Tad Moore. How could you not? Certain radio jingles you couldn’t get out of your head: the Kleen King jingle, the Bare’s Stove & Spa jingle and the Tad Moore jingle.

“Who’ll go the extra yard for you? Tad Moore, that’s who. Who’ll give one-hundred-one percent to you? Tad Moore, that’s who. When you want a smidge more service, you need Tad Moore.”

What was the card of a realtor he’d never met doing in his wallet – along with enough cash to buy 5.56 mid-week adult season passes at Bridger Bowl? He sat in the driver’s seat and turned the ignition key. His mind raced as his truck idled. Was he responsible for the slaughter of more than a score of black-lab-coated humans? He knew he tended to overlook details, so maybe those black garments weren’t really lab coats. Perhaps the dead people were cosmetologists, or art critics or members of the Bozeman Symphony Orchestra.

There were only two people who could shed light on this conundrum: Beth (who had somehow known Captain Kirk’s phone number) and his mother. His hand brushed against the amulet in his pocket and he experienced an overwhelming urge to drive to his mother’s house on North Black. He yanked the inverted goat head out of his pocket and tossed it on the passenger’s seat. Had he been more observant, Gilbert would have noticed that the cryptic characters on the amulet, when reflected in the rearview mirror, were not actually in Mandarin, and that Albertson’s was running a special on pistachios. Gilbert loved pistachios.

He drove to Beth’s house in the exclusive Culo Verde subdivision on the southern outskirts of town. He pulled past stacked-stone pillars into Beth’s driveway and saw something that made him slam on the brakes. Beth had company all right. He shook his head in disbelief and shouted, “Spanky?!”

Erin Fuller

Erin Fuller is a fledgling writer and likes to pretend she is a comedian. She is a member of the local improv troupe, Equinox Comedy Death Match, and author of the barely-palatable novel, The Adventures and Woes of Taylor Graham. Her first novel, it was written in 28 days during NaNoWriMo 2008 and shall never see the light of day, at least in it’s current state. Thankfully, she has a ‘real job’ as a camp director.

“That bitch is seriously sleeping with my little brother, of all people?!?!”

A new side suddenly shone through Gilbert as the anger built so quickly it almost seeped out of his pores. He threw open the door of the dull red Tundra, leaving it gaping wide as he strode in giant, stomping steps to Beth’s front door. He passed right over the niceties of knocking and pushed his way through the unlocked door.

“What the fuck, Beth?” he yelled before his eyes settled on the scene in the room.

The living room looked nothing like Gilbert remembered it. The overstuffed, coffee-colored, micro –suede couch on which they had many times made love was gone. In fact, all of the furniture had been cleared out. In their place sat nearly a dozen stern-faced men and women, all in dark brown hooded robes, and all staring at him. Gilbert stood frozen in the doorway.

Not two seconds after Gilbert had first pushed open the door, Beth was already on her feet and rushing to him. The fiery anger he felt had already slipped away and been replaced by fear and confusion. The sole thought that passed through Gilbert’s mind was sudden regret that the amulet had been hastily left on the bench seat of the pick-up truck.

“What don’t you understand about wait for instructions?” Beth demanded as she grabbed his elbow and jerked him inside the house, looking out briefly before slamming the door. “Bernard,” she added quietly, “Please take care of the truck.” One of hooded figures got up quietly and headed through the house towards the garage door.

“Wh… what? You didn’t tell me to wait for any instructions,” Gilbert said foggily. He was still trying to take in the scene before him. His eyes scanned the circle of people and settled on the eyes of his only brother, Peter, who had gone by the name “Spanky” ever since an unfortunate incident with the class beauty in elementary school. How in the hell did Spanky get caught up in… this… well, whatever’s going on here? he wondered.

Beth’s harsh voice interrupted his thoughts. “You should have been told when you were given the phone. And didn’t your mother call and tell you to come over?”

“My mother’s mixed up in this, too?”

“Oh, don’t worry. It’s not like she knows what’s going on. We just thought she’d keep you occupied. So did she call you or not?”

“Well yeah, but when I said I was calling you, she got all excited.”

“Oh, damn it.” Beth took a deep breath before continuing, “Well, you’re here now, and it doesn’t look like you were followed. Gilbert, I suppose it’s time you met The Council.”

Sid Gustafson, Sid’s upcoming THE LANGUAGE OF HORSEMANSHIP will be published by Eclipse Press in Lexington, Kentucky. www.sidgustafson.com

Meta-foolishness, you say. You thought we penned much of this Carlos Castenada plot last time, this transfiguration from one state to another, one stage to another, much of it a subliminal response to the scrivener’s excessive use of illicit drugs and licit alcohol which results in errant gratuitous violence and moronic metaphoric naming. Foolish plots for foolish words, oh foolish ones… Seven plots you have seen: amnesia, drugs, cuckhold remorse, violence1, cloaked talismen, youth, and motherhood, that is until Erin entered the fray installing sex into the story, the only dependable plot.
Earlier, you thought the phone had no dial, but from here on out spanking will occupy your concerns.
Earlier, humane societies began to seem recurrent, and soon you will know why.
Déjà vu and much of it true.
If you are hoping for a novel’s multidimensional fiction, hoping to get out of Flatland where old stories are told but new stories live under the click of a footnote mouse, spank on2.

Footnotes:
1 Sam Peckinpaugh’s The Wild Ones comes to mind. (I watched that movie in the Ellen, yards from this story will be read but what we need here is a Rancho Deluxe plot, which I also viewed in the Ellen, the crowd packed in happy.)
2 Gilbert refused to go in. Beth, always a big lithe girl who could both dig and spike, bent Gilbert over on her knee and gave him a good spanking. Gilbert experienced something he had never felt before, a G-spot orgasm, oddly wild and as yet undiscovered in his repertoire of sexual adventurousness, and of all places right out there in Beth’s yard where they once played croquet. Gun took on new meaning for Gilbert, non-lethal. He followed Beth indoors. He stood before The Spanking Council, a torn-pocket smile, a nice line of clear drool coming out of the lower corner of his mouth, Spanking Bliss.

Mark Ross

Then, blackness, dropped like a heavy curtain echoing on an empty stage. Gilbert slept for what seemed to be days upon weeks. There were no dreams, no sudden awakenings, nothing but moments where he would begin to realize that he was becoming conscious. Just as his eyes would adjust to the greyness and the shadowy details of a room would begin to form, he would slip back into sleep.

Later, Gilbert eventually realized he was awake and studying a small spider on the ceiling above him, The spider would move very slowly, then stop for a few minutes, then move a little more. Gilbert propped himself up on his elbows and looked around the room.

He was in a poster bed. The room's furniture — a large dresser with mirror, a chest of drawers, and a small desk and chair— was a dark antique mahogany which sank heavily into a thick, powder-blue carpet. The walls were white and bare except for a small, square, matted silhouette of a young girl that hung alone next to a closet door. The desk was empty as was the top of the dresser. Gilbert could hear music from outside the room but it was too muffled to identify.

He swung his feet around and stepped onto a cold, narrow piece of plastic that led to the door. I haven't seen "carpet protectors" like these since I was a kid, he thought as he walked to and opened the door. Now that he was out in the hallway, he could hear that the music was some sort of tropical jazz. He could also hear harsh whispers coming from behind an almost shut door at the end of the hall. As he moved towards them in slow-motion, he began to catch some of the phrases. We can't wake him up now, he'll see what we're doing! He needs to understand, the sooner the better. Mr. Moore, with all due respect, I don't think you understand the lengths my wife will go to see this thing--

Gilbert pushed open the door and the eyes in the room turned to him. There was a woman, in her 30s, pretty, wearing a mink stole, standing with two men both dressed in dark suits. On the bed behind them were piled coats of all sorts, and on top of them, a young boy, asleep. Gilbert stared into the face of sleeping boy, and he felt his insides tighten, then drop away.

Alison Grey
Alison Grey is the marketing coordinator and newsletter editor for the Community Food Co-op and occasionally finds people who will actually give her money to write articles. When she isn’t shamelessly promoting the Co-op, she is probably skiing, drinking beer or coming up with new and exciting ways to spend money that she does not have. She also admits to a recent addiction to Facebook.

Meanwhile, Gilbert’s mother (also known as Trudie) was at the Community Food Co-op, sipping on yerba matte tea and eating a fresh organic salad. A recent convert to the sustainable and local food movement, she no longer supported the evils of industrial agriculture, instead opting for an herbicide-, pesticide- and GMO-free diet. Now, she biked to the Co-op with her eco-friendly canvas shopping bags and stocked her shelves with kombucha, Jamaican jerk tofu and rice milk.
Recently she had even written a letter to the owner of Albertsons informing him of the dangers of farmed fish, something she ate excessively during her pregnancy with Gilbert and believed caused him irreparable damage, particularly to his delicate psyche, perhaps contributing to his fear and distrust of women.
As she popped a cherry tomato into her mouth, she opened her laptop and immediately signed into her Facebook account. It was her latest addiction since giving up cigarettes, where she would spend inordinate amounts of time updating her status, commenting on photos and developing close and meaningful relationships with 439 of her closest friends.
She clicked on Gilbert’s page, which seemed to be the only way she could be a part of his life these days. He had ‘un-friended’ her at least five times in the past six months after she posted inappropriate comments on his wall, but recently had guilt-tripped him into ‘re-friending’ her.
Trudie sighed, he was still listed as single and the most recent wall posting was her own, asking him to call her. However, his status had been changed to say: “Gilbert is going to Albertsons for the great deal on pistachios.”
And his picture was changed too. Looking solemn, he was draped in a black coat holding a long white phallic-looking weapon. She gasped, choking on a hardboiled free-range organic chicken egg. This couldn’t be!
She immediately went to Beth’s page. There was a message on her wall from a beautiful woman with a fur jacket that read: OMG. WTF? IMHO, TMI about Gilbert! BTW, CYA and DBEYR it’s all FUD. FWIW, he’s totally SITD. LOL, your BFF, Sandra.
Trudie called her 13-year-old niece to decode this strange mix of indiscernible new-age shorthand, which translated to: Oh my God. What the fuck? Too much info about Gilbert. By the way, cover your ass and don’t believe everything you read, it’s all fear, uncertainty and disinformation. For what’s it’s worth, he’s totally still in the dark. Lots of love, your best friend forever, Sandra.
Immediately, Trudie began calling Gilbert. No answer. She leapt from her seat, running from the Co-op and frantically began peddling her bike towards Albertsons.

Kent Davis
Kent Davis is an actor, director and playwright. He is also a member of the Choose-Your-Own-Department faculty at MSU and an artistic director for the Equinox Theatre Company. His new comedy solo performance, called No Space, will be running at Equinox from March 27 to April 10. He makes games for geeks and struggles with cooking things.

Trudie pedaled like the wind to the corner of 11th and Babcock. Later that evening she reached the other side of 11th and continued on toward Albertson’s. She prayed that Gilbert had succumbed to one of his odd counting fits and had been delayed parsing nuts, but her screaming Mother’s Instinct told her that he was probably long gone. She could only hope to find some information that might help her search.

She rode. The crunch of the gravel, the card tattooing the spokes, the lack of any other discernible ambient noise, it was almost soothing. Too soothing.

She backed the pedal of her cruiser, skidding to a stop. She sniffed the air and detected a faint hint of... almond oil? That long-familiar scent and the sudden howling of all the dogs in a five block radius activated her dormant senses. She hadn’t felt this, aware, since those terrible three days, so many years ago on that freighter in the Yangtze.

She quickly emptied her canvas shopping bag onto the pavement, shooting an especially pained glance at the gluten-free pizza crust she’d just discovered on sale. It couldn’t be helped. She took a quick breath and used her long dormant training to knot the bag into an improvised morning star, a weighty, deadly six pack of lemon-flavored Pellegrino resting at its heart.

She avoided the bad hip as she swung back onto her bike, madly pumping it back up to speed. There were footsteps running behind her. She grimaced at the familiar sound of someone tripping over a bottle of kombucha. She kicked herself into an even higher gear, powerful middle-well-late-year-but-still-shapely thighs launching her forward at formidable speed. The streets flashed by, each just like the last: houses, trees, cars, and hooded figures running to stop her progress. There were so many of them. She couldn’t turn back. She had press on, for Gilbert.

She had wanted to keep her son from this life, protect him from it. Gilbert, that is, not the weird little other one, the homunculus. But here it was.

Two of the hooded figures rushed out of the La Parilla parking lot, interrupting her reverie and brandishing phallic objects that she instantly assessed as weapons of some sort. She surprised them by veering towards them, whirling her makeshift bludgeon and screaming like a banshee. The canvas mace crushed the sternum of one, and she balanced herself by planting her Dansko-clogged foot in the hip socket of the other, neatly bisecting them and shooting forward into the darkness. Seconds later, a huge, dark shape dropped from the trees into the road and straightened, looming in front of her....

Marjorie Smith
Marjorie Smith is a writer, editor, actress, professional rabble-rouser and lately has been earning much of her living promoting the Intermountain Opera. This is her sixth year as a fool.

Gilbert came to and found himself lying somewhere dark and comfortable with the wisp of a pleasant dream escaping. He lunged after the dream and grabbed its tail. Ah! Yes, this was a very good dream. Somehow he had become Orpheus and had just persuaded the God of Love to allow him to journey to the Underworld and retrieve his beloved Euridice, Beth for short. His journey had been pleasant and he sensed that he was drawing near his love. He had been give one odd but essential instruction – he must not look at his beloved when she was brought to him. He must lead her back to the land of the living without once looking at her. Piece of cake, he told himself. I can do that.

Meanwhile, in the parking lot of La Parilla, Trudie had time to draw in a huge gulp of air before the dark shape floated over her and she was enveloped in something that felt like fine satin against her skin. The object settled over her, gently flattening her onto the pavement . She remembered how long ago, as a small child, she had used every chance she had to pet a cat to gently flatten the animal onto the floor.

She noticed that what should have been the rough pavement of the La Parilla parking lot didn’t feel at all right. She moved her hands under the heavy satin. The surface beneath her felt soft and itchy, definitely a fabric, a heavy wool perhaps? She turned onto her side and explored further with her hands. Her right hand came to the end of the satiny surface above her and she drew back in sudden fright. Beyond the satin she had felt fur.

An animal! But so quiet. The only movement she could sense emanated from her own hand and arm. Gingerly, she moved her hand in a stroking motion. It wasn’t a live animal. It was a former animal. The weight above her was a giant piece of fur! Then, when her hand encountered a large button she understood the juxtaposition of fur and satin. She was lying under a huge fur coat.

Late blooming convert to the realm of sustainability and ethical treatment of animals that she was, Trudie shuddered. A fur coat! How many – her hand explored again – mink, was it? How many helpless little minks had been murdered to make a coat huge enough to cover her?

The rougher substance beneath her was wool worsted, she thought. She moved her hand in a sweeping motion and found it diving into a pocket. So! She was lying on top of huge one coat and under another. Where on earth was she? She wriggled a bit to the right and then drew back aghast. She had touched skin and it wasn’t hers! Another human body was with her in the giant coat pile.

Just then a hand gripped her wrist. “Come, Euridice,” said the familiar voice of her son. “I’ve come to take you home.”

Craig Kenworthy
Craig Kenworthy is an award winning playwright and poet. His play “But that’s not what we ordered” recently won Best Script at the 5th Annual Equinox Theatre One Act Play Festival. He also writes the ‘30 Second Timeout’ column for the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

It was her third son.

Now, before there was Mandarin or any tongue that survives to our days:

An ancient warlord had three sons,
one fair, one tall and one like a stone
in the river that never wears away

The lord bore an amulet of power
marked by symbols that no one
but his line could read

In the land there was a woman
so beautiful that poets wept
at their failures to describe her

Each of the sons wished for her hand
and so the lord sent first the fair, but she said:
“But your beauty would rival mine own too much.”

So went the tall and she said to him:
“I will stand in the shadow of no man.”
And the one like a stone?

He would not go,
for though he feared no sword or bow,
he quaked at the thought of her dismissal

So the lord spoke to their mother and said:
“Choose one of our sons. For he will wear the amulet
and when she sees this, her heart will soften.”

But the mother said “Though she is beauty
beyond the best day of my youth, she is not worth
the heart of two of my sons.”

And so she flung the amulet into the waters
But the sons were watching her
and the fair waded out, but the channel was deep

Next the tall sought it, but faltered
when the fair seized him by the leg
and they both disappeared

Out went the one like a stone,
his feet crossing gravel and mud all the same
until he came to the place where the amulet lay

and went under the waters, but did not rise
And so the mother turned away for to weep
until she heard his feet on the shore

and turned to see that he carried
his two brothers,
but no amulet.

Kris King
Kris King grew up in Bozeman and has been a columnist (travel, advice, food, sex) and freelance writer since 1985 when she realized she had nothing to pawn but stories and opinion. She delusionally believes in the power of words to change the world but works for community nonprofits in case words don’t save the world straightaway.

Gilbert’s head was reeling but still he kept a firm grip on his mother’s arm and dashed down the carpeted steps to a doorway and out into the bright light. He bent over taking big gulps of clean chilly air to clear his head, then stood and looked his mother in the eye. (Despite some odd nagging feeling that he wasn’t supposed to look at her.)

“Something more than weird is going on,” he said.

She nodded vigorously in agreement, but for once said not a word. He grabbed her arm and began walking briskly down the intermittent pavement of the pseudo sidewalks that subdivisions favor. He cursed as he stepped over a landscaped border of tall native grasses, annoyingly realizing that he had himself installed it last year before he got laid off. But soon he was overcome with malevolent visions whirling in his head: men in hooded robes, his ex-girlfriend in the arms of his brother, dead bodies, a flashing amulet, Broker Tad Moore’s leer, the River Styx, spanking, fur coats, his cat Obama shitting in his shoe, a gun, and Salisbury steak microwave dinners.

The faster and further they walked the clearer his head became. He looked at his mother trotting next to him and said, “I suspect we have become part of a hideous trifecta of hallucinations, cult behavior and conspiracy theory. Like so many Americans.”

“What??” screeched Trudie.

Her son kept walking and said, “I don’t know if the people in that house are after us or in our heads but we need to get away.” She thought of the hooded men, the phallic weapons, being buried in fur coats, and wholeheartedly agreed. She worried about where her bike was and where they were going, but was too giddy that her son was taking her into his confidence and taking charge of her welfare to voice her concerns. “Finally,” she gloated to herself.

Gilbert slowed down and began, “Here’s my theory – Americans have evolved to function on a diet of processed, hormone and chemical-laden foods without nutritional value for generations. When local, fresh whole foods are introduced into our systems we start to malfunction – and hallucinate visually and psychologically. I’m not immune – Beth fed me soy burgers, yerba matte tea, and Tofutti Cuties – but I’ve inoculated myself since our breakup with frozen microwavable dinners and fountain Cokes the size of my head so still have some vision. When the hallucinations begin, conspiracy theories spring up and people gravitate towards cults for comfort.”

Trudie looked at him with dawning understanding and recalled how the tuna fish casseroles with cream of mushroom soup topped with potato chips she had raised her family on had kept them all sane and focused back then. “Go on,” she encouraged.

“We need some bad coffee with powdered creamer, fried potatoes drowned in gravy from a Sysco can, eggs from anemic caged hens, and lots of pork product to regain our chemical balance and obtuse insight to work this out, ” he urged.

They headed for the Western Café with a sense of resolve and peace. Gilbert was disconcerted to feel the amulet warm and solid in his Carhartt pocket, and wondered if maybe there was something else going on that he was overlooking but dismissed the thought and said, “…

Seabring Davis

In realty Seabring Davis is the editor of Big Sky Journal and Western Art and Architecture, but secretly she fantasizes about being a musical actor. Next to writing, only dancing and singing through the emotions of life could be more gratifying. This is her first spin as a Fool.

“CUT!”
The cameras pulled back as actor/director Jeff Bridges waved his arms at the crew.
“It’s not right, it doesn’t feel right,” Bridges said in his resinous gravelly voice, stepping back to look at the set that had remade Bozeman’s old Main Street circa 2009.

The café was on the north side of the street before and there had just been a small window with a four-top, not this long, showy see-and-be-seen counter cum stage. The Western had been a hole in the wall place, next to the barber that was known for $10 haircuts and an old-fashioned shave. Bozeman was different now. He scanned the props set up in the café scene — all shiny chrome and colorful retro-Bauerware pottery cups and plates — it was so unlike the worn old place it had really been, so unauthentic.

His gaze drifted down Main Street, east to west. The actual buildings — new, sustainably built, energy efficient, straw bale, solar and wind-powered structures that had homogenized what had once been a quaint mountain town with character — had been masked with brick storefronts to recreate the historic look Bozeman had once been known for. It just seemed all wrong. Yet he couldn’t quite put his finger on its source…

Granted, he was too old to play this bachelor part in an action-psycho-thriller-politico-mentary, but when the students from HatchFest tracked him down in the pool at Chico Hot Springs, they’d been so persistent. And so full of praise for his role in Rancho Deluxe, for his role in keeping the independent film culture alive. Once he read the script, Gilbert Saves Sustainability, he knew it was his duty. This was not Star Man or a Duracell battery voiceover; this was film-noir ala 21st Century.

When he’d agreed to act in, direct and produce the film, he saw it as an opportunity to speak out for the good of sustainability and hope in humankind. He’d wanted the use of the white Wii devices to symbolize weapons representing the poison of technology in our lives, the Facebook obsession to offer insight to our disconnected social network and the commercialization of natural foods to shed light on the dangers of overwrought capitalism running rampant in small town America. But now he wasn’t sure if those last minute re-writes had been such a good idea.

“Maybe it would have been better as a musical,” Bridges mused.

And with that thought, he texted his assistant: bring me my guitar.
In a fluid flourish, she handed him a custom-made Gibson. The actor/director strummed the chords and looked into the camera.

“Roll ‘em!” he called and walked down the Middle of Main Street in his new musical role as Gilbert Nathan Sullivan.

Michele Corriel

Freelance writer and author Michele Corriel is a fool for food, a fool for love and a fool for words – to sum it up – a fool’s fool. When she’s not fooling around she’s kept prisoner at the city’s pool, where she can be found contemplating the synchronicity of life’s deep waters and the usefulness of superpowers.
“This aggression will not stand, man!” could be heard from the rafters of Albertson’s to the warehouse where it all began. Gilbert, AKA Bridges, AKA Singing Sullivan, was going off-script and if he was lucky, off-world. Enough was enough. Gilbert managed to wind his way home, counting his steps, touching every blue car, and managing to curb his desire to kiss the stop light buttons, until he was safe and sound with his microwave and Costco-sized stash of ketchup.
As soon as the door opened his faithful and hopeful cat Obama rubbed against his leg. Gilbert picked up the only friend in the world he could trust.
“It’s just you and me, buddy,” Gilbert mumbled into the cat’s fur. The cat, meanwhile, had somehow gotten its paw caught in Gilbert’s jacket and the amulet ended up wrapped around Obama’s leg. The cat meowed and Gilbert bent to try to untangle it.
With a flash of light and a tremor beneath his feet, Gilbert could only watch as Obama transformed into a cross between Spock and Morpheus, with the amulet still dangling from his now leather-clothed leg.
“What took you so long, Gil?” Obama cried out. “We’ve got to … uh… save the town… and, uh….the world and let us not forget about the, uh, … banking system as we know it! There’s … no time to waste.”
“But what about my mother, and Beth?”
“Your… ah … mother? You want your mommy at a time like this?”
“Either that or a pile of warm, comfy coats to nap on top of.” Gilbert, who was normally a shy OCD kind of guy, was getting tired of all this bigger than life stuff. All he wanted to do was to eat his microwave Salisbury steak and watch the newest episode of Fringe. “And weren’t just a housecat a few minutes ago? What’s the rush?”
“This is a crisis of … ah, … epic proportions, Gil!” Obama licked his fist and wiped his hair back, then broke into song just as Beth, now all in green and looking suspiciously like Vina, the green-skinned Orion animal women, who give off powerful clouds of pheromones, enticing all males and some females into their clutches.
“Beth!, Don’t do it, Don’t get near Obama!”

Mike Finkel embraces brevity.

“Okay,” said Beth, and left the house.

D.J. Martin
D.J. Martin moved to Bozeman from New York two months ago to work on his first novel but so far the only writing he has done is his contribution to Foolish Words, for which and to whom he is forever indebted for getting his fingers typing again.

But, as we know, Gilbert tended to miss things. Had he not been so fluxumed by Obama’s sudden transformation, he might have thought to ask, ‘Since when has Beth EVER been so accomodating, and selfless, especially in time of crisis?’
‘Okay my ass!,’ Beth thought to herself, ‘That amulet is mine.’ With that she spun to the side, crouched to her knees, pushed open the cat door, and blew a kiss into the kitchen. Obama was in mid-sentence, continuing to berate Gilbert with his litany of crises, “...save the whales, re-institute glass re-cycling in Bozeman...” when his nose caught the waft of Beth’s scent. Overcome with desire, he transformed back into his feline shape and darted through his cat door, into Beth’s waiting clutches.
“I’ve got you Obama!” she cried, as she held him up by the scruff of his neck. Then in an moment of free-association, she said aloud, “You know, it’s great that your namesake is in the White House and not McCain or, god forbid,Tina Fey’s muse, but I really wish Hillary were President....”
As the last sound of the sylable, ‘dent,’ rolled off Beth’s tongue, the left eye of one of the three goats gracing the side of the amulet winked shut and Gilbert, who by this time was an expert pistol marksman, found himself standing dumfounded in the center of the Oval Office, autonomically twisitng the silencer off his smoking gun. President Obama, Vice President Biden, Speaker of the House Pelosi, and President pro tempore of the Senate, Robert Byrd, lay strewn at his feet, each with a neat hole in the center of their forehead.
Gilbert thought, “Lovely, and I thought it was hard getting a date in Bozeman before...” But before he could continue feeling sorry for himself, Beth said to Obama, who was still suspended from the scruff of his neck, his four limbs and the amulet dangling, “And for that reason only, I really wish Obama had not been running at all this election cycle...”
As the last sound of the sylable, ‘cle,’ rolled off Beth’s tongue, the left eye of the second goat gracing the amulet winked shut and Gilbert found himself ...

Jon Gerster is an old Yellowstone ranger, now trying to keep up with the Lehrkind Mansion. He writes foolish words - having written for the Tributary in Head to Head, and other publications. He is working on his first novel called "Cats in the Attic" about the golden days of dude ranching in Jackson Hole.'

.........without a thought - his mind was a blank. "Who am I, where am I? What am I doing with this strange woman?" Beth could tell what had just happened. The amulet was doing what she knew it would and she was the person ready to make it happen - going back in time. Beth had prepared for this her entire life, she was the One - the One who could correct the errors of the past. It was her destiny to reverse time, going back to a time of solvent banks, a balanced budget, - back to a point 'BB' - but what did "BB" mean? Suddenly the answer to this lifelong question was obvious- "Before Bush!" she jumped to her feet looking at a confused Gil
She grabbed Gil, and held on tight - "I have to remember the last part of the amulet spell.....hmmmmm" She knew she was the key and that Gil was waiting for her to take him back to sometime in the 1990s - to prevent the appointment in 2000 of Bush as Americas first 'dicktater' as she had always called him.
Beth calmly started reciting, as she knew this spell somewhere deep in herself - the spell that would activate the power of the Time Amulet. She had to get it just right or risk surging forward in time!
"Hocus Pocus, Ford Focus, Amulet of time, silent mime, Foolish words of politicians wringing hands of admonitions, take us to a time sublime, 13th Friday '99; Obama, Oh mama, Newt of Gingrich in your eye, Clinton lighter times to fly to a past when times were high!" -
With those words the room where she held a confused Gil, started spinning - she hoped she had empowered the amulet correctly - and noticed the wall calendar retreating in time - "Bailouts, FannieMae, Baer Sterns, Enron.......Mission Accomplished.......Bring Em On.......9/11........Y2K...........MonicaGate......"Its working!"........
"Oh God, I dont know if it will stop where we need to!" 1999 became 1998, and 97, slowing into late 1996, December, No v e ......m....b......e........r 13th. Friday. The room stopped its whirl, and Gil came back to life with thought -
"Hey, you wanna get a pizza at that new Papa Murphy's, then go see that film at the Rialto - you know the one the Film Festival is raving about?", Gil said.
Beth composed herself, trying to reset her outward appearance to the moment. After what she had been through in the last 10 minutes, not to mention the past 13 years in time made it difficult - butshe muttered "Sure Gil" - "Oh and tomorrow honey, I want to look into buying some stock in acouple of new companies called "Yahoo" and "Amazon"!
Gil laughed and replied "Ok, Beth, if you like westerns and the rain forest, we can look into it."
They were out to pick up the pizza. Beth now had to figure out how they overshot 1999 and landed in 1996 - butshe realized she had four years to figure out how to stop Bush from becoming Americas first 'dicktater".........and all the disasters of his reign.........
But for the moment, she was going to enjoy a younger Gil and a Bozeman with half as many traffic lights.........

Rachel Hergett

Rachel Hergett dabbles in creative forms. She writes the What’s Up With That column for the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, has finished a play in an evening and has novel aspirations sadly thwarted by the attention span of a two-year-old. So for fun she quite literally sticks to haiku with the creation of her office product retailers dream – stiku-ku – short form poetry on post-its… Well, sticks with it unless there are crayons involved. You don’t have crayons do you?

This time it was the snub-nosed director who yelled “CUT.” Jeff Bridges be damned.
“Who added all this deus ex machina bullshit?”
The slightly garish twenty-something hid his mismatched eyes behind now retro square-rimmed black glasses and favored a pair of lime green boots that may have had a bit of a western flavor had he not kept them shined so that anyone who glanced down (and everyone did) could see themselves reflected in some sickly distortion. Selected as director for this project by his film professor because he showed up for the 8 a.m. class at Montana State more often then his classmates, a fact made more prominent by being the first name on the roster, Bentley Aader only barely held on to the role by using what can only be described as epic powers of persuasion.
Maybe it was the crimson spots threatening to burst that just made people agree to his demands, maybe it was that he reminded people of a used car salesman they almost trusted because they thought he would at least sell the high-end models suggested by his name, maybe it was just that they felt sorry for the poor fool – but people always gave in, and quickly. How do you think they got Jeff Bridges on this flick?
But now, Bentley was not trying to persuade anyone to do anything. He was damn well going to tell them and they were going to listen.
“Off script, off the fucking script,” he muttered under his breath before looking up at every pair of eyes on set.
Bentley took a breath, preparing himself to lay into the cast and crew for losing the meat, the heart of this story. “Come on people. Are you with me here?”
But before he could get into his surely ineffectual rant, Bentley focused on the eyes before him. No one focused back. They most assuredly weren’t with him. Instead, they were looking at the amulet, supposedly a prop, glowing on the ground at Jeff Bridges’ feet. Jeff picked up his guitar and sang…

Shayna Gibson
Shayna Gibson is just here to party.

Bridges strummed the C chord soulfully, but the resulting harmonics
were restful only to his vital organs as a blue and yellow jeep
convertible ended his life.

The driver, a stunning woman that smelled like orgasmic spankings, and
her passenger, a regal man that smelled like cats, paused in
confusion.

"Brilliant," whispered Bentley smelling the tremulous return of his
useless authority.

Gilbert wondered why everything was so smelly all of a sudden. Then
Gilbert wondered how he was still experiencing these strange narrative
sensations if he was being played by Jeff Bridges who was clearly the
sad victim of a deep, strange boredom that pulls at the edges of all
fiction. One of the coats purred in Gilbert’s ear.

The purring smelled like an answer.

"Oh," he said. "I'm a nasal psychic and this giant wagon of coats
being pulled by a convertible jeep is like hundreds of others being
pulled around Bozeman, MT. All filled with people who have had their
lives stolen by movies or prose."

"You're forgetting that if the evil doppelgangers get too comfortable
in our lives, they take us to work in the back of grocery stores until
one night some evil Kirk gets too paranoid or confused and shoots
everybody," said a coat-muffled voice.

Outside, Beth and Obama looked for a map. A moment ago they had been
in Jeff Bridge's car, on the way to Vegas to do some spanking with the
illicit contents of The Late Dude's glove box, and then the amulet had
started to glow and shake like their table was ready.

"Where are we?" asked Beth.

"On top of a robot dressed like Jeff Bridges," Obama purred helpfully.

"I thought I saw a sign back there that said Narrative Throughline,"
she added pouring over her map.

"Oh. Really?"

Corinne Garcia
Corinne Garcia is a freelance writer and editor who is finally out of the closet with her dream of writing for corny women’s magazines. She’s currently trying to get her foot in the door with publications such as Ladies Home Journal and Woman’s Day. But sometimes her foot gets slammed in the door and that really hurts. However, she’s slowly getting used to the pain, and she’s even starting to slightly enjoy it.
said the robot.
He was your average looking robot—metallic grey in color with flashing lights—but somehow he’d landed some major roles. He had a history in Hollywood longer than Hugh Hefner’s list of bedmates, starting in 1968 with the role of Hal in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” He then landed R2D2 in the Star Wars films, but he let the fame go to his head and in no time found himself hanging out in seedy neighborhoods with a hooker on each metal arm, and a bottle of Crystal in the other, and a crack pipe in the arm that hung over his “on” switch. After a 10-year period that was consumed by uncontrollable binges, he made a comeback starring in “Wall-E.” His story was similar to Robert Downy Jr.’s, but you didn’t see his name on the invite list to the Academy Awards. Oh no, the Academy would never invite a robot.
No matter his film resume, he was always ignored by the pararazzi and the film critics. Now he got this crap role playing a robot modeled after Jeff Bridges.
Out of nowhere a metal amulet bounced off the side of his robotic head, violently shaking him out of this montage of his patheltic life.
“Ouch, that really hurt!” he said, looking up and scanning the room with his head spinning around in a 360. Where did evertyone go? The lights, the cameras, the set?
Just then a car squeeled to a stop and out came a dissheveled woman carrying a black cat. They were heading right for him, and lunged past him for the amulet just as another figure approached.
“Gilbert, how did you find us?” cried the woman.
Gilbert tossed the robot a phone as he too dove for the metal disc.
“Just press ‘Talk’,” he yelled, and the robot did as he was told, not knowing who was going to be at the other end of the line.
Dominique Blokker

Dominique Blokker is currently a DJ, Jazz Director and ex-movie critic at KGLT. When not listening to or spinning music she is futilely trying to catch up with technology. She has been lapped more times than she cares to count. She was published way back in the '90s in New York magazine one week after having her writing credentials challenged by a crack-addicted screenwriter. She now writes for her own amusement.

“Hello?” the robot asked tentatively.

“Your phone call cannot be completed as dialed. Please make sure you are within 50 centimeters of the amulet to complete the circuit. Enjoy this crappy instrumental version of 'The Girl from Impanema' until your call can be completed”
“Hold? I am put on Hold?” he sputtered out loud as he watched the humans wrestle in the dirt for the shiny disc.
“I know that voice,” said the automated answering device. “R2D2, is that you? How did you get the Phone?”
“It was handed to me by a male human who is trying to get the amulet thingy away from a female “ He recognized the voice from somewhere in his checkered past. He couldn’t remember her name but he trusted the voice.
“Keep the amulet away from the cat!”
“How did you know that there is a cat here?” he asked incredulously.
“There is always a cat involved when the universe needs a reboot. Grab the amulet and get out of there. You will receive further instructions later.”
Click .The Phone went dead.
Beth and Gilbert were still playing keep-away while Obama circled waiting for his chance to pluck the amulet out of an unsuspecting hand. Just as the feline was about to pounce, a metallic hand grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and lifted him aloft.
Both humans stopped and glared at the movie star clone when they heard Obama’s howls. Together they approached the Cyborg and started to circle like hyenas.
The robot saw something in the humans’ eyes he rarely saw, and it scared him into throwing the cat at Gilbert and turning to run - not before Beth managed to sneak up behind him and push his “off” button.
Damn Humans! Can’t live with them, can’t kill them …………..yet!

Jonathan B. Gans
JB is trying to understand enough of what he writes down in a daily, predawn, semi-conscious state so that he might separate the stuff into poems, give them titles and re-shape them to fit on a page in his second book hopefully to be published at the end of this year. He is supporting his writing habit by raising Performance Quarter Horses for sale in the midst of an economy where folks are having difficulty paying the mortgage. This seemed once like a good plan.
It’s a weighty thing to be a robot. Humans have severe expectations. And sustaining creative, independent artificial intelligence is not a challenge to be treated like inventing the windshield wiper. Even Spielberg flopped with A.I. Cyrus the cyborg had developed some feelings along the way to this moment when his authority was challenged and his power plug pulled.
When you are asked repeatedly to fulfill a mission and programmed so expertly to succeed, either man or machine develops feelings of loyalty. If not to the cause at least to the programmer.
“Fetch the cat and bring him to me”, were his instructions. “But only when he has the amulet.”
Bad timing. Cyrus reached too soon for the cat, which shrieked in pain and clawed desperately at his wrist until oil leaked through the neoprene skin and Cyrus cried out in his artificial scream, just as he had been taught to do. To the kids he sounded like a bullfrog on a wet night trapped in a cistern. When he flung the cat it bounced off of Gilbert and into a pool of quicksand where it stopped its howling, struggled with a series of short mews and quickly began to sink.
“Save the cat”, warned Beth, a bit too bubbly for the moment it seemed to Gilbert. “He has secrets—the code”.
“Cats don’t share secrets”, Gilbert replied knowingly. “Only decapitated mice.” But being both a good boy and an earnest boyfriend, found a broom and poked it near the cat at the edge of the sandpit.
“He loves me,” thought both his Mother and Beth at the same moment. “It’s good to have a man at home at times like this—as well as for all those little repairs, you know, the stuck disposal, running toilet, clogged gutters—“
But their musings from separate poles of the estrogen cycle were interrupted by Cyrus who for the last few minutes had been shedding artificial tears over his slit wrist while he waited for the skin and carbon fiber tissue to regenerate.
Now he was whole again, a robot on reconnaissance, a man on a mission. Easy as bending over for a lithium grease enema, he stooped to pick up the temporarily forgotten metal charm and dropped it into his briefs where it would be safe and warm. Happiness is a warm amulet.

Kim Rossi
Kim Rossi has been a Moose DJ since 1992. Due to a recent shift in, well, shifts & the technological advances of streaming, her life-long dream of being the number one listened to show in Iceland is now obtainable. Watch out northern Canadian provinces - you're next!

Or so she thought. Trudie, having been left to pay the tab at the Western, had been wandering around for what seemed like hours, searching for her ungrateful son. She had been rehearsing her guilt-laden diatribe, berating him for not only ditching her, but also leaving her with no way to pay. The perverbial "washing dishes" just wouldn't do. Please! Her nails. So after some quick talking and a promise to waitress on Wednesday, a day they seemed to always be short-staffed, she had switched on her Mom GPS and began tracking Gilbert. This had proved to be a weighty task. Time jumps, endless returnings to a pile of coats, the brown-robed ones & interchanging directors had all caused her delay in locating him. Now here she stood, just a moment short from seeing Gilbert, Beth & Obama sucked into the sandpit (& I'm sure into some new alternate storyline). But, none of that mattered now. Cyrus had cast a look in her direction that had made her knees feel weak. As she gazed into those propylene eyes, there was a quality she almost recognized. Something almost familiar. Too familiar. "It couldn't be", she thought out loud. But, she hadn't laid eyes on him since that smoke filled night in the Amazon, so many years ago. The night that had resulted in Gilbert......
Trudie tried her best to suppress the urges welling up within her womaness. Were these urges a result of seeing him again, or the lusty, red-hot glowing amulet in his pants......
She looked to him for answers.
"The Dude abides."
Soren Kisiel
The quicksand pits on Main Street had been a bad idea.
No one would argue with that now. But at the time... well, suffice to say that each generation of City Commisioners feels a need to leave its mark. But there’s only so many layers of new brick crosswalks and re-furbished holiday octopuses that you can get away with. So when folks at the Co-op pressured the Commisioners for quicksand - something to do with downtown wetland re-introduction – they got a pit at each intersection.
It was only a matter of months before a “Here-GrabThis” Broom (as they came to be called) was hung near each pit.
And while a sand box at that moment would have really hit the spot for panicking Obama, every instinct a cat has just pushed it deeper and deeper into the pit.
“Here, grab this!” yelled Gilbert, waving the broom.
Beth, realizing the cat’s lack of opposable broom-grabbing thumbs, dashed forward to pull the Here-Grab-This Broom from Gilbert’s hands. But as she stepped forward her foot slid through a small pool of robot-oil and bits of neoprene. She lost her footing, reeling toward Gilbert.
In they went, Beth, on top of Gilbert, on top of the shrieking Obama. Their struggling forms disappeared into the muck.
They gasped and struggled for breath before they realized they didn’t have to. They lay on damp, sandy ground, in a dim gray darkness. Gilbert held Obama in his arms. Beth, the broom.
They looked about themselves, into dark eyes of drawn, ashen faces. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of figures stood around them, too many to count, fading back into shadow.
“The underworld,” whispered Beth.
One of the figures spoke:
“I wrote the part about going back in time to stop Bush,” the figure said quietly.
“Yeah, I liked that part,” said another. Many of the heads nodded.
“The Underworld of Storylines,” said Gilbert.
A beam of sunlight danced on Gilbert’s face. The grey faces groaned, mouths open in hungry awe.
Gilbert looked up to see a metal robotic arm reaching down toward them, through a liquid-sand canopy overhead. One set of servo-fingers delicately balanced a White Russian on the Rocks. The other, a broom. “Here,” came a voice, “Grab This.”

Mike England is becoming disturbingly comfortable with mediocrity.
As Beth quickly wrapped her fingers around the extended broom handle, Gilbert placed his hand on her arm. “Wait,” he whispered.
“It’s okay, Gilby dear,” Beth reassured him. “I don’t sleep with robots. Even ones that look like Jeff Bridges.”
Gilbert didn’t know why he should believe her, when at one point in this story, it looked as if she were going to get it on with a cat. Only another wild deviation from the plot line saved her from joining the ranks of such notable punchline-fodder as Richard Gere and Rod Stewart. How is a cyborg any worse? At least it could smoke a cigarette with you afterward.
He looked at Obama, who shrugged. “Don’t look at me,” the cat said. “I didn’t even want to be in this story. Besides, you’ve got a zodiac goat talisman, a wad of cash, and a semi-automatic pistol. Make some shit happen.”
Gilbert looked around. The dark, shadowy environs no longer felt strange and foreboding. His composure welled up and spread through the vast chamber like an oil spill. He looked up at the robotic arm and the slightly translucent sand-canopy. “Cyrus!” he called. “We’ll be right there. I just need a second.”
Gilbert took one hand and reached for the White Russian. Turning toward the dark figures, he held up the amulet with the other. A shudder went through the crowd; they all stared, transfixed by its shimmering, pulsating power.
Gilbert took a long sip of his drink, then licked his lips and addressed the sea of pale, insentient faces, which he instantly recognized as a Bozeman city council meeting. It was like the underworld, just without any sense of finality.
“Which of you wrote the parts in this story about sycophantic security guards, annoying realtors, and impuissant young film directors named after luxury automobiles?”
Several figures stepped forward.
“How about the parts where Beth cheats on me with my brother and a Hungarian model?”
Two more figures stepped forward.
“And Trudie’s aimless wanderings around Bozeman?”
Four more shapes separated themselves from the crowd.
“Alrighty then,” Gilbert said. He polished off the White Russian, pulled the pistol from his pocket, and shot every one of them through the forehead.
The remaining figures drew nervously back into the shadows—except one, who bore a striking resemblance to the owner of the old Bullet Hole on Peach. “Did you write the part about me shooting people in the head?” Gilbert demanded.
The figure slowly nodded.
“Thanks,” Gilbert said, and tossed him Obama. “A talking cat’s gotta be worth something, even down here.”
And with that, Gilbert pocketed the pistol, took his now-faithful ex-girlfriend around the waist, and grasped the extended broom handle. “Now,” he said, “let’s get on with this story.”
Kent Orms
The broom handle jerked the two of them up through the sandy Jell-O ceiling and into the fresh Bozeman air. Trudie, graceful and lithe, ran over and hugged the two of them, dusted the sand out of Gilbert’s hair.
“You’re okay?”
He nodded, still dazed.
“Mom, what’s going?” Gilbert started, but Trudie had spun quickly, athletically, and in two bounds was in a protracted embrace with Cyrus, pushing him backwards behind the dressing partition.
“Trudie? I can’t believe it’s you. It’s…it’s been so long. I had… alkaline batteries then.”
“It was enough.” she said, pressing closer.
They were two for the ages, these two, oblivious to the spinning, foolish world around them. Lost in a lover’s gaze, her hand head ran across his cybernetic exoskeleton, then went south for the winter.
She went shopping for bananas, he rebooted his hard drive. She downloaded his RAM, he raided her pension fund. She accepted his stimulus package, he went bankrupt. She bailed him out again and again. She shuddered, he ejected a DVD. She looked down at the glowing, hot disc and gasped. It was the amulet.
She turned away, shoved hard against him, did a TJ Hooker roll backward and came up behind a metal trash barrel in a gunslinger’s, modified-Weaver stance. He smiled.
Gilbert jumped at the sound of the gunshot and the movie set emptied in chaos.
Trudie emerged, catlike, from the partition and in a flash pulled Gilbert and Beth down behind the Jeep. Trudie threw Beth the pistol.
“Reload. Now. Gilbert, you too. You’ve shot 38 people, it’s time you reloaded.” Trudie’s eyes narrowed as she scanned the far east end of Main street, now aglow with the setting sun.
“Those weird brick towers, that’s their source of power. And we’re almost out of time” she said, almost to herself.
“Once the sun sets, the bloodthirsty packs of wild chocolate labs will come down from the hills. The fabled Hounds of Hell-ena”. Beth shuddered at the thought. Gilbert shuddered at the thought of his spanking.
Kate Howe already sent you her bio and is so disorganized that she can't find it again...
Suddenly, Trudie begain to shake.
"Did I just... did I just kill him?"
Beth and Gilbert stared at her. Trudie was a wierd one to be sure, but coming unglued, especially when multiple layers of reality were involved, was not something she did easily.
"I, I can't tell. Did I kill him? Or did I just do a cool stunt move and grab you guys... Oh god.. Cyrus..."
"Mom, what is going ON?"
Trudie looked up at him, her eyes limpid pools of crystal tears... "Oh, Gilbert, I should have told you earlier..." she stood, slowly. Gilbert was rapt. Whatever it was, it was going to be good. What in the world could his mother have been hiding? Why would she bother? Their lives were bizarre enough...
"Gilbert, your father..." she began
Suddenly, Trudie lurched backwards, slamming sickeningly into the faux boardwalk that some art director had erroneously placed on Main St. in Bozeman rather than on the Livingston set where it belonged. Trudie lay sprawled, head cocked at a bizarre angle, a red pool spreading rapidly out behind her, matting her ginger hair. She gazed, confused, at Gilbert, who was not holding a gun.
Smoke curled maliciously up from the barrel of the Glock Beth had taken quietly from Gillbert while they were listening to Trudies rant. Gilbert looked from his dying mother, who only moments before had been standing and talking, to his ever confusing if delicious girlfriend, who was glaring at Trudie with a slick smile curling the corners of her mouth.
"No talking, Trudance." Said Beth, in a cold, automatic, almost robotic voice.
Gilbert stood, shocked. Somewhere, he was sure there was an amulet, and it was glowing, and vibrating, but right now, he knelt down at his mothers side.
"Mom..." he said, as he touched her face and tried to look into her eyes.
"Your... (gasp) father... (gasp) was... a... (swallow, sputter)... ro...ro...."
"Yes, he was a romantic man, I know mom, you've told me."
Suddenly, Trudie seemed to regain all vim and vigor, lifting her head up off the boardwalk and glaring at him. "Don't interrupt. Jesus, Gil, I taught you better than that. And NOW? Right NOW? While I'm dying and trying to tell you something that will change the course of history, and your life and EVERYTHING? You choose NOW to interr.." And with that, her head flopped back, and she was dead.
Gilbert sat, shocked. Oh, that's not gonna leave an emotional scar. An enormous tidal wave of guilt rose up above him, just about as big as Trudie had intended it to be. He looked hopelessly to where Beth had been standing with the smoking gun.
Beth was unzipping her skin and stepping out of it. "Your father," said a metallic voice, akin to Beths, "Was like me."
Gilbert blinked in the sun. Gilbert realized his hands were sticking to his mother's head, as the blood dried. Gilbert thought he might be talking to a robot. Gilbert thought that Zaphod Beeblebrox might stop by to pick him up at any minute.
Lucia Stewart mostly plays with words in two other forms: 1. Music through Djing at KGLT and producing concerts for PorterHouse Productions, and 2. Conversations through creating regional conferences for NewWest.Net. You can generally call her a music junkie who’s passionate about the Rockies, its community and its playground amenities of its wild places.
But then, it was heard. In the distance. The howling and barking. Hooooowwwwllll. Ruff, ruff. Howwwlllll. Ruff, Ruff. Howwwwellllll.
It was them. The fabled Hounds of Hell-ena. They could smell the blood. To Gilbert, it smelled of singed toe hairs. But no matter how much Gilbert didn’t want to smell, he was just that curious because frankly, he couldn’t remember the last time he smelled singed toe hairs…
Beth, now in a new form and figure of a Labrador, sat there. Smelling the air. With a stance as though such a smell had never touched her nostrils, and the hairs twitterpaited with excitement. She listened, and knew. How could she have forgotten?
Gilbert sat there, and slowly removed his hands from what was now was a cream-colored Labrador. Where did Trudie go? Mother? Who had Beth become — a dog robot? My Father? Where did the bloody shot come from? Why are there predominantly Labradors in Bozeman?
Gilbert stood up, just in time to catch the parade turning down Main Street. “Today is almost exactly six-months from when you humans begin hunting season around here,” Beth, the dog, said. “That’s means is meat grilling season.”
What Gilbert saw confused him. It looked like Bite of Bozeman, 4th of July and a Friday night near the Rockin’ R blended into one. But the streets were lined with massive BBQ’s on either side of Main Street, and it was light outside.
“Here is Bozeman, we’ve become the Meat Grilling capital of Montana,” said Beth. “So we like to celebrate by everyone bringing their meat to Main and putting it on display. It’s official Grill Your Meat day. And here comes the cavalcade of chosen Meat Grillers now.””
The parade rolled by. The hounds of Hell-ena lead the procession. The Rottweiler of Red Lodge followed. The Basset Hound of Billings tried to keep up with their short legs. And of course, the Poodles and Pugs of Polson, waived together out of the stagecoach.
As he gazed at all the gathering dogs, he noticed one common thing. They were all sniffing each other’s butts. Is that how they tell the Robots from the true K-9’s. Was he going to have to smell butts from now on to understand if someone is human, beast, fowl, electronic, or metallic?
“Huh,” he thought. “I wonder if any of those butts smell like singed toe hairs?”
Michael Becker survived three years as a professional journalist and amateur blogger for the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, and now he's an amateur journalist and professional blogger who also writes for Montana State University. He is often mistaken for a conservative rancher.

Gilbert, who had wanted nothing else out of this day but a TV dinner, watched the parade of municipal dogs make its way down Main Street, carefully avoiding the city-funded sinkholes as they went.

It was oddly smelly. Human and robot blood was drying on the street in the light of the setting sun. Meat and hair was everywhere. It was just like the locker room after junior high gym class.
“Hello, Gilbert,” said a voice from behind him.
Gilbert spun around, wondering just what the hell was going to happen now. The gun, still in his hand, now reloaded, flew up to meet the next challenge; but his trigger finger hesitated.
“Melvin?”
“At your service,” said the fat security guard.
“What are you doing here?”
Melvin’s belly threatened to untuck his white button-up as he bent over the robotic corpse of Cyrus and pulled the amulet out of the robot’s underwear.
“I told you this morning that was a powerful item,” Melvin said. “Now why did you go letting robots and dogs and ex-girlfriends take it away from you?”
Gilbert, who tended to miss things, now remembered the conversation that morning, how Melvin had seemed to disappear into the racks of frozen food in the Albertsons warehouse. Thinking harder, he now remembered seeing Melvin all day long, just outside the frame, so to speak, doing things to span the gaps in the storyline, like retrieving the amulet from where he’d left it on the seat of his truck and putting it back in Gilbert’s pocket so he’d have it for a later scene.
“It was you trying to hold this plot together all along, wasn’t it?” Gilbert said.
“Yes,” said Melvin, handing Gilbert the amulet again. “And now that your mom is dead and your girlfriend’s a dog, I have something important to say.”
Melvin took a deep breath.
“Gilbert, I’m your father, and there is one last thing you must do before the sun sets…”

Holly Zadra, owing to a mild existential crisis, failed the bio-writing part of this assignment.

“You must return to Albertson’s to pay for your TV dinner. You may have shot the storylines dead, but you will not, and I repeat, you will not steal from a large corporate grocer owned by a regional conglomerate based in Chanhassen, Minnesota.”
Ah, yes, the old psycho-mythology: the son must bear the burdens of the father.
And yet, we clearly see Gilbert’s Negative Mother Complex bears the rotten fruits of Gilbert’s own undoing. Not able to separate the actual Trudie from the shadow projection that his mother is a robot, Gilbert is metaphorically blinded. Thus, he carries out the age-old Oedipal complex by interrupting his mother’s dying words. Given the opportunity to finally see the truth of his being, he unconsciously chooses to remain in the dark murky soup of the Wounded Child archetype that includes an abiding sense of self-pity further complicated by an Oedipal-erotic fetish with his mother’s comfortable Dansko shoes. Further, by finishing his mother’s final sentence, Gilbert elucidates a grandiose psychic inflation of the Patriarch as archetypal Hero.
How else can one explain Beth’s transmogrification? The aborted spanking session? A continual need to blame City Council and the Co-op – AKA nagging, authoritative mother figures – for all the sandpits at each intersection on Main? How else can we explain Mike Finkel’s brevity?
The complexes of the ego reach far and wide.
Was it mere tomfoolery that more than one writer killed all the other storylines – AKA the other writers – in order to propel his or her personal storyline? Or was it the shadow side of the archetypal Artist manifesting in the madness that often accompanies genius?
Will these lines written under the pressure of Ray Sikorski’s stringent 24-hour turn-around someday make our children’s children rich when finally, finally, all our hard work and artistic struggles are appreciated by a more discerning readership?
Ritchie Boyd is a nerd, and has been one since the first time he blew out all the circuit breakers in his family’s old brick house in the suburbs of Cleveland by doing unspeakable things with a few pieces of wire, some scotch tape, a 110 volt outlet, and a cat named Poopsie. He has been known to wear a kilt, is a co-founding member of Equinox Comedy Death Match, and has not written much since the very underrated “Boyd Holiday Letter of 2007”.

As all these disjointed thoughts and memories ran through his overtaxed and undernourished mind, Gilbert slowly raised his hands to the sides of his head, looking not just a bit like the figure in Munch’s “The Scream”, and pressed hard.
No, he thought.
No.
NO. Noooooooooo!
“No what?” asked Melvin.
“I don’t know, what?,” asked Gilbert, suddenly distracted.
“ No, not ‘know what?’ - I mean, you said ‘NO!’”
“Did I?” interrupted Gilbert.
“I thought I only thought that”, he thought to himself.
“Actually, you did”, replied Melvin, by now feeling far too much like Bud Abbott to Gilbert’s Costello.
“Did what?”
Poor Gilbert was at a total loss, much like a reggae musician on “The Thistle and Shamrock”.
“You screamed ‘Noooooooo!’, so I’m asking you, no WHAT?” snapped Melvin.
“Ah...” muttered Gilbert.
Melvin continued. “Did you say that because I just told you that I am your father (which by the way would be REALLY hurtful), or because I ordered you to go back to Albertson’s and pay for those Salisbury steak dinners?”
“Salisbury Steak!” Gilbert’s eyes widened.
At that exact moment Gilbert began to founder on the question that had dogged him since his trip to the U.K. as a young boy: “Why Salisbury steak? Why not Cwellyn steak? or Dwygyfylchi steak, or....” but he caught himself and shook free of the hopeless vortex of trying to understand the paucity of vowels in the Welsh language. Not a moment too soon...
He gathered himself. “That’s it! Melvin, er..., Dad, we’ve got to get back to that crate in the warehouse where we first met. We’re not safe until we fix it.”
“Fix what?” Melvin wondered aloud.
Ray Sikorski likes that people think he knows what's going on. But he really has no idea what's going on.

Gilbert grabbed Melvin by the hand. It was all starting to make sense: The black lab coats were made from black labs! That's why he didn't want to have sex with Obama the cat! The Hounds of Hell-ena were zombie dogs! And his ass was vibrating not from the phone, but because evil interstellar robots were using his derriere to host... what? Something...

Gilbert found himself and Melvin traveling in the back fold-out seat of a station wagon. There was a homonculus sitting next to him. It had a vague family resemblance. Melvin was driving. “Let's stop off for some Albertson's brand beef jerky, whaddya say, Gilby?”

Gilbert nodded from the back seat. He felt a certain tranquility – the bliss one always feels after offing 30-odd writers who insist on creating 110 different plot lines. He passed by the cashiers who wanted his money for the TV dinners. He passed by the beef jerky aisle. He passed by the amulet aisle, even though he could get 2 for 1 with his Albertson's card. He went into the back, to the big crate. He opened it. Without looking at the contents, he walked in, and shut the door behind him. His ass began vibrating again, and he felt a Zen-like calm.

“Hello, Beau,” he said to his brother.

“Yeah, hi.” Beau was a fine actor, too, but all the good roles went to the better-looking brother. Gilby had tried to make up for it with The Fabulous Baker Boys, but there was still some bad blood there. And the homonculus, their other brother, never got any roles at all.

But who were these others inside the crate? It was crammed with people! They introduced themselves one by one: Ryan, Joseph, Sally, Susan, Heidi...

The crate was filled with writers!

“I thought I killed all you assholes!”

Keith Suta
You may remember Keith Suta from such creative pursuits as: The last two Foolish Words soirees; KGLT-FM's "The Coffee Show"; and his movie "Dead Noon," released this February to DVD to almost universal disinterest!
The only other sound Gilbert could summon was the small popping noise of his lips smacking. Searching for support, he turned to face the man who claimed to be his father. Uncanny how Gilbert missed it before, but, in fact, now that Gilbert really concentrated, Melvin bore more than a passing resemblance to his brother – just add some wrinkles and lose a little hair and you have...
“Spanky!” roared Gilbert, bounding forward and clawing at Spanky's face. Gilbert's fists pummeled through holes in defenses. Spanky's cries of, “Ow! Quit it!” were of no use. Mom wasn't there to break up this fight. Gilbert knocked Spanky to the floor, ripping off the latex makeup prostheses that turned his younger brother into Melvin the security guard.
“Why, Spanky?” Gilbert blurted, “Why all of this?”
“Because I hate being called 'Spanky,'” Gilbert's brother moaned. “I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you stupid kids, and your stupid cat!” At that moment, Obama the cat, stepped out from behind the stupefied writers. He sat down, seemed to adjust his collar, and transformed into a man wearing a sharp Hart Schaffner Marx suit.
“Mr. President?!” Gilbert goggled. “What are you doing here? And... how?”
President Obama put a reassuring hand on Gilbert's shoulder, “I have many talents I have not yet revealed,” he declared, “Transmogrifying into animals is simply one among many... I can change produce from spoiled to fresh with a touch of my hand; I can fly; I can make amazing three-layer nachos... As to what I am doing here, Gilbert, I have decided to use my powers to travel around this fine country of ours, helping the individual, as well as the populace at large...”
With that, Barack Obama picked up the amulet, which began to glow with a bright, violet light. He whispered an ancient chant known only to those who have spent time in various Pacific islands. The glow grew brighter and brighter, filling the warehouse and obscuring Gilbert's vision. Blinking the tears from his eyes, he saw that he was surrounded by his brothers, his mother, and Beth. The President stepped forward and addressed them, his voice low and intense. “Treat each other better in times to come. I am not coming back to bail you out again... Also, I'm seriously reconsidering my plans for a comprehensive program to employ writers.”
Gilbert finished typing. He sat back from his laptop computer, rubbing his eyes. Gilbert was a man who tended to miss things. He missed his brother, estranged and working out in the oil fields in Wyoming. He missed his mother, gone now for over a year due to a heart attack; if only she'd eaten healthier and exercised more. He missed Beth, who ran off with the world's premier Hungarian male model... Jeff Bridges would never buy this screenplay. Gilbert would have to delete it all and start over tomorrow. He stretched and yawned, his cat jumped up in his lap. Gilbert scratched the cat behind the ears and enjoyed the soft, low tones of the animal's purring. If this were a movie, the camera would cut to a close up of the cat, holding in its mouth a large medallion. If it were a particularly bad movie, the cat would wink at the camera as the phrase “The End?” came up on screen. But this isn't a movie. And our story ends here.

2008 FOOLISH WORDS

Ryan Cassavaugh
Ryan is a founding member of improv comedy juggernaut Equinox Comedy Deathwatch, erstwhile writer/performer for TV sketch comedy show "The Pizza Show," stand-up comic, puppeteer, and writer of four award-winning plays, including "Last Kings of America," which won best script and audience favorite at the 2008 Equinox One-Act Festival.

In the beginning...

Has this ever happened to you? You're waiting for the bus to pick you up and take you to one of the fabulous stores we have in lovely downtown Bozeman (Downtown, mind you, not the mall); when, quite out of nowhere, a very frightened looking man with an obscenely fake mustache runs towards you, shoves a small, oddly shaped package in your hands, hoarsely gurgles the name "Marcellus" and drops dead at your feet with a skull-handled dagger protruding from his back? Well, if it has, then that is one thing you share with James, a young man who was just now finding himself in that most unlikely of circumstances.

He blinked confusedly (it seemed the least he could do), then he blinked again. He stared at the dead man, then at the package, then at the dead man again. He blinked a third time. At this moment James really wished there had been another person waiting there for the bus, so he could at least turn to them and say "Well, you don't see that every day!" but there was no one to turn to. He was alone; alone with a dead man, a package, and an overwhelming urge to run like hell.

‘There is of course, no sense in running' he told himself. ‘Running would solve nothing. What is needed is a cool, level head. A rational man does not panic!'

James had just made up his mind to be very cool about the whole affair when, to his surprise, he realized that he was running, and, apparently, had been for quite some time. He was well out of sight of the bus stop by the time his mind fully accepted the fact that while it was busy thinking, his body had been busy fleeing.

Still clutching the package, James came to a stop down a small side street and scuttled into the doorway of a dilapidated apartment house to catch his breath and more closely examine the package.

The package was heavy; very heavy for its size. It was no bigger than a super-ball, wrapped in brown paper, and trapezoidal in shape.

James sniffed it. It smelled like his grandmother's house when he was a kid. He held it up to his ear and listened. Was it... ticking? A BOMB! No, wait, that was just his heart pounding. No, it made no sound.

This was nerve-wracking.

Things of this kind just didn't happen to James. The most exciting thing that had ever happened to James was being struck on the head by a foul ball during a minor league play-off game. (He had been in the papers!) But this was something altogether different. This was... mysterious. James was pretty sure this was some sort of espionage. The thought staggered him... he, James Quincy Monroe was, through some twist of fate, mixed up in honest-to-God espionage! For the first time in his life, James wanted a martini!

Before he could explore the fantasy any further he was startled back to reality by the sound of the apartment house door creaking open behind him. He spun around quickly only to find himself face-to-face with the largest man he had ever seen. The man was easily two heads taller than James and twice as broad. His eyes were small and mostly obscured beneath two dense outcroppings of yellow eyebrow. His fingers, which were the size of summer sausages, were clenching and unclenching furiously. This man was, in a word, ‘menacing'.

"There you are!" the man cried with, what James noted, was marked relief. "The professor was beginning to think you weren't coming. Do you have the package?"

James held the package out instinctively. The gorilla looked at it approvingly then motioned for James to follow him back into the building.

James followed like a man in a dream.

The hallway inside was cold and completely dark except for the small patch of light that streamed in through the open door.

"We've been expecting you Mister Marcellus," croaked a voice from the darkness of the hallway. The door behind James creaked shut, and the room went black.

Marjorie Smith
Marjorie writes for several publications and acts in local theatre and film projects. She is also a musician, if being a member of the MSU gamelan and the Awesome Polka Babes counts.

You know how they say that before you die, your whole life passes before your eyes? James had always wondered how that could possibly be true. That time he was hit on the head by the baseball the only events that passed before his eyes before he lost consciousness were the innings leading up to that foul ball.

This time his mind was trying to work out the puzzle of the last few harried minutes as he lost consciousness. The professor and the giant goon hadn't stabbed the man who had given him the package, he told himself, because they thought James was Marcellus. But why had he run exactly to the place where Marcellus was expected? Maybe it was the package? Could it have controlled his movement? After all, he hadn't even meant to run!

Those thoughts coursed through his brain as he blacked out, along with that croaky voice saying, "Take the package from him."

As he regained consciousness he heard the voice again. "I knew the needle was not a good idea. It's paralyzed his grip on the package. Ana Maria, see if you can persuade him to release it."

And James' busy brain thought, Aha! That's why my head doesn't hurt. They didn't hit me on the head - they jabbed me. That would be why my right bicep is so sore.

Slowly he opened his eyes. A table lamp nearby emitted a dim light but most of the room was filled with deep shadows. He could see that a gorgeous woman with long, dark hair was kneeling beside him, leaning over him. She was wearing a very low cut blouse and he thought he might pass out again from the view right in front of his eyes. He took a deep breath. She wore some sort of exotic perfume and she most certainly did not smell like his grandmother's house.

Her voice was low and seductive. "Senor Marcellus, I need that package. Can you give it to me?"

James would have done anything she asked, but his fingers refused to obey him. They would not release the package. Instead they explored the odd shape. It reminded him of something. It felt like - could it be? A very heavy, very small Sponge Bob Square Pants?

No, that was ridiculous! And yet ...

Keith Suta
Keith "That Jeopardy! Guy" Suta is co-host of KGLT-FM's The Coffee Show and is gainlessly employed as a writer. "Dead Noon," a movie he co-wrote and appears in, will be distributed later this year by Lionsgate Entertainment to video stores worldwide.

James groggily blinked and tried to focus on the object in his hand. Another vision took precedence-- Ana Maria's décolletage. James was still under enough nerve serum to think he heard a wailing saxophone solo and to imagine himself turning into a cartoon wolf, howling at the top of his lungs and unrolling his tongue an unprecedented length across the floor.

Just then, two seemingly disparate events occurred:

At that very moment, far away in his secret underground geodesic dome, a mysterious billionaire sat stroking his white, longhaired Norwegian Forest Cat, cackling evilly to himself. But that's just a normal Tuesday night for Ted Turner...

Also, James saw the Professor bearing down on him, wielding a device that looked like it was constructed out of pneumatic tubing, parts from a rusty meat grinder, a dentist's drill, and several Ron Paul campaign buttons. James stammered, "B-b-b-but I'm voting for Mike Gravel..." The Professor grinned a crooked smile, his machine grinding, humming, buzzing and making wheezing accordion noises all at once. Ana Maria was shrugging into a poncho, as if she was seeing Gallagher at Branson, Missouri and expected to get covered with watermelon goo. James thought he knew who the watermelon was going to be.

Just before one of the spinning blades, prongs, or assorted spork-like attachments made contact with James' face-- the door to the room exploded inward. Silhouetted in the light, stood a man, a military-grade AA-12 combat shotgun held at the ready. The AA-12 can emptied a 20-round drum of 12 gauge shells in just under four seconds. This is what it proceeded to do to the floor, walls and ceiling all around James. The Professor and Ana Maria dove for cover to avoid the falling debris. James would have done so, had he not been strapped to a table. The man with the gun hurried to the table and began unbinding James.

"We don't have time for questions. Come with me, if you want to live," said the man, in a decidedly non-Austrian accent.

James glanced at the dusty object still clutched in his hand. "Who are you?" he blurted.

"I'm Thaddeus Franklin Akira Walter Bergdorf McKinley Spader Jodorowsky Thompson MacGee Alan Marcellus. Call me Marcellus."

"No time for questions, but we had time for that?" James started to ask, but was yanked out the door...

Sid Gustafson
Sid is a novelist, pacifist, and word bum. He teaches equine studies at the University of Montana Western in Dillon (High Horse University), but writes in Bozeman, where his mind wanders freely. http://www.sidgustafson.com/

Marcellus dragged James into the hincty alley between Willson and Grand and stuffed him into his Hummer before heading through the neon dims of snowslain Bozeman, south, rising out of the streetlights of Bozeman, slowly humming up to the great farmy curve, and then left, up Hyalite, alongside the rock fences, rising into snow, and then into deeper snow, deeper darkness. "We're going fishin'," Marcellus stated militarily.

City water supply, James thought, not understanding where the thought arose. The grayling, the afluvial grayling. How are the grayling doing? he pondered. Are they fluvial or afluvial? They have the reservoir, and they have the creek. They have water. Still water. Running water. Cold water, water under ice. James was not sure what had overcome him-- what had overtaken his mind, his body. He did not feel like he thought he ought to feel. He felt poetic and destined.

As they wended through the steep canyon, the object in his hand began humming. The humming became paralytic. James could feel his hand loosening, his body loosening, the Hummer humming, his hand humming, the whole world... humming. Rising into darkness, rising into the mountains. Trees rising out of the world. Snow rising. Hummer rising, Marcellus driving robotlike, his redneck rough and red and hairy. They came to the reservoir. A gibbous moon arisen to starch the sky, whiffing the stars. Fluvial, afluvial. Effluvium. Moon arisen, moon risen. Oblong moon, long night.

Marcellus wheeled the Hummer to the boat dock on the eastern shore, southeastern shore, northeastern shore? James gawked out the window looking for Polaris. There was no Polaris, no BIG Bear, no little Bear. A glow to the north, Bozeman glowing in her valley, her bisected, resected, subjected, dejected valley of flowers not blooming.

His hand loosened enough for him to open his palm, and the thingy started glowing, humming now, and glowing. Marcellus dragged an ice fishing drill out of the back of the Hummer. James followed him out onto the ice. The jaundiced moonlight phosphoresced the ice a sulfurous yellow. Marcellus flipped some little switches on the drill, and pulled the cord. The machine took life, rattling and choking and banging, and then, humming. The rattle choke and bang bounced off the dam, bounced off the mountains, bounced off the moon, and came back to James, back through the hum and glow of the object in his palm.

Marcellus drilled, drilled through the ice. Chips of ice. Chunks of ice. Drilling, chipping, and then chunking deeper. When the ice-commando hit water the reservoir spit and groaned, a glottal lurch buckled the ice, unshackling the juggernaut Hyalite Reservoir had become.

The fish, James thought, the gray ling, the bur bot, no, the rain bow... must be the moon glow splitting my fool hearty words.

"James, you Jimmy, you nin-com-poop ninny," Marcellus bellowed, "drop that device in the hole."

James leaned over the hole, the black hole, a moonlit blackness tinted sulfuric yellow. He tipped his palm, the thing a ma jig rolled, plopped, came back up floating as if to say farewell, before sinking into the depths of manmade Hyalite Reservoir.

As the two marched back to the Hummer the littoral water under the ice took up a prismatic hue, and the hue rose into the ice, all the hues of the world rising into the ice, and as they looked back the hues rose out of the hole into a vortex, swirling the night, shaking the ice, stirring the world.

Holly Zadra
Holly writes and edits for the Tributary, but she brings in the big bucks finagling fiscal sustainability for the non-profit sector in Bozeman.
Ana Maria Marcellus scoffed, pulling off her wig of bombshell brunette to reveal tightly cropped bleach-white hair, "He wasn't as easy as Thaddeus, even under the serum." She reveled in thoughts of Thaddeus's former naïveté as she stripped off the poncho and replaced it with a neoprene body suit, lit a cigarette and blew it in the professor's face.

"Your tactics are so gruesome. Can you not, in all of your intellectual finery, come up with something clean?" she asked.

The professor stood there, seething and charmed at once, and handed his latest device to the big guy who turned toward the door.

"Let's get to the reservoir."

Ana Maria brushed past the big guy secretly revealing to him a sleek crimson gadget as she and the professor hurried off to their converted Chevette rife with the professor's rampant contraptions including a slant-six turbo-charged 7-liter engine. While the professor gassed up the thirsty Chevette - 19 miles to the gallon on the highway - Ana Maria placed her little red device under the front passenger seat. She pulled on a trilastic hooded vest, zippered boots, goggles and gloves.

She was in for a very cold dive, she thought bitterly. In her mind's eye she saw the professor's failed attempts to snorkel, his body seizing with anxiety and sinking toward the bottom of the pool...

She recalled his response, "I just couldn't psychologically reconcile my being under water and being able to breath."

Back on Main Street, the couple sped off to Hyalite. As they spun out around the left turn marking the entry to Hyalite Canyon, the professor slammed on the brakes. The two stared up at the sky in disbelief.

"We're too late!" the professor stammered.

"Not if I have anything to do with it," Ana Maria responded. "Move over. I'm driving."

The professor sidled out of the car like a child being punished, and Ana Maria climbed over her submersible spare air and the stick shift to the driver's seat. The professor hadn't even slammed his door shut before she took off up the winding road. Straight ahead was Thaddeus in his Hummer.

‘Compensating for something?' Ana Maria wondered as she lurched passed the giant tax incentive and waved to her husband and his newest follower...

Joseph Menicucci, Jr.
Joseph waxes poetic about our national pastime at baseballfaceoff.com. He is currently an instructor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Montana State University-Bozeman.

'It is little...very little...tiny even,' thought Magnús as Ana brushed past him in the doorway, 'but... I... think that she just showed me the red detonator she mentioned last night.'

Magnús had been sleeping with Ana since her trial separation from Thaddeus; she liked him, and even told him things that she didn't tell anyone else.

"I like you Magnús. I can tell you things I can't tell anyone else."

'Yes, that is what she said,' thought Magnús as he struggled to recall more of their conversation from the previous evening. He eventually remembered that Ana said that he reminded her of someone that she read about in a book once, someone named Santino, or Sonny, (he wasn't sure which one) but only when he was making love. Ana also said the Lord's name a lot when they were in bed, but she said it was all right because she was an atheist anyway. She also said the f-word a lot when she had sex.

"You say the f-word a lot," he told her.

"It's alright, because I'm an atheist," said Ana.

'Atheists can say the Lord's name and the f-word when they have sex,' thought Magnús, while making a mental note that he certainly was not an atheist.

Ana then told Magnús something very important. "Magnús, I'd like to tell you something very important..."

And this, of course, is all that Magnús could remember from the evening he had spent with Ana. He could remember the passion of their kisses, the lovemaking, the conversations of Sonny and the f-word, and Ana Maria saying the Lord's name over and over again, but he could not remember the most important thing she had told him.

Frustrated by once again forgetting something so important, Magnús turned his head to the sky and made a noise so violent, so guttural, that it was as if all motion stopped around him. People blocks away paused upon hearing the horrible sound, and they turned toward him sympathetically. Just then, when the world had paused to gaze upon Magnús, the sky exploded into a swirling mix of colors that, for a moment, seemed to dance to the echo of Magnús' primal scream.

His frustration turned to horror as Ana's parting words suddenly materialized to him as if revealed amidst the cacophony of colors now overwhelming the sky. "You must remember what I've told you, Magnús. I need you to follow the plan exactly if something goes wrong. My very life depends on it."

Many years later, when mothers would tell their children stories of the heroics of Magnús the Great, they often left out the story of a defeated Magnús Skúlason, huddled against the brickwork of the downtown Bozeman building, sobbing as he muttered repeatedly to himself, "I can't remember...I can't remember...I can't remember..."

Liz Allen
Liz is a therapeutic massage therapist who spends a substantial amount of time rock hounding in the mountains with her dog Tigger, telemark skiing, and writing poetry and short stories.

‘That Magnús is one unobservant dolt,' thought Ana Maria as she shifted the Chevette into Hover-Craft mode. ‘What could he possibly be doing right now to miss this night sky extravaganza?'

The Professor regarded her wistfully on an ice sofa and remarked to no one listening, ‘This fantastic color display reminds me of the Aurora Borealis,' while Ana Maria and her 5' 11" model body loomed over the ice-hole and readied herself to jump into the swirls of the abyss.

Her voyage into the ice hole's gaping mouth was brief. Underwater, she believed she pressed the red detonater and for a dramatic effect once on ice again, tossed it into the ice hole. It was actually a trilobite that the Professor swiped from Earth's Treasures earlier that day. The Professor had his own plan, a twisted and undeveloped plan, but a plan nonetheless, despite his distracting prolific propensity for shoplifting.

Ana Maria, unaware of the slight upturn of his grimace, quickly wiped her hands together, and snapped "We best be getting back to town Professor, I don't wanna be responsible for recovering your liquefied body off that ice sofa. You know what's about to happen."

"Right you are Ana," the Professor tried to look hurried. When, in reality, nothing turned him on more than a woman in charge. "You should drive!"

They hopped into the Chevette, still in Hover-Craft mode, and glided back through the forest onto the rural road, in the outskirts of Bozeman. That's when Ana pulled over to shift out of Hover-Craft mode, to fit in with the Subaru AWDs amassing on the roads.

"What the....?" Ana Maria began to stutter as she realized the red detonator was not doing its job. Instead, the psychedelic swirls in the sky transfixed her. For a moment, she thought she saw the outlines of a trilobite glowing bright orange. She felt herself slipping off the edge of reality.

"Did you...?" Her eyes teared as her gaze drifted to the grimace of the Professor and her question hung in the air inert. She slumped over in her bucket seat, a good hour of drooling unconsciousness upon her. At least that's how much time the Professor hoped he had.

The Professor gently caressed her beautiful neoprene legs as he moved her into the back seat. Unfortunately, the kaleidoscopes in his eyes were of no effect to the person who pulled up next to him, in a maroon Subaru AWD.

Craig Kenworthy
Craig writes the 30 Second Timeout column for the Chronicle. His radio play ‘Hurf" won a Silver Charles Ogle Award in 2007. He still can't believe he lost to that Bradbury guy.

It was the guy from the bus stop, minus the dagger sticking out of his back. The mustache looked as fake as ever, though. [A note to the reader- in full postmodern tradition, this would be a good time to reflect not on "I thought this guy was dead", but instead on "What is death?" Is it a state of being? A resolution of all our hopes and fears, realized or not? Your father in law complaining about his heel spurs? And if death is a journey, is dying at a bus stop just symbolic as hell or what?]

"Creighton?"

The driver of the Subaru nodded. It was the kind of nod you don't ignore.

"Hello, Professor. Or should I say ex-professor?"

The driver got out. He reached into the Chevette and took the keys out of the ignition.

"I prefer former professor. Just as you must prefer former grad student."

"Former. Sounds like a good descriptor for me. At least until this little experiment or..." Creighton looked up at the sky. "....or experience, maybe, starting having some interesting side effects. Have you driven past the cemetery, professor?"

"The pet cemetery? You know I go there every week to see Buttons."

"I am not referring to your obsessive devotion to a late Pekingese, you dolt."

"Actually, she was a Chow and she was all I had, except for my patents. I tried curling up on the couch with them, but it just wasn't the same."

"Listen to me, the people in the cemetery. They're..."

Pedro's revelation was interrupted by the sound of Ana Maria hitting the Professor over the head with the Chevette's owners manual. Normally, that would just be annoying, but in this case, she'd wrapped the manual around the vehicle's tire iron.

The professor's head hit the steering wheel, setting off the car's horn. Ana Maria shouted above the din:

"We've got to find Marcellus and Magnus."

"You want to find a trellis and sphagnum?"

She wondered how many tire irons this car had, but decided moving the Professor would be easier.

"I said we must find Marcellus and Magnus."

"Magnus, the guy who owns the Icelandic restaurant on Tracy?"

"He's the key to stopping this now."

"Stopping this? I am not sure I like that idea."

"We must protect the current state of affairs."

"Listen, lady. In the current state of affairs, I'm dead."

Bob Hendricks
Bob was born in Frankfurt Germany in the waning days of the Eisenhower administration and moved back to the USA when he was ten months old. While he has no memory of Germany, he does retain a fondness for BMW motorcycles and dark Bavarian beer, and he credits both for the occasional inspiration to write a one-act play.

Weaving through the sea of Hyalite Reservoir bound Subarus, topped with Yakima bike racks, and sprouting fists with raised middle fingers deriding the H-1's conspicuous consumption, Marcellus and James headed north-back toward Bozeman. The endless stream of oncoming traffic braided a rope-light that stretched to the historic downtown retail district. Congestion on South 19^th slowed progress, and prompted drivers to pass without regard for oncoming traffic, and-when the inevitable collision blocked the opposing lane-they took to driving on the shoulder and passing in the ditch.

"I much prefer police states-I prefer the order. No traffic jams and the trains run on time," groused Marcellus, as he detoured to Cottonwood Road to avoid the gridlocked South 19^th. James knew the route... knew there were two unavoidable ninety-degree turns that would require the lumbering Hummer to slow to a crawl and give him a chance to jump and run. Marcellus downshifted as they approached the first opportune corner. James steeled his nerves and inconspicuously grabbed the door handle. It was a right turn, and centrifugal force would hold the passenger side door closed-his escape would require extra effort, and his adrenal glands were rising to the occasion. James suddenly realized that escaping the Hummer was only the first step. He must also escape the AA-12 shotgun and its professional handler. The perpendicular roads he anticipated were surrounded by wheat fields; there was no cover... no place to hide... no escape. James sighed and released the door handle-adrenaline capitulated and regrouped for another opportunity.

James correctly concluded that this shotgun-wielding commando who rescued him from the clearly perceived-yet thoroughly misunderstood-threat back in the apartment building, was much more concerned with the package than with James' well being. He resented the demeaning tone Marcellus used to address him. If this package was so valuable... so vital... then shouldn't he be accorded some respect for ushering it away from the bus stop, its dead courier (or so James thought), and the gathering crowd?

Cottonwood Road passed the little red schoolhouse and descended slightly as it approached Hyalite Creek. As the Hummer crossed the creek, James noticed the blue-green glow that month-old ice, and a two-foot blanket of snow could not conceal. The spread of the glow was outpacing the river's current. The current could not have carried it from the reservoir, over the dam, down the canyon, and into the valley faster than the Hummer had speeded down the paved roads.

"What is that?" he demanded of Marcellus. "What was in the package? What is it doing to the lake... to the water?"

Marcellus responded as he had been splendidly trained: "You don't have a need to know." While his answer was surely condescending, his tone had changed, and James noticed it. But he did not realize that the tone of Marcellus' voice meaningless. He had rehearsed that response for years so that he could deliver it in the exact same manner to the lowest errand boy that Langley could dispatch to retrieve his laundry, to the President. And he had indeed delivered that same line-in the same flat tone with a hint of respect-to both.

James contemplated his next possible escape opportunity, oblivious to the commotion behind him. The blue-green glow beneath the ice and snow was far more brilliant-indeed violently psychedelic-in open water. And it marched upstream under the ice-defying the current-toward Palisade Falls, where it raced up the column of ice to the top of the waterfall and shot into space like an electron charged fountain reaching up to the sky, seeking its Aurora Borealis source and bridging the eight and a half light minutes back to the sun... back to the solar flair that spawned it. Cold fusion had been created, but was far from corralled.

For the second time that evening-and the second time in his life-James craved a martini. A Bombay Sapphire martini. Straight up with a twist... and dry. Put the vermouth in the air humidifier.

Alison Grey
Alison is a Bozeman native who has spent much of her adult life trying to avoid the real world, a semi-successful pursuit. When she isn't skiing, eating French fries or wasting away her youth in local dive bars, she is a writer who prefers the ridiculous and socially unacceptable to the boring and mundane and is attracted to hot men in snow pants.

Word spread quickly throughout Bozeman of the incoherent transient emitting horrible groans and mumbling the same repeated phrase over and over again.

The first to come across this mysterious transient were Dorothy and Jan, a duo a retirees walking home from their usual luncheon date at the Nova Café. Their animated conversation detailing the numerous achievements of their grandkids was cut short when they came upon Magnus, now huddled in fetal position, peering up into the sky with glazed eyes, red and puffy from his dramatic breakdown.

"Are you all right?" asked Jan, inching slowly towards Magnus.

"I don't remember," said Magnus, his voice so hoarse Jan could barely understand him. "I don't remember...we had sex...oh, we had great sex, mind blowing...but, ah, I don't remember."

Magnus mustered his last bit of strength to raise his arm towards Jan, beckoning her towards him as he let out a low guttural noise. She lurched backwards, moving more quickly than she had in years.

"Dear Lord," she said to Dorothy, her voice quivering with a mixture of fear and animosity. "What a pathetic sight. The last thing we need are a bunch of beer guzzling, crack smoking, sexually perverse, societal rejects dirtying up our community."

"Absolutely," Dorothy agreed. "What this town needs to do is buy these low life scoundrels a one-way ticket to Missoula with all those hippies that actually feel sorry for them."

"Ah, she was so beautiful, naked, sweating and moaning," Magnus quietly bellowed, tears streaming down his face. "But, I just can't remember."

"That's it," screamed Jan. "We're calling the cops."

"Pervert," hissed Dorothy, as the two scuttled down the street.

As the two were busy alerting local law officials, a black Ford truck pulled up next to Magnus, screeching to a halt inches from his head. Through his blur of tears, Magnus saw two dark figures in cowboy hats coming towards him.

He let out a whimper, wishing he was back in Ana's arms, cuddled tightly against her voluptuous breasts as she screamed profanities to the Lord and called him Sonny.

Weak and tired, Magnus did not resist as the two men wrapped him in some sort of animal hide. He could feel himself being lifted, and with a thud, dropped into the bed of the truck. As the engine roared beneath him and the truck sped off, Magnus could hear sirens in the distance approaching the site of his abduction.

After a long and painful ride over bumpy dirt roads, the truck came to a halt. Before Magnus knew it, he was unwrapped, and found himself sitting on a buffalo hide. He looked up to see a grinning Ted Turner gently stroking a longhaired white cat.

Brian Kassar
Brian has lived in Bozeman for 8 years and been active in the arts community as an actor, singer, writer and director. His scripts have won an Audience Choice award and 2 Best Production awards in the last three Equinox Theatre One-Act Play festivals.

"Where's the Orb of Dominion?" asked Ted, placing the cat on the floor.
Magnus was still sitting on the buffalo hide, a bit dazed from the trip and subsequent deposit in front of Ted Turner. The cat rubbed against knee, purring loudly. Magnus absently began petting the cat as he tried to make sense of this surreal tableau.

"The Orb!" screamed Ted, simultaneously maniacal and benevolent.

The outburst jolted Magnus back to the present. With surprise, he noticed he was petting the cat and immediately stopped. He hated cats.

"I...I don't know. I've been having problems keeping track of things...my memory..."

Ted interrupted him. He bent down, inches from his face, and hissed, "What do you think will happen to our little deal without the Orb? The fate of Ted's Montana Grill lies with that Orb. Without it, our previous agreement will become null and void."

Magnus noted a smell of sandalwood and tobacco. "Our lives are now inextricably entwined my friend," gloated Ted.

"Mr. Turner, please. I need this deal as much as you do. I can help find the Orb. I know someone...someone close to the Orb. You see, a while back this girl and I.."

"ENOUGH!" shouted Ted. The cat, which had begun licking its ass, paused with its leg raised in the air as if hoping to answer an arithmetic question. "Bring them in."

At that moment, an elevator door opened and one of Magnus's cowboy hat-wearing abductors shoved Anna Maria and James into the cavernous room.

"Anna Maria!" exclaimed Magnus.

"You know this guy?" James asked Anna Maria.

"Yes," she replied. Hoping to avoid speaking the truth (oh the awful truth) of their knowledge of each other, she said, "He owns the Icelandic restaurant on Tracy."

"Indeed he does," said Ted Turner.

Magnus tried to interject. "But-"

Both Anna Maria and Ted Turner gave him a look that served to silence him. Anna Maria's out of desperation, Ted Turner's out of menace.

James quickly made sense of the situation. "I think I have what you want!"

Like a predator, Ted Turner approached James from the other side of the room.

Michele Corriel
Michele is a freelance writer working with about a dozen regional and national magazines. But perhaps she is even less well-known for her invention of the Poetry Dispensers that keep popping up around town (and around the West). She is currently working on her third (or is it her sixth?) novel for young readers.

Playing with the somewhat dull-edged skull-shaped dagger, Ted turned to the hermetically sealed doors that were supposed to have guaranteed that no microorganisms gained entrance. But something much bigger than a microorganism had indeed obtained a foothold in his lair.

"I thought I told all those Romney kids to get out of town!" Ted sneered at his personal assistant, none other than Pedro Creighton.

"I told them, sir, but they insisted on staying. I believe their father is buying the Yellowstone Club and turning it into a retreat for the Tabernacle Choir."

"Creighton, seal those doors at once! I can't be bothered with the noveau rich. And don't forget to vacuum the cat," Ted returned to his guests.

"But aren't you?" James pointed at Creighton. "Isn't he? ... What the?" James stuttered into his half-finished martini.

Ana could see Creighton pretend to vacuum the cat, but in actuality he was signaling an escape route to her.

Ted's head swiveled and caught Creighton in the act. "So, I see we've got a mole here."

"Where?" Ana searched her face to see if that pesky mole on her upper lip had resurfaced. "Does anyone have a small hand mirror?"

"Not that kind of mole, you idiot!" Ted yelled.

"You mean a spy?" Creighton feined disbelief.

"No, there, that furry animal burrowing under my carpeting! Quick Creighton get my buffalo gun!"

"But sir, that's only for shooting buffalo." Creighton replied, unlocking the back door and allowing both Ana and James the ability to leave.

Ana knew her only chance to make a run for it was to create a diversion. But what?

In a last gasp effort to save herself and James, who was looking rather cute in a bedraggled sort of way, stepped forward and declared, "All right, you got me. I'll tell where the Weapons of Mass Destruction are."

"Honey, that's yesterday's news. No one believes in them anymore than we believe in cold fusion." Ted threw his dagger across the room. "We need the Orb, darlin' The Orb."

Ana's eyes signaled to James, darting from the curtain to his feet. "Run," she mouthed when Ted wasn't looking.

And he did.

Right into the Professor who was emitting multi-colored rays of light from the ends of fingertips. Everything he touched turned psychedelic. He was the trippiest Midas that ever walked the streets and tunnels (tunnels?) of Bozeman.

At that moment Ted hoisted his buffalo gun and shot at the mole.

"Wait!" screamed the Professor. "That sir is no mole, that's my wife!"

Mike Finkel
Mike is currently producing offspring at a disconcertingly rapid pace.

Goddamn there's a lot of characters in this story, thought Mike Finkel as he read he tale, then read it again, and found himself thoroughly confounded. I guess that's what happens when there's too many cooks in the kitchen. How wonderfully, egotistically rude would it be, he wondered, to fuck the whole thing up, insert himself as a character, have that James guy -- remember James? has anybody actually read this far? hello? -- shut the book he was reading back near the Thomas the Tank Engine track over at the Barnes & Noble, and, in a nice Italo Calvino sort of way, start the whole damn story again?

It could be a simple, coming of age yarn about a young man -- a man named James -- and his mother -- let's call her Eileen -- driving with the multitudes down North 19th Street, talking about what they'd like to eat for lunch, speaking of the weather, telling unfunny jokes. Tender. Poignant. Subtle. A searing look into the quiet angst that defines our time. The ennui of life. The meaning of it all. Possibly written in French.

Certainly, we could weave in a lot of insider hilarity, like making good-natured fun of the fact that you have to mortgage your home to afford a bagel at the Co-Op, or that there's really only two types of people left in town -- real estate agents and yoga instructors -- or that by city ordinance you must own a black lab or face expulsion. We'd have to note the amazing and unbelievable fact that Petsmart can be read as either Pet Smart or Pets' Mart. And we'd no doubt retell tell that great old Bozeman knee-slapper about being only 20 miles from Montana...

Shit.

You're right.

It's a bad idea.

Really bad.

So: There's an orb in the lake. The sky is all trippy. Someone has apparently wed a rodent. We've poked some fun at Ron Paul, Mike Gravel, and Mitt Romney, but not the sacred Democrats. People are named Marcellus, Ana Maria, Magus (with an accent aigu), the Professor, Dorothy, Creighton, Jan, and Ted. It's possible that the Professor has a name, but I missed it. Marcellus is also known as Thaddeus. I think. Anyway, there's been a bit of sex. People have driven all over the valley. The word "hincty" has been used. Someone has a diminutive penis. Can we say penis in this story? Martinis have been craved. James, I believe, is still the main character.

Plow on, my dear Soren.

Soren Kisiel
Soren Kisiel is an award-winning playwright and co-author of Broad Comedy, the Executive Director of the Equinox Theatre Company and the founder of Spontaneous Combustibles Improv Comedy Troupe.

Plow on, indeed, Mike. For what choice have we?

I understand your impatience, my friend, but sit here by the fire. Let the night's quiet calm you, for there is still much to tell.

You cannot be blamed for feeling that there are too many characters in this story. There are many. But you see it is only by a complete telling of the tale that the deeds of Magnus the Great can be seen in their full light. Only with a full recounting of Magnus' mighty actions, and those of the legends around him, can the true heroism be seen, and the fullness of his humanity.

Indeed, it is tempting to disrespect our ancestors. To chuckle over a word like "hincty" or the confusion of names, but is this what we wish to teach our children?

If our great stories were allowed to be treated so lightly, how would we know who we are? When we are asked why we wear the cloaks of silver dire-wolf fur upon our shoulders, or why our leaders wear a ring of cold iron from the north seas upon their brow, what will we answer?

Just as if the traditions of Magus Terra of the Denim Overalls had been lost, we would have been lost as well.

If the Ways were not passed to her from the earliest times, from wise one to wise one, if they had not been preserved to eventually land in Magus Terra's leathered palms, would we even be here to tell the tale? Passed from Sun Tzu to Sun Ra, and indeed from the hearthstone to Firestone. Yes, Firestone. For, my friends, my community, it is around tires that our story now turns.

Magus Terra of the Denim Overalls stood just outside the property line, across the street where Hyalite Canyon Road finds its bottom, at Cottonwood Road. She knew this was coming. And she knew she wouldn't be prepared. She had spread herself too thin.

When the elders had given her the task of maintaining the wall, she should have made that her only goal. Live in the house across from the bottom of Hyalite Canyon Road, and keep the holy tire-wall intact.

Few in Bozeman now remembered the tire wall, it had been so long since it was taken down. A fence, long and proud and as high as any rancher's, constructed entirely of old tires. Of eternal tires, holy tires, tires imbued with the elasticity of angels, as all rubber is. Tires made to stand the test of time, the test of progress.

That wall had been gone a half-decade, at least, when now it was finally needed. For half a generation Magus Terra had watched over the wall, before she became distracted.

It was too easy to become distracted. Her attention had been pulled away in so many directions. Supporting local businesses... fundraising for small non-profits... reading the Food Co-op's newsletter... taking on students of her ways, like Stephanie Campbell, or Holly Zadra. This land offered so much for a woman like Terra, how could one blame her for not maintaining her focus? So when the property taxes got to be too much - for all her income had gone to bailing out small theater companies - and the house with the tire fence was sold, she tried not to think of the tires, to put them out of her mind. Terra, after all, wasn't her real name, anyway. She'd done what she could, right?

But now, watching the dancing glow reaching out from the mountain tops, she understood why the angels had placed the tire wall there. Why the spirits had chosen that spot at the bottom of the canyon to make their steel-radial stand.

She pushed a tear from her eye. This was no time for self-pity, or regret. Pulling a worn bandana from her pocket she blew her nose, steeling herself against what was to come.

She climbed back into the U-Haul she'd rented, the illustrated postcard of Wounded Knee painted on the side no coincidence. From the breast pocket of her denim overalls she pulled a long graying eagle's feather, and placed it on the dashboard. Firing the engine, she headed for the storage unit. The storage unit where the tires had been stacked upon one another like prayer stones, sleeping peacefully for these many years.

Sally King
After paying her New York dues, King lives in Bridger Canyon and writes about food, wine, travel and design for Big Sky Journal, Western Art and Architecture, Wine Review Online, Wine Enthusiast, More, and other publications and websites. sbkproductions.com

Hunkered down in the U-Haul, Terra (a.k.a. Ana Maria, Junior) thought about the life she had led before storing so many things in the storage unit. She'd had an exciting life, a good life, and now she was willing to put it all on the line.

In addition to the tires in the storage unit, there were cases and cases of Ketel One vodka. Why had she felt the urge to stockpile so much vodka? It had to do with some feeling of scarcity. Terra was always worried about being broke, poor, hungry, and unable to pay her rent. Now that cost of living in Bozeman was out of control, she had felt compelled to be somewhat of a pack-rat.

During her years in town, she had asked Ted to bail her out so many times-which he did, even when he was married to Jane-and she just couldn't ask him again. It was too embarrassing. And she certainly couldn't call Marcellus! Not again!

So, she slumped back in the driver's seat of the U-Haul and thought about what to do next.

Terra worried about the tire situation; it was more of a stressor now that she was divorced from Thaddeus and she had to fend for herself. She started pacing.

Then, it came to her: YOGA! If I go to Down to Earth's mysore class, I'll be able to think straight; I'll be able to come out of the Emerson-pink and glowing with that yoga high-and confront the contents of the storage unit. The tires. The vodka.

So she walked over to the yoga studio, spread out her yoga mat, and proceeded to chant, breathe, and move her body and mind. After 1 1/2 hours of introspection and yoga poses, Terra had a clearer head. It worked every time. "Practice, practice. All is coming," said her guru.

She rolled up her sweaty yoga mat. "OK." She sighed. "Here we go." (When she got nervous or anxious, she talked to herself. It was her own way of dealing with stress. )

When Terra arrived at the storage unit, she entered her code, and there they were: All the tires, plus, all the Ketel One vodka. The room was chilly, and she was grateful that alcohol didn't freeze. "Plus," she said out loud, "...he LOVES martinis!"

She knew she had to consider the Orb. She thought about adding some Ketel One to the hole in the ice. Would it help or hurt the situation? Terra worried about the fish and the environment, but she also knew that the vodka would very slightly change the temperature of the water in the reservoir so that the water would be more accessible.

She sat in the storage unit, opened a bottle of Ketel One, and took a long swig, right out of the bottle. Just like James had done.

She put on the red Neoprene suit that she knew she had to use, took one of the tires, tucked two small bottles of vodka in her vest-the one she bought on sale at Northern Lights-- and headed up to the reservoir.

When she got to the reservoir, she took out the tire and......

Jonathan Gans
Jonathan lives with horses and over the ridge from Bridger Bowl in Brackett Creek country. He writes poetry, teaches kids, talks to his dogs and has loved the same woman for 31 years. His recent book 49 Poems: Where Are You Leading Me Now? was published in 2005.

...a can of charcoal lighter she kept in the trunk for starting fires on wet mornings in the campground. She tucked her rolled up Yoga Tarp under one arm and her prayer helmet under the other.

"I'm a gonna either scare that loony Orb back into the zenith delta where he come from or git him to settle down right heah ‘cross from me like we was gonna smoke a pipe and he's gonna tell me just what this whole shindangdooie is about," she muttered, taking a look around to see if anyone else might be watching her one woman parade from her Rambler down to the lakeside. She'd gotten tired of shifting into that worn out U Haul clutch and had left the beast at the storage yard.

"Ain't this a helluva thing for a gal as shined up an smart as I used to be, reduced to this kind of foolishness in the dead of night, and for what? Got to be some dumbass furriner man type behind this I am sure."

Down on the ground went the old tire when she'd carried it through the pine woods as far as she could on what breath she still had left at that altitude. She squatted stiffly and squirted the inside of the rim with lighter fluid. Reaching into the front slash pocket of her skintight suit, she pulled out a Zippo lighter and flicked it into flame in front of her face for a moment. "You light MY fire, baby. Always, Jimbo" read the engraved inscription on the cover.

"What the hell do I think I'm doin out here anyway? Savin' the world? Bringin in the Orb? Livin out a dam fairy tale gone real wrong, ‘ats whut."

She reached forward and lit the fluid inside the tire. It all leapt into a flaming blue ring, and instantly began to cast up the putrid black smoke for which riot tires are famous. With the tiger striped prayer helmet pulled down snugly, her rhythmic chanting of the Zarathustrian Manger Moan Mantra echoed and ricocheted inside her head like a swallow trapped in an attic trying to find a way out. But keep it in she did, as she was supposed to do, now sitting on her spread out tarp in the pose of reception, soles of her Birkenstocks pressed together, the burning tire's black light casting an eerie glow on her red neoprene suit. She was like the red pointer of her own compass, aimed in some new magnetic direction other than the four cardinals, calling out of the dark matter of the sky whatever Power, God, Orb, or late night freak with a portable dish might tune her in.

She felt prickly. Was it the suit? Itchy on her skin. Hard to concentrate on the Mantra. What if the tire burned out before she got the message? Would she know the message when she heard it, be able to distinguish it from her own inner slavish rant, her worn through complaint on life? She would know. She had to know. She was the only one out here, the only one with her own tire, her own inner reggae filling in what crevices remained in her disintegrating brain, the only one in The Red Suit, the only one believing in The Great Man after so many disappointments from so many little men, the one true believer in The Orb. Somethin's comin.

She paused for a good long swig of the cold and burning vodka. And another. One more. Back to the chant. Now she was feeling the energy, her blood running warmer, her eyelids twitching from the expectant REMs behind them. She tilted her head back and looked directly up into the night sky and she saw it then, saw the rainbow Orb, circling the moon like rings around a stone thrown into night's own water. It was descending slowly, spinning as it came down to where she sat, a patient disciple, a Vestal waiting in the light of a burning tire, her mouth dropped open, eyes wide as temple bells. Did she see the little man, the little man just inside the rim of the rainbow Orb, as if he were at the controls, controlling the descent of the glimmering, shimmering donut orb. Yes, she had harnessed its power, and it was coming down to meet her, to greet her, to rescue her, to reward her with all those dreams she had for so long been wanting.

She was fixated on it, her face full upward as it grew in size. She felt her neck stiffen and cramp from the cold and she couldn't straighten it. She was losing her balance, being drawn into the light tunnel. She fell backward and the nape of her neck, unprotected just below the helmet, landed with a heavy thud on a downed log and she passed out.

Kate Howe
Kate wastes a lot of time writing poetry, short stories, screenplays (some of which she's finished!) and the occasional novel. Sometimes they get published. When she isn't teaching skiing at Bridger Bowl or rock climbing at Spire, she can be found hanging absurdly large sculptures from the ceiling of the Co-op or documenting the insanity that is her life at http://www.skiingintheshower.blogspot.com/>

James looked down at the neoprene clad, Birkenstock wearing fruitcake that was his former flame and sighed. Why are the most interesting ones also the craziest? Clenching and unclenching his right hand, which was pulsing in psychedelic patterns where he had touched the Professor (read as: shoved him violently out of the way as he made his escape), he looked across the ice to the group that had gathered on the shore.

Anna Maria nodded at him. Magnus, who had the potential to be great, stared vacantly at Anna Maria, wondering if he could inhale her bodily and suck her into his skin. The Professor and Marcellus were trading touches back and forth, seemingly playing games with the psychedelic pulses of light. Interesting that in every crisis, there is also time for boredom and distraction. The dead guy sat dejectedly, looking sullenly at Magnus, and realizing that it could just as easily have been him. Okay, it HAD been him. Anna Maria hadn't let him inhale her bodily into his skin, either. It was time to get on with life. Perhaps he could find work up at Bridger teaching skiing. People say it's a good job, an okay place to meet hot women.

James surveyed the motley group and knelt next to Tara. Lovingly, he removed her tiger striped mantra helmet, allowing her wild, unkempt hair to spill from it. Even insensible, she was still strangely compelling to him. He still couldn't believe this had to be done. His history with her, it had been hard to stay away, and equally great to be outside her orb of insanity... he glanced again at Anna Maria, who was scraping Magnus off her lower leg with her heel, and gesturing for James to get on with it.

"This is ridiculous," thought James, feeling a bit biblical, a bit in over his head, a bit moronic, and not just a little curious. He bent down over his former love, whispered her name. The Professor and Marcellus touched the ice at precisely that moment, sending pulses of cosmic light across the reservoir toward them.

James, who might have thought "Not again" or "Oh, please" normally under such circumstances, was wholly captivated by the spectacular goggle tan that Tara was sporting and drew nearer and nearer realizing as the scent of hot neoprene and sweat assaulted his senses that he had never ever needed to taste someone as badly as the taste of Tara... his lips descended upon hers and all eyes turned to the sky as...

Mike England
Once a writer of marginal promise, Mike has currently suspended his literary ambitions to engage in the equally unprofitable business of independent magazine publishing.

...Ted Turner emerged from the center of the iridescent glow, riding a white, winged buffalo. The deranged media mogul bore down on them, eyes ablaze with the indignation and fury that only a member of the bourgeoisie can feel when outsmarted by proletarians. "Impudent little wretches," he growled, kicking his spurs into the flying bison's ribs. He reached out and stroked his cat, poised like a sphinx on the beast's shaggy head. It purred momentarily, then let out a horrid wail that echoed through the canyon.

The group on shore froze in place. Not only would Ted be on them in seconds, but they were all transfixed by the banner trailing from the winged creature's tail: "Where Culture Meets Evolution: Buffalo Ted's Montana Grill and Flying Wild West Show." Anna glanced at the Chevette and was overcome with shame. Her "Be a Yokel, Buy Local" bumper sticker now seemed so 2006.

The Professor cringed with self-loathing. He had helped create this abomination, when he was part of the secret genetic engineering program concealed in the geodesic dome beneath the Flying D Ranch. The winged bison Pegalo had been their only real success-unless you call turning his wife into a mole successful (which he certainly did). The Professor remembered Ted's impassioned soliloquy when Pegalo was born. "Forgive me, Montana, for Jane," he'd said, in a rare moment of humanity. "I was weak! Like Beowulf with Grendel's mother! Jane is my curse, and always will be-at least until the Vietnam vets die off. But the Flying Wild West Show will be my salvation! What ex-Marine could hate me after seein' buffalo-mounted cowboys jousting 200 feet above the Gallatin River?"

James, still in his liplock with Tara, opened his eyes in time to see Ted and his giant albino bison-bird landing on shore. As Tara smiled and groggily maneuvered herself into the downward dog yoga pose, James's mind wheeled with a single, persistent thought: "Can you really get high off tire smoke?"

Ted dismounted and leveled his buffalo gun at the group. "Where is the Orb of Dominion?" he demanded. "Without it, my genetic augmentation program cannot succeed! Anna Maria, unless you want a 50-caliber slug through your saline sacs, I suggest you get in the water and fetch me my orb."

While Ted was threatening breast reduction and James was considering new psychoactive opportunities, Magnus was thinking. An ember had ignited inside his brain. He felt everything around him changing, shifting, like the air before a storm. And then all at once it burst into his consciousness. He suddenly remembered what Anna had told him during their moment of non-blasphemous, profanity-laced ecstasy. How could he have forgotten? Those tender lips, whispering to him ever so sweetly that it was he, and only he, who possessed a penis diminutive enough to save Bozeman from certain doom.

A change came over Magnus. His stooped shoulders raised and broadened. His furrowed brow relaxed and a look of calm permeated his countenance. Everyone turned to witness the grandeur and dignity of Magnus's transformation. He was no longer Magnus the Miniscule. No longer "Big Guy with Tiny Pee-Pee," as the Hopi called him. Destiny had arrived at last. He would become what his Aunt Ruthie had always told him he'd become: Magnus the Great. And for the first time in his life, he knew exactly what he had to do.

Shayna Gibson
Shayna is the recent recipient of mild Internet infamy. She wishes she were joking. She also can't resist flirting with the boundaries of literary decency. She's sorry. No she isn't.

It takes a great act of daring to be considered by the Board of Literary Name Suffixes to be qualified as a "the Great." It is, as of yet, an unbusted myth that correlates outstanding genital characteristics to greatness. Of course, that said, the size of a man's genitalia has little to do with the quality of his constitution. Unless, of course, you happen to find yourself in Butte, Montana on St. Patrick's Day without pants.

Of all of the greats, Magnus had by far the most fascinatingly magical stick of salami in his pants (except, perhaps, for Joan of Arc, who found her holy armor more comfortable when she stuffed its codpiece to prevent chaffing the empty slot.) This trouser tiger had lain dormant for the majority of Magnus' life, only did it finally begin to awaken with the arousal provided by Ana Maria's sailor mouth and the vacant afterlife plans that solidly slept behind her irises. It was a lust-slaked glimpse of a faith in vast empty nothingness that was promised in Ana Maria's climax-dilated pupils. Like all "the Greats," Magnus had been injected by his own potential by the noncommittal affections of a disdainful woman of action.

Catherine the Great had a prophetic vagina. Xerxes the Great possessed a testicle that permeated the aroma of freshly baked bread. Alexander the Great had been blessed (or cursed depending on the moment) by two nigh-identical Greek peni to pack in his Byzantine underpants. The slightly lubricated hand of fate had touched Magnus with a gift that might cost him his very life, or at least certainly his dignity.

With one last look of profound, almost pubescent longing at Ana Maria, Magnus dropped trou. A collective eyebrow raise directed itself at the new dangling member of the adventuring party. It would have introduced itself, but it was rather cold. The awkwardness of the moment lingered at length before finally giving way to the light jazz-infused sounds of Tony Mottola.

"Magnus!" Ana Maria gasped as she fully understood his plan, "I had no idea that your penis was baritone."

Ted Turner was not amused. His flying buffalo was not appeased by the sounds of pants-sausage easy listening. Ted Turner was not a man to trifle with with your pants down. Unless of course, you knew his secret...

Rebecca Kinman
Rebecca is a vagabond writer whose recent travels to South America have inspired a number of humanitarian projects. A former Co-op employee, she enjoys the occasional indulgence in affectionate jabs at the store's philosophical core. But she doesn't mean it because she wants to continue friendly visits with her ex-coworkers while they're still on the clock. Read her blog at http://people.tribe.net/rebeccarose>

……That second to the Co-op, the Ted Turner Foundation was one of the biggest annual beneficiaries to ACRDA (Americans for Complete and Rapid Destruction of the Amazon). “What a useless, putrid waste of potentially profitable advertising space,” Ted grumbled.

“Yah, Magnus’ penis is capable of so much more,” chimed Anna Maria.

“No, you Latina wannabe fool,” cried Ted. “These foolish words astound me! The Amazon Rainforest is a waste! I’d like to buy it all and start a new advertising campaign,”

Ted’s eyes joyfully sparkled at the thought of thousands of species of endangered monkeys violently dying, one by one. His mind basked in the thought of lush green canopies being whipped to shreds and ancient native traditions slashed by the pleasure of capitol greed. His heart pounded expectantly as he conjured the idea of replacing the entire Amazon with a colossal… billboard. The largest one ever. It would be visible from…the moon! From Saturn! From His secret collection of Sinead O’Connor reggae bootlegs! It would read: “Ted’s Montana Grill. Eat Great. Kill the Rainforest. ” His late father would be very proud.

As if telepathically detecting Ted’s devious plan, Anna Maria grabbed Marcello’s AA-12 shotgun with her right hand and Magnus’ very vocal manhood with the other. It was a trick that she’d learned from a 180-year-old shaman that she had met in Venezuela after her post-college quest to find herself. “The male member is a great thing. It is like a shotgun,” the shaman had said. “Only a woman can combine their powers to save our people. To save the jungle. And the world.”

“Don’t even think about it,” Anna Maria commanded, pointing the expensive firearm to Magnus’ temple.

‘Sorry honey,” she whispered to a very sweaty Magnus. “This will only take a second,”

She bravely pointed Magnus’ singing penis toward the buffalo, who was now trying to plug his ears with his hooves.

“Make one move and I’ll put this penis on permanent Barbara Streisand. You and your Buffalo will live in an infinite hell that no soundproof geodesic dome can shelter you from!”

“Oh, you foolish, foolish girl…”cackled Ted. “Everyone knows that the Double-Handed Feminine Phallus Grasp can be overridden by pressing just one simple button. One that lies deep within the center of the Orb of Dominion. Now tell me where it is, or I will be forced to buy Hyalite Canyon and have the city’s water supply laced with…chlorine! Then I’ll have the Board of Directors at the Co-op raise the price of local, organic non-genetically modified bison! Then I’ll sell the Co-op’s McDonalds’s franchise and use the extra cash to bleach my mustache! I’ve got those sold-out hippies wrapped around my little finger! Huaahuaa huaaa!”

Everyone fell silent. The idea of toxic cleaning products in their drinking water -- and on Ted’s face -- was sickening. And Terra had just read in the Co-op newsletter that ground bison was already an astronomical $5.99 a pound. Not to mention, McDonald’s--and thus the greater Bozeman Community--would suffer greatly the economic loss of the Co-op’s underground investment in unethically raised meats and their not-so-underground investment in soy-based, tasteless meat like product. The future of Bozeman was greatly dependent upon stopping Ted Turner, the Co-op, and their collaborative efforts to make a buck off of pseudo-environmentally progressive causes.

There was only one thing to be done.

Stephanie Saline
Stephanie writes at her kitchen table, rides bikes, works at the Emerson, is a member of Equinox Comedy Death Match, and will play Mindy in Alan Ball’s “Five Women Wearing the Same Dress” in MSU’s Black Box Theater in April. She is currently scouting acts for a summer burlesque show in her backyard. Seriously. Email backyardburleycue@gmail.com for more info.

Had Ted only known that the indulgent revelation of his nefarious intentions would actually cause their ultimate undermine, perhaps he would have chosen to enjoy an unexpressed thought.

His tragic fate, sung from the shelves of Poor Richard’s by so many ravenous heroin-hollowed and rehab-muted sirens on the covers of glossy fashion and celebrity gossip magazines, could have been avoided. But Ted, too rich to fetch his own copy of the latest Vanity Fair let alone burden his pockets with an actual wallet, had abandoned a life of chance and confrontation – which threatened to change him in ways he did not plan or expect – for one of convenience and catering. Ted’s housekeeper Doris had dispatched the lowest ranks of her staff to run in-town errands on his behalf for years.

What had once seemed the hallmark of luxury – the having of others tend to life’s everyday tasks so as to spend one’s time in more esoteric or at least commercially lucrative endeavors – had, over a lifetime, left Ted with a rather stunted soul. Thanks to Doris’ competent anticipation of Ted’s every whim, a small bell had even been recently installed in his personal water closet, which when rung, sent a manservant running to him, in each hand a roll of bathroom tissue.

Like Howard Hughes and Doris Duke before him, Ted had in fact noticed the gradual erosion of his dignity. Mostly in the dull pity he felt whenever he saw a photo or interview of Britney Spears. Yet Ted felt – if he could be said to feel anything anymore - strangely helpless to counteract it. His common sense had long since been replaced by an eccentric’s reasoning, which would explain why, upon remembering that he no longer knew how to operate a motor vehicle, instead of enrolling in the “Safe Driving Refresher” adult ed course, he had taken to traveling by bison volant.

And so, like any starved soul who joins the conversation half-emptied martini glass in hand, Ted blurted out his pathetic designs for Bozeman, the rainforests, and his restaurant, whose giant red neon sign proposed for the Baxter franchise had rankled the Historic Bozeman Society, who - with the mistaken sense of ferocity usually reserved for small yapping dogs - had predictably threatened to deep six the whole project.

On the banks of Hyalite Reservoir, the group had grown restless and fidgety in the musk of Ted’s loneliness. Oblivious, Ted barreled on.

“…and after the sign thing is put to bed, we can all get together for dinner at the restaurant. San Pellegrino’s on me. And then, you can all come over to the Flying D and we can watch youtube. Have you guys seen ‘two girls in a…’”

Had Ted been more keen, he would have known the “Double-Handed Feminine Phallus Grasp” for the ruse that it was. Instead of being distracted by the AA-12 in Ana Maria’s right hand, he would have understood that fate of his villainy was held in her left.

In the time that it took for Ted to impress the friends he longed for with his plans of domination and conquest, Ana Maria’s clever hand had succeeded in warming Magnus’ previously shy member. Had Ted been more observant, he would have seen Ana Maria release Magnus’ little warrior, now fluffed for his world-saving mission.

And if Ted had been a man who wiped his own ass, he would have registered that a freed and aroused Magnus was now waddling - pants around his ankles - to the hole bored mere hours before by Marcellus and James.

On and on, Ted talked. “There’ll be simulated sunrise and sunset ever hour on the hour, and every Friday night the maître d’ will release baby bison into the dining room for a running of the bulls…”

As Magnus kneeled, he looked back at Ana Maria. She was laughing in the moonlight. Unlike Mr. Turner, Ana Maria’s secrets were protected behind a pair of imperial guard dogs, her grin and her cunt. There is but one hero in the stories of men, she mused. She made a mental note to check out Beefalo Station, the new all-male burlesque club and fantasy show behind Miss Lil’s in Belgrade, after this adventure wrapped up.

Somehow, Magnus knew his singing cock was the one thing that would attract the Orb of Dominion like a magnet. Instinctively, he prostrated himself on the ice.

Ray Sikorski
Ray wrote a play for the 2008 Equinox One-Act Festival, has a book called “Driftwood Dan and Other Adventures,” and contributes to national and regional publications. He has never seen anything quite like the 11,797 words that preceded his Foolish Words installment.

“I'll be damned if I'm going in there,” said Magnus' penis, rapidly shriveling. “You can soak your head all you want, but I ain't goin' in and I ain't singing a tune.”

“C'mon!” implored Magnus. Everyone was watching, which didn't help matters any.

“You know,” said Ted Turner, eyeing Magnus waning member. “Buffalo meat just isn't selling quite the way I intended it. Maybe Ted's Montana Grill needs to branch out into something a little more exotic.”

“I going in!” yelled Magnus' penis, straightening back up. “Name me a tune! You want it, I'll sing it!”

Magnus reassumed his position over the ice hole, and the crowd egged him on. The colorful orb swirled across the heavens, and Ted Turner noted to anyone who would listen that it was only colorful because he colorized it. And then, appearing from behind a snow bank, was a character who looked vaguely familiar, yet no one could quite place him.

“Who's that dude?” asked Ana Maria.

“I'm the star of this story. James. Remember me from page one?”

The others looked at him blankly.

“I was handed the package from the dead guy while I was waiting for my bus.”

The dead guy nodded in vague recollection.

“What I want to know,” James asked, “Is what the hell is going on with this story?”

“What does it look like,” said Magnus, his undulating nudeness turning pink from the cold. “I'm saving the world from a sinister plot by humping this ice hole with my diminutive, singing penis.”

“Well, you're right about a sinister plot,” replied James. “But the sinister plot isn't to destroy the world. It's to keep me from being the main character of this story, and I'm not gonna take it any more!”

“Why do you deserve to be the main character?” asked Magnus. “You don't have a singing penis.”

“You don't have a billion dollars and a flying white buffalo,” said Ted Turner.

“You don't have a red neoprene jumpsuit,” said Ana Maria, Jr.

“You don't have beautiful décolletage and use the f-word during sex,” said Ana Maria, Sr.

“You aren't dead,” said the dead guy.

“You don't know your way around Bozeman's hincty alleyways,” said Marcellus.

“You don't have a cool name like Creighton,” said Creighton.

“You don't know the ins and outs of Italo Calvino's style,” said Mike Finkel.

“You don't grasp the essence of Norse sagas,” said Soren Kisiel.

“You don't understand the concept of meta-narrative,” said Ray Sikorski.

James listened very, very patiently. “That all may be true,” he finally said. “But I do have the keys to the Chevette.”

And with that, James got in the old rust bucket, fired it up, and drove the ice-covered Hyalite Road back to Bozeman – leaving behind the crowd, the orb, and Magnus' penis, which was now softly blubbering just below the surface of Hyalite Lake.

James drove to town and parked at the bus stop. This time, he paid no attention to the dead guy and his package. Instead, James waited for his bus, got on, and simply rode away.

THE END