Posted by NL on April 20, 2005 at 14:43:09:
The Civil War-- Part 1
One day, without even getting hit in the head, it all came back to him...
She knew she was very thin, but it didn't seem to matter to her. Boys liked her, she said. She said she thought her breasts were pretty and she rather liked having such a small, round, ass. She sat on her boss's desk, once, and said she'd worked her little butt off. He made a cute comment. So the question was, why was he, Norville, so shy about fucking her? Everbody else in the office was fucking her, so why didn't Norville join the party? Well, yes-- Norville would have loved to join the party if he could have strangled Miss Soup at some point, before or after fucking her. If not before, then definitely after. The difficulty came in explaining his strong desire to tighten a noose around her slender neck...
Later, in his condominium apartment after the usual boring work day, he strangled his love-doll. It was rather delightful, the way the thing's head would swell as the noose tightened. But the darn thing popped like a cheap balloon and scared the absolute piss out of him. Norville also had a sudden flashback to his childhood, and a kind of revelation came to him.
His folks did all their doctoring with Special Salve, a mixture of powdered yellow sulfur, gunpowder, and lard. It went on the dog for ringworm, and on his head for the same, and on his foot when he gashed it open in the creek on a smashed beer bottle. Then his foot turned green and he almost died, until his granddad found his tools, stolen from a field hospital tent at Gettysburg by his father's father, and cut his leg off-- not Norville's leg, but his grandfather's leg. Such love! He cut it off halfway between the knee and hipbone. His granddad explained it like this: "There's a sort of space down behind the one we know, like a secret passage in a big old house, and the nerves of every thinking creature go into that secret passage-- even the beings that live among the stars, linking up into what we call a Sympathetic Ganglion." He slurped at a fifth of King George the IV, a fine cheap, nasty, whiskey to kill the pain. "Yep, that's something my twice-removed Daddy learned in The Civil War, and the knowledge came to him in the form of a rifle slug so slowed by successive deflections by twigs and foliage in the forest where they happened to have been ambushed by a pack of rebels that when it struck him between the eyes it merely dented his thick skull without splitting it or penetrating and laid him out cold under a thick bush, so he was not shot to death or bayoneted when their position was overrun-- ouch, my leg hurts, what's left of it." Another swig. "Well, the next thing you know, he was mixing up a special potation of lard and gunpowder and yellow sulfur, which he smeared on his head and lo it was cured. But also he had learned about that vast hidden Sympathetic Ganglion by which it is possible to touch every creature anywhere, for good or ill-- stop playin' with my leg!" Embarrassed, Norville dropped the severed limb in the dirt on the creek bank. Once he had overcome his revulsion the thing was fascinating to behold and felt quite extraordinary as it cooled and became less and less like anything that lived, though it continued to resemble a leg, albeit a somewhat scrawny one, scabrous of shank. "Now then, you have no doubt noticed, Norville, that whenever anybody has any sort of complaint in this family, that complaint is smeared all over with a vile concoction of lard, gunpowder and yellow sulfur-- for that is part of the lore and history of the Tooth family, since that long ago encounter of The Civil War. Yeah, all Tooths, know of the healing power of that special salve. But not all know, and pay attention now, Norville, of the Sympathetic Ganglion." He paused for effect. He was getting pretty drunk. "Surely you have noticed that your Dad's smearings with our special family yellow gunk are not overly effective, eh? Like, he smeared that shit on your dog when it had the mange and the dog ran away, never to be seen again. And he smeared that shit on your foot and it was like to rot off, wasn't it?" And that was true. But then, Norville noticed that his foot was good as new and it seemed to have healed at the moment his granddad's leg came off. He thought that was strange. And when granddad ligatured his stump he smeared the ragged, bloody end with the family's special shit (to use Norville's granddad's words) and truly by this time despite all the King George the IV (no longer manufactured, by the way), his stump looked terrible and the flys swarming over it seemed actually to ENJOY that foul paste of gunpowder, yellow sulfur and lard! By golly, there were maggots in it already! "Yep," his granddad continued (his name was Norburt Tooth-- Old "Fartburst" Norburt!),"it was my responsibility, if I chose to accept it, to pass on knowledge of the Sympathetic Ganglion, as well as the recipe for the yellow stinking shit, to your Dad, but I judged him to be wuthless and unworthy, so only gave him the formula for the smelly stuff-- HA HA HA! But now I gots to pass it on, I GOTS to send it on, so, it comes to you now, Norville, you are the one to git this great gift! And LO, it comes with fear and trembling, for much great harm can be done by the fella who can link up with the Great Hidden Ganglion and touch anyone, anywhere, anytime, for good or ill!"