PDF

The Legend of Bo Grass


by Shawn Misener


      A pretty long time ago, when perfumes were new, there were perfume factories, and behind a particular perfume factory rested a toad named Bo Grass. He was a goddamned giant animal, the size of a boisterous shrub, or a small school bus.

     

     Bo ruled the city by suggesting new scent formulas in a booming croak of a voice that shook the earth for acres around, and as a result everybody in town smelled like fairy breath. Or, on his BAD BREATH DAYS, all of the people reeked of rotted sushi from an elk's ass.

      One dark maroon sunset Bo up and left, leaving the town without olfactory direction. The people quickly discovered their own sweaty aromas, which smelt strange, like new cars. Armpits became the subject of grotesque and intense fascination, and people spent hours prowling around, smelling random and unexpecting pits.

      Eventually the mayor was left with no choice but to save the townsfolk's sanity. He assembled a search party of the finest noses around and sent them out of the gates bellowing "FIND ME BO GRASS! WITH ALL HASTE!"

      Seventeen days later the weary scouts returned, minus two or three who had apparently succumbed to an overdose of recreational giant toad licking, a psychedelic ovverreach, ultimately throwing themselves on their daggers like Midwestern samurai. The rest, who were still tripping balls and barely hanging on themselves, had a story to tell.

      Bo was found in the Black Albion forest with an impressive harem of musk ox, which he mounted dozens of times a day, smoking web-rolled cigarillos in the process of humping them, his expressionless toad eyes staring at nothing while the lady ox brapped in animal ecstacy. The time Bo Grass spent NOT drilling ox he spent rolling the cigarillos, which were filled with just his crystallized sweat alone. The scouts curiosity had overtaken them and they plundered his sweat while he dozed, mazing their way through a labyrinth of languorous oxen, test tubes in hand.

      "And he is happy?" Asked the mayor, sighing deeply. The scouts nodded as one, trying not to bug out. "We shall leave him be. If he is happy he deserves it."

      The artist Rushquez was commissioned by the town to build a statue in Bo Grass' memory. The statue was conceived from plastic and sweated fruit flavored water. The town children loved to climb it and lick it while their parents sat hypnotized by the amazing sideshow of scents that Rushquez installed around the statue. One moment their minds were calmed by a light sandalwood, the next spirited away in reverie by a near-oppressive meatloaf. The statue and vents eventually became known as The Garden of Toad Smelling and Licking, which seemed like a stupid and obvious name to those clinging hopelessly to the memory of Bo Grass' odorific legend.

      Bo Grass never returned to town, his statue was eventually destroyed, with everything else, by that nuclear holocaust, but at least we have a story. There's always that.

Endcap