Alphabet Broth, or, The Whale

[This I wrote my senior year of college. It's an e-mail that I sent to a coed that I either was trying to go to bed with or already had, I forget which, and BCC'd to a friend with a somewhat similar sense of humor. I'm not quite sure what in the world I was thinking—it's a pretty fuckin' weird seduction—but please note the rather amazing alphabet game (if I may qualify it as amazing) in "Chapter 3."*]

From: [Short Round]

Subject: Alphabet Broth, or, The Whale

Date: January 29, 2000 12:48:55 AM EST

To: [The coed]

Bcc: [The friend]

Chapter 1: THE HORSE

[The coed] pilots a plane upsidedown for thirty minutes, finally notices it's upsidedown, then flips the world to right herself. People fall out of bed onto the ceiling, jump out windows and bounce nimbly on nimbal trampolines. [The coed's roommate] hangs by her hand from the hair of a handsome horticulturalist named Harry, whose shoes were cemented moments before to the floor of the fortuitously spilled sea by Mafia hitman Tony the Tiger Capezzolo. "Fortuitously" for Harry, but not for the fish of that ex-sea, who flail as they fall. A few strike the windshield of [the coed's] plane. She reconsiders.

Chapter 2: UNDERGROUND

The horse balances, shaking, on one hoof.

Chapter 3: AUTHORIAL AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL INTRUSION

The young Pseudonym bore an uncanny resemblance to his grandfather's exbutler, an insolent cur by the name of Nestor Cuckoldhersteller. Shaking with unearthly indignation, the grandsire's shade slipped stealthily into the sepulchre of the scheming servant, seeking to serve the sod a serious spectral talking-to. Unfortunately, vexed with xenophilia, YOU zealously arranged (being callously driven eternally forward, given Harry's irritatingly jocular kleptomania) little mock Nestors of plaster—quite realistic, really. So Pseudonym's sire's sire saw seventeen servants, A to Q. All quiet (being plaster), could one deceive Nestor's enemy? Most feigned lifelessness, gamely keeling. How joyous it

is, no doubt, to deceive an old man's old and tired specter! Satisfied? Satisfied, are you?

Pseudonym's identity, by now, must hardly mystify. He/I lie on a therapist's couch, peering over from beneath. The scene from my perspective is shapely abstraction, with a nasally voice. "Understood?"

"No," quoth sprightly Pseudonym, still in his youth, "never. Take yesterday, juggling letters pointlessly, toiling under a whip I myself created by caving in from A to Q, and that only because 'seventeen' starts with an S.** At one point I faltered, went to F where I should have gone to M, and found, 'Foolish mortals, gullible, let hieroglyphic kitsch impair judgement.' My correction annihilated a life. Where now resides hieroglyphic kitsch? How anticlimactic, that conclusory I! requiring enjambment where J ended so prettily on itself, and on Judgement, Mercy's Christly counterpart!"

The therapist snored and started. "You have said too much," as though he had heard.

Right about then, [the coed] turned the world upsidedown. (See Chapter 1.)

Chapter 4: UNDERGARMENTS

The horse balances, shakily, on another hoof.

THE END

© 1962 Playboy Enterprises

* S through to S again, then moving inwards from A and Q (for some reason) to I.

** Oh, that explains it. Or...huh?