Slippage by Harlan Ellison Read Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Harlan Ellison
peoples, who laughed at the silly clothing the great navigator wore. They all ordered pizza and the man who had done the rowing made sure that venereal disease was quickly spread so that centuries later he could give a beautiful young woman an inoculation in her left buttock.
LEVENDIS: On Piltic the 34th of October, he gave all dogs the ability to speak in English, French, Mandarin, Urdu, and Esperanto; but all they could say was rhyming poetry of the worst sort, and he called it doggerel.
LEVENDIS: On Sqwaybe the 35th of October, he was advised by the Front Office that he had been having too rich a time at the expense of the Master Parameter, and he was removed from his position, and the unit was closed down, and darkness was penciled in as a mid-season replacement. He was reprimanded for having called himself Levendis, which is a Greek word for someone who is full of the pleasure of living. He was reassigned, with censure, but no one higher up noticed that on his new assignment he had taken the name Sertsa.
This story has been titled
Shagging Fungoes
___
But even after I got out of Basic Training in’57, and wound up at Fort Knox, and brought Charlotte (and all the furniture from the Manhattan apartment) down to that tiny, miserable house in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, I was still able to delude myself that I had a marriage.
When I got the call from Cleveland that day, the call from my brother-in-law Jerry, telling me that my mother was desperately ill and might die, I went to the Company Commander and asked for an emergency leave. When I drove from the base to the house, and told Charlotte we had to pack fast to make the journey to Cleveland, she simply wouldn’t hear of it. I’m not going, she said. I argued for a few minutes, but I was beside myself worrying about my mom, so I just said fukkit, threw some clothes together, got in the car, and got in the wind.
___
Anywhere But Here, With Anybody But You
Omen. There had been a helluva nauseating omen that this was going to be one of the worst days of his life. Just that morning, if he'd been prescient enough to recognize it for what it was. But he wasn't, of course. No one ever is. The neighbor's cat, which he truly and genuinely, deeply and passionately despised, that fucking ugly one-eyed shit-gopher cat with the orange tuft of hair on its muzzle, that puke cat was sitting in the tree right outside his bedroom window when he opened his eyes and awoke from a restless night's sleep, and turned to look at the kind of day it was going to be. In the branches nearly touching his second-storey window, sat that fungus of a cat, with a dead bird hanging out of its drooling jaws. Like a stringy upchuck of undercooked manicotti. With feathers. He looked right into the dead face of that bird, and he looked right into the smug face of that toilet bowl cat, and if he'd had the sense or foresight to figure it out, he'd have known this was a significant omen. But he didn't. No one ever does.
Not till he came home that night from work, from wage slave hell designing greeting cards for the Universe of Happiness, across the river and into the industrial park, "did he look back with incomplete memory, and suspect that the presence of stringy, matted-feather, watery thin blood death right outside his wake-up-and-sing-a-merry-song window was a message to him across thirteen hours.
He got the message when he pulled up in the driveway and got out and went into the back seat and pulled out his jacket and his attaché case, and looked at the house. It was dark.
He got the message when he walked up the front walk and turned his key in the door and opened the door, and the house was dark. No smell of dinner cooking. No sound of the kids cranking with the Mario Bros. No feel of preparations for the evening. No sight of Carole rushing across his line of sight. Only the beginning of the taste of ashes. He got the message.
And
LEVENDIS: On Piltic the 34th of October, he gave all dogs the ability to speak in English, French, Mandarin, Urdu, and Esperanto; but all they could say was rhyming poetry of the worst sort, and he called it doggerel.
LEVENDIS: On Sqwaybe the 35th of October, he was advised by the Front Office that he had been having too rich a time at the expense of the Master Parameter, and he was removed from his position, and the unit was closed down, and darkness was penciled in as a mid-season replacement. He was reprimanded for having called himself Levendis, which is a Greek word for someone who is full of the pleasure of living. He was reassigned, with censure, but no one higher up noticed that on his new assignment he had taken the name Sertsa.
This story has been titled
Shagging Fungoes
___
But even after I got out of Basic Training in’57, and wound up at Fort Knox, and brought Charlotte (and all the furniture from the Manhattan apartment) down to that tiny, miserable house in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, I was still able to delude myself that I had a marriage.
When I got the call from Cleveland that day, the call from my brother-in-law Jerry, telling me that my mother was desperately ill and might die, I went to the Company Commander and asked for an emergency leave. When I drove from the base to the house, and told Charlotte we had to pack fast to make the journey to Cleveland, she simply wouldn’t hear of it. I’m not going, she said. I argued for a few minutes, but I was beside myself worrying about my mom, so I just said fukkit, threw some clothes together, got in the car, and got in the wind.
___
Anywhere But Here, With Anybody But You
Omen. There had been a helluva nauseating omen that this was going to be one of the worst days of his life. Just that morning, if he'd been prescient enough to recognize it for what it was. But he wasn't, of course. No one ever is. The neighbor's cat, which he truly and genuinely, deeply and passionately despised, that fucking ugly one-eyed shit-gopher cat with the orange tuft of hair on its muzzle, that puke cat was sitting in the tree right outside his bedroom window when he opened his eyes and awoke from a restless night's sleep, and turned to look at the kind of day it was going to be. In the branches nearly touching his second-storey window, sat that fungus of a cat, with a dead bird hanging out of its drooling jaws. Like a stringy upchuck of undercooked manicotti. With feathers. He looked right into the dead face of that bird, and he looked right into the smug face of that toilet bowl cat, and if he'd had the sense or foresight to figure it out, he'd have known this was a significant omen. But he didn't. No one ever does.
Not till he came home that night from work, from wage slave hell designing greeting cards for the Universe of Happiness, across the river and into the industrial park, "did he look back with incomplete memory, and suspect that the presence of stringy, matted-feather, watery thin blood death right outside his wake-up-and-sing-a-merry-song window was a message to him across thirteen hours.
He got the message when he pulled up in the driveway and got out and went into the back seat and pulled out his jacket and his attaché case, and looked at the house. It was dark.
He got the message when he walked up the front walk and turned his key in the door and opened the door, and the house was dark. No smell of dinner cooking. No sound of the kids cranking with the Mario Bros. No feel of preparations for the evening. No sight of Carole rushing across his line of sight. Only the beginning of the taste of ashes. He got the message.
And
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