By H.V.B.
He remembered--but never dreamed its source--the old poem which began,
"A swibosh is an Indian," and as he leaned back in his chair puffing on
a pipe, his lean bronzed face darkly serious against the moonglow, a
little echo hooted from the hills as if an owl'd cried.
Then Edris called. At the alarmant tingle of the bell, like a tinnient
tang of a rattlesnake's tremor, he ran to the telephone and shouted
eagerly, "Edris! My darling." Then he remembered to take receiver off
the hook. He was answered by dead silence. Then, to his amazement and
utter horror, a long damp tongue swished out of the mouthpiece, lapped
his cheek and disappeared in a puff of acrid steam. "The Martians!" was
his first thot, as he tremblingly buttered his toast. Then he heard
Edris' voice. It floated easily from the ceiling as if it were inverted
steam. He looked up, and discovered overhead that the planet India had
vanished from the map. It had peeled itself loose and inched over the
wallpaper and was now wrapping itself like a second skin around a baked
potato. "But that's impossible!" he breathed, "There aren't any potatoes
in August, and especially in bathtubs." Again Edris' voice reached him.
What was she saying? "Go with the pretty men, dear, they'll feed you an
orange." But that sounded crazy. He was worried, and clung to a red-hot
radiator which melted into a puddle at his touch, burning a round red
hole in the rug.
Seventeen puffs of black vapor--he counted them--whiffed up winsomely
from the charred circle. "Around and around," he said, dreamily,
remembering the second line of the poem, "When Fifthly is perplexed."
Edris oozed out of the shadows to him, longlike and snaky, with fearthy
fettles adorning her foresome, and a blaze in her eyes like the
hurmwurst of Whidby. Island, island, he repeated to himself, thrusting
an negatory hand thru the farthing of her wrabdy--and her mouth parted
to disclose another mouth, from which issued visible words like ticker
tape of steam in chilly air, so surprising him that he could only stand
rooted, like a tree. It was then that he noticed the snakes in her hair,
as the leaves sprouted from his cheeks end from every simple vascicle of
his tubular perpendages sometimes cursorily applellated, eyebreams.
Among the amiderie of her fascinating fingers, which she waved before
his face like the shimmer of phosphorescence on a salty sea on hot
midsummer moonlight, took shape an elegant form, something reminiscent
of a redchief. Within his sore heart a black thot grew, spurred by the
excess of his agonized birdtwitters, bidding him to slay and do so
quickly. He reached for a weapon. There was nothing at hand but a slug.
He groaned. A slug against snakes? What chance of victory? As tho she'd
read his thot, she moved nearer, her laffter lifting and lowering like a
fragile boat on waves of honey. One by one her eyes--390 of them--popped
out with hollow slaps like corks from bottles, while within the dull
draperies of scarlet which adorned the farthest lamp-post stirred an
unnameable bloody something which sent forth a thrill of foreboding into
his anguished heart, and he remembered the 4th and last lines of the
poem "He who dines alone is hexed." He uttered a gurgling scream as she
leaped upon him, and her snales torn and the steam of her bare
eye-sockets scalded him--then the ensanguined thing crawled limply over
the face of the blinding desert and the vacant sun stared sitelessly at
nothing.