“Check it out what this old man gave me,” Brad said, showing Mark his backpack. “Any books you put in here are weightless. The drawback is you forget how to read.”
“That sounds like that one Rick & Morty episode,” Mark said.
“So?”
“So, do you want to get sued?”
“That’s fiction!”
“So are we!” Mark looked nervously at the edges of the blog post.
* * *
David sat back in frustration. This cursed story generator worked great, but the characters kept announcing the plot and breaking the fourth wall. Still, it was worth it to get Friday Fictioneers ideas every week.
The idea for this story came about seven months ago when I was traveling and wondered what it would be like to travel internationally in a purely barter economy.
Prescott stood in a crowd at the exchange bank, meaning a long section of the river bank where you could exchange things. He had just arrived by boat for vacation. This was his one chance for adventure and to see new things. So far, the exchange bank was providing enough new sights, sounds, and smells for at least a month.
Standing in front of Prescott was a man with the word Teller on a placard around his neck. Prescott wasn’t sure what that meant, although it apparently meant someone whose job it was to tell him things.
The teller was looking skeptically down at the sand dollars Prescott had spread out on the table.
“I don’t know,” he said at last. “Who would want them? I mean, what do they do?”
“They’re transportable wealth,” Prescott said, feeling an uncomfortable feeling growing in his head. “You can carry them around. And they’re pretty. Look, I just want to trade them for something that would be valuable where I’m going inland.”
“Onyx is big these days,” the teller said. “They hit a big vein just down the coast six months ago. Of course, that means people don’t want it as much either. I mean, it’s pretty, but you’re better going with something practical, like wheat or cheese.”
“So, what should I do?” It felt like a betrayal of his own abilities to even have to ask, but Prescott could not envision himself carting around a hundred pounds of cheese for the next month.
“You know what you should get into,” the teller said, with a thoughtful squint. “Sheep. They’re walking meat, milk, and wool. Plus, a caravan came through a week ago and snapped up all the sheep and herded them south. There’s a severe shortage now.”
“Then how am I supposed to get them?” Prescott asked, surrendering all pretense of competence in finance.
“There’s one herd left,” the teller said, pointing to a dirty white clump of bodies a stone’s throw down the bank. “They’re old and ornery, so no one wants them. You’ll get them cheap. All you have to do is drive them ten miles inland to the town of Wakk and trade them for miniature stone carvings of the god Bingbong, the patron god of miniature stone carvings. Those things are valuable anywhere.”
This was sounding like an awful lot of work just to get enough wealth to travel for vacation. It would make a good story though.
“Yessir, you could travel a week on a single Bingbong if you’re careful,” the teller said, answering the question Prescott never asked. “You should be able to get 8, maybe 10 for that herd in these times.”
With thoughts of having his trip financed for ten whole weeks, Prescott made his way over to the sheep herd. He had planned to travel until he ran out of funds, but he had not been sure how far the 48 sand dollars he had collected would take him.
“What do you do with them?” one of the shepherds asked when Prescott proposed the trade.
“You carry them somewhere else and trade them for other things,” Prescott said. He lifted up his right foot and scraped it off on a nearby rock. “And they don’t smell or poop.” The shepherds did a straight swap, trading all 48 sand dollars for the 26 sheep. One of them even threw in his staff as well.
“You’ll need it,” the man said before the two of them wrapped up the sand dollars and ran off, whooping with joy.
The sheep weren’t just ornery, Prescott found. They were also old, decrepit, lame, and in one instance, dead. He discovered this when he made an exploratory attempt at herding (by yelling and accidentally hitting himself in the foot with the staff). The flock had moved a desultory few feet, except for one particularly bad-smelling ewe who stayed put. Prescott found that it was being held up by wire.
He had gotten the flock up the bank and almost to the main road that led out west when there was a sudden buzz in the air, as if a celebrity had just entered the room, or at least an especially large wasp. Prescott turned to see four ships entering the harbor.
“Sheep ship!” he heard. “The sheep ships are here.”
Prescott found a teller. “We’ve been waiting for these for weeks,” the man said. He caught sight of Prescott’s decrepit flock. “Ooh, you might want to get those inland as fast as possible. That’s the only way you’ll get anything for them now.”
For the next few days, Prescott struggled to keep his vile flock moving along the inland road as huge flocks of strong and relatively nice-smelling sheep passed him by. He was almost relieved when five of his sheep got lost in the woods and another two fell in the river.
Finally he arrived in Wakk and made his way to the local exchange meadow. There seemed to be more sheep than people there.
“I’ll give you half a Bingbong for them,” one man said, sizing up the flock. He shrugged. “I dropped it on the ground.”
I think I have a title for my travel memoir, Prescott thought as he walked away. How I Turned 48 Sand Dollars into Half a Bingbong. If he ever got home alive, it would make a good story.
The phone rang just as I was waking up. To be fair, it was noon, so I couldn’t complain. I looked at the screen: an unknown number, but it was coming from Moldova, which intrigued me. My Romanian was pretty rusty, but I figured even if it was a scammer, it was worth answering.
“Bună,” I said into the phone.
“What?” It was a woman’s voice, sounding confused.
“Who’s this?” I asked.
“Georgette. Is this Apollinaire Jobhy?”
“Call me Paul,” I said. I liked to have it both ways, the distinction of having a unique name without the hassle of actually using it. “Are you in Moldova?”
“What? I’m here in Montreal. Are you in—”
“Your phone says you’re in Moldova,” I said, cutting her off. I liked my conversations as short as possible before I had my coffee.
“I found this phone in my apartment when I moved in,” Georgette said. “It still worked so I’ve been using it. I don’t know who’s paying the bills. Look, are you the paranormal accountant? I need help.”
“That’s me,” I said with a yawn. I didn’t tell her that I had never actually used my degree in paranormal accounting. My college advisor had been way off about how useful it would be. “How did you hear about me?”
“I found you on the Internet,” she said.
That was a bad sign. I could only afford to advertise on pop-up ads and I automatically distrusted the intelligence of anyone who would click on a pop-up ad, let alone call the number it gave.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
She hesitated for a minute. “It’s something you have to see.”
Oy, this kind of client: the show and tell kind. She was the kind of person who would refuse to say “my husband’s been murdered” over the phone and would make you drag yourself over to the crime scene in order to point at the mangled body of her late spouse half in the washing machine and then say, “my husband’s been murdered.” To give a hypothetical.
I agreed to come to her apartment at three. She gave me an address in the Mile End neighborhood, which was a good sign that she would at least be able to pay for whatever services I provided.
I got to the house at 2:55 and hung around outside until 3:15 before climbing up the white-trimmed stairs to the second-floor apartment. It’s never good to be on time too often or people start to expect it.
Georgette met me at the door in a terrycloth robe with her hair tied up in a rainbow bandana. She led me into the living room. I didn’t see any deceased spouses half hanging out of anything, so things were looking okay so far.
“Here’s the problem,” she said and untied the bandana. A cascade of auburn hair fell across her shoulders, as lustrous as a shampoo commercial. I stayed silent since I had no idea where this was going. We stared at each other for a second.
“It’s brushed,” she said. “I think it’s even conditioned.”
“Oh, it’s beautiful,” I said quickly. “You did a great job.”
“I didn’t do it!” she shouted. “I went to bed an absolute mess and woke up like this.”
“Good?” I ventured. I took another glance around, just to make sure this wasn’t leading up to a dead husband somehow.
“It’s terrible!” she cried. “I’m an actress, you know. I just moved here to shoot a movie called Legal Animals. I play Kitty, the former Miss Universe-turned-homeless woman with a heart of gold. She’s been living on the streets for years. My hair has to look horrible and shooting starts in three days!”
“I’ve heard of this,” I said, just to stall for time. “Where do you sleep?”
She showed me the bedroom. Clothes were strewn around like the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. I reached under the bed and pulled my hand back sharply. My finger was bleeding. Turning on my phone’s flashlight, I looked under the bed.
“Just as I suspected,” I said. I grabbed a hanger lying nearby and fished out a hairball the size of a tennis ball.
“That’s gross,” Georgette said.
“You have no idea,” I said. I pulled out a Ziploc bag and pushed the hairball inside. “This is a demonic hairball. I think I know your problem.”
What was surprising was that I actually did. Paranormal accounting is more about hidden treasure and satisfying the demands of long-dead auditors. We don’t do much with hair that get mysteriously brushed during the night, but paranormal everythings tend to talk. We have conferences and everything and I just happened to attend a breakout session about this very problem at the last conference I’d attended: SpookCon ‘18.
“You’re being haunted by a brushubus,” I said. “It’s a demon that sneaks into your bedroom at night and brushes your hair. Sometimes it even styles it. You can tell they’re around by demonic hairballs under the bed.”
“And by the fact that my hair gets brushed every night by itself,” Georgette added. I nodded sagely.
“So what do we do about it?” she asked. “Shooting starts in three days, and I absolutely have to look like a bum.”
“Can I see your phone?” I asked. I wasn’t sure it would help with the brushubus, but I’d been curious about it ever since she mentioned finding it.
Georgette handed me a beat-up cell phone. The photo album was full of selfies of an elderly bald man in a variety of poses. I instantly recognized Dr. Iulian Turcan, the Moldovan professor of criminal entomological engineering, the incredibly niche field of designing insect-like robots to steal things.
“Here’s the problem,” I said. “It looks like this guy, Dr. Turcan, used to live here. He’s been hiding for years from a group of crime-fighting anteaters. They probably got wind of him and he had to leave quickly, forgetting his phone. He’s bald, so the brushubus must have been starved for anything to brush for that whole time. When you moved in, it took out all that pent-up brushing on you.”
“So what can I do?” Tears were queuing up on her lashes, preparing to kamikaze her cheeks.
“There are two options,” I said. “It is possible to get rid of a brushubus. The first think you have to do is—”
“Make a pentagram of combs!” she cried, clapping her hands.
“Please let me finish,” I said. “You would need someone with even more hair to come stay here. Every day you move their bed a little closer to the door. Soon they’re sleeping in the driveway, and the brushubus will go with them. Over a course of months you move their bed further down the road until it reaches another house and there you go.”
“What’s the second option?”
I told her. She took that option.
Georgette insisted on paying me my hourly rate of $60/hour. Unfortunately since I was so good, that left me with ten dollars for my work. Taking my advice, she made a reservation at a hotel for the three weeks of shooting where her hair would remain as messy as she liked. When it was over, she could return and have free hair care for the rest of her life.
“Just watch out for the demonic hairballs,” I said. “They bite. But they do eat all the dust bunnies, so it’s not all bad.”
Putting my ten-dollar bill carefully in my wallet, I went outside and down the stairs. Another case successfully solved, another client happy. But as I walked to the bus stop, a nagging discontent pricked at my mind.
Was I ever actually going to use my degree in paranormal accounting?
Mom called it a cruise, but I knew that prisoners didn’t go on cruises. I rode to the dock the day the ship left. I couldn’t see Dad, but I waved as the ship steamed away, just in case.
He returned five years later, tanned, muscular, almost unrecognizable. He didn’t drink anymore, didn’t yell or get violent. I didn’t mind the polite stranger he’d become.
At first.
But he doesn’t laugh anymore, doesn’t go outside. He just sleeps or watches TV.
Now when the ship comes, I ride to the dock to curse the beast that, somehow, ate my father.
A strange story, but that is probably what you’ve come to expect from me. What do you think happened to the father while he was away?
I keep meaning to write and post the Friday Fictioneers story on Wednesday, but the last few weeks have been crazy busy here. I work in international admissions at Gannon University and we have new students coming in for the October session. Next week should calm down a bit, relatively speaking.
“Describe this picture!”
copyright Rowena Curtain
This was the final round of Eluci-Date, the show where two contestants competed for a date with a lexicographer by creatively describing pictures. It had been called Meta-For-a-Date until it was bought by thesaurus.com.
My mind froze like a naked Floridian in Greenland.
Sunny.Stripey.
My opponent Lewis looked smug.
3…2…1…
“Angelic safecracker!” I bellowed.
Kristina, the lexicographer, gazed at the picture. “Lewis?”
No! She wanted a comparison.
“Smeared titanium white on the palette of creation,” Lewis said, smirking. “With a #6 fan brush.”
Kristina frowned, then grinned at me. “Why would an angel become a safecracker?”
For a moment, Viktor thought the strong hands on his forehead were his mother’s. Then he smelled the blood and gangrene and he remembered.
“How is the battle?”
“The lapots are bombing the Volga’s east bank,” the nurse said. “But Stalingrad still stands.” Her hands worked at the bandage, teasing the cloth away from the fevered flesh.
“Is there penicillin yet?”
“Russian penicillin,” she said. Then the pungent taste of the garlic extract filled his mouth.
“Is there any hope?”
Her hands smoothed down the new bandage onto his scorched scalp. “We are Russians,” she whispered. “We never give up.”
* garlic was used so often by the Red Army that it was nicknamed Russian penicillin
**Lapot: Russian nickname for the JU-87 Stuka divebombers, from the word for bast shoes, since the landing gear resembled that type of shoes.
I sat by the fire in my backyard last night, watching the flames dance and writhe, throwing up sparks into the cool early-fall air. The only sounds were the popping of the wood as it burned and the muted city sounds of cars several blocks away. Above me, Cygnus glowed amid a purple-black expanse.
A chorus of honking began to grow—birds, not cars luckily. A second later, a B-2 bomber-sized V of Canada geese appeared directly above me, the lead goose eclipsing Cygnus almost perfectly. They were flying so low that the firelight made their pale underbellies glow faintly. Their dark wings cut long angles of black out of the sky. In a few seconds, they had disappeared over the house, heading for the lake.
I wonder if they know they’re going the wrong way, I thought. It’s fall and they are flying north. Well, that’s 2020 for you. Maybe they were just trying to get back to Canada as fast as possible.
Did you have supper? It was after breakfast, mid-evening over there.
No reply. My heart beat faster, irrationally. His friend Amber was there too. She’d learned Vietnamese, he’d said.
The phone chimed. I jumped for it.
“Is that Stan?” my husband asked from the kitchen.
“Yeah.”
He came over to read the reply.
Yep!
A picture popped up of a glowing building and a lotus flower fountain.
“It’s gorgeous,” I said. “My lucky little boy. Still, I worry.”
“He’ll be fine. After all, he’s nine now. He’s not a baby anymore.”
*
This Friday Fictioneers story is very late, but since Rochelle chose my picture this week as the prompt, I wanted to make sure I wrote one. I took this picture in Ho Chi Minh City when I was there on business a few months ago. I wrote a kid’s book about my travels called Stanley and Amber in Southeast Asia, about a kid and his unicorn friend traveling around Southeast Asia (it started out as a Flat Stanley project for my niece; thus, the name). So, I thought I’d write this from the parent’s perspective.
You have reached a quiet bamboo grove, where you will find an eclectic mix of nature, music, writing, and other creative arts. Tao-Talk is curated by a philosophical daoist who has thrown the net away.
The Green-Walled Tower 
