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In This Issue

• Water On The Knee
• The Annihilator of Mathematics
• Demonic Speak-n-Spell
• The Fed Interviews Jon Voight
• Letters to the Feditors
• Sam Jenning, or: Eating Children For Profit
• Immigrate This!
• Where In Our Hearts Is Carmen Sandiego?
• The Life and Times of Carmen Sandiego
• Redder Rabbit?
• Good Golly Fucking Gumdrops, I Like Candy!
• The City’s New Hot, Sexy, Superhot Nightclub!
• Where's Waldo?
• Logical Journey into Eugenics
• Think Columbia Sucks? It's Your Fault, Doofus.
• A Farewell to Harms
• A Farewell To Bill
• Tracy Briskit, Fed Queen
• Make Your Own Safe Space!
• Columbia Trail: Safe Space, Bathroom in 347 miles
• Cook with Barney!
• THEY Watch
• The Staff of 21.8
• The Staff of Volume 21

They wheeled the poor sucker in on a plastic cart. They must have been all out of metal ones. Judging by the redness and swelling of his nose, I thought immediately that he must be near dead from hypothermia. But then they removed the sheet, and I forgot all about how cold he must have been. There were holes, holes all over his body... Jesus Christ, this man had been through a lot. I asked for a scalpel. They told me they didn’t have any. I asked for a cuvette. They told me they didn’t have any. I asked for a goddamn speculum, but they didn’t even have that. Slowly, calmly, an assistant handed me a large pair of tweezers attached to a wire cord. I sighed. This was going to be a long night.

“I need 10ccs of...” I started, but all the assistants frowned at me.

“We don’t have that either.” I sighed again. This was going to be a very long night.

Forcing myself not to avert my eyes from the horror, I observed soon what his first problem was – inside one of his open wounds there was a bone disgustingly out of place. I gave my huge tweezers a decisive pump and moved toward the wound, in the patient’s arm. He was deathly still. I wondered briefly if he was even alive at all – he looked so phony and plastic. I brushed that thought out of my mind; the assistants wouldn’t have brought him to me if he was dead already. I dug my tweezers into his arm and grabbed the bone. Bringing them back up, my tool hit the side of the patient’s open wound, and I found that he was still quite alive. His nose turned bright red, even redder than it was before, and a horrendous buzz sounded in my ears.

“My God, what is that?” I shouted at one of my assistants.

“What is what?” he said as he looked at me, confused.

“What is that infernal buzzing?” It was still going on. I looked down and saw that my tweezers, dropped, were still touching the patient’s wound.

“I don’t hear any buzzing.”

That’s when I realized that this case was going to be an especially strange one. Nobody could hear the buzzing but me?

“Nobody can hear the buzzing but me?” I asked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” replied the assistant.

A voice somewhere far off said, “I can hear the buzzing, Jimmy!” It sounded like the voice of my mother, long dead from a horrible accident involving a scalpel.

“Shut up, mom, you’re dead!” I shouted.

“Watch your mouth, now, honey, and get back to your game!”

Game? Game? What could she possibly mean? What devil’s play was at work here? I tried to shake it off and get back to the operation I was performing.

I aimed the tweezers at that bone again, the one that had caused such a funny reaction last time I tried to remove it. More careful this time, I slipped the tweezers in, pinched the bone, and slipped them up quickly through the wound. I looked at the patient’s nose. Not bright. I listened. No buzz. I grimaced and nodded. I knew what had to be done, in each of these open wounds.

My next adversary was the colorful butterfly improbably lodged inside the lower part of his chest cavity. Tweezers in, snag!, and just as I finished, my train of thought was interrupted by another old and familiar voice. It was the voice of my father, also long dead, also from a horrible accident involving a scalpel.

“Honey, have you seen my Fleshlight?” the voice called.

My mother’s voice responded, seemingly to my father’s, both eerie and disembodied: “Jesus Christ, love, don’t talk about stuff like that with Jimmy around.”

I blushed behind my surgical mask. I hoped none of these assistants heard these voices; they’d start calling me by my diminutive childhood name. I decided to grab one and ask him, just to make sure.

“What’s my name?” I shouted at one of the assistants. He was too scared to respond. “Say my name, bitch! What is it?” I shouted again.

“Your name is Dr. James Larson, sir,” came the barely-controlled voice.

Then, my disembodied father’s voice again: “Oh shit, it sounds like Jimmy might have found it...”

And my mother: “Don’t be stupid, honey, he’s only ten. But you watch your language, Jimmy... and you too, Charles!”

Returning to my work and forgetting about my name, I saw a horse strangely implanted in the man’s leg. I started in with my tweezers, then stopped. This was no normal horse, and it could be removed by no normal horse-removing procedure. I needed a better look at this hole. I grappled around myself for a flashlight. These assistants were worthless – I was just going to have to get the necessary tools by myself. Finding one and bringing it forward, I tried to turn the flashlight on, but I found no switch on the side of it. I looked at the top, which didn’t look like a normal flashlight, but had some bulbous pink slit in it. Strange...

The ghost of my father suddenly appeared before me, swiping the flashlight out of my hand and saying, “Oh, dammit, honey, he did find it. You didn’t do anything with this, did you?” I didn’t know what to say, so, mouth agape at the ghost of my father, I shook my head. “Don’t worry, honey, I got it from him, but he didn’t know what it was!”

Entirely shaken by this Shakespearean visit, I tried to regain my composure. I took a deep breath and entered a Zen-like trance. Working quickly, I fished out the patient’s ailments in a flash, barely pausing between one and the other. A loaf of manna, an instrument of writing, a wrench, a sundae, a rubber band, a water pail – all of these flew out of him in a blaze of glorious surgical procedure. Finally it was all down to one item, the coup-de-gras of operations: the wishbone. I readied my mind. I chose internal music appropriate for the battle. It went like this:

“What’s the story, Wishbone? / What’s this you’re dreaming up? / Such big imagination / On such a little pup / What’s the story, Wishbone? / Do you think it’s worth a look? / It seems kinda familiar / Like a story from a book / Shake a leg now Wishbone / Let’s wag another (tail/tale)...”

With a start, I realized that song was not only in my mind, but coming from the room next door.

“Wishbone’s on!” my dead mother’s disembodied voice called. The ghosts were trying to distract me – distraction by cute Jack Russell terriers and great works of Western literature! And then I found it. The scalpel… those goddamn assistants had lied to me. It was right there all along. And I realized that maybe my parents hadn’t been killed in horrible scalpel accidents…yet.

So I brutally murdered them both and sat down to watch “The Prince and the Pawper.”