Small Town Grievances 39: Haunted by priest's squashing

Small Town Grievances 39: Haunted by the priest's squashing

• We are trying our best to ignore Mayor’s new sad-looking dog, whom he claims has an unerring ability to sense when somebody is carrying pornography. Many townspeople been left blushing while waiting in line at the theatre or the mega-pharmacy waiting pen as Mayor’s new dog haunched up beside them and began sighing heavily and rolling its big teabag eyes in the direction of their pants pockets, which Mayor gleefully points out must be full to the brim with illicit material. We stopped laughing at the spectacle long ago, even when we feel the target is deserving due to bad credit rating or distractingly loud carphone conversation volume. None of us should have to deny Mayor’s charge that we “used up our porno ration already and it’s not even the equinox”. None of our research has even turned up the existence of a “porno ration” in all of town’s dark history.
      What is to be done with the sighing dog, whose origins are unknowable and health deeply perilous? Mayor has claimed variously that he inherited it from some far-away cousin, or discovered it the only survivor of an overturned boxcar on some flaming trainwreck night. Lauren M. who’s common-law married to the head of animal forensics at the community college in Hindenburg said it may be an “allergies sort of situation”, and that we should at least wait for the dog to gain some tolerance to the town’s unique atmosphere, particularly with all the ancient air coming out of the ground now the permafrost’s thrown in the towel.
      But when will that be? How long can we endure? The dog may simply be of a sighing breed, due to European countenance or some physical hiccup that arises when a creature bred to rid grain silos of cobras lives far longer than its creators ever envisioned.
      Father Lloyd of the hyper-denominational church suggested we would do well to keep grace close — the shame it brings is manageable, and it must not be an easy thing to be made in the way of this dog. Orphaned, genetically adrift, denied the venom you were bred for, dim with purposelessness, lacking the noble drive of even the lowliest paperboy. It must not be easy to have Mayor your only ally in a strange new land. Father Lloyd is right, of course. But it's easy for him to say, it's well known that he’s still allowed to own huge quantities of pornography on healthcare grounds after that parade float ran over the back of his heels and made his feet look like skis for most of last year.

• Town Hall is accepting public submissions in its case against local unsettling businesswoman Sally K. for the crime of running a shop that nobody can work out what it’s meant to be selling. This is as long-running an issue as any in town, and there are many passionate voices from all corners of the community. All of them agree that Sally K.’s wares are deeply disorienting and that even trying to get an idea of the store while standing outside is exhausting in a way nobody has time for.
      Under God's green eyes, what is she trying to sell us? Is it the homoeopathic sodas on their warm little shelves? The extensive collection of owner’s manuals for a kind of extinct car that a sign boasts “LOST ITALY TWO WORLD WARS”? What does it mean that the rock-climbing equipment is “used heavily but un-blooded unless marked otherwise”? If customers are truly forbidden to sit at the fancy French cafe table with its backwards-knees ergonomic stoolette, as a recorded message repeatedly reminds us in more than one language, then who is it there for? Why does Sally K. have a menu for a range of hot drinks if she’s going to pointedly remind us that she has to leave the store and trek essentially across town on her medically bankrupt feet to retrieve them, and if anything happens we will have to live forever with the knowledge that it was we who sent her out there? If we do take hot drinks, why must we promise to finish them before we take part in any sessions in the “Basking Room”? 
      Nobody even knows what the "Basking Room" is or what takes place there, except unreliable Terry P. with his difficult mind. Terry P. rose at Town Meeting to announce he’d once explored the back rooms of Sally K.’s store while she was struggling beneath the colourful bolt of silk he occasionally asked her to fetch down when he wanted to poke around. He says he went deeper than he ever had before, and there, far from the sun and the people under it, he found a darkened room with a single desktop computer, on which a man seemed to be doing homework.
      When I tell you nobody was happy with this explanation. Under enhanced interrogation Terry P. soon admitted that he could not say for certain who the man doing the homework had been, or if it had truly been a man at all, or a child rendered disproportionate by the uneasy dimensions of Sally. K’s store and the computer's unearthly brightness settings.
      Eventually Terry P. fell into a stress-prophecy during which he claimed the figure in the room had actually been none other than Lost Hero Powell Denver. We knew then we would gain nothing of value from Terry P. and we lay him on his moped and sent it roaring in the direction of home. As much as we would like to say otherwise, there's no way it could have been Lost Hero Powell Denver, a famous dead policeman of our parents’ generation who fell in the line of duty while responding to a house fire where he bet members of the Lady’s Fire Brigade he could fit his whole mouth around the nozzle of a firehose and probably still have room left over for them to stick bits of dry spaghetti inside if they wanted.

---
If you enjoy and would like to support Small Town Grievances, you can do something unheard of and donate $1 here. All proceeds will go towards the creation of an official town chariot with those nasty spinning blades sticking out of the wheels.

You can read other stories at jackvening.net.

You can read the full(ish) Small Town Grievances archive.