We Write Short Shorts

Three brief tales of métier

It has come to my attention that many of you are groaning under the weight of all the words I’ve showered upon you. I occasionally go on a bit—this I know, so I empathize with your plight, gentle reader. This fortnight I thought I’d lend you a hand by writing a set of short pieces on a loose theme (very loose), that you might enjoy a plate of dainty little hors d'oeuvres rather than finding yourself inflicted with forty minutes of fruitless chewing on a baseball-sized wad of overcooked ground beef and dry wheat bread. Bon appétit!

An Ode to Gas Station Pickles

“I can read in red. I can read in blue. I can read in pickle color too.”—Dr. Seuss, I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!

Yesterday my friend bought one. A gas station pickle. You’ve probably seen these, though likely the sight didn’t register in your conscious mind. There’s a class of "foods" sold only—or mostly—in gas stations, the presence of which goes largely unmarked. Hot sausages, pork cracklins, an assortment of clear-plastic wrapped pastries and fried pies, triangular sandwiches, eggs floating in pink brine. Deep down you know this stuff. Have you ever bought any of it?

At one time or another I’ve eaten all of these things. But I can’t say I highly recommend it. I was surprised when my friend Maxwell bought a pickle. It was the size of a handgun, suspended in a plastic womb of green amniotic fluid. There were three varieties of pickle in the semi-refrigerated display case: Kosher, Hearty Dill, and Hot Mama. Maxwell remarked that the pickle itself wasn’t nearly as disturbing as the illustration on the package, which depicts an anthropomorphic pickle shaking off bulging droplets of pickle juice. There is indeed something weirdly erotic about it—especially in the case of the Hot Mama, in which the lumpy cartoon tube is dolled up like an emerald streetwalker. Maxwell purchased a Hearty Dill. Dill is not ordinarily an herb described in such terms, but I suppose hearty could refer to the pickle itself. It was an ample pickle.

Thirty minutes later, back in the office, I received a text from him accompanied by photo of the pickle. A single bite was missing, and his caption read, “f’nasty.”

I’m sure the executives at Van Holten’s—the company responsible for the pickle—would be saddened to hear this review. Van Holten’s is a proud company, or a shameless one, I’m not certain which. They sell pickle brine: “Use it as a shot chaser or a drink mixer—either way it's DILL-ICIOUS!” That’s hard to imagine. And Pickle Ice, which is basically pickle brine popsicles. I’m not making this up. Or how about this: “Our Big Papa Dill Pickle Lip Balm is formulated specifically designed [sic] to aid in hydration.”

Pickle lip balm.

Van Holten’s has been around for over a hundred years, which is easy to believe. It’s much easier to believe, in fact, that someone started a company selling individual pickles in 1900 than in 2000. But I bet pickle lip balm wasn't one of their original products. I bet that’s a recent thing. So the next time you're sleepwalking through a board meeting, entertain yourself by picturing the scene in the Van Holten’s conference room five or ten years ago. A bunch of graybeards contemplating their own extinction by way of graphs covered with downward plunging lines. "What do we do?" they plaintively inquire, and over in the corner the hotshot young pickle genius spots his opportunity, rises dramatically, and after a pregnant pause, speaks the immortal words, “Lip balm, gentlemen. Lip balm.”

Who am I to say it’s wrong? I ate the rest of Maxwell’s pickle.

The Blacksmith Will See You Now

“It is a great while since I felt the grind of bone under my saw,' he added, smiling with anticipation.”—Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander

Recently the universe saw fit to let me in on the tale of the surgeon John Bradmore and his most famous patient, the future King Henry V, after Henry was shot in the face with an arrow.

The arrow, fired by some anonymous archer in the army of Harry “Hotspur” Percy—erstwhile ally of Henry’s turned rebel—struck Henry in the right cheek and sank six inches through meat and cartilage and bone—but not, miraculously, through any key vessels or gray matter. Henry, who must have been wired to the eyeballs on methamphetamine, continued to fight. 

When the sun set on the Battle of Shrewsbury the victorious Henry was already the focal point of a battalion of surgeons generously leavened with crackpots in surgeons’ clothing. Potions were quaffed and unguents were smeared. Hands grasped at the arrow; hands wiggled the arrow back and forth; hands snapped the shaft off just at the edge of the socket, leaving the steel bodkin point buried beneath the torn flesh. What became of those hands is anybody’s guess but it’s a good bet that they were separated from their owners. Another pair, however, was freed before all was said and done…

Enter John Bradmore, metalworker, imprisoned for counterfeiting coins. Professional metalwork, both illicit and licit, was a side effect of Bradmore’s main career: surgeon. There was no Amazon Medical Instruments in 1403; it was economical therefore, just as it was for the farrier, for surgeons to make their own tools.

So in a scene worthy of Hollywood, the servants of the king were sent to snatch John from the ravening jaws of justice and bring him bodily to Kenilworth, in the castle of which lay the prince in his throes. Bradmore strode into the room, buoyed with a confidence made of equal parts genius, derring-do, and relief at getting to swap for more familiar problems. 

He began by pouring honey on the wound. Sounds crazy but honey has antibacterial properties; it’s actually pretty smart, though it’s quite likely that this was a common treatment. What came next was pure Bradmore, Metal Surgeon: he peered into the gory depths of the wound, slicing it open nice and wide so as to afford the best possible view, and after a moment’s meditative silence he stood suddenly and swept out of the room, snapping his fingers in the air and shouting “Bring me to a well-equipped foundry, forthwith!” Or something of that nature.

Whatever the particulars, he invented and created a tool on the spot. Picture a pair of metal tongs which, when held together, form a sort of artificial arrow shaft. Now picture a threaded metal rod between them. As the rod is turned, the tongs are forced apart. This was the tool that John Bradmore made, and this is the tool he brought with him, back to Henry’s room.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever done anything to piss off your boss, but in this case the boss has the power to have you beheaded and drawn and quartered, your head mounted on a spike outside the Kenilworth city gate. But John Bradmore had conquered his fears. He gingerly guided the tool into the arrowhead socket and turned the rod until the pseudo-shaft was tight. Then, with infinite patience and deliberation, he worked the tool back and forth, putting just enough extractive pressure upon the handle to allow the weapon to overcome its bonds without exceeding the limits of the tool itself. 

Presently the steel spike emerged from the prince’s nut leaving what must have looked like a bowl of ground beef in place of his right cheek. Bradmore washed the wound out with wine, poured more honey over it, and covered the whole unappetizing mess with a cloth dressing. This he changed often, gradually reducing its size as the wound healed over. In eighty-six days Henry was back to princing and Bradmore was measuring the rooms of his new place on Ye Olde Easie Street.

All I’m saying is, that’s something to chew on the next time you have to fast for six hours prior to an ultrasound. 

Workaholics Autonomous

“I got an ant farm; them fellas didn’t grow shit.”—Mitch Hedberg

Sixteen long years ago, when my daughter was a sprightly two-year old, we got her one of those old-school ant farms. A flattish plastic box with clear sides and a molded red barn on top, the kit came with a bag of sand and a coupon for ants. We sent the coupon off to the bug warehouse, and a couple weeks later the postman delivered a little plastic tube with a dozen black carpenter ants squeezed inside. Not knowing how long they’d been in these cramped quarters, I felt bad for them, so we wasted no time tapping them out into the hole atop the farm. I’d expected this would be a ticklish operation, but the ants were logy from the chilly weather and the long containment, and were as docile as cows, if less bulky.

The little sable ladies — I’m given to understand the workers are all ladies — took to their new home with aplomb. Within hours they had begun to excavate, enthusiastically hoisting grains of sand out of embryonic tunnels and depositing them in mounds at the sides of the box. They were tireless. Each day we examined their handicraft to find their tunnels reaching ever further toward the bottom of the box. There were three, equally spaced, and one day they all met at the bottom. The ants subdivided the resultant prisms of sand with a horizontal tunnel, leaving a sort of inverted window pane. Their geometry was Mondrian-perfect, and I think at this point we assumed they would take to a leisurely life, perhaps with a short shift each day to ferry the drops of sugar water we gave them down into one of the galleries that they had built around each tunnel junction.

The thought, apparently, never crossed their tiny ant minds. Not content to let human notions of aesthetics govern their tiny world, the ants without hesitation began subdividing the remaining sand blocks. Four masses became eight, then sixteen. At length the tunnels’ proximity began to disturb their structural integrity. Some of them collapsed; some merged into others, and gradually their beautiful formic mandala disintegrated into chaos. Yet still they continued digging. The top of the farm was a slag pile of sand, soon enough joined by the corpses of those ants who had worked themselves to death. The graveyard grew day by day, until there were three, then two, then just one ant left, still working without pause. And then there were none.

Four or five years later we tried it again. This time it was a gift for my young son, but there was another difference. The kit we purchased was from the same company, but at some point in the intervening years a new generation of ant farm executives had decided the time had come to bring the operation into the future. Gone was the molded plastic barn, and all of the farm-related imagery on the packaging. Instead of sand, the interior was filled with a transparent blue gel impregnated with sugar, and the box was lit from the bottom with an LED strip. 

The wisdom of putting ants, which evolved over millions of years to dig nests in dark soil, into a glorified jelly jar lit up like a discotheque was apparently never considered.

At first the experience seemed much the same as the previous kit. The ants duly set to work digging their tunnels, and down they went like fingers stretching into the sapphire medium. After a few days though, the pace of the work began to flag, and within a couple weeks all digging activity came to a halt. The ants stopped working; stopped moving really. They lived on as long as their predecessors, but in the presence of so much food there seemed to be no impetus for them to work. So each remained fixed wherever she’d come to the realization of the futility of her task, and simply ate. Curiously, as they began to die a few weeks later, an ant would stir for long enough to remove the corpse, but otherwise they were as torpid as if they’d just discovered Jerry Springer and Oreos.

I can’t think about these so-called farms without a jot of horror. Horror at the machine-like quality of the first batch, which upended my notions of what it means to be a living thing, and horror at the torpor of the second batch, which seemed to point an accusatory finger at my own tendency toward sloth. How would I respond to being cocooned within a warm, springy bed of Jello?

I can’t rightly say. But it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to find that somewhere on some distant planet there’s a young alien and her alien dad peering into a plastic box, watching in mute dread as a dozen or so humans spend their every waking moment inventing ad campaigns for shrimp jalapeño appetizers at Chili’s or curling up on expensive pillow top mattresses to binge episodes of Fargo.

Or penning little monographs about the tribulations of insects.