He’s not too proud to hurt someone to prove a point if the need be. He squeezes a bottle of hand sanitizer into his mouth; later he will be sick into a white sink. The scent of hickory smoke nauseates him on the green at the barbecue and he asks to be excused so he can go and vomit into a handkerchief behind a tree. When he turns back the grill is directly between him and the picnic tables. He runs into the taupe concrete building bent low and working his arms up and down, like a cockroach. His feet pad down the carpeting and he takes refuge in a cubicle, not his cubicle. He sits in the office chair with armrests for a few minutes trying to breathe correctly. He finds he has forgotten. The central nervous system begins to take over, and the lungs jackknife his torso like the Jaws of Life as they expand. Swiveling the chair to face his coworker’s computer, he’s filled with a sense of dread. His chest puffing and deflating, his eyes rolling and his mouth hanging open, his spittle drying. He bangs on the keyboard with his fist like an unfed toddler. It wants to know if he wanted to turn on sticky keys. Over the edge of the cubicle opposite to this, a head peers. It wants to know why he isn’t outside. He shrieks and scrambles and falls down in his haste to escape to the bathroom. He pounds furiously on the hand sanitizer dispenser and shovels handfuls of the pink stuff into his fluttering mouth. He sits on the tile in front of the row of stalls retching and waiting for somebody to find him.

-Most likely not, sir, for I am a man of taste and refinement and

-Fine, then. Just tell the story before my porters arrive and forcibly eject you through the uppermost window of the North-West tower.

“Well, then. Ahem. Where was I? This was last touched upon so many months ago I cannot bring myself to recall the idiocy that occured upon this hallowed parchment. Having newly acquired quotation marks and a codpiece of genuine Pewter, I believe I shall simply concoct a new bunch of ridiculous lies.”

“Uncle Maurice! Why, shame I do cry! Never! Tut tut! Such impertinence, and to have so unfashionably left us pondering your fate for so many months-”

“Nonetheless. Now where was I? Ah, yes. Beginning anew, rising from the ashen hills of Dunkirk like a bedraggled hatchling Phoenix, as though o’er the furthest hill-top Athena too rose fully formed of Zeus’ brow! God’s areolas could hold no smaller glory than that of this beginning, for in the East there rose a full sun-”

“Uncle Maurice, is there such a thing as a sun half-poured?”

“Children, I have but little time for your queries into the overindulgence which is delighted in by many a man, for wither th’  glass is half empty, half full, or even hemming one in on all sides, one can rely upon the near-clockwork precision of the assembled aeronautical associations of the world’s nations to awaken one with great, joyous rumblings from deep beneath your fishing trawler.”

“Uncle Maurice, Great-Grandfather says that was the A.T.F. dropping depth charges below your houseboat.”

“I can’t see why the A.T.F. would be interested in a stock pond. Anyhow, as the story goes, ’twas morning, and the sun rose in the East, to a certain quotient fulfilled in its rotundity. The sounds of cock’s crows and sodomy with goats issued forth with great authority from the farmlands yonder, and I marveled at man’s industry! It is told in some halls that there are some who would say in certain company that a select people speak in dulcet tones, behind closed doors, of the raising and issuing forth of deformed goat/human hybrid foetuses.”

“But what does this have to do with the gold mine in Alaska and the wicked Canadian Clefty Francoise?”

“Ah, that villain. When was I telling you of him?”

“This is useless.”

“No, no. Come back by Uncle Maurice’s feet. The fire burns yet, and I’ve a yarn to spin…”

1. The key to understanding this simple story is:

A) the narrator is obviously insane, and the urn is a symbolic displacement of the narrator himself, his memories gone to pot (pun intended, quite tackily too).

B) The Jews run everything! If you go to a mental hospital and set fire to it, it will help stop the Zionists.

C) N/A- The reader is illiterate. Please check if applies.

D) Stop touching me! Get out of my coccyx and stop making me dance! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO

2. What literary device does this short piece employ?

A) The Darkys have seized the fortress and the gun-powder! Quickly, while the plantation’s still being set ablaze and they’ve not found the horseless carriages! Flee to the woods, children, or they’ll soon be firing the cannon upon you!

B) Fragmentation augmenting short, terse inverted sentences in first person to give a feeling of verbal relation.

C) N/A- Teh radar is irritant. Peas czech if apples.

D) Oh, the pain! The undeniable pain of being forced to dance by invisible, unseen demons for twelve straight hours! I’ve lost at least seventeen pounds and I can’t reach the phone and I’m losing blood and there’s semen all over the couch! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

3. Regarded as “curiously strong,” what breathmint was imported by the French from the Pyrenees in the late 1800s?

A) Oh god it hurts make the bleeding stop please oh god oh god my feet are numb and there’s blood all over the carpet too and I still can’t stop dancing Jesus lord of hosts I pray to thee please if thou hast still mercy in thy soul please lord amen wash my soul so that I might die cleansed of sin, and go to Heaven where I know I should go instead of Hell! Oh, god! Is that an ember from the fireplace alighting upon my merino wool rug? NOOOOOOOOOOO

B) Irishmen aren’t drunkards, they’re just pretending so they can steal my mugs! well, they can’t have them! Not one, not any of them, hear me you intoxicated gibbering louts? I know you’re listening on the various electronic devices you’ve telepathically implanted in my various ceramic statues of cocker spaniels!

C) N/A- Te reder z ltrait. Piss ceh if apils.

D) Altoids, although what does that have to do with the short story?

4. Who is the narrator talking about in lines 66-67 when they refer to “The Earl of D’arcy”?

A) I can’t do this anymore. This is just stupid. Just give me an F and I’ll drop out of this course, okay? This is ridiculous. I don’t even like mid-20th-Century Literature written by Neapolitans with forked bicuspids, I don’t know why I took the course “Mid-20th-Century Literature by Gertrude Stein and Simone de Beauvoir”.

B) I’ll tell you what else, it’s those despicable Hispanics’ fault that I don’t get welfare checks anymore, because they’re taking all of them from my mailbox because even though they’re unemployed they’re too lazy to register for welfare, so even though every year I compose my own census where Caucasians compose 99% of North America and then send it to the Post Office and they only take one every four years they still get my welfare money I was going to spend on action figures! How is that fair?

C) gajafafnfnnfa..f.a.f.dsslffnnbnbvnakfdjafljdsfhgibfjnal,poiahubmgerklfjcnd

D) Thank the lord, it’s the angel Gabriel coming to rescue my immortal soul from the flames! O, he stretches out his beauteous arm so that he might take me with him to a realm of fleece and wondrous harp-strumming and twice-daily massages by tiny asian women with hands like dolls made of china! Wait- what’s this? He doth not come closer? Am I to leap towards his immaculate appearance? Dare I bridge the gap ‘twixt faith and obeisance, and come hither to my lord and his heavenly host? What folly- what jest! He laugheth yet, as though he too has found this inconcievably trite notion too full of the brief jollity which has punctuated too markedly my short life! He pointeth at me, and with such mirth he cackles! What! A fiery manacle, from the cellar, bursting through the floor and coming round my ankle? I am being dragged towards- NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Hag is troubled in a bony type of disaster. The whores are waiting outside the shanty-house, holding their breath and saving it for the moonlit country shop to solidify the wisps of smoky exhalations. Shaving Desdemona as a tree, perceiving the curling bark sliding away onto the brown and green wren crayon ground. Here we all are, the gang of candelabras, dancing a graceful and ethereal dance backwards in a circle treading on everyone else’s train. Destructive limbo of the heart, and yet a wedding dress will always seem like a great idea to any function but a funeral in a graveyard for automobiles. For sanitary reasons, one must assume. Shellfish will doze like little anchors without boats, eternally being inched towards displacement by the soothing bosom of the sea. Leaning against the vacant outhouse is a wizened old man wearing suspenders and a white tank top. He wants to smoke; he can’t because if he does he’ll die. The bivalves are incapable of perceptible pity, but he feels it emanating from them in the harbor, waves of their compassion oozing through the atmosphere like a gelatinous smog. He suddenly feels like the victim of an oil spill; he does not need their charity. Rustily, a player piano gives up the ghost a block away. It will be betrayed and abandoned by its owners, shunned to the side of the lonely street. For weeks it will stand there hunched over itself and not understanding why it is unloved as it grows ever rustier. Coral opalescent columns zigzagging every which way in blues and teals and outlandish hues of a slick rainbow-tinged black obfuscate the path to victory, little cousin. Put your hand in mine, and we will float to a marsh of great distinction. Apparitions and flickering images project themselves onto the hollow trunks of nicotine-stained trees that stand thigh-deep in the scabrous muck culled from slaughterhouse floors. It shall be glorious, and there a great chorus of nuns shall with their silvery voices coax open our locked cuffs. What a hideous thinness we must then come into, so gaunt and stretched tall and oblong we are nigh two-dimensional. Using our light-post corpses as a beanpole or a ladder, the ivy creeps to heaven, and our destiny is fulfilled. Once in God’s realms, the treacherous plant begins its intricate designs anew. Whilst ensconced in the finer points of appreciating a harp, Gabriel will first fall prey to its iniquitous salacity. It wends its way about his ankle, tenderly spiraling his calf. Now! Oh, now it has come to his midsection, and, progress unfettered, surmounts his Adam’s apple! It pauses a moment at his delicate, ruby lips. It rears back, it quivers. Is this its portal? It is hesitant. It lays itself flat upon his chin. It readies itself. It hastens first up the trestle of his lower lip, and marches through the valley between. Traversing the noble upper promontory takes but a moment’s notice, and then- oh horrors- it penetrates his feminine, unflared nostril! Some days later, lumps of cancer expunged themselves from the clouds, and multitudinously availed themselves upon the harbor. They slapped the pavements, and rendered the fishmonger a bygone necessity. In a recession, barbarism is a necessity, and to put food on the table is of essence no matter what mystery the meat arouses.

Metallic zephyrs playing supercollider tag with cirrus clouds of red pinpricks set to an effervescent, smirking ragtime zip that skips and loops points offstage; the giant petulantly banging his balled-up fists on walkmen. To this: does it look forward? Orientation pornography for a dedicated cartographer (he punched the clock until it was lying on the floor bleeding and it wasn’t moving anymore and then he
hunched himself fetally and cried to himself that it was unfair, nobody had ever been given any choice over the matter and it all had come to this) that gnawed at the nervous system secretively and et the man’s innards and spat out the gristle and bone through his own mouth. His wife and children never knew. And when the birds started singing, it was all gone. Forever.