Small Town Grievances 40: Dishonouring the waters of Shithead Bay
Small Town Grievances 40: Dishonouring the waters of Shithead Bay
Management at the Above Ground Rat Archive have again requested townsfolk to stop donating all the complementary seasonal fabric swatches everyone picks up from Felt Catastrophe this time of year. They say the swatches are all too small to use as blankets or cloaks in any of the archive’s award-winning dioramas and are generally so shitty to the touch that they make your eyes itchy just looking at them. Like all state-funded bodies the archive isn’t technically allowed to refuse donations outright, but nothing’s stopping them from hiring an off-the-books not-well veteran with a weasel net and a psychological warfare boombox to intercept anybody approaching the museum seeking to learn about the honour of rats or to use the public toilet that’s listed in all the travel books for some reason.
Good news: Lorraine F. has had her private investigator’s licence revoked for carrying around the largest handgun you’ve ever seen in your life and using it to force a confession out of just about everyone in the phone book. She vows to fight the charge with her big gun, though the thing is so heavy she can’t lift it for more than a few seconds before she needs to lie down in the dirt and dream herself back to strength.
Mayor called an emergency meeting Sunday to demand someone volunteer to tell Father Jenkins that his muscle implants are freaking everybody out. This was bound to happen eventually. Father Jenkins' enormous new arm and leg muscles are unsettling to look at as they strain against his men’s-regular holy robe and make a noise like a waterbed every time his sermons get to an exciting moment. There is nothing natural about them. They appeared almost overnight following the incident in which some unfamiliar teens bullied Father Jenkins into giving up the use of his confessional for a self-blinding party (unbridled staring into the burning bead of a welder’s torch, for what purpose we are yet to fathom).
Mayor says that those old lady parishioners yet to be driven off by Father Jenkins’ muscles are too spiritually weak to say anything, but I disagree. It’s more likely they’re simply in love with Father Jenkins. They wish to see him renewed. As a young man he sold carpets before he got a whiff of the lord’s scent. He was tall then and they remember how tall he was. There’s a photo of him in his younger days, huge and strong, on the wall of the church’s employees-only toilet, which you can use if you prove you’re pious in all things or verging on bathroom calamity. It must be hard to see him, full of seawater, and know what he once was.
Bad news: After nobody volunteered to confront Father Jenkins, Mayor vowed to mobilise town’s troubled youth militia to spit at Father Jenkins with small stinging gravel and assail him with the branches of berry trees until such time as his muscles are punctured or he gets the picture a little bit.
There are fresh concerns about the overly sponsored orphans at Blessed St Mary Christopher’s Wonderous Home for Unwanted Lads. The orphanage has once again increased the density of brand logos featured on the orphans’ depressing ugly orphan uniforms, and visitors complain that the children are becoming more and more concerned with brand loyalty and the success of local businesses over appealing to potential parents via more traditional orphan behaviour. Where are the pathetic swaying dances? Where are the quivering pre-weep expressions while gesturing with a wooden hand to an oversized cgi image depicting their hypothetical grim child-labourer fate (e.g. dangling desperately from runaway hot air balloon safety rope as it soars away from cruelly administered dirigible festival)?
They go too far with their tactics, flagging down highway travellers to pepper them with improper questions about preferred fibre supplements, threatening to expose them for subscriptions to unethical egg delivery services, breaking the windows of their cars to leave surveys about outdated bedroom organ difficulties or barely generous coupons for that ear irrigation clinic that still has a racist children’s picture book in the lobby the last time anyone checked.
Meanwhile, orphanage directors Bernice J. and Clancy J. (married or siblings?) argue that brand engagement is a vital part of any child’s healthy development and that to deny the orphans their preferred mode of self-expression would have the same effect on their brains as slipping a lithium battery into their morning popcorn. And while the two claim they don’t see a single cent of sponsorship revenue, they refuse to answer any questions about how they can still afford to wear a completely new polyester cowboy suit every day of the calendar year, each one so starched to Christ that it can stand under its own power as if worn by a man vacuumed at rapture or made invisible by scientific horror.
Town Hall has announced an inquiry into the hospital’s innovative early-parenthood trial which promised new parents the chance to bring a separate, hospital-sourced baby home with them to avoid the late nights and other evils of early parenthood while their real baby develops in comfort elsewhere. Troubling accounts that the babies received are unnerving and seem too wise and strong to be true infants, often demanding to be left alone for long vigorous walks or requesting taxi-fare to go see other parents they’ve been promised to. Mary S. complained at town meeting that her temporary son speaks several languages at a conversational level but is unable to sustain an interesting conversation to save his life. New father Tony G., who was childless for so long, seems to be the only participant enjoying the trial, and can be seen playing chess with his stand-in daughter most weekdays in the park that’s closed at sunset due the trees looking freaky in the twilight.
Unsanctioned paddle boat companies are ruining the sanctity of our beloved Shithead Bay State Park, whose mossy waters were already out of whack thanks to the explosion of invasive species like the Low-T River Viper and Hitler Spud, both of which are technically endangered but not in an interesting way anybody cares about. Now there are calls for Shithead Bay to be preserved by adding it to town’s Areas of Holy Interest register, which is supposed to designate those places God is suspected to have visited or would visit if he didn’t have his hands full keeping Satan from drinking of the gardenhose of heaven.
But we know in our hearts that this will do little, and that the fate of Shithead Bay is sealed. The register has done little to stop trespassers from accessing town’s other Areas of Holy Interest, of which there must be at least 20. The only difference is that now theyre forced to drive past a menacing billboard of a stern-looking cartoon bishop shovelling an ashen skeleton into a laundry bag in what must have at one point been considered an intimidating fashion, while an automatic recording screams that you’re speeding no matter how fast you’re driving, even if you’re walking before it, even if you’re crawling forth like a dog, eyes wide, tongue dry and hanging, seeking nothing but grace.
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