PICTURE BOOKS ARE NOT OUR FRIENDS!!!
After a long trudge into "town" yesterday I found myself standing, for lack of a better place to unthaw my beard, in what the locals like to call, euphemistically, the bookstore. In actual fact it is only a small parlour enthusiastically hammered onto the front of a gold-prospector's cabin by a previous owner who felt he had struck the mother of all lodes and was looking to put on airs of european sophistication. Shortly thereafter he consumed rather more brandy than his unsophisticated liver could handle and he was buried, along with his shovel and pan. He was not buried with his gold nuggets. I find this omission to be unfortunate because of the Zen-like cycle of emergent birth/burial/ re-birth the nuggets would have experienced. I believe the other gold-seekers assumed that the nuggets weren't Buddhists and would prefer to go to the saloon.
His body was unceremoniously interred in the unstable soil by the side of the river upstream from town. The value of the residual, largely Pentecostal, gold in the gravel tailings downstream trumped the value of sanitary drinking water. Happily beer was available and consumed in abundance. Less happily the spring floods sometimes deposited clumps of scraggly beard and freshly-washed scrotums in the street.
The current owner (of the parloured house-not the scrotums) was a Miss Fluffert. She had received, some years ago, a government grant of funds meant to act as an incentive to encourage the development of small businesses. The other local ladies who had received the grants all opened bordellos. Miss Fluffert, though possessing abundant charms, had instead swept the parlour floor, rescued a pile of bedraggled novels from a library that was down on its luck, and bought two persian cats. She then used bold crimson paint to place "Ye Booke Nooke" in gothic script above the front door and waited for the cash to flow.
It wasn't long before she realised that her choice of colour and font were a bit unfortunate in a valley full of lonely, rich, semi-literate men aware that a fresh rash of bordellos (pox of bordellos?) were soon to open. Dog-eared codgers, with calloused mitts full of dog-eared twenties, began crowding into the shop seeking the bookies and nookie that the sign seemed to promise. Miss Fluffert painted over the sign. The cats looked on with supreme disinterest.
This brings us near to the point of this rather complex tale. While combing the last icicles from my beard in this selfsame bookstore yesterday I perused the contents of the singular (and in fact single) bookshelf. I hoped to find a copy of one of these "Harry Potter" books I've heard so much about. While engaged in this fruitless hunt I noticed that a Robert Service ballad anthology was quite soiled and seemed to have a very weak spine. (For clarity I should perhaps mention that "a Robert Service ballad anthology" is the name of the bookstore's oldest cat. This name, though admittedly unusual, is the source of much merriment in an otherwise quiet town. Verbal images of nonplussed tourists holding an equally nonplussed, but frequently-requested, cat are passed mouth-to-ear about the town to relieve the suicidal depression that builds when the winter descends in August.)
Now where was I? Oh yes! Cats! How is it, I ask, that every used bookstore I've entered in a good few trips about the globe seems to contain the same two soporific pussy cats? They serve no purpose. They lounge; they stretch; they sidle; they sleep. They never play; they never lick themselves (or each other) inappropriately; they never engage each other in high-pitched angry conversations of a sexual nature; they certainly never leap gracefully from stack to shelf to eyrie in a manner befitting their evolutionary heritage. Anecdotal evidence (Which is far superior to those haughty "scientific" studies. Who's with me! High five for guesswork!) would suggest that I could go into every used-parchment concern in Haifa and find a pair of cats that would both recognise and ignore me. A lack of litter boxes or odour in four out of four establishments surveyed proves conclusively that these cats don't even defecate! This strikes me as odd and I am a man who knows odd. I once saw a Kodiak bear flag down a mini-van and try to bum a cigarette.
I didn't know for certain what was going on but, as usual, I gave it some rapid thought from all directions and engaged in some rabid speculation. ( Which reminds me of a story about a french doctor who tried to corner the vaccine market. Mai excusez-moi. I digress.)
I initially thought that the cats were simply cloned via stem cell harvests from a particularly dopey pussy cat obtained through incessant incest in a line of felines bred for extreme docility. For a while, gazing into the vacant eyes of the nearest cat, I even wondered if perhaps a factory in California was producing pseudo-clones by using a combination of plastic surgery and drugs to alter the bone structure, colour, and personality of the cats. This of course was the method used to produce Michael Jackson and his army of impersonators. Or was something in old books, perhaps lead residues in the ink (or must spores or dusty metaphors) turning the cats into placid clones?
As I left the shoppe, and stood freezing on the icy steppe, I couldn't help feeling that something was missing from these possible solutions to this vexacious pussy puzzle. While I pondered I bit off a nice piece of squirrel jerky from the stick I like to leave ripening in the hood of my parka. I quietly masticated as through the frosty window I saw Miss Fluffert struggle to remove an aging tightly-fitted jacket.
The light from her kerosene lamp revealed a face that was a pale impassive mask. Mousey hair lay passively in a formless bun. As I squinted through the growing hoar frost at the broad billowing skirts nestled in the dust and shavings about her feet I briefly wondered what had become of the sparkly, vibrant woman who had contemplated opening a pleasure palace. A redundant fold of skin drooped, like a curtain, over her restrictive collar and twitched slightly as her hands languidly removed a final morsel of petrified book paste. The dust jacket fell to the floor.
An uncontrollable spasm shook me and my breath, my accumulated saliva, and a few morsels of foetid rodent, sprayed out my nostrils, freezing instantly in the frigid air, and tinkled on the window like an exhibitionist wino.
Instantly I was in motion. The deathly fear that gripped me gave my snowshoes wings. In the split second that followed my jerky exhalation I had spotted something that chilled my already chilled bones to the bone. At the edge of the flickering shadows one of the cats, its long swath of concealing fur swaddling all except its dark eyes, had looked at me: had noticed me! I ran.
Around the house and through the back yard I sprinted. Between the house and the half-moon-doored privy lay a deep, virginal blanket of trackless snow which I crossed at a ponderous lope in my Air-Caribous. The outhouse had obviously not been used since July!! With every mile I put between myself and that cathouse my heartrate, and my core temperature, dropped and I was able to think. Arriving at home I sighed as I lifted the thong off my frozen knob. (We use leather straps to keep our doors closed.)
Beneath my patchwork wolverine quilt I could not sleep. I counted mountain sheep. Then I counted musk-oxen. There were four of each. Good. None had been purloined while I was in town uncovering what was perhaps the biggest threat to international security since the internet.
I had been looking at it all wrong! It isn't something in the books that is altering the cats. The cats are putting something into the books and that mysterious substance is altering the people! For decades animated, flirtatious, politically aware young women have been opening used book stores and imperceptively, year by year, turning into librarians. Librarians! They become dull, ponderous folk who cherish contemplative solitude, keep their silence as they keep their chastity, and drape themselves in muted shades of taupe. They debauch not. They imbibe nothing but tea and think it sinful if their shortbread is gayly patterned.
Who is behind this dreadful plague that afflicts the literate women of the world: which afflicts some greatly and others less. (Consider Hillary Clinton, an inveterate reader, versus Paris Hilton.) Think of the cats themselves for the answer: those haughty beasts in their thick body-obscuring mantles and deep veiled eyes: those Persians from the mysterious and therefore justly-hated East. What do we call Persia today? Iran!
I leave it to the good people at Homeland Security to take it from here.
.
Chatboard (1)