Big Bucks

The woods being full of hunters,
some deer escape to a televised quiz show.
Who wrote the swing classic "Sing, Sing, Sing"?
The deer do not know.
(It was Louis Prima.)

The deer prefer Glenn Miller, 
though they cannot afford to ride the Chattanooga Choo Choo
unless they win big in the next round.

Who composed "The Song of the Volga Boatmen"?
The deer look at each other.
One of them dips his antlered head and buzzes in.
"Unknown," says the deer. "It's a traditional Russian piece,
popularized in the U.S. by Glenn Miller."
Correct! Bonus round!
In what year did his version hit #1 on the charts?
"1941," responds the deer. Too easy.

Later on, a herd of deer board a train.
They read a magazine and then they're in Baltimore.
The bucks clatter their racks on the Phoenix Shot Tower.
One doe asks another, who wrote "In The Mood"?
Joe Garland and Andy Razlaf,
but she is not smirking for knowing the answer.
______

for Sunday Muse #81. 

Three

Chloe the serial killer is having the devil's own time dragging the tv pitchman's body into the weeds.

How's that for an opening sentence? Eat my dust, rubes.

She had had her thumb out--
cute as a box cutter in an angel's hand,
chin up
hip cocked
standing in the harsh shine of the rising sun.

She hadn't given a damn about limescale.
She hadn't cared how many ShamWows he had in his trunk.
Now his shitheap Hyundai is parked crookedly on the shoulder,
and one lonesome long-legged caffeine junkie is trying to stash him behind the hollyhocks.

It must be the Bohemian in her.

She has almost got him to the center of the cloverleaf when she hears something.
Shit. She's not alone.
Chloe turns in a slow circle. 
Then she sees a dark form nearly obscured in the shade of a trash tree--
it is the Queen of the Vampires in black panther form,
and she is crying.
Have you ever seen a cat cry?
They do it silently, but with their whole soul.

"Here is the place," she says to Chloe,
"where Athena, Artemis, Hestia and I used to hang out.
In those days, we killed all the developers before they could draw their first breath.
Artemis used to turn guys into jackalopes; no construction crews.
Hestia would build a fire,
and the four of us would pass the Mad Dog around.
I liked us better then."

The tv pitchman forgotten, Chloe sits down in the tall grass,
as the Queen of the Vampires resumes human form.
She continues:
"Now Athena is some muckety muck with the power company.
She lives in a condo,
and her owl is just some detailing on the door of her fucking Audi.

"He used to hunt here, swooping down from the trees,
and Artemis loved him so much, just as if he were her own.
She would coo to him like he was Head Baby at the Adorable Factory.
With a mouse in his talons.
And those big eyes.

"Arty lives with some woman who wears an ankh and runs bullshit workshops.
She's gone vegan, and doesn't even remember Orion at all.
Chloe....?" She falters.

"Yeah, hun? Tell me." 

The Vampire Queen lets out a shaky sigh.
"She...she spells woman with a Y."

"Oh, hun." 

"I know, right?"

They are silent for a long time, the tv pitchman stiffening up beside them.
"What about Hestia?" Chloe asks, putting her arm around her friend.

"She runs a B&B,
making English muffins for couples from East Candyland,
chatting them up, then washing another god damn load of sheets in the afternoon.
What happened to us, Chloe?
We were cool. Why do we suck so hard now?"

Just then, there is a rustling in the grass.
Chloe looks up, the sun seeming to traverse the lenses of her shades.
"Look what the cat dragged in!"

It's the Succubus, fluttering her black wings lazily.
"What's this?" she asks. "GSA troop 17?"

Chloe explains, shrugging a shoulder at her friend sitting next to her.
"She's feeling old and uncool."

"Fuuuuuck," says the Succubus wisely,
as she and the charming serial killer lift the Vampire Queen to her feet.
"What you need is some coffee, lady.
And guess who's sitting in your favorite booth at Danny's as we speak?"

The QOTV sniffles and wipes her face with her sleeve.
"Uh...Emmylou Harris maybe?"

"Nah. Even better. The Dark-Haired Chick."

"She not in Toronto?"

"Nope."

"Not in Chicago?"

"Nuh uh."

Not in L.A.?"

"She's at Danny's, waiting for you, you silly shithead. C'mon. I saw a Hyundai we can steal. We can be there in fifteen minutes."

So the three of them step over the dead tv pitchman and in fourteen and a half minutes,
they are at Danny's Coffee Shop,
once again the cool queens of caffeine.
_____

black night hollyhocks

Although I only used one word ("queen") from the list, it was mood wings's word list that inspired me. This is also for the Real Toads mini-challenge. Kelly Letky's photograph "Dance With The Ghosts of Tomorrow" made me think of the spontaneous scrub that springs up in unused patches of land, like next to freeway interchanges. The top image is hers. 

Athena, Artemis and Hestia are the "maiden goddesses".

Diana the Huntress (Artemis)

Dedicated to cool girls everywhere.  

 

Creola the Kind

Hive-heads, you human honeycombs of disordered thought,
drip yourselves out of day rooms across the complex.
You have been made to feel like ants in a land of bustling giants,
each one of them wearing enormous, iron-soled clown shoes,
and I'm here to tell you--
things are about to change.

Come out to the green paradise of the asylum courtyard,
where morning glory and clematis vines climb the catatonics.
Which the cleric, which the classic presenter?
Come to where the learned diagnostician finally shuts his yap
and sits the fuck down 
on a pretty, donated bench depicting tiger swallowtails in flight.

Feel that? Inside your poor flood-damaged skull?
It isn't the medication.
This is real.

Even if you aren't Catholic--
though the mind reels at such easily remediable error--
Creola the Kind can help you.
See her enter by the main gate, with a cheetah on a chain.
The tethered cat is emblematic of the mind caught up in the Play-Doh sludge of encumbering madness.
Enter the healer.
Enter the liberator,
Creola the Kind.

As she joins you in the garden, 
she brings with her the sea breezes characteristic of the Creolan Mission,
though this institution exists landlocked,
blighted,
sandbagged into torpidity by a ballast of text books and dogma.
At the touch of her hand on your cheek,
you begin to feel something nearly forgotten,
as if she carries in her fingers a series of bees
who introduce peace, and a spreading sweetness.

Forget about your doctor.
Her nervous condition has become acute,
causing her to build elaborate nests out of prescription pads.
To burn sacred candles there would only result in disaster.
Instead, my dear florid crazies,
lean into Creola's offered remedy like infants at the breast.
Watch the clouds float by like milkships,
honeyships,
sending nets over the side and into your stormy constellation of symptoms,
plucking you new and gleaming from the tempest.

She is a fisher of men, and more particularly of women,
sent here with your own personal Bonus Round from God.
She is Our Lady of the Falling Piano,
Creola the Kind.
________

written with inspiration from a word list invented by mood wings!

image: the ridiculously cool Cristina Scabbia