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a Finch in the Window
Down in the Dirt, v150
(the October 2017 Issue)




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a Finch in the Window

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On a Rainy Day
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Parable

Reggie Mills

Part 1
    Here is a good one for you.
    I tell my pal Walter that I have fucked his mother. It is not relevant if I have or have not fucked his mother. I have not actually fucked his mother but this is not relevant. What is relevant is that my good pal Walter does not know the false truth of what I have said, in terms of me having fucked his mother. So.
    Then: Walter is upset towards me about what I have told him. Fair enough. I would expect no less. This is genuine anger towards the genuine person me. Plus, on top of this, at the time when I said what I said, I made to depart from the premises of my good pal Walter immediately, without giving him time to come up with substantial response, leaving him in a word insatiated, if that makes sense. Plus this was also in front of a group of mutual friends, say upwards of half a dozen friends, so Walter’s blight and shame were made quite public, I should feel.
    Then, I did not see or come into contact with my good pal Walter for a number of days after the event, so I left him to stew in it, basically.
    I heard through the grapevine that in these days Walter’s anger while traversing the general community was palpable.
    In any case, on the next instance when I encountered my good pal Walter I could taste his anger through the furrow of his brow. And this is when Walter says to me that he will slit my wrists and stick them in bleach.
    At this point I would like to pause, since this is a vexing thing for me myself to hear. It is a surprise that my good pal Walter will want to do this to his good pal me. And yet there are parts of what I have heard that to me feel real. For instance, I believe it is obvious that Walter’s anger is genuine. But that it is genuine enough to motivate Walter towards slitting my wrists and sticking them in bleach? Putting me in such a world of pain? Potentially even poisoning my blood with hypochlorite and inducing my death? This, it seems, is not so clear.
    And so I believe there is some unpacking for us to do if we are to solve this. First, let me vacuum ourselves into the assumption that Walter is upset towards me just for the fact of an innocent person intercoursing with his mother. Is this such a bad thing? For his mother to enjoy pleasure, and to be happy? Is Walter the type of person to not want others to be happy? His very own loving mother, no less? Walter is my good pal, and this personality trait is unfaithful and something I would not condemn to him. His anger cannot just be this.
    The next thing I think we should turn to is the betrayal of me towards Walter that my action implies. Since Walter and I had been good friends, intercoursing with his mother without discussing this with him first could be thought of as going behind his trust, which he may be displeased with. Additionally, there is the fact that I kind of threw Walter under the bus of our mutual friends’ attention, making this statement public to them, exposing him not only to my action but to the ridicule and shame on his part.
    I think we must as well consider the question about if Walter believes what I have said. I am not inside of the mind of my pal Walter so I cannot say from which direction his anger is motivated. The anger is real. It is possible he does not believe what I have said, in which case however his anger still stands.
    Plus there are so many other factors which could go on and on, so I find myself unable to reach conclusion—unable, worrisomely, to determine if my very own blood and life are at risk. Which is not a place I would like to be. And so at this juncture I appeal to you for help in asking:
    Is or is not my good pal Walter going to genuinely slit my wrists and stick them in bleach.

 
Part 2
    The part I forgot to mention in out last problem was that though I referred to our person of interest as my good pal Walter throughout, Walter is not genuinely a good pal of mine. Walter actually is not even a person. Walter is a character made-up.
    Maybe go back now then and adjust your response.
    In any case, I have a real good one for you now though. I will have to warn you however that this is a good one both for its moral conundra, but also for its gut-wrenching emotional gravity; so if you are a faint-of-heart type please turn away.
    But I will continue: This one now is about a girl that I know from my real life who for the sake of her genuine privacy I will call her J(jjj     Our story begins with J(jjj     So.
    J(j     J(j     The day passes okay and she goes to sleep at night. But when she wakes up the next day she has a headache that renders her unable to function. It reaches midday and without any noticeable change in symptoms J(j     They run some quick tests and the doctor comes in with the results.
    And what J(jjjj     But: The doctor does not stop here. Not only is J(jj     Withdrawal from such is indeed the source of J(j     Plus, and the doctor doesn’t know if J(jj     Which J(j     So it then occurs to J(jjjj     Then J(jjjj     Aborting the child, killing it for her own well-being, is such a deep evil to J(j     In any case, J(j     Was this the correct choice?

 
Part 3
    Would your answer now change if I said that our character’s legal name was genuinely J(j     Anyways, I have one more tale for you before we are done. This last one is a little bit shorter and also less unhappy, I believe, than the one in Part 2, which I think will be good for righting the mood a bit before we go our separate ways. So let us get into it.
    Riddle me this:
    I am the person of interest in this case. I am in this case a middle-aged housewife. I am not genuinely a middle-aged housewife in real life but that is not important; I am for this fiction a middle-aged housewife. At this moment in my middle-aged housewife life it is a weekday afternoon and my loving husband is at work and my lovely children are at school. I am folding a load of freshly hot laundry in our living room which I decorated myself according to a picture I liked in my favourite décor magazine, which I have a monthly subscription to. At this time I am also enjoying a cold glass of my favourite twist-cap pinot, bottles of which I, in these past weeks, have been able to drain dry at a rate of roughly one per two and a half weekdays, and while I am drinking this glass I am also watching today’s episode of The Dr. Oz Show on the living room’s 50" 4K HDTV. All, you may recall, while I fold my laundry. It is 1 p.m.
    What ends up happening is that, on this episode of The Dr. Oz Show, Dr. Oz reveals a new, revolutionary weight-loss treatment. He has a guest on the show presenting this thing to us. It is a treatment in the form of a pill which if you take it you will shed such a volume of weight that you will be amazed. You take this pill twice a day with water and with a one-hour buffer before and after meals and you will see results within a week.
    It is no secret that my figure is not as it was when my loving husband and I first married. It is no secret to my husband. Three kids does this to your figure. And I would not mind having my figure back as it once was.
    So this weight-loss treatment is appealing to me.
    Plus, says the guest on the show who is a friendly-looking woman with brown hair in a tight ponytail, this treatment is both herbal, which I like, and all-natural, which I like.
    I buy two months’-worth of the thing, a total of 120 pills for only $49.99 USD +S/H, and they arrive at my suburban two-storey house in only three days, which impresses me. I begin the regimen that day.
    I do not at all discuss with my husband that I am enduring this treatment, for I know that he does not enjoy discussing topics of trivial domestic nature.
    However, after exactly one week of taking this pill what ends up happening, to my chagrin, is not only that I don’t lose any weight, but that I actually gain five pounds, which for a person of my stature is a significant volume. These are not the advertised results.
    And so I am displeased: I feel displeased with Dr. Oz. I feel betrayed by Dr. Oz. This “Dr.” Oz who let this friendly ponytailed woman onto his show to claim that this treatment will work.
    In my displeasure I use a full weekday afternoon while my lovely children are still at school to write up a letter to this “Dr.” Oz using my family’s Macintosh home computer. I use some of my strongest words. I say how it is now apparent to me some of the parallels between this Dr. Oz and the famous Wizard of Oz, and the scathing wit of this association fills me up.
    But when I go to mail the letter a weird thing happens: When I go to mail my letter I see myself from outside myself. I see myself holding the letter printed out in black ink with the appropriately distributed italics, boldfaces, and underlines, for emphasis. I see myself holding the envelope with the written-out address of The Dr. Oz Show’s Viewer Interaction department. I see myself preparing my mouth and its ample reserves of saliva for when I need to lick said envelope shut.
    And so it occurs to me, as it may have occurred to you, that either I can mail this letter or I can not.
    I leave the rest to you.



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