This is part of serialized short story. I posted the
beginning on 11.03.2012, and if you click on the label, “The Adventure of
Alphus Gibb,” you can see all the available pieces together. I’ll be posting
new segments on Sundays. I hope you like it.
***
8/13
Alphus Gibb
kept to himself mostly, and his birds, and his fireplace. He liked to warm
himself with tea and hot chocolate. His mother believed that peppermint tea
would cure anything, from menstrual cramps to bloody noses, and Alphus had
inherited this drinking habit.
One day,
his half-sister Suzan, who lived in the next town over, called his phone.
“Hello Alphus,” she said. “This is your sister, Suzan. I was wondering if you’d
be interested in a pet frog.” Pet frog!
Suzan was a biologist. She had wanted to study the absurdities of life since
the operation that had made her Alphus’s “half” sister.
Suzan was
born a conjoined identical twin. She and Lisa were attached at the hip, well,
pelvis. One of them facing forward and the other backward. Or both facing
forward, from their individual perspectives, and both of their sisters facing
back. Masha, their mother, decided that they were okay just like that. “If they
can survive, then how is it logical to separate them?” She reasoned. She also
figured it would be easier for her this way, only having to keep track of one,
besides Alphus, of course.
The girls
were four when Alphus was born. When they were ten, the girls started getting
very sick. Lisa looked the worse for it. They were both fatigued and pale.
Black splotches started appearing all over their body, and from these splotches
hard nubbins started to form. As the weeks passed, these nubbins started
becoming all-out horns. Little horns everywhere. After about a year of this,
Masha took her children to the doctor.
The doctor
was quite pleased that Alphus’s eyes were completely open after being shut for
the first couple years of his life. Now they were sleepy-looking and a darling
shade of blue. The doctor was less pleased about the sisters’ horny condition.
“Now Masha,
why didn’t you come to see me sooner?” The doctor asked. Masha looked at him
with compassion and tried to help him understand, “Dr. Hootzenhouse, I am under
the impression that adversity is the good soil of character. I didn’t want to
rob my girls of that. It is only practical to start growing their thick skin
early. It helps tremendously in dealing with the world.”
Doctor Hootzenhouse
gave his customary nod of ascent. Still, he said, “And despite all that, I am
glad you brought them in. Your girls have a severe case of Raptor Pocks. It’s
got their innards in a pickle; the livers, both, are weak. Hearts are
palpitating. Lisa’s spleen has run dry. And they’ve developed eczema, which is
unrelated. The only cure for this is eggs.”
“Eggs?”
said Masha.
“Yes, eggs”
replied the doctor, “scrambled, poached, in a tortilla, on Sundays, through the
holidays, before church and after, over easy, dry, with bacon, with Mr.
Benedict, nested, sunny side up, in the rain, hard boiled, omelets, even
deviled if you are willing to put in the work. And don’t forget drowsy eggs and
brown eggs and eggs put in a stack and ones in your back pack and those cooked
on the sidewalk and frozen and pickled and whipped into jelly. And put a little
bit of egg in your salads; I find that delicious.”
“Do they
have to be chicken eggs?” said Masha.
“I think
that’s your best bet.”
When I was a boy I ate four dozen eggs thought
Alphus.
So they ate
eggs in all the ways the doctor had suggested. Alphus resented this. His
affinity towards things Beauty and the
Beast did not extend to the character Gaston. His neck looked like
stretched silly putty, the shape of his head was gross, and he did and said
nasty things. That his family was embracing Gaston’s eating habits stressed
Alphus immensely.
In not too
long, the eggs had helped – the girls shed their horns, leaving sharp things
all over the carpet – but their cholesterol went through the roof.
Lisa
eventually complained of a pain in her calf. When that pain got extreme, the
family went back to see doctor Hootzenhouse. The doctor predicted a blood clot
in her leg, and suggested that they go to the hospital in the next town.
The town
next to what was to become snow country, America was over two hours away. The
four, or three, depending on how you look at it, piled into Masha’s
economy-sized car. By the time they arrived, the parking lot of the hospital
was dark, and it was raining. The lights of the emergency room reflected gold
and silver off the puddles. Alphus sat in the front seat of the car; his chest
was tight. Everyone had been very quiet. The car had bumped violently as Masha
had pulled off the main road.
“Alright
Lisa, Suzan, take off your seatbelt” she said before stopping the car. Masha
could be very efficient in times of obvious crisis. Alphus watched his mother
rush through the emergency room doors that slid open with a pressurized woosh,
her arms around his sisters’ waist. She had left the car door open. The
entrance to the hospital was lit up all the way around. It had an aura or halo
like it was the subject of some medieval painting. Fluorescent light shone from
within and the doors accepted his mother and sisters like gracious sliding
jaws. He got out and wandered in after them.
He waited
in the room with the shiny floors until he fell asleep. When he woke, Masha
told him that surgeons had cut his sisters apart. A nurse with short hair
stared at him with a sad face. Alphus felt strange to have her looking at him
like that. The clot in Lisa’s leg had traveled to her heart, and it was the
doctors’ opinion that Suzan’s heart could not pump enough blood for both of
them. When they had been separated, Lisa had died. As far as Alphus understood,
she had just gone away somewhere. He only saw the one half-sister anymore.
Would Alphus
like a pet frog? He had never had a pet before. He wanted his first pet to be
perfect. He had considered goldfish, iguanas, puppies, mice, he’d even gone to
the store to hold some of them. But he had been unable to make a decision, not
knowing which one of them would be perfect.
“A frog
would be nice” Alphus said.
“Perfect.
I’ll have someone bring it over to you.”
In a few
days the messenger arrived. The doorbell rang, and when Alphus answered it, he
found a lidded cup sitting on his door mat. He peered into the sip hole to see
what was inside.
Frog?
Alphus was
worried the frog would hop away as soon as he opened the cup. He tipped it in
the bottom of his largest Tupperware container, holding his breath. He felt
slightly dizzy knowing the next couple of minutes were completely
unpredictable, worried that the frog might startle him.
Alphus
tilted the lid off the cup. Nothing came out. He poured the frog out. It slid
out on its back – nose then belly then legs. It’s underbelly was grayish pink,
stillborn. Alphus did not understand. It lay there like it had no care for the
world using its bulbous eyes as a prop.
Alphus set
about making its new home more comfortable. He added some mancala stones for
their pretty red and pink colors and some water. He thought that frogs liked
water. The frog lay on its back and stretched out its hind legs until all its
joints were extended.
Alphus
watched it from morning to night. He wanted to get acquainted with it, wanted
to know what it was like. It was his pet, his first pet.
In a week,
Suzan called to check in. When Alphus told her about how it was acting (Well, I
think it’s sort of shy…), she told him to let it go in the backyard.
Alphus
could not see the benefit in this. “Alphus,” Suzan explained, “in biology we
learn that sometimes after something bad happens, animals stop moving just like
your frog. They don’t respond when you talk to them; they won’t eat the food
you set out for them. It’s best if you just throw it into the backyard.”
“It’ll be
in a better place” she added.
Alphus was
sorry about this. He wrapped his burgundy robe around him and stepped onto the
end of the porch. The yard of snow was spread in front of him. He bent his head
over his frog, and it was then that he noticed the smell. It was putrid; he
felt like retching. Alphus held on to the container and hurled his frog away.
The frog flew, the stiff hind legs tumbling over forelegs over nose, body,
belly, eyes. The pretty stones flew too, disappearing into the long-dead
raspberry bushes.
Alphus went
inside and cried a little bit. He decided he wanted nothing more to do with
biology; Suzan could keep it to herself.
Outside,
the quail cult had its first quaily sacrifice. They pecked the frog’s body with
no remorse, and the frog didn’t mind either because it was
