Plenty of Fish in Hell

Emily clicked on Lil Bub's Christmas message and watched her adorable face hang tongue all over the holidays.  "Aww," she said to herself.  Then she loaded Marnie The Dog's page and clicked through the snaps of Marnie lolling out of a tote bag and covered in tree-shaped cookies.  "Aww."  She scrolled down more and found a photo of Marnie and Lil Bub hanging out together, their tongues almost touching.  "OMG!" she shouted out loud, and her heart started racing so hard that she had to get up from the computer and go take a shower.

In the shower she daydreamed about owning a puppy and teaching it how to play roller derby.  She wondered if this would be the year when she finally scheduled her sloth saturation experience.  When she got out she went on her phone and checked her email.  There was yet another email meant for her across-the-pond doppelganger, UK Emily, this time from eHarmony, telling her that they were not able to find enough matches for her to allow her to become a member at this time.  Emily winced in solidarity.

All during work she kept getting notifications from Plenty of Fish.  UK Emily must have reactivated her account, and by the look of it she was going HAM on the UK dating scene.  By the time Emily settled in to eat her nightly pot roast, UK Emily had already turned down six dates and accepted four more.  You go girl, I guess, Emily thought, and wondered if she should open a Plenty of Fish account in the states.  Nah.

The next morning she had a couple of butthurt messages in her inbox, including a particularly gross one from Up4Snooker2, who told UK Emily to stuff a malty oatcake up her minge.  She could only see a thumbnail of Snooker, but he was obviously not a trophy fish.  She thought about writing back to him but didn't want UK Emily to find out she'd been getting her emails for years.

It took a couple of days for the messages to slow down, but when they did they stopped completely.  Emily wondered if an acceptable fish had been reeled in and had its head dashed against the side of the boat.  Then she got a new notification.  She sighed, because she liked sharing the funny messages with friends but it was also nice to get your own emails about your own domestic dealings.

This one was from what looked like a randomly-generated email address (bhe402sih929@freemail.free99.co.uk), with the subject line: "3 DAYS."  When she opened the email it just said, "U DONT KNOW WHAT YOU DID PUT IT BACK U HAVE 3 DAYS".  She shook her head and remembered why she'd never start a Plenty of Fish account.  There were definitely plenty of fish out there, but not many worth mounting and even less worth hanging up in your man cave.

Emily closed her email and went on Lisa Frank's Facebook page to see if they had any memes about Mondays.  They did but it was Thursday so she saved them to post later when she hadn't had enough coffee to drink before work.  Then she logged back into her email and there was another message from bhe302sih929.  It said "IN CASE YOU THOUGHT IM FUCKING AROUND" and there was a picture of her front door with a gloved hand wrapped around the doorhandle.

UK Emily, what have you gotten yourself into? she thought.  She went into the spreadsheet she kept of UK Emily's correspondence, pulling out emails of people she might be able to get in touch with.  She mostly received institutionalized spam from noreply accounts, but there was the odd old friend or classmate who had tried to find her with google and fired a shot in the dark that happened to skip over the pond into Oregon.

She forwarded the messages to all of the people on her list, and then opened bhe's email and wrote back to him to tell him that he had the wrong email and she was going to contact the UK authorities.  At first she wrote Scotland Yard but then she wasn't sure if that was really a thing.

"U WOT THINK IM STUPID" was the reply, which begged an answer, but she was getting freaked out.  She spent the rest of the day trying to find the right Emily on facebook, twitter, instagram - did they have UK alternatives to social media?  She tried to imagine some: materate, flatfinder, nigelslist, but then she remembered that she'd gotten an email a few days ago from SMSlim, which helped British people hold fast to their resolution to take a social media diet.  "Bangers and mash!" she cursed under her breath.

The next morning she woke up and there were a couple of auto-reply emails RE: failures to send.  An old college friend named Bess had written back to say that she'd lost touch with her years ago but thought she was living in Newcastle.  She had been for a couple of months, but even Emily knew she'd moved two or three times since then.

Emily had never wanted to get the wrong person's emails so much before.  She was having a hard time enjoying videos of cute dogs wrapped in ribbons, and she could barely choke down her pot roast.

Around 2AM there was came another picture that showed UK Emily's door.  This time it was kicked in.  And another picture, which she recognized was of UK Emily's budgies, but when she'd seen them before they hadn't been smashed to pieces and covered in blood.  "WHERE IS IT?"

She had to do it.  She was getting desperate.  She had to sign up for Plenty of Fish.  UK Emily might be taking a holiday from Facebook, but her search for love knew no bounds.

Emily didn't know exactly where her English counterpart lived, so she left her location as "UK."  Then she tried to think of all the emails she had gotten, every interest she knew.  She'd studied psychology, but obviously didn't really learn anything.  She liked pop and Celtic music, owned birds - the budgies!  :'( - and an outdoor cat, got lots of coupons for takeaway.  She knew that UK Emily was a bit of a traditionalist, if she was being nice.  Meaning at this point she was looking for a man a few years older, taller, maybe a doctor or solicitor.  Old enough to really want kids.  She named him Barry and gave him a dog, a flat that was too big and lonely for just him.  She tried to think of what UK Emily wanted to hear.  I've got a lot of love to give.  I like to laugh.  I want to find someone to cuddle up and watch Sherlock with.

She searched for all of the profiles that had UK Emily's age, but didn't find anything.  She lowered the age range a couple of years and there she was.  She had moved to Northampton, and was currently looking for work.

"Good morning, love, didn't expect to see girls like you on here.  Thought it would be all slappers and chavettes, but you're right fit and look like you love to laugh.  How do you feel about Sherlock and having a cuddle?  Hope I'm not being too cheeky, I've just got a lot of love to give.  Barry."

She clicked refresh over and over until she got a reply.  "Hiya Barry, I'd love to get together.  I'm out of town until tomorrow night.  Can we get together then?"

Emily thought for a little bit and then wrote back, "I know this is going to seem crazy, but I have the same name as you and I've been getting your emails the last couple of years.  I'm not sure what happened but someone is mad at you for something, and they're going to do something terrible.  What is your email address, I need to forward you something."

Ten minutes later: "Fuck off you wanker." Barry was blocked.

Emily opened the email with the budgie again and scrolled through the pictures, shuddering.  She looked up the local police department and gave them a call.  They listened for a couple of minutes and then asked her to wait.  They must have put the phone down instead of putting it on hold, because she then heard a man's voice in the background: "We've got another one.  She's fucking mental."  She hung up and took a shower.

There was another email waiting.  "IVE GOT ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD.  THAT MAKES ONE OF US."  There were pictures of her apartment, her bed, her computer, her cat.  Emily threw her phone on the desk.  She didn't know what to do.  Something terrible was going to happen, and she didn't know how to stop it.

Two hours later, she was on her way to the airport.  It would take 12 hours to get to London, then another two to get to Northampton.  If everything worked out she'd be there a couple of hours before Emily got back into town.  She paid for Internet on the plane, and made another Plenty of Fish profile.  This time she was Michael, who played it cool but just wanted a squeeze on the old strawberry creams.  She messaged UK Emily and said she was just going to be in Northampton for the weekend's veterinarian conference, and wanted to find someone to show him around.

"I'm not a slag," UK Emily told him, waiting to be assured that this was true.  Michael told her that he was thinking of relocating to Northampton, and was hoping to find someone who would go with him to see the shoe museum.  Her told her that his mates kept calling it the shoeseum, and that he loved to laugh.  She agreed to meet him at the train station when she was coming back into town.  They'd pop over to the pub for a pint, and if things went well they'd meet the next day for a tour of the old shoeseum.

She checked her email and found the last message from bhe.  She wrote back and told him that she would meet him at the pub.  How much was she supposed to bring?  He told her to FUK OFF U KNOW WHAT YOU TOOK.

When they finally got to Heathrow she hailed a taxi and asked it to take her to the train going to Northampton.  The driver told her that she looked fagged.  She told him that she just flew over from the west coast of the US, and then before she knew it she had told him everything.  "Blimey," he said, and told her that he'd take her all the way to Northampton.  "The name's Pete, and I'd be a right bastard if I charged you after hearing that."

Pete took her to pub that UK Emily had suggested.  He insisted on coming in and waiting with her, saying that he'd already blown a day of work and might as well go on holiday.  He ordered them two full English breakfasts, and although she wasn't very hungry she picked at the bacon, fried bread, tomatoes, eggs, mushrooms, black pudding, sausages, and even the baked beans, which reminded Emily of all the American foods she disliked.  Pete had a shandy while Emily sat staring at the door.

After a while, a man wearing a track suit bottom and a tight Northampton football club shirt came into the bar.  He kept his hand in his pocket, and took a seat at the bar.  When the barman came over, he told him to piss off.  Surprisingly, the barman did.

Emily opened Plenty of Fish and sent a message from Michael.  "Ordered a pint at the pub - should I order you something?"

"I'm so sorry, I just got off the train and am a right mess.  Some twat spilled their coffee on the seat and I sat in it.  I'm going to walk home and change.  I'll meet you in a hour and a half if you're still up for it."

Michael asked if she wanted him to come by, but she didn't respond.  After a couple of minutes, the man in the Cobblers shirt got up and skulked out the door.  "I have to follow that man, Pete," Emily said.  "Thank you so much for everything."

Pete stood up and told her that he had to see it through.  They hurried out the door and saw the man walking west towards the high street.  Emily grabbed a free paper out of a street box and opened it like she was reading it to him.  They followed the man at a distance, stopping once and again to pretend to argue about where they were going.

At last the man stopped at the outside gate of a terrace house flat, which Emily remembered from the pictures.  He looked around to see if anyone was near, then took a knife out of his pocket.  He went inside and closed the door.  Emily and Pete snuck up to the gate and let themselves in.  They listened at the door.  "What should we do?" Pete asked.

"She's going to be here soon.  We should call the police."

"I'll ring them up," Pete said, but as he walked around the corner Emily got a notification on her phone.

It was a message from Plenty of Fish.  "Hi Michael, ran into a friend outside the station and got a lift back to my flat.  I'll be done in a couple of minutes.  Why don't I just meet you at the pub like we planned?"

Emily pushed the door open and went inside.  She slowly stepped up the stairs and into the flat proper.  She could hear the shower going behind a closed door, but didn't see the man anywhere.  "Who the fuck are you?" came a brusque voice from the shadows.

"My name is Emily.  I'm from America, and I'm here to fuck you up!"

The man stepped out and flashed the knife at her.  "Go home, cunt."

Emily moved behind the couch and grabbed the nearest heavy object, a barely-started-then-discarded copy of JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy.  The man surged forward, and Emily threw the book at him.  It bounced off his shoulder and he grunted, then stabbed forward.  She jumped to the right and threw her weight into his arm.  He twirled away and dropped the knife.  She jumped over the couch and kicked him in the back.  He fell down on the ground.  She put her hands on either side of his head and twisted.  He shouted, "JESUS FUCK!" and grabbed at her hands.

Emily plopped down onto the ground and twisted his neck again.  She was see-sawing it back and forth, turning it as far as she could.  He screamed and screamed.  The bathroom door opened, and UK Emily came out.  She saw the two of them on the floor and started screaming herself.  Emily twisted and twisted and twisted.  She grabbed the man's chin and torqued his whole head back, slamming it back and down into the ground.  His back cracked and his face snapped left, where it stuck.  The man shrieked an awful noise like "Eeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaeeeee!"

"What the fuck?  What the fuck!" UK Emily screamed.  Pete burst in through the door and started shouting himself.  She came behind Emily and tried to pull her off, but she wouldn't let go.

Emily bashed the man's face into the ground.  His nose erupted in a cascade of blood and snot.  She yanked hard, ripping off his ear and tossing it away.   Her leg snaked over him and she arched back and with a nasty pop he suddenly went limp.  She threw his body on the ground, hyperventilating, and pushed him away.

UK Emily grabbed the knife and ran into the bathroom and locked the door.  Pete stared at the man's limp form on the floor and looked at Emily and kind of shuffled over behind the couch.  She glared at him but he just shrugged and nodded at the mess she'd made.

"Can you go talk to her?" Emily said, walking into the kitchen to wash her hands.  She watched out the window as flashing lights came down the street.

Once the police were inside, UK Emily finally agreed to open the bathroom door.  She came out but wouldn't take her hand off her face until they threw a sheet over the body.  "This is some kind of piss-up, right?" she kept saying as Emily explained what had happened.

The police wanted Emily to come down to the station, but she led them into the other room where the budgie cage was, and showed them the rest of UK Emily's cat withering on the fire escape.  She opened the emails on her phone, and explained that she had tried to call the police department.  She told them she just wanted to go home, back to America, where they only ate one fried meat per breakfast.

"Miss, what was this man asking you to give back?" the police questioned UK Emily.

"I don't even know, I've never seen him before.  He's wearing a Cobblers shirt but he doesn't look like a Northampton man if I've ever seen one.  Even footie fans here don't like the Cobblers.  I wonder if it's about NI Emily."  She explained that for the last several years she had been getting emails from an Emily that lived in Northern Ireland.  "She's a right slag, always getting noties from Tinder and whatnot."

The police offered to give Emily a ride back to the airport, but at this point she'd had a very long series of days and could barely keep her eyes open.  UK Emily offered to let her sleep in her guest room.  She took Pete over to the pub and bought him a drink, saying that she couldn't bear to be in the house until they cleaned all the blood off the floor.

A couple of hours later, Emily woke up to the sound of UK Emily and Pete having a shag.  They sounded pretty mashed and were both laughing their tits off, and she wondered if she'd stop getting PoF notifications soon.  When she woke up in the morning they were both snoring, so she logged onto UK Emily's computer and downloaded her spreadsheet to the desktop.  She left a note telling her that she had saved her life, and the least she could do was take her fucking email off all of these sites.  P.S., she wrote, how did you mistype your own email so many fucking times?

Emily walked down to the train station and got a pass to London.  She called work and told them she was going to take a few days off, and bought a guidebook.  She hadn't planned to be on holiday, but she was damned if it wasn't going to be the dog's bollocks.

Google Spider Goats II: The Search for Men's Rights

I.
After everyone finally agreed to raise spider goats, it only took about a week for the modular trailer to arrive in the driveway.  The driver had no way of unlocking the gate so they dropped it just off the road and left a note saying they would be coming back from Prineville in two days and would pick it up then.

There were supposed to be ten kids but they only ended up with nine.  The distributor had sent an extra collar but hadn't sealed it in the metal box so the other goats had half chewed it up in transit.  The only other thing that came with them was the box, filled with a fabric strip holding thirty glass ampules of some nutritive solution, thirty disposable syringes, and about three hundred tiny pellets in a brown bottle.

"They're way younger than I thought they would be.  I shouldn't have believed them when they said that they would ship with all the food they needed, and we definitely don't have enough mothers to feed all these guys."  Natasha folded down the ramp and let the goats amble out.  "Let's put them in the far shed and I'll call and see what they want us to do."

They had a hell of a time getting a rep from the distributor on the phone, so they ended up calling around to some neighbors and setting up a couple of "milk dates."  For the next couple of days they watched in bafflement as each kid turned up its nose at the milky teats, and happily gobbled down their daily pellet.  A few days later they called and thanked their neighbors, and told them they didn't need their nanny goats anymore.

The distributor had sent seven female goats and two males, but as they grew they all developed the same gray-brown udder with stubby, almost choadly teats.  The udders distended and swung like pastry pouches, dry to the bone inside.  They behaved skittishly and the other animals on the farm didn't care to be around them.

Just before the pellets ran out and the goats were scheduled to eat solely grass and roughage, some of the udders started filling with what felt like hard little marbles.  In a week's time they were all swollen up and the goats got cranky as hell.  Everybody pitched in to help figure out the best way to milk the goats.  It was an enormous clusterfuck.

First of all, the goats were ornery little cusses.  They had been cute as a button at first, but they grew into goggle-eyed teens ceaselessly head-butting and kicking everything in their path.  Secondly, the gene therapy had made them subtly sick or mutated in a variety of ways.  Some of the goats had been growing little horn clusters out of their foreheads and necks, some would grow a millimeter of horn and then lose it; a handful were just straight sick and covered in suppurating lesions.  The last fuck in the cluster was that nobody in the world knew how to milk a goat producing a liter of super-superglue a day.  The best they could do was coax it out in long ropes which stuck to everything, and wind them like warm frogurt into metal pails.

After a particularly enraging session that left about half her hair glued to a barn beam, Natasha called up the distributor for advice.  This time a representative got on the phone immediately, and began to ask a barrage of questions.  "Who did you say you work for?" Natasha inquired.  The person said that the distributor had been acquired by a new division of a different company, and that they were scrambling to provide support to their partner farmers.  It had been a mess, they said.

"The nine we have are fairly healthy.  Not as much as our regular goats.  Yeah, that's about what we've seen too.  We're looking for advice on what exactly to do with all of the smilk.  That's what we've been calling it.  I mean it's coming out and we're collecting it, but it's not easy.  We separated it.  Some of it's turning yellow but it hasn't gone bad.  No, we wouldn't know what that looks like.  It hasn't turned into cheese or anything.  No, I didn't think it would.  It was - never mind."

The representative scheduled an inspector to come out and talk to them.  They were going to buy the three vats of smilk that had been produced, at a rate that was both impressive and made them suspicious that maybe it was worth more than they had been offered.

The inspector turned out to be three people in two vans.  None of them seemed interested in inspecting anything.  They collected the vats first.  One inspector handed them a check with the agreed-upon amount, then drove the van away.  The other two took cheek swabs of the nine goats.  "Where's the tenth specimen?" one asked.

"We only got nine kids.  The rep said on the phone that you guys were going to show us how you've been collecting their sm- how you milk them."

One of the inspectors took out of her pocket the chewed-up collar that they had found in the modular trailer and tacked up in the barn.  "Was this from the tenth specimen?  Did it pre-decease or did it die here?"

Natasha rolled her eyes.  "We only got nine delivered.  If you're not going to do what you said we've got a lot of other stuff we need to do."

"These goats were given to you on a provisionary basis with the expectation that you would report certain metrics and findings to our outfit.  Why didn't you report the missing goat?"

Natasha shared a glance with the other farmers.  "We called but you wouldn't pick up the fucking phone.  Look, we're not interested in having you on our property anymore."

The walked the inspectors back to their van and watched them drive away.  For the next day or two they avoided the goats, until the whining and bleating got to be too much.  Inside the barn, they found an impossible mess.  The goats had been backing up against the walls and sticking their smilk strands to the walls.  The strands criss-crossed the room, and half of the goats were tangled up in their own effluvia.

They spent all day taking the goats out one by one and cutting the smilk-mats out of their fur.  With alternating hot and cold water and some mineral oil they were able to coax most of the smilk to stick to itself, and they piled the nasty mess up outside of the main house.

When they were almost done, Natasha stood inside the barn looking at the walls, wondering if it would make more sense to clean the place or knock it down and a build a new one.  There were a couple of smilk-threads dangling from the ceiling, which she just could not figure out.  "What the fuck?" she murmured to herself, and started pulling them down.  As she did, she noticed the tenth goat hiding up in the corner of the ceiling.

The goat was much smaller than the others had been, and she could see why the collar hadn't stayed on.  Its head and neck were miniscule, but its body was fat and round, and its inverted legs gangled outward into the corners keeping it stuck in the air.  It wasn't supposed to be possible, but if all the other goats looked like their mother, this one had obviously gotten its father's genes.

She heard some commotion from the far side of the farm, near the locked gate that went to the road.  She could see a couple of vans, and at least two sets of red and blue lights flashing.  She motioned to the goat to climb down, which it did without fear, and she picked it up in her arms and carried it to the main house.  She set it inside the door and ran over to the front gate.

When she got there everyone was yelling.  She slowed to a stop when she saw a police officer pointing a gun at her.  She could barely hear them arguing; she was watching the inspectors round up the goats and hoist them one by one into the back of the van.  She saw another set of inspectors, who must have been parked on the other side of the farm, on the dirt road behind their back fence, coming out of the main house.  The inspectors then went into the little barn, came back out, got in the van, and drove away.  The barn went up in flames but nobody moved or said anything.  Five minutes later the police told them to go back inside and call the fire department.

They called the fire department, and the state police, and the news, and just about everyone they had ever met or known.  The state and local police had records of every call and officer movement that whole day, but nothing matching the officers who had shown up at their farm.  The distributor had gone out of business weeks ago, and no one could drum up anyone willing to talk about it.  Besides the nasty, soapy mess outside of the main house, and the pile of dirt and embers that remained of the little barn, it was like the last couple months had never happened.

II.
Natasha moved the plywood cover off and scooted feet-first into the crawlspace.  She grabbed the strap on her bag and pulled it inside.  There was an old plastic menorah nailed to one of the beams in here, but she needed to inch in a couple of feet to find the switch.  In the orange glow, she could see most of the low-ceilinged room.  Rumi's eyes shined, and she heard its clicking bleats.

"Rumi, Rumi."  She felt one of its tiny pointed hooves tap her leg.  She tickled the fur around its ankles.  "Hi Rumi."

She pulled two tap lights out of her bag and set them on the ground.  She tapped them on, then off, then tapped one back on.  She motioned for Rumi to tap the other one, which he did.  She smiled quizzically.

"I brought some books and some food.  Do you want to eat?  Do you want me to read to you?"

Rumi tapped its hoof on a beam.

"I brought a couple of new ones.  There's a sci-fi book, sort of what we'd call young adult.  If you're like a regular goat you'd be a young adult now, so you might like that.  It's about a ship that takes people to look at the sun, but then it drifts into the sun's gravity and this astrophysics prodigy has to help get them out.  No?  There's a book I'm reading about interpersonal dyn - no?  Let me guess, you want to read this book of poems."

There was an impatient tapping.

"Yeah yeah, I get it.  Here, this one's by Samuel Coleridge."  Tap tap tap.  "Okay, fine, but there's only three Rumi poems in this whole book, and when I'm done we're going to read something else.  Let me see, this is number one:

    Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
    there is a field.  I'll meet you there.

    When the soul lies down in that grass,
    the world is too full to talk about.
    Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
    doesn't make any sense."

Rumi clapped its four hooves together, imitating the applause it had seen the night it watched them gathered around the fire making music with friends.

"Why do you like Rumi so much?  I mean, he's okay but it's - never mind."  She put down the book and got out some cans of food and opened them.  She pointed: "This is olives, this is mackerel, this is some dog food.  I know you're not a dog but I really can't tell what you like.  They don't make canned flies, not that you like flies."

Rumi ate a little bite out of each can and then turned back to her.

"I brought you some other books, too.  Stop complaining, they're for you to read on your own.  This one shows you what the different letters are, this one lets you see how the letters work, and this is a book that a kid might read when they first learn.  Okay?   I'll read you the other poems, but I have to go soon."

She slid next to Rumi and flipped one of the tap lights up onto the book.  "When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy..."

Things on the farm had been intense.  It was like they had adopted a child and then it was taken away and no one wanted to hear about how upset they were.  Friends acted sympathetic, and the news seemed interested in their story at first, but the more they  divulged about what had happened, the less people answered their phones.  Their own complicated feelings about both the spider goats and having to take care of them just made things worse.

Natasha hadn't mentioned Rumi to anyone else.  She meant to but they had felt so violated by what had happened that she didn't want anyone to think it might happen again.  A day after the fire they had been sent a messenger that told them to produce the body of the tenth goat.  They told the messenger that it really never had been sent, or never made it to the farm at least.  They just wanted to be left alone, and the person seemed to believe them.  It had been weeks since then, and they just wanted things to be normal again.

Natasha woke up to a note one day saying that some of the partners were moving on.  They didn't need remuneration for their shares of the farm, they just wanted to start over somewhere else.  They didn't leave numbers, and their phones weren't in service.  She found herself down in the crawlspace more than she was up in the land of the living.  Whenever she could get away from the demands of the farm, and the demands of her relationships.  Whenever it felt safe.

When she first brought Rumi into the house she thought that it might die.  Their first representative had joked with them about spider goats and goat spiders, told them that this wasn't Frankenstein.  "The gene therapy is like a scalpel going in, slicing out the milk protein production.  Then we stitch in the spider proteins," they had said.  They told her they didn't know what outcome to expect from the program, but that the goats had been healthy so far, and things looked promising.

After the fire she thought it had run away, but she found it a few days later peeking out of the crawlspace in the basement, looking exhausted.  She gave it some straw and fresh grass from the yard, and then some eggs and slop when it didn't eat those.  It didn't seem to like any of the food she brought, but it stayed alive.  She wondered what had been in the pills they sent along with the kids.

It was much friendlier than the other goats, and its eyes had this spark that made it seem like it was smiling.  She liked being near it, and began to read to it when she felt lonely.  It stared at her mostly, but it tapped and clicked when she read it poetry, especially love poetry, especially Rumi.  It was obsessed with Rumi, which she thought was amusing enough to name it after, but was a little maddening at this point.

When she left she explained that she had to go into the city for a night, but that she would be back soon.  She told Rumi that she would go to the library and get some new books.  She pet it on the head and gave it a hug.  She tapped the books and said, "Until the juice ferments a while in the cask, it isn't wine. If you wish your heart to be bright, you must do a little work."

In the city, Natasha ate at one of her old favorite restaurants.  She got drinks with a friend and bought some lightbulbs.  She went to the library and almost got some children's books, but it felt ridiculous so she walked down to the waterfront and watched the boats going down the river.  She felt normal for the first time in a long while, and when she thought about going back to the farm she chewed on her nails.

When she finally got back, Dave was looking for a book of his.  She asked him if it was a book of Rumi poems, but he just stared at her and said no.  When he went out to the big barn she stepped into the basement and found Rumi in the crawlspace with a pile of books next to him.  There were the children's books, but then several more that he must have pulled in from upstairs.   "Did you read all of these?"

Rumi tapped on the ground and pushed the books towards her.  She asked him if he wanted more and he tapped again.

"Do you want me to read to you?"  He didn't tap, but he moved closer and started nuzzling at Natasha's pocket.  "All I've got in here is my phone."

Rumi tapped on the ground and pointed at the phone.

"You know what this is?  It's called a cell phone.  You can talk to people who aren't around.  Not that anyone uses it for that anymore.  Mostly it's got the Internet.  You can write things in here and then it shows you pictures and - um, let me just show you.  I don't usually have to explain the Internet to people.  It's sort of confusing?"

They sat next to each other as she showed him how to get to Google.  She asked him what he wanted to look up, shook her head, then just typed in goats.  They looked at goats for a while, then looked up spiders.  She tried googling "spider goats" and they found a couple of hits.  There was a movie, "Google Spider Goats," but it was mostly filled with conspiracy theories and she didn't want to confuse him.

She heard someone coming back in upstairs and told Rumi that she would bring him some more books later.  He pushed the books away and pointed at her phone with his hoof.  "I can't give you my phone but you can use my old Kindle for a while.  It's got a couple of books on it and I can get you whatever you want."

That night she put all of the free books she could find on the Kindle and then dropped it off by the crawlspace entrance.  He had finished them all by the next day.  She remembered that one of their old laptops was in a box in the closet.  It still worked so she connected to the wireless and pulled up Google.  She typed in, "Teach me how -" and looked at the results.

Do I need Rumi to learn how to Dougie?  Do I want the Internet to teach him how to love?  Am I really going to give the whole Internet to someone who just learned how to read? she thought, but the thoughts made her feel old and out of touch and paternalistic.  She loaded up Wikipedia, dictionary.com, a website about plants and animals of the world, and some blogs she liked.  Then she opened Notepad on top of the browser and wrote, "Write words here."

The next time she saw him he looked very, very tired.  She came over and stroked the back of his head.  He was on hour nine of a ten-hour Youtube loop of a cat jumping and not quite making it.  "It's just a loop, you don't have to watch the whole thing."  He looked at the screen and the cat fell and he made a noise like laughing.  She laughed too.

He showed her how aluminum foil is made, and a man with glasses blending a Rubik's cube in a blender.  They watched "Thriller" twice while Rumi scrolled up and down in the related videos.  Natasha moved his hand off and checked Notepad, but he hadn't written anything.

"Can you type?" she asked.  She slowly pushed her fingers on the keys, continuing "Write words here and we can talk to each other."

Rumi put one of his tiny pointed hooves over the keys and typed "klae;gnzfdm,se" and then clicked back into Youtube and they watched Thriller again.

"I don't think I can watch Thriller anymore today.  Do you want me to bring you some food?"

Rumi waved his hoof in the air and went back to staring at the screen.  Natasha shrugged went upstairs.  The next time she came down he had moved on to researching the history of submarines and the various influences on Punjabi cuisine across two wikipedia pages that he scrolled through simultaneously.  She brought him some eggs and a bucket of slops, which he absentmindedly ate as he read.

"Do you want to read to me?" she asked him, but he shook his head.  "Do you want me to read to you?"

Rumi looked over at her and closed the laptop.  She felt around in the dark for any books that were left, but she didn't find anything.  He pushed the laptop over to her.  She opened it and found some Rumi poems and started reading them.  He tapped her shoulder after a while and pointed to a different window.  "I'm not going to read to you about the various models of early German submarines.  Sorry.  Do you want to see some of my friends on Facebook?"

Rumi pointed to an open tab that said /r/pics.  She clicked over and found a bunch of opened pictures: a baby dressed like an Ewok, a smashed-up car with a note that just said "SORRY," a cat in a box, a smiling girl with a celebrity neither recognized.

"Is this what reddit is?  I don't get it."  She clicked to the main page and read him a post where people talked about their worst dates.  "Oh God, I can't believe that she went on a second date with him.  This is horrible.  That one's terrifying!  Ugh!"

After a while she closed the laptop and scratched the fur around Rumi's knees.  He looked a little sickly, but he was also getting bigger and bigger.  She had no way of knowing how much he was supposed to grow, but they would need to find him a new home before he outgrew the crawlspace.  "You know, Rumi, if you figure out what kind of food you like, I'll bring it to you.  You can see everything that exists on this thing, kind of.  Don't get the wrong idea.  It's not everything, not even most of the important things.  It's like a living dream humans wish about themselves.  I need to go take a walk."

Next time she went down he told her he wanted a sandwich.  "I already brought you a sandwich, and you didn't eat it.  Stop Googling sandwich, I know what it is.  What kind of sandwich do you want?  A sandwich can be almost any food, it just has to have bread on either side."

Rumi opened the notepad file and wrote.  "Get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich."

"Jesus, I get it.  What kind of sandwich do you want?"

"Get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich, bitch."

"What the fuck, Rumi?  That's not funny."  She snatched the laptop away and looked in the browser.  What have you been reading on here?  Don't read this shit, Rumi.  Is this the fucking red pill?  Rumi, this is not cool.  That is some gross misogynist bullshit.  Do you even know what a misogynist is?"

Rumi rolled his eyes.  He turned away and pouted.

"I knew this was stupid.  If you want some books I'll get you whatever you want, but there's no way I'm going to let you turn into a men's rights activist.  Do you even identify as a man?  Do you even - ugh, fuck you, Rumi!"  She stuck the laptop under her arm and pulled the cord out of the outlet next to the menorah.  She went upstairs and threw the laptop in the closet.  She went into the kitchen and put some random shit from the refrigerator on a plate and threw it down the stairs where it shattered all over the floor.

The next day she came back in and Dave was cleaning up the kitchen.  All of the glasses and plates had been knocked out of the cabinet onto the floor.  Two of the windows were broken outward.  There was a long scrape up the stairwell wall, and holes in the hallway upstairs.  The closet door was open and the laptop was gone.  "Someone broke into the house," Dave said.

Natasha went pale.  "Look," she said, and told him everything.  Together they went down to the basement.  The plywood was propped up against the door, but when they went to push it, it wouldn't budge.  Gray-white clumps of spider-silk anchored it on.  "Rumi!  Open the door!"

They went to get a crowbar, and without saying anything Dave got a gun from the safe upstairs.  They pried off the plywood, but inside the crawlspace there were thick ropes of smilk hanging all over.  Natasha reached her hand in to brush it away, but it was everywhere.  "Rumi, what are you doing?" she called.

In the far corner, she could barely make him out in the glow of the laptop screen.  She picked a flashlight off the basement wall and shined it in.  The whole crawlspace was covered in white ropes.  Rumi looked almost completely deflated, having covered the whole corner with a cocoon-like mass of smilk.  When she called his name again, Rumi turned away and sprayed a chunky dollop towards them.

"He's dangerous," Natasha almost whispered.  "He was so cool before, but I couldn't protect him."

"You tried to save him," Dave said.  He offered her the gun, but she took it and put it down.

"I don't think he's got much longer to live.  Hand me those."  He handed her a hammer and some nails from the tool bench.  They set the plywood against the door and took turns nailing it in.  Smilk plopped over the edges of the board as the hammer hit, dribbling slowly down like jizzy white molasses.

Inside the crawlspace, Rumi blinked into the light.  He clicked submit and refreshed until his post appeared.  "DAE Hate When Women Try To Control You?!!" the title said.  He logged out and into his alt account, and read the comic he had made.  It depicted a spider weaving a web, and then his girlfriend coming home and telling him not to eat the flies he caught.  With the last ounce of strength in his body, he commented "Sick comic dude women are total hypocrites" and then upvoted it and died.

Earth Mother

"I wanted to put it here.  There's more room around the back of the house but I thought it would be kind of weird to have it under their windows.  I don't care but they might."

"No this is the best spot for it.  Since the garden's over the fence you can open the side and pull the tray out and dump it into the compost pile.  You'll need to have at least two, probably three piles."  Meera slid her foot over a square of dirt about the size of the outhouse footprint.

"I went to the hardware store and got the rest of what we needed.  I have some leftover pallet chunks and boards that I can cut up if we need more framing.  Thanks for doing this.  It's weird but I think it will be good for us to have a third bathroom.  We used to have an outhouse at the lake house - my grandma and grandpa's house - when we were growing up.  It was kind of horrible to use but I have mostly fond memories of it now."

Ben walked over to the garage and went inside the house.  He came out with some tools and materials and started stacking them up under the roof of the gazebo.  Cars shuffled down the road outside the fence, but it was otherwise quiet.

Meera picked up her gardening tools and put them into the box she kept in her car.  She folded up the back seats and nestled the box in with her clothes.

They spent the afternoon hauling out the pieces of the outhouse frame they had assembled the weekend before.  When Parker got off work they fit the pieces together and screwed them in place.  "I'd shit here," Ben said, and they all agreed that it was going to work.

Over the next week Meera put in the interior compartments, door, and nailed on the scrap wood they were using for siding.  She painted it green on the outside and white on the inside, and glued a glow-in-the-dark half-moon on the inside of the front door.  They drove out to the green hardware store to find "a short, chunky toilet with the biggest and most affable shit-eating grin you guys have" and found a spiffy model that not only looked like Mr. Sparkle, it was pearlescent pink.

Once the outhouse was finally done they all stood around wondering who'd bite the bullet.  Nobody quite seemed fit to burst and it felt like something you shouldn't go into half assed.  They all agreed to use it the next time they had to break bread, and that was that.  A couple of weeks later, it was second nature and everybody was happy to have a second bathroom (or just to have their first bathroom back).  The next plan was to build a sun shower, but that was a more diffuse and bourgeois need, and caused less of a problem in the early mornings after several cups of coffee.

It was funny now, and practical, to be four people living in a three-bedroom house, with a tenant downstairs and one living in their car.  "It's not the commune I wanted, but it's the one I got," Ben said when they were digging holes in the front yard for planting.  "Maybe we can get some teacup goats, or a flock of micro-chickens.  We can walk them over to the MAX and charge people who work downtown to pet them."

That night went Meera was using the outhouse before bed, she heard an "Oooooo oooo ooooh" kind of noise and promised herself she would get more sleep.  The next morning she passed a knish-sized dollop of stool and heard it again.  "Ooooo ooooh.  Oooooooohohoho.  Thank you!"

Ben was getting ready for work inside the house.  Parker's alarm was going off through his bedroom door.  Meera burst in, making Ben scream in a lilting girlish voice.  He looked at Meera and laughed, but she seemed perturbed.  "What's up?  You need to use the shower?"

"It's nothing," she said, and went back outside and got in her car and drove away.  Meera came back two days later and ate some dinner with everyone in the house.  "Have you guys used the outhouse lately?"  Everybody shook their heads.  She started talking about some changes she thought they could make to the front yard so that the vegetable garden got more sun.

After dinner she snuck out and went back to the outhouse.  She picked up a stick and pried open the door warily.  She knocked some cobwebs off the corners of the ceiling and stepped inside.  With one hand she opened the door and with the other she lifted the toilet lid, in case something needed to run out.  The clamshell cover inside the toilet was up, so she gently stepped on the toilet seat until it parted.  She rapped the stick on the rim of the seat.  Nothing.  She waggled the stick inside, but there was nothing but turd shrapnel and mulch.

"Hello?" she said softly, then turned red and felt foolish.  She slammed the lid down and turned to go.  As she did, she felt her guts squirming and felt an overwhelming urge to splurge.  She pulled down her pants and made gravy.

"Ooooooh."  She looked down between her legs.  "Ooooohoho."  The voice hissed up from the bowl like chocolate velvet.  "Ohoho, you came back," it chortled.  "Thank you, thank you.  Please, more!"  Meera thought she was empty but as the voice spoke her stomach gurgled and she filled the bowl again.  "Oho hoho," the voice came again.

There was a knock on the outhouse door.  "Meera?  Are you okay?"

Meera called out that she was fine and then sat silently for almost an hour, listening to the quiet of the outhouse and the cars crawling by on the street outside the fence.

The next day she drove out past downtown and headed west.  She was going to go for a hike in the forest but decided to keep driving and ended up at the beach.  She stood looking at the haystacks and made lines in the sand with the toe of her shoe.  She slept in the back of her car with her sheets pulled over her head until they turned translucent with the dawn light and the whole town started to wake up.  A dune buggy revved its engine across the parking lot.  She swatted the noise away like a fly but she was awake now and crawled up front and started home.

Meera thought about staying with her family for a couple of days but decided against it.  She felt a little crazy but was used to the feeling and wanted to garden and read in the gazebo.  She'd use the inside bathroom while everyone was out and if it got too crowded she'd go to the library down the road.  She needed some new books anyway.

When she got back home she walked inside and then out again.  She picked up a rock and went into the outhouse.  She put the rock on the lid and stood inside the closed door listening.  She moved the rock and opened the lid and then put it back down and set the rock on top and walked to the library.

She couldn't focus to read the titles on the books in the library.  She kept remembering that she had a book under the front seat of her car.  Halfway home she told herself to stop pretending.  She didn't care about books.

"Ooohoho," the voice came from between her legs.  "Thank you, Meera.  Thank you!"

"You know my name?"

"They say it often.  They talk about the garden and how well you do it.  They talk about my house and how it happened, it really happened."

"Do you talk to them?" she asked, but it just chortled.

"What do you eat?" it asked in a serious tone, like it wanted to understand what it was.

Meera told it that she had eaten some greens from the garden and a rotisserie chicken leg out of the fridge, and the food she had eaten on the way to the beach, and then explained how a composting toilet worked.  You are alive, she said, which was always somewhat true with a composting toilet, but she didn't or couldn't explain the real difference.

It asked her to take it out with her, around the city.  She said no at first but then got a yogurt tub and fished out some turdlets with a garden spade and twisted the tub up into a bread bag and tied it to her bike handles.  They biked out to the waterfront on the north side of the city and sat by the river watching planes take off.  It seemed a little cowed by the whole experience so it sat quietly and listened while she told it about contemporary social issues.  It cooed and murmured and after an hour or two asked to go home.  "I'm drying out," it explained.

For the next couple of days, Meera visited the toilet twice a day, whether she had to go or not.  She was working odd jobs and sometimes had to drive back and forth with the traffic, but she always went out of her way to visit.  She asked everyone in the house to not use the outhouse, which they mostly didn't anyways so it was not a thing.

One night she brought her blanket out of the car and curled up next to the bowl with the lid up and her pillow resting on the seat.  All night she smelled sweet straw and earth and - to be honest - the occasional nose-curling puff of sewage.  It was like cuddling with someone you loved who might also benefit from a shower, and it felt like nothing she hadn't done before.

The next morning Ben came out of the house and knocked on the car window.  He peered inside and saw nothing, and then went to the outhouse and knocked.  The door was locked.  He stuck a thin piece of metal into the door and lifted the latch.  When the door swung open Meera was there, curled up.  She opened her eyes and blinked, and then smiled and went back to sleep.

They had a house meeting a few days later and offered for Meera to sleep on the couch inside.  At the least she could use the cot in the garage or next to the laundry machines, which wouldn't much bother the tenant in the basement.  She said it was sweet but she liked where she was.  They wanted to tell her not to sleep in the outhouse again, but they couldn't say why it should matter to them.

It had been a couple of months since the outhouse went up, and the bin was getting full.  Meera set her phone to go off at 2AM.  When she got up the whole night was quiet.  She could hear someone rustling through a recycling bin streets away.  She opened the outhouse door and pulled out the tray under the toilet.  It was heavier than she thought and it hit the cement with a clunk when she pulled it down the step.  "Meera," it lilted, but she shushed it librarianly.  It whispered, "Where are you taking me?"

She opened her mouth to say that they were just going around the fence to the compost piles, but then she wasn't sure.  She had been thinking that it would be nice to have it in the garden while she worked.  She would spread it around her kale and beans.  They could work together under the sun, doing their part to make new life.  But then she thought about her housemates, and the neighborhood dogs, and she imagined eating a garden-fresh cucumber and hearing it scream inside her head.

"Where do you want to go?" she asked.  She had told it about the car, the beach, the mountains, the desert.  She told it about things that reminded her of it.  The forest floor, the river delta, the amphibious slough bottoms.

"Let's go to the riverside and watch planes take off," it whispered just as she was remembering that day with the yogurt tub.  She went into the house through the back door and got a garbage bag, dumped the tray inside, and made some space in the front seat of her car.

They drove over to the marina near the airport.  Meera picked up an old parking pass from the ground and stuck it in her window.  It was too early for anyone to care.  She coiled a sheet on the ground and wrapped the bag in it.  She dragged and carried it through the half-full parking lot, over the curb, and next to a bush rising out of the thickets of grass on the riverbank.  There weren't any planes taking off yet, but she uncovered the bag and opened it to let the cool morning air in.

"Oooh.  Oooooooh," it sighed.  "Thank you, Meera.  You are so good to me."

They sat staring out over the river and laying back to look at the sky.  The edges of the sky started to lighten, and the occasional bike zipped by on the trail behind.  People started up their boats and headed out to fish.  A white and black car pulled into the marina, inching slowly along, shining a light on the windows of the parked cars.

"We can't -" they both said at once.  Meera turned to look at it.  She touched the patch of straw and earth that most reminded her of a face, and realized why it knew her so well.  It was her, a part of her, and it was of her.

She pulled down the edge of the bag and tipped it into the bush.  "How do I say goodbye to you?" she asked, but in response her stomach burbled.  "I'm not ashamed," she answered, and squatted over it.  She grunted and held onto the bush.  When she was done, it glistened beautifully in the morning light.  She covered the heap with grass and took the bag back to the parking lot.  She wanted to go back but she thought if she did she would never go back home.  She would sit there until she collapsed and turned to earth, and together they'd slowly dry out and sink into the river.  She craved it, but it was not time.

A week later she came back and stood by the hummock next to the bush.  She said hello but there was no answer.  As she looked out over the water a plane flew overhead, and in its wake she could make out the almost-inaudible chortling of the river.

KLB #G3D-P

Kara stood at the open window watching the people lined up below.  A woman held her bicycle and waited for two men to finish locking theirs together.  Music fuzzed out of the downstairs theater and from two open doors on bars across the street.  Cars were nervously inching across the intersection, trying to squeeze between all of the people gathered on the corners.

She pulled the window down and let it slam.  The woman looked up as Kara drew the curtain and everyone outside disappeared.  She could only hear the odd bass thud from below, and the scratching on the door to the closet.  She got a towel from the bathroom and pushed it under the threshold.  The scratching stopped for the first time in an hour or more.

She went to the kitchen sink where she had left the last jar of pickles.  She ate two standing over the sink and then washed her hands.  She drank a mouthful of brine and shook the jar until a piece of garlic fell within reach of her tongue.  She scooped it into her mouth, ate it, and dumped the rest into the sink.

The G3D-P 3D printer on her desk stopped whirring and she remembered what she had been doing.  She walked over, opened the lid, and picked up the translucent white rectangle.  She blew on it but there was no dust to set loose.  She put it with the other pieces and clicked the "Off" button.  The lights on the printer went dark as the parts clicked back into place.

"Kara," came a muffled voice from the closet, "Please."

She picked up the parts and took them into the bathroom down the short hallway on the far side of the kitchen.  With the door closed and the lights off, there was nothing to break the peace.  She put the rectangles next to her toolbox on the table she had lowered into her clawfoot bathtub.  She sat on the closed toilet lid and assembled the pieces.  The first six panels snapped together like LEGOs, making a tall thin-sided box.  There were four pegs which stuck into four small holes in the backboard of the box, and four tiny squared loops like stirrup bones in the ear.   Stapes, Kara thought, remembering her books of anatomical illustrations.

Kara scratched her neck absentmindedly, then realized it was a reaction to the scratching noises in the other room, which had started up again.  She turned on the faucet.

Up in the medicine cabinet was a bundle of plastic packaging from her G3D-P.  She undid the tape and pulled off the outer layers.  Water was dripping out of the inner pouch.  The tape was half hanging off so she just stripped it away and slid the figure onto the table.  Its beige skin was hard and reflective like porcelain, but the water drops clung to it.  Kara dabbed it with a piece of toilet paper, and as the water came off it began to sag and wiggle.  It heaved and sputtered lunglessly out of its open mouth-hole.  She shook her head and dropped a dot of water onto the center of its face.  The whole thing puddled like a rag doll.

Kara picked up the limp figure and lowered it into the box.  With a pair of tweezers from the cabinet she maneuvered its hands and feet into the stirrups and carefully pressed them into place on top of the pegs.  With each peg in place the figure was mounted in mid-air like a lepidopterist's specimen.  At last she wiped its mouth and watched it suddenly flip back into taut motion.  It strained and started up again with its feral child moan, but she clicked the transparent lid into place and the only sound was the faucet.

Kara set the box on the toilet lid.  She moved the toolbox behind the wastebasket and swapped places with the table in the bathtub.  She took a quick shower, not bothering to close the curtain, and toweled off.  She turned off the faucet and pushed the table into the hallway.  She grabbed the box and threw it into the oven and turned the dial to "Clean."  She opened the closet door and took a dress off the rack and pulled it over her head.  She stepped into a pair of shoes.

Dandelion reeled around the carpet, blinking against the light.  Her nails were red and broken and it hurt to walk, and the sudden freedom bewildered her.  "It's been days," she spat out, jumping up to eye level with Kara.  "Where is he? "

Kara went to the window and opened it and stood watching the people below.  There were so many people downstairs, crowding the sidewalk and stepping into the street.  No one noticed her.  She looked over at Dandelion.  Her back was raised and she was whipping her tail through the air.

"Where is he?" Dandelion asked.

"The kitchen," Kara said.  She followed Dandelion and as the cat stood staring in horror at the red-ringed oven, Kara's hand darted out with a pair of kitchen scissors and snipped the strap around its neck.  Dandelion's tag dropped to the ground with a tinkle, and Kara stomped on the strap with its little beige gizmo.  The gizmo shattered into a hundred pieces, throwing tiny diodes and circuits across the floor.  She picked up a bottle of olive oil and spilled it over the fragments.  "You can go."

Dandelion looked at the plasticky mess pooling in the bottom of the oven and turned back towards Kara.  Her mouth opened and closed, and then she skittered away out of the kitchen, across the carpet, and out the open window.  There was a shout, and then some hooting laughter.

Kara shut the window and the curtain.  She unplugged the G3D-P and brought it into the kitchen.  She opened the oven and waved away the acrid smoke.  The smoke detector started to wail.  She pulled out the oven racks and tossed them into the sink.  She set the G3D-P on the glowing coil and let the door thunk closed.  She pulled the table next to the door of her apartment, squeezed through the crack, and toppled the table over.  She locked the door, slid the key through the crack, and hurried away down the hallway and outside through the crowd.

The Story of Bunsmas

Long ago, when King Herod ruled Judea, God sent the angel Gabriel to a young woman who lived in the town of Nazareth.

The angel appeared and said, "Peace be with you, Mary!  God has blessed you and is pleased with you.  You will become pregnant by the Holy Spirit and give birth to a baby boy.  You will call him Jesus.  He will be God's own son and his kingdom will never end."

Mary thought about this for a while and said, "I really appreciate the gesture, Gabriel, but I've been putting off the whole kids thing for a while now and I just don't think we're ready.  The carpenting business is slow right now and Joseph has been listening to a lot of reggae lately.  I'm just feeling like maybe he's not the one."

"How much reggae are we talking about?" Gabriel inquired.  Mary walked him into Joseph's room and they looked at all of the blacklight posters on the wall.

"I've talked to God and he's willing to hold off on the Jesus thing for a bit.  He's willing to offer you a baby girl whose kingdom will last for a thousand years."

"Wow, that's really generous," Mary said, stalling.  "I've got this cousin, Elizabeth, who's getting heck of lonely in her old age and has been crying about it nonstop every time I go to see her.  I really feel like she'd be happier carrying your divine baby.  Just between the two of us, I'm trying to keep this body tight and right."

"It is a fairly tight bod, for a human.  Go and see Elizabeth, and God will bless you otherwise."

Mary wrote a passive aggressive note asking Joseph to please buy some more frankincense to cover up the various smells coming out of his room, and went to go see her sister.  Elizabeth made a big show about having a secret that she just couldn't wait to tell Mary, but Mary just rolled her eyes and made coughing noises whenever Elizabeth hinted about her new baby.  After a couple of weeks, Mary knit a baby hat that said "Fartilda," dropped it on Elizabeth's bed, and headed back home.

When Joseph saw Mary he marveled at how much her backside had grown.  "What have you been feeding that thing?" he asked with his tongue poking out of the side of his mouth.

"What are you talking about?" Mary asked, spinning around, trying to sneak a peek.  She ran her hands over her voluminous hams, thinking back to that day when the angel Gabriel had blessed her thrice.  "I just ate a lot of carbs at Elizabeth's.  She keeps saying she's eating for two but it's more like three or four."

Joseph nodded and smiled but didn't tell her that the angel Gabriel had visited him too.  Gabriel told him that God had delivered unto them a blessing that would save them all.  At the time he thought that maybe it was a son who would grow up to play professional sports, but it looked like it was just going to be a fat pair of buns that would be sure to keep the lead in his pencil.

Mary remembered why she had liked Joseph in the first place (he was very dumb and sweet) and they spent a lot of time canoodling.  He asked her to marry him one day after they DI'd, and maybe it was just the oxytocin but she said yes.

At this time, the land where Mary and Joseph lived was part of the Roman Empire. The emperor Augustus wanted to have a list of all the people in the empire to make sure they paid their taxes.  He told everyone to return to the town where their families came from, and enter their names in a census.  Each family would also be given a raffle ticket.

Joseph had always dreamed of winning a raffle, so he dragged Mary all the way back to Bethlehem.  By this time several months had passed and Mary's butt was gigantic.  She had stopped letting Elizabeth come over, as Elizabeth would only speak in riddles, saying things like, "When you sit around the house you really sit around the house," and "Your back half is so fat, it needs its own postal code."

When they finally reached Bethlehem, they needed to find somewhere to stay.  At the inn, the innkeeper looked Joseph up and down and said they were all booked up.  "Please, my wife is encumbered.  We need a place to stay," he said, pitifully.  

The innkeeper looked Mary up and down.  "I'm sorry, we can't even fit that thing through the door.  Why don't you just prop that booty up with a stick and sleep under it?"

Joseph slammed the door to the inn and told Mary that he'd rather sleep with the animals anyway.  They snuck around back and went into the barn.  The animals didn't seem to mind Joseph's tuneless humming or various aromas, and Mary was pooped.  She scooted her voluminous buns into the nearest manger and curled up on the floor between two turd piles.  They fell fast asleep and all night the animals arranged themselves artfully around the couple.

As they slept, God went around tying people's shoelaces together and putting clear tape on their thresholds.  Then he woke them up all at once and startled the shit out of everyone.  They were pissed off at first but then they saw God's shit-eating grin and pretended to be amused.  "All right, all right, all right," God said, "I've got good news!"

"Can we go back to the Garden of Eden?" a shepherd asked, but God stopped smiling and someone elbowed the shepherd in the ribs and it was awkward for a minute.

"Anyways... Today in Bethlehem a savior has been born in a manger!"

"Oh well that's cool too," the shepherd said, wincing.  He ran to catch up with all of his friends who were running towards the inn.  When they got there they saw Mary's huge buns and were like, "Woah.  I've got to tell everyone about this!"

The shepherds went around telling their friends about this lady's huge ass, and their friends were like, "Cool."  But then the shepherds were like, "No you don't get it.  You've got to see it in person."  And then they did, and it was better than good.

Angels, shepherds, carpenters, and the other three types of people that existed in those days spread the story far and wide.  Some Wise Men (who happened to also be ass men) heard about this miraculous booty and came to Judea bearing lotions and various stretch fabrics.  "Where is this bountiful buns that makes even the limpest noodle go al dente?" they inquired.

Herod, the king of Judea, heard this and it made him very angry to think that he spent all of his day doing side bends and sit-ups and no one was paying attention to his backside.  He sent for the Wise Men to come to him.  He said, "When you find those sheep let me know so I can peep them."  But Herod did not tell them that he was more of a tit man himself, and wouldn't be able to appreciate the buns.

The Wise Men found the tent that had been built around the ever-widening buns and laid down their gifts.  "Here's some lotion for your skin, some stretchy fabric to swaddle those globes, and here's a magazine to read when you get bored."  The Wise Men turned to go but Mary told them to stay and write poems about her buns.

That night, an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream.  "Get up," the angel said, "Build a house around the buns and lean up against it like you're waiting for a camel to pick you up.  Herod is coming to murder the buns so that his subjects will turn their attention back on him."

When Herod arrived he told all of the shapely women and men to come out of their houses so he could gaze upon their buns.  "There are no fat buns here, my king," the Wise Man said.  They pointed at Mary leaning up against the wall, saying, "That woman has the fattest buns in our whole city, and hers are like two raisins taped to a dust pan."

"You call that a buns?  This is a buns!"  Herod shouted, pulling off his tunic and brandishing his firm but fleshy posterior at them.  He stomped all the way back to his palace and sat on his hands, squeezing his buns furiously.

At this point everyone was pretty sick of looking at the buns and Mary just wanted to go back home and close her curtains and take a bath.  When they got home there was a note from Elizabeth about her new son Jesus, who was supposedly a big honkin' deal.  "She's never going to shut up about this," Mary said, so they changed their names and moved to Nazareth.

Epilogue

Herod died after being ranked fourth in a "Best Body Parts of Judea" year-end list.  The Wise Men went home and set their poems to music and invented Sir Mix-a-Lot.  Joseph's name was drawn in the raffle but no one showed up to claim the prize.  Mary's buns went back to their original size but every now and then she'd bend over and something on a table ten feet away would knock over and fall on the floor.  Jesus overcame his helicopter parenting to do various memorable things like become a carpenter and get crucified.  The buns lived on forever, wibbling and wobbling in divinity.