10.27.05
Pond Scum: The Merkin Chronicles
By Steve Finbow
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There is a small planet orbiting a distant sun. There is a small moon orbiting a small planet orbiting a distant sun. The inhabitants of that moon are a pinkish brown, a yellowish black, a reddish green. They are mostly large and shiny. Some have threadlike pigmented structures that grow from follicles beneath the skin. Others are as bald as stingrays. Some carry metal implements that puncture and tear the flesh with speed and light. Others carry a breed of tiny domesticated canine with large erect organs of hearing and protruding organs of sight. The race of people who live on the small moon orbiting a small planet orbiting a distant sun spend their days facing away from the small planet orbiting a distant sun. Their newspapers tell only of them. Their television shows only them. They pretend the small planet does not exist – even when it yells, even when it pukes, even when it shits. The people of the small moon are orphans. They have mouths in the back of their necks from where they spout bile and hatred. They wear mirror-shades reflecting back their fellow citizens who would dare to see the truth in each other’s eyes.
By Nicholas Allanach
The main crops that grow in the crimson milky cobalt fields are ace, bean, boffo, bone, bullet, case note, clam, coconut, fish, frogskin, lizard, peso, rock, rutabaga, scrip, simoleon, and yellowback. The most popular, however, is the buck. Its body is albino and it has an intricate viridescent camouflage. Variations in skin markings differentiate the six existing species. All are highly sought after, but collectors hunt with bare hands, spoons, and butterfly nets the elusive and beautiful Benjamin Franklin. Five species have become extinct: the William McKinley, the Grover Cleveland, the James Madison, the Salmon P. Chase, and the almost mythical Woodrow Wilson.
Apart from hunting bucks, the people of the small moon – known to the people of the small planet as “Merkins” – take into the system of organs surrounding the opening in the front of their heads substances containing nutrients; they bite, chew and swallow this tangible matter. The organ is usually greasy, sticky, and wiped with the back of the hand; it is also open constantly and emits a yelping, strangled sound causing other beings to flee. The noise is familiar to some inhabitants of the small planet that orbits a distant sun, however, experts believe that within a century the noise will be incomprehensible to most.
100 years ago, the Tellurians – the inhabitants of the small planet – barely acknowledged the Merkins’ existence. Occasionally, the odd Merkin would visit the small planet with a travelling show – these Merkins were called “moolads” – they rode domesticated perissodactyls and whooped and hollered. Thirty years later, after saturation access to Merkin media, the Tellurians began to wear Merkin-style clothes, and adopt Merkin-style poses, to read Merkin books, and listen to Merkin music; this resulted in the emission of replicoxide, which, in the thermosphere, transformed into egogen; inhaled by the Merkins, this gas caused giant-head syndrome. To counter this abnormality, and to make them look less weird, the Merkins began to overeat in the hope of balancing the head-to-body-size differential. After a while, the Merkins began to look like magnified balloon animals – their arms resembled exploding sausages; their thighs, the bloated carcasses of sun-ripened manatees; their bellies, the inflated mass of a circus big top – that’s a circus big top full of proboscidean, artiodactyl, and plantigrade warm-blooded vertebrates, abnormally undersized people, and grotesquely costumed comic entertainers, don’t forget.
Slowly, the people of the small planet became disenchanted with the people of the small moon that orbits the small planet that orbits a distant sun; appalled by the Merkins’ violence, sickened by their over-indulgence, horrified by their insularity, the Tellurians plotted to blast the small moon and its inhabitants into the void. But it was not to be.
The Tellurians shook their hands with fingers clenched into their palms and rattled their stout single-edged cavalry swords with a curved blade but could not bring themselves to rid the aggregate of all existing matter, energy and space of the Merkins. Occasionally, a lone Tellurian made an object that flashes and burns, disfigures and destroys, but their rebellion was a mere stitch in a circus tent’s flap-like entrance. The people who inhabit the small moon that… Oh, fuck it…. The Merkins held mirrors up to their faces and looked over their shoulders at the small planet – they smirked, they fired their metal implements that puncture and tear the flesh with speed and light and they laughed, and they laughed.
The Tellurians eventually turned their backs on the small moon. The Merkins smashed their mirrors, sending clouds of glass into the sky to reflect back only the people of the small moon. The Tellurians began to expunge their libraries of any mention of the Merkin race. They erased Merkin films, burned Merkin books, and deleted all Merkin music. The distance between the small moon that orbits the small planet that orbits a distant sun and the small planet that orbits a distant sun, although geographically the same as when this story started, will, in time, and in terms of comprehension and compassion, become immense, so immense that the small moon that orbits the small planet that orbits a distant sun will no longer orbit the small planet that orbits a distant sun.
What will be the future of the limited-in-size natural satellite of the limited-in-size celestial body revolving around a faraway gaseous body? Who knows? Who gives a shit?
Click here to read previous Pond Scum columns.
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Click here for Steve Finbow's bio and a list of works published.
© 2005 Me Three
