Those Who Refuse to Lay

The exception is the babies. Babies are snacks for lots of things – even birds of prey.

Silty was an old bird waiting for a pension check from the San Jose Coven of Esteemed Witches in which she had dedicated most of her life. As her personal trainer, I admitted that she had to give up on such empty calories snacks, such as babies, because they are known to be very blubberous even after hard boilings. There are NO nutritional benefits to rolling them in chocolate.

“Oh, Fooey.”

Silty always promised to diet and exercise but I had come to the conclusion that she must open her purse and spill out the beans. There were several broken vials in there, for Silty was a hoarder. She had tongues of whale from the last endangerment ceremony, there was a little mangrass marked as belonging to Napoleon and I held up the vial for inspection… shook it loosely.

“Oh… Chicago. Summer of ‘88.” Silty smiled and recounted how she could not afford to buy Napolean’s entire private region when it came up for auction but had been able, after much negotiations, to purchase the uppers.

“You actually paid for this?”

“Well…”

Six checks of Silty had bounced and I was worried that I would not be able to pay my mortgage if Silty didn’t start trading like others. She was hiding two young baby arms in her corset and wasn’t making much of an opportunity to hide it. (I always let clients go to the bathroom before the weight-in) and Silty just stood there gnawing on a baby foot like it was completely normal.

“Silty. Come on. You said you want to lose the weight for flight school.”

It was true that even witches occasionally need commercial flight and must summarily be charged by the pound on single propeller Cessnas. I think they do this to avoid the Real ID check at the larger airports but I’m not sure.

Silty was getting around to asking if I knew a good pet replacement specialist when I stopped and asked her, “What happened to Anastasia?” The cat had severely hampered our first set of meetings as it seemed like the two were mentally entwined. One would not run on my treadmill without the other giving her tips on good posture.

“She got hit by a speeding car.”

I stopped going through Silty’s bag. “Did she try to stop a car, again?”

“Well…”

“Never mind you. You’ll just have to wait until Anastasia grows back. It takes a while, that’s all.”

Aunty Silty had gone through several cats because I live on a farm road with no apparent speed limit. Also, it’s very hard to have a wife and a family when your old aunt is always offering to watch the nursery. The woman really can’t help herself and has no inhibition against eating her own grand-neices and nephews.

“Go ahead and get upon the scales.”

Now originally, I thought Aunt Silty was just trying to support the new business but I have come to realize that she really has gotten rather obese from all the snacks and sitting there watching Waverly Place for hours. The woman needs to get out to the wild again and stop pretending that her life is about taking an eventually vacation to Haiti.

She calls it a spiritual calling. The Haiti.

“One hundred and … oh my Lord…”

Silty looked positively childlike as I caught that she was levitating. A baby dropped out of her stockings and it didn’t look like anyone I knew so I just put it aside with the other artifacts.

“You’re going to have to come down, Aunt Silty.”

The woman was slow to oblige, trying to recount some trickery where she had made me believe that there was no gravity as a child. Come to think of it… why didn’t she eat me? I think she had some pact with my mother, who was also not eaten as a child because something in our genetic makeup is toxic to certain witches. They call it the spirit of love.

Silty slowly lowered her hovering body. I wrote the official weight down on my clipboard and gave her a shot of Oxempic which is important to regulate the diabetes. Then my aunt wanted to make a quick run to town and see if there were a sale on moldy lemons. (she doesn't’ really care about the lemons). I asked if she would actually be ‘running’ this time or if she was going to hex a trucker again?

Silty blushed and said that she would run.

We have a surprising number of semi trucks in the back field and I don’t think the neighbors will believe that they are winter projects. Some of them are loaded with groceries or autoparts and I must now believe that Aunt Silty is the reason that eggs are so expensive in California.

“That’s fine. Would you like to take my dog?”

Silty hissed. She stood right there, then crouched, then hissed. It’s the greatest way to get her to actually run – I release the hounds and she can pull out all the baby snacks and beatle larvae she keeps in hidden places. They won’t slow down.

I smile. “Have a good run.”

I usually wait for ten or twelve minutes because its three quarters of a mile to the end of the road. Silty won’t be able to grab a trucker on the frontage road unless she really hustles. I know her tricks.

Stan, the very capable Russian Wolf Hound, is waiting for his evening run. He has a pack of other capable friends like “Bear” the Japanese Tosa, there’s even a Quiche Hound we begot when a perfectly good Thanksgiving Breakfast went bad. It just took a little bit of Mom’s old Bag Balm (with additives) to turn the egg dish into a dog.

“Ok. Who’s next?”

One must work out in the country for my clientele which includes an overweight Yetti, serial killers who ate too much sugary cereal, there’s a missing girl from milk cartons who has quietly been on the run from her homeroom since 1979. I treat them all as if they are some form of outer family, treat them with the dignity and sometimes supremacy that must be understood when dealing with such monsters.

My next appointment is The Muscle Man of Galt who no longer has his muscles and must take injections into his forehead to continue his work on the country farm circuit. As long as we stuff his coat with various sausages, inject the crease between his eyes with enough Botox for a permanent scowl, people rely on his reputation as a Cow Puncher and give him berths so very wide.

“Tommy, I just can’t punch another cow. My hands are all swollen.”

I remind him it’s “Doctor Tommy” , now. I sent away for a degree from People’s University once they were finally accredited to be mostly certified in all the fifty states. Now I can charge Medi-Cal directly for the service of all my monsters. With correct diet and exercise, the state believes they can slowly be returned to work.

“Let me see your knuckles.”

It was true, the knuckles were beyond approach. They were beyond the normal red/purple/blue that one exhibits after many hours as a cowhand in the ring with a bull. Some rodeo clowns can make over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a season rescuing riders from the bulls they inject with Mad Cow colonic and other steroids. Jacky, The Muscle Man of Galt, is expected to stop them with a challenge to the bull's dignity. He steps right into the ring without the sword of the matador and offers a bare knuckle fights between riding rounds.

“Have you tried the Blistex I gave you last time?”

Jackie scowls and says he can’t get the lip balm off his hands after a fight. The beers slip right out of his hand (though he can barely clench them anymore) and people have been known to try to give him a sipping straw in the corner chairs of the bar.

It’s not very dignified for a muscle man to use a straw on a beer. I looked at the hands again and said, “I understand.”

Jackie won’t wrap his wrist before a fight. He’s suffering from Awful Age Syndrome and can barely make it to the outhouse between rounds. Most of my monsters are very old and they only have a few more years before modernization really makes them unfit for duty.

I put Jackie’s hands in a champagne bucket of boiling ice. This is a chemical treatment that was introduced during the Wrath of Hoth, and might be more normalized to viewers who have seen the pictures of lava & ice.

He has to soak.

My next patient is a Wigwam. This is a native person who lives near Mickey Grove Zoo in Lodi. One day the state just forgot he was there and started plowing down his land, erecting large cages for penguins and lemurs. Ted Pee says the eating is good but it is very noisy. He would prefer to hunt in the old tradition but so far the animals wont give him a good chase when he releases them from the displays at night.

“What’s wrong today, Mr. Pee?”

My clipboard says he is suffering from a mighty bout of gout which is caused by excessive butters put on the zebras he roast over the fires. It is a version of uridic crystalization.

“My wife left me. I hurt.”

I look down. "Ah..."

“Was it the lady you met at the market?” Ted was enormously successful at Super Market Dating because he always ambushed women in the freezer aisle and said such pretty things like, “I bet you never tasted that raw.”

Enormous curiosity exist in the freezer aisle because some people have never poached a real thanksgiving turkey from the Stockton Delta. They actually have to thaw their food four days in advance and assume they will be in the mood for turkey instead of wild boar or the many pheasants found all over the river system.

Ted explained that it was nice taking tea each morning in the Japanese Tea Garden since the exhibit is never opened unless people reserve a wedding or party in advance. The bonsai are always clipped and he doesn’t need keys since he is strong enough to just pull down the locks. Half of the locks are now broken.

“What seems to be the problem?”

I hated to ask but many of my monsters need strong treatments of the therapy variety. As there are no certified therapist for monsters on the West Coast (as certified by People’s University), I must deal with the mind as well as the body and occasionally the soul.

“I told her she has hair on her chin.”

Ted stopped and looked sheepish knowing he did perfectly wrong.

I coughed before asking, “How did that make you feel?”

He blushed and said he didn’t want to be a critical husband but each time he went to shave her face when she slept, the woman woke up and thought he was coming for a scalp.

“What do you think I would do with a scalp? People are strange, man.”

Truthfully, scalp sales had come down since people started using Rogaine. I completely forgot though Ted wouldn’t sign up for Extinct Tribal Resources. He was not part of TIFL (the medical department for indigenous people) and often paid me in bits of polar bear or whatever the zoo was hosting that week.

“What about the gout? Is she bleeding your ankles like I asked?”

Ted nodded that she was fine with the needle. The man didn’t have much years left to hunt and would have to consider pretending that he lost his faculties because the Cognitive Decline Center at Lodi was going to be the only one to take him to the afterlife.

Most of their patience forget their wallets.

About that time, Jackie started hollering that his skin had fallen off the knuckle. I ran over and checked that all of his pain receptors were chemically sealed shut and opened a new can of Teflon Forever Flesh. Apparently the proteins in Teflon resemble the protein in people and are not immediately rejected by the body. We used to have to shoot people in the eye to get past the T-cells, those vigilant body guards, but now we can just patch things with Teflon Flesh and Dupont is very happy again.

“Next time you swing at the bull, your fist will glance right off his face and you have about two seconds to uppercut him with this.” I handed Jackie an injection of Dehydrating Salts which would turn his challenger into beef jerky right on the spot.

Jackie looked displeased because it wasn't very manly to cheat.

“How many rodeo people want to take home some beef jerky?”

“Well…”

That’s right. Lockford meats used to have the big sticks for a buck and a half and now they were nearly twice that. People love beaf jerky. Jackie was going to be a hero with one glancing punch – all the way from the Clements Stampeed to the big show in Salinas.

I wished him well.

About that time the phone rang and it was my Aunt Silty taking a ride to market with a man who had a truckload of ungassed tomatoes. She was on a CB Radio that interacted with a telco forwarding switch and promised that she wasn’t bringing any more semi trucks back to the property.

“You need anything at the market?”

I looked over my line of patients – people who had to seek medical care on the farm though our treatment manual came from Montana. A small booklet of cowboy poetry and poultices and folk remedies. Most of the patients waited with strange appetites and there was no single publisher of magazines to intersect all their various interest. Essentially all of my belongings were at risk of being destroyed while people waited for help.

Aunt Silty was smiling through the phone/radio and happened to mention that Gilroy, her truckdriver, was on his way to a baby baptism after dropping his load. Seemed like my aunt wasn't gong to be losing any weight.

I looked over my chain of monsters and wondered if patching people up really made them any better?

I excused myself from Ted the Wigwam and checked the PH reading in Loberta’s tank which had been driven all the way down from Sacramento. She was a mermaid siten who sang in a dive bar. I went out and spent a moment with my two headed hens who refused to lay. It’s really much harder to snap the neck of a two headed hen. One should never try to be more humane and drown them in a swimming pool.

It doesn’t work.