Vivesectionist Seeks Donors

            The telephone rang. “Yes? No. No! No arachnids this week!” Jacques slammed the phone down, the third time in ten minutes. This online advertising nonsense was not paying off. He had even specified “bipeds”. He stood aching, flexing his back with both hands gripping his waist just below his kidneys. Surely, there's an easier way. He adjusted his glasses as he squinted through the smeared windowpanes at the Salivation Army cohort drooling for donations across the street.

            The kettle was nowhere close to full. Two of the attendants left abruptly for a lunch-and-loo break, leaving behind only a Major with a tambourine gripping his buffalo robe, the smoke under the kettle torn asunder by the splintering wind. “No doubt, it's tough all over,” Jacques reasoned, “but no skid marks for me, I still eat broccoli every day!” His methane fumigation put all vermin straying into his laboratory out of their misery quick and for good. (The reader may here extrapolate the number of non-effecting causes unleashed on this planet each and every day.)

            One of the Salivation Army attendants headed straight for the nearest bank building to visit the loo. The other, Pinto Dreck, headed to the local Chambermaid Dairy for something to taste. He'd had new heels applied to his old pair of boots just days earlier, and with his resolute stride and the memory of the past weekend's festivities fresh in his head, he was now conjuring new verses for the Stones' “Let It Bleed” between his ears.

            Stepping into the Chambermaid Dairy, Pinto eyed the freezer display cases. The tops of the sundaes were strewn with the carcasses of many kinds of fruit of greater and lesser merit, prunes not among them, however. (It's whispered widely that the prune lobby was still irate that prune sundaes were never to be found in any Chambermaid Dairy. Be that as it may, franchisees of Chambermaid Dairies knew approximately how prunes and prune juice stimulate rumblings of several sorts.) Of all days, though, Pinto had an acute hankering for prune juice. Not utterly aware of Chambermaid Dairy policies and practices, Pinto innocently ordered a tall prune juice.

            “No can do,” the stark freckled redhead behind the counter replied.

            “But I like the taste of it, I'm not even constip—” Pinto began to answer.

            “Ah-ah-ahhh! I don't care how many or what kinds of -ectomies you may have ever had, dear, and I won't say anything about whatever else you may want for breakfast, but: no prune juice!” the redhead clicked her teeth together, gnashing at every word emerging from her otherwise shapely mouth.

            Pinto knew rejection when he encountered it and was just leaving the establishment when other events overtook him. Collusion between the prune and fig lobbies—well, negotiations had been fruitful, and the two industries were about to embark on a joint guerilla marketing campaign: and who could have predicted, who could have anticipated, who could have known, but they had to begin their campaign somewhere, and so the very Chambermaid Dairy franchise that Pinto was on the verge of exiting was about to face the first deployment of marketing force and zeal.

             Pinto had barely turned on his newish heels when fifty prunes promptly dropped down through the ceiling tiles, yielding fifty nearly-simultaneous squirts. The redhead behind the counter promptly gaped, and she would have exclaimed but all she could actually manage to do was open her shapely mouth in wonder and amazement. Pinto's gast was at least equally flabbered, and none of what he was seeing and hearing would have made the least bit of sense to him had he not spotted in almost the same moment an avocado-green limousine parked across the street, from the depths of which someone was clearly operating a remote-control device. This vehicle Pinto instantly recognized as a corporate limo for Queen Fig Enterprises, as some eminent personage in the remote depths of this very limo had made daily generous donations to the Salivation Army kettle every day he'd been on duty over the past three or four months.

            While the actions in this Chambermaid Dairy franchise constituted distinct progress, still Pinto concluded he would not be sipping or slurping any tall prune juice for the moment, so he continued walking to casually stroll out. By the time he reached the sidewalk, a curled finger from the depths of the limo beckoned him through an open window, and Pinto obliged the summons by strolling over after looking both right and left (it was a one-way street, but these days—you know?).

            By the time Pinto reached the limo's opened window, the hand was proffering a contract, which Pinto now began to duly examine. This was the moment he'd been waiting for, almost entirely without knowing it! Pinto kneeled beside the limo to sign the contract with the pen now being proffered through the open window, after which he was invited in and whisked away.

            Pinto soon began his new job as Court Jester for Queen Fig Enterprises (“The Fig, My Able Queen!” being the corporate motto of the day) and took to his new position in good stride. In bell cap and motley, owing to his gangly physique and the boots he insisted on keeping his feet clad in, Pinto proved he could provoke mirth even without resort to flatulence. To prove this to the small knot of remaining QFE doubters some weeks later, Pinto ceremoniously pulled out a wedge of sharp cheddar and cut the cheese thoughtfully. Everyone at the ceremony smiled as the perfumed air wafted heavenward, each secretly anticipating a date with a small brick of Limburger.

            Nevertheless, on the Friday following, someone high in the corporate tower ordered the QFE kennel to release from the basement its horde of Hellhounds—all thirty-one of them—for a final assessment of Pinto's intestinal fortitude. Their claws clicking and clattering up the granite steps of the corporate tower to Pinto's office on the thirteenth floor, the Hellhounds raced with slathering jaws dripping runny Brie. Pinto was a tad surprised by their approach but stood in characteristic good form, providentially, and already was poised outside his office with his hands cradling a fresh mound of black tar Havarti. The Hellhounds bounded for Pinto's throat, but inhaling one or two snootfuls of the black tar along the way, one by one they each and all began to float in Havarti bliss.

            Confident but recovering from residual nervousness, Pinto was relieved that the Hellhounds' slathering hellishness had taken a back seat to their newfound intoxication. “Chalk up another one to black tar Limburger!” Pinto chortled (he himself had concocted the blend of Limburger and Havarti that yielded the Hellhounds' transport to aerial bliss). The Hellhounds floated on the thirteenth floor for almost two full weeks thereafter, not even noticing their inability to salivate.

                                                     -END-