Forgiveness County
Attention: I’ve included an audio version this week if you’d like to listen rather than read. Just hit the play button above. If you do, I’d love to know what you think. But first, we laugh…
The stories I share here have been nonfiction. Real stuff. Like the time I felt compelled to strangle a Girl Scout while running my first (and only) marathon. Or the time I deterred a crippling depression by unintentionally committing assault with a condiment. Or more recently the time my mom offended an entire In-N-Out Burger by slipping, Freudian-style.
Most of the people in my life know—and have made peace with the fact—that they will likely, sooner or later, end up in All Kinds of Funny. In fact, my daughter has offered a warning on her social media: “Be nice to me,” she said, “or my dad will write about you.” My little girl. :)
Sometimes, though, I get little pieces of stories, a detail from a friend or a family member that ain’t exactly a whole story, but it’s something I can fit for a laugh if I angle the banana peel just right. In that spirit, I have something new for you today. Let’s see how it lands.
It’s been a funny week in Forgiveness County. Orson Smoot hauled his mobile petting zoo to the Forgiveness County Elementary School. He had a potbellied pig named Preston, a Giant Sulcata Tortoise named Scooter Waddle-bottoms, and a chimp named Arnold. Orson inherited Arnold from a distant aunt who let the chimp smoke Virginia Slims until she herself died of lung cancer.
As a pacifist and animal activist, Orson was mildly passionate about providing children with animal conservation education. And he was terrible at it. He got no respect from the children and even less from the animals who consistently dropped a turd whenever he got up on his soapbox to spout off about the majesty of the animal kingdom.
This week, a precocious yet contrarian eight-year-old incessantly prodded Orson with questions about panda bears. Orson politely attempted to steer the discussion back to chimps, more specifically to Arnold the chimp, but the contrarian eight-year-old just whined, “I don’t care about your stupid monkey.”
“He’s not a monkey,” Orson insisted, gesturing with a pointed finger. “He’s a great ape, among the most intelligent of all the—” And this was when Arnold the chimp bit off Orson’s finger, which he had mistaken for a Virginia Slim menthol cigarette, as the chimp was out of his mind, suffering from nicotine withdrawals.
Orson spent the next few days at The Stepsisters of Mercy Medical Center where surgeons tried and failed to reattach his finger. When the surgeon on call broke the bad news, the patient in the next bed over asked what had been done with the severed digit, suggesting that it could be treated and mounted as he was an amateur taxidermist. Unfortunately, Forgiveness County had rules and regulations specific to human body parts, to say nothing of, ya know, common decency.
When the other patient was discharged, he left Orson with a few back issues of The Taxidermy Review. Taking into account that his affinity for animals had cost him a finger, Orson reasoned that taxidermy might serve as a better way to spend his time.
Having collected a settlement from the company that insured Arnold, Orson bought a used Hummer, a black leather jacket, a set of black leather pants, a rifle, fishing rods, tackle, and Cheryl, a bloodhound. The idea was to hunt an animal who could then be skinned, tanned, prepped, and mounted. Cheryl came from a long line of champion hunting hounds, so the first step should have been easy. But it wasn’t.
Orson’s missing trigger finger made it difficult to shoot. He tried to use his middle finger, but the middle lost quite a bit of dexterity due to the missing pointer. Orson opted to shoot left-handed, but this wasn’t much better. As he struggled to get comfortable, Cheryl became bored, wandered off, and snuffed out a wild boar. She barked and bayed to let Orson know where to aim. Orson was so frazzled, though, that he mistook Cheryl for the boar and shot the poor, sweet bloodhound in her floppy ear.
They spent the next few days at the Tails of Redemption Pet Clinic. The vet amputated one of Cheryl’s ears, which broke Orson’s heart but also made him feel like he had a friend he could relate to, the pair of them having lost a rather integral body part.
Retiring his rifle for the time being, Orson piled into his used Hummer with Cheryl and drove out onto frozen Bon Mot Lake to try his hand at ice fishing. This proved equally challenging. Orson couldn’t get the auger started to drill the hole. A fellow fisherman with more fingers than teeth gave Orson a stick of dynamite, insisting that it reduced the ice-cutting labor by a factor of ten.
Thankful for the advice, Orson lit up the dynamite, tossed it out onto the ice, and waited. Orson even felt a little giddy. He nostalgically reflected on countless summers and 4ths of July when he had nothing but fond memories of barbecued hotdogs and fireworks. Cheryl was also giddy. Unfortunately, being a not particularly bright bloodhound, she was unable to differentiate between fetch with a plain old stick and fetch with a lit stick of dynamite.
Before Orson even realized it was happening, Cheryl had fetched the dynamite, the fuse ever dwindling and all but guaranteeing disaster. Once Orson pieced together the imminent terror, he grabbed his rifle and aimed to the side of Cheryl with hopes that the warning shot would startle her, force her to drop the stick of dynamite, and then run back to him.
Bang!
The warning shot did scare Cheryl but not enough to drop the dynamite. And because poor Cheryl had just the one floppy ear now, she suffered vertigo, and when she ran, she veered left. That left-leaning trajectory put the used Hummer in her sights, which—in her dog brain—seemed a good place to remove the tail from between her legs. But she never got that chance.
Ka-boom!
The used Hummer and sweet, one-eared Cheryl sank to the bottom of Bon Mot Lake.
Surrendering now to a more passive strategy, Orson bought a bike. He rode around town looking for road kill that hadn't been too badly mangled. He found some squirrels, some too-slow bunny rabbits, but nothing that whispered to his taxidermist’s soul until he rode to the middle of a highway to inspect a large opossum carcass. When he took hold of the opossum’s tail, though, he quickly learned that the opossum was playing possum.
The big rodent came to and hissed, startling Orson who jumped back and was nearly crushed by an oncoming rusted pickup truck that swerved and collided into a large redwood. The impact knocked a black bear from the tree, and the great beast plummeted to its untimely death, landing with a thud in the back of the rusted pickup. Lucky day.
Orson brought the bear into his living room, which he had converted into a work space. Immediately, he consulted the latest edition of The Taxidermy Review, perusing an article entitled “The First Steps to a Magnificent Mount.” As Orson studied, he noticed an advertisement in the magazine for this year’s World Taxidermy Championship. Now truly inspired, Orson went to work for the next few weeks, skinning the bear, mixing Plaster-of-Paris, pouring the mold, placing the skin, inserting the marble eyes, and finally, setting and polishing the teeth. Finished, Orson had a work of which he was proud. He loaded his mount into a trailer and towed that trailer across the country to compete at the world championships, representing Forgiveness County.
Wearing his all-black leather duds, Orson entered the convention center. There were more taxidermy mounts than there were people—everything from pigeons and porcupines to lemmings and largemouth bass. Orson inquired about registration for the competition and was directed down a long corridor where he found a Mississippi-river-sized line, inundated with taxidermists and their black bear mounts, many of which assumed the same pose as Orson’s. His was nothing special.
Devastation set in. Prematurely defeated, Orson didn’t enter the line. Instead, he exited the convention center altogether, unwittingly walking into the middle of an improvised animal rights protest, where he was doused with a bucket of white paint.
Orson moped back to his trailer. He had gotten himself a can of gas and a box of matches. Just as he was about to soak his mount in gasoline, he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the window—white paint globbed all over his black leather getup. Inspiration strikes at the oddest times.
Orson beelined for a drug store. He bought a spray bottle and a gallon of hydrogen peroxide. He returned to his trailer, unveiled his mount, and set to work.
A couple hours later, Orson rolled his covered mount into the convention center. He registered and waited for the judges to inspect the numerous mounts, many of which made him nervous due to their clear exhibition of expert craft and exceptional authenticity—buffaloes, jackdaws, razorback boar, antelope, whitetail deer, and, of course, an army of black bears.
Finally, the judges approached Orson. He unveiled his work. A wave of gasps broke all over the convention center at the sight of the first-ever giant panda bear mount. It was beautiful. It was majestic. It was subversive. It was illegal. That is, it was illegal to shoot endangered species, but the powers-that-be ain’t always the powers-with-common-sense, and they insisted on a DNA test to verify Orson’s claims. Orson was arrested during the blue ribbon ceremony and immediately extradited to Forgiveness County where he spent several days in Thornbottom Correctional before a third party mysteriously posted bail.
The story of Orson’s giant panda bear mount spread through Forgiveness County, catching the attention of a conservation group who offered to pay Orson’s bail and legal fees in exchange for letting them use his story in their campaign and for agreeing to promote wildlife conservation in preschools, grade schools, and junior highs.
And that turns that page on this week in Forgiveness County, where milestones are measured by missteps and redemption is unlikely but available.
Thanks for reading! And in case you missed it, here’s a link to Dig, my new dark crime comedy novella. You can get the ebook for .99 cents or, if you’re a baller, the paperback for $8.99.
One body. Two brothers. A whole lotta gravedigging.
Most people need all ten fingers to play the piano. So when up-and-coming bluesman Griff Wiggins freakishly loses two of his fingers, it doesn’t take much effort for his two-bit older brother Ollie to talk him into a career change.
The career? Robbing the local kingpin.
But when the robbery goes sideways, they find themselves digging a shallow grave in a mountain pass. The dead body wasn’t part of the plan, but if they can just dig the grave and lay the body to rest, they’ll be on their way with the score of a lifetime. Seems easy enough, right?
Wrong. There’s Ollie’s girlfriend who’s playing her own angle. There’s car trouble. There’s a one-legged associate who can’t stop bringing up quasi-philosophical quandaries. But most importantly, there’s a river of bad blood flowing through a lifetime of broken brotherhood.
And Griff and Ollie will have to bury the hatchet if they hope to bury the body.
Hi there
Try Life in a Putty Knife Factory :D
“Be nice to me or my dad will write about you” is something I hope my own little girl will use as a threat (:
Enjoyed the read, thank you