Title 2 awaits you. Next title (and closing of this title) on Monday morning.
And since the last one was the first title and we're still getting the hang of it, feel free to keep posting there if you want. I don't care. :)
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"Well, bugger."
"You can say that again. That was my favourite moose."
"It was a stupid moose."
"Don't say that about my favourite moose!"
"Next time, you drag the moose up the mountain. Mooses aren't made for mountains."
"His name was Eric."
"Why did you bring the moose, anyway?"
"Sometimes, I'd sing 'Hang On to Yourself' to him as he slept."
"Are you even listening to me?"
"Eric should have listened to me. Hang on to yourself! Hang - oh god look at me, I'm a blubbering mess, over a stupid bloody moose. Hang on to yourself!"
"Here's a tissue."
"Thanks."
"So why did you bring him?"
"I wanted to see if a sherpa really could bring a moose up a mountain."
"I really want to hit you right now."
"Don't be silly. I know sherpas don't know kung fu."
"No, but we do know where to find rocks of just the right size for bashing heads in."
"I don't think you're a real sherpa, anyway. Sherpas don't say 'bugger'."
"Do too."
"Do not. Also, you didn't bring the moose up the mountain."
"I brought the moose up the mountain! You were there! You saw! I brought the damn moose up the damn mountain! Where's a head-bashing rock when you need one?"
"Not to the top of the mountain."
"Even half a head-bashing rock will do."
"It's not like it's my fault the top of the mountain mysteriously vanished."
"You'd think I would at least be able to find a handful of pebbles, but no. Once again, this stupid mountain that, I remind you, you chose, once again mocks and laughs at me. Take that! Ow! Bugger!"
"What did you think kicking a mountain would do?"
"It's not even a bloody mountain! Ow! It's a volcano!"
"Well, yes, but to be fair, I didn't know that until it erupted."
"I really wish the person I was going to die with was someone other than you."
"Well now, that's not a very sherpa-like attitude."
"Even the moose would be better."
"I thought you didn't like the moose?"
“It's not gonna work.” Kate said.
“It will, this time I know it will.”, Tom replied.
They were standing in a kitchen, Tom dressed in a parody of a chef's outfit. He stood five feet, eleven and a half inches tall to Kate' five feet, nine inches. She had played basketball in college, he loved the game but couldn't qualify, such are the fickle whims of fate and genetics. Pushing his sweat ladened, curly black hair back from his face Tom stared intently into the brown pot of goo simmering on his stove. The kitchen they were standing in was an over sized galley style, it had room to maneuver without getting in each other' way, not that either of them were moving around much, both hovered near the stove where two pots were heating. The front pot had a thick dark sauce in it, the back pot was of heavier, cast iron construction and filled with heated oil.
“The Mexican's figured it out, I can too.”, Tom said with some emphasis.
“It is totally not the same thing at all!”
“Why not?”
On the counter nearby sat six dark balls, about the size of snowballs, a slight vapor rolled off of the frozen concoctions. Next to that was a pale green bowl filled with cornflakes.
“I think it is a consistency thing, chocolate doesn't melt the same, it burns more readily.” Kate said.
“I just cook it less, it will be perfect. You'll see.”
“Like the other five times?”
Tom waved his free hand about his head as if chasing off a fly, “Test subjects on the way to perfection.” He continued stirring with his other hand, “This time I am using a totally different technique. See? First a quick dip in here.”, he pointed at the pot he was stirring, “Then the cornflakes, then the hot oil. It will work.”
Kate eye widened and threated to roll back into her head, “Alright, if you say so anyway, it just seems like a big mess to keep cleaning up every time it doesn't work out.”
“Did Jefferson give up on the light bulb? Did, uh, well I don't really know any other inventors. Wait! The Wright brothers! Did they stop after their first failure? No, nor will I be so easily dissuaded from a mere five prototype letdowns.”
Both watched and waited as the candy thermometer slowly crept higher. Finally Tom, pronounced the pot hot enough and grabbed a pair of tongs and lifted one of the dark snowballs from the counter and dipped it into the chocolaty mess, after the briefest of dips he thrust it in the cornflakes and then gently lowered it into the hot oil at the back of the stove. This was the test, previous versions had disintegrated in the hot oil, leaving nothing but a burnt smelling sludge in their wake. This ball was holding together nicely, it had come directly from the coolest part of the deep freezer, after sitting for more than a day.
Tom's face twitched as he watched the cornflake coated ball slowly rise to the top of the hot oil, then he grabbed another utensil, a stainless steel scoop, and carefully put it under the golden ball and lifted the thing out. A smile touched his face as he placed it onto a small white plate, then dusted it with powdered sugar. Taking the plate in one hand he flourished his other over the dessert and presented it to Kate.
In his best, cheesy-fake French accent he said to her, “Madam, I prezent to jou, deep-fried moose!”
Zombieman: I've had deep-fried ice cream before, which is delicious, and now I really really want to try deep-fried mousse.
Everyone else: Nobody says you have to stop at one story, right?
***
Deep-Fried Moose 2: The Moosening.
"Look at this one, daddy!"
I didn't look up from my paper. It wasn't particularly interesting, but there was precious little else to distract me. "I wish he'd stop calling me that," I muttered, half to myself.
"But you are his father," said Alice. She knew perfectly well this argument was futile, as many times as we'd had it. We were both so tired of arguing that neither of us would raise our voices anymore. To a casual observer, we could be discussing the weather, or a particularly fine Merlot. "What else should he call you?"
"Sir. I am a soldier, after all."
"You keep saying that, but when was the last time they called you?"
Just then, the phone rang.
---
You don't get a lot of time for reflection as a soldier. A soldier pondering the deeper meanings of things is, in most cases, a soldier with massive haemorrhaging and multiple organ failure who failed to notice the enemy sneaking up behind him because his head was in the clouds. This time was different, though. This enemy wasn't capable of much in the way of stealth. We knew where they were, where they would come from. It wasn't a matter of being particularly alert - only a matter of waiting to see how badly the odds against us were stacked.
I was still unable to completely lose myself in reflection, even given the extreme boredom of waiting for the enemy to show up. Both soldiering and interminable parent-teacher conferences had prepared me well for the occasional boring spell. My eyes wandered the horizon - still only trees. The lookout would tell us when they came.
Crouching here, cold, hungry, and - like everyone else - waiting to die, I realised how much I missed my family. My home. If I made it home, I told myself, and I've seen too much crap to believe in a higher power but if something, somehow, gets me through this and back home, then I'll take Alice out to an Italian restaurant. I'll buy her flowers, really do it right. I'll even miraculously find that awful garden gnome she got from her grandma, the one that mysteriously went missing shortly after it arrived. Hell, I'll even buy the damn kid a plastic dinosaur or something. He'll just throw it in the deep-fryer, but I'm sure on some level he'll appreciate it.
---
"Captain Allen?"
"Speaking."
"You've been off-duty for seven years now."
"Not my fault. You never called me back."
"There's a situation. You've being called back."
I missed the army more than anything. Sometimes I would lie awake and dream of phonecalls like this. Sure, my wife was beautiful, and sure, my kid was... a kid, but in time it all begins to seem so shallow. There's no life in it. Eat, work, sleep. At least when you have a gun in your hand and mud on your face, you know you're alive. Well, at least for the next few seconds.
"I still have my uniform."
---
We weren't ready. As long as we'd sat there, planning our defence, we weren't ready. Nothing could have prepared us. There were just too many of them. They were relentless.
I was still alive. That didn't mean much. They would be back soon - we'd seen what they did to the dead and wounded. Stray screams wandered up to us from the few still fighting, or more likely, running like dogs.
I was still alive, but I had no hope left. That's how I knew I was dead. They would come back, and it would all be over.
Something wet and greasy dripped on me. I laughed. All this, and it was raining, too. Soon I was slick and wet, but it wasn't until some of it dripped in my mouth that I realised it wasn't any ordinary rain. I spat it out.
"Oil?" I tried to turn my head, which turned out to involve pain, pain, and in case I'd forgotten it, some more pain. Curiosity and the fact I was going to die gave me the strength to look up, and see the black rain falling around me. There was a crack in the ground, where the earth itself had been torn asunder by the blasts up here, and oil was gushing out. It fountained into the sky and tumbled down again, all around me, all around the dead.
I was fairly certain it wasn't possible to open a crack that deep from mere cataclysmic gunfights, but another such crack not far away was proving me even more wrong than I already was.
---
"See?"
"Not really, no. What is it?"
"You have to guess!"
"No, I don't. I have to go read my paper. Stop bugging me."
"It's a moose!"
I looked at the mangled piece of batter the kid was juggling from hand to hand - it had only just come out of the fryer, and was still glistening with oil. It could almost, if you looked at it from the right angle, under the right light, be a... mess.
"It's a mess."
"Yay! I made a mess! Look mum!"
---
The lookout called. I came out of my reverie. All around me, soldiers' heads were snapping to follow the pointing hand of the lookout. For a moment, we saw nothing. The lookout had binoculars, we just had our eyes. It didn't take long, though. The horizon started moving. It wasn't dirt and trees anymore - it was living, breathing.
"Mortar!" I shouted. "Fire!" The deep thump sounded immediately. The soldiers were no slouches. "Reload, fire at will!" Thump, thump, thump. I was still waiting for the first one to hit.
A pile of smoke erupting in the distance marked the first hit. At this distance, you couldn't even tell if it did any good. The distance was good, at least - it hit right near the edge of the brown, living mass that approached. From here, though, you couldn't even see the blood.
"My god," said Charlie, crouching next to me. "There are so many. They said there were lots, but - I can't see the end. There can't be that many, can there? I didn't think there were that many in the whole world."
"Nobody did."
---
It had taken a few minutes, but I had crawled to the edge of the hilltop. From here, I could see the moose below, still hunting down survivors. There were too many of them. They weren't a horde - they were a single, smelly, brown animal, one that covered the land as far as I could see.
Admittedly, I couldn't see very far right now, but that didn't change the fact that there were still a lot of the bastards.
I coughed out a laugh. "Stupid kid," I said to myself. "Stupider moose." The oil pouring out of the ground was doing its best to get in it again, but the ground itself was in the way. Rivers of the black stuff were now as ubiquitous as the rivers of moose, and most of the moose were belly-deep now. They didn't seem to mind it much - it made it harder for the humans to get away.
I pulled the pin, and threw my grenade. It was a crappy throw. Seven years of idleness and a severe beating by an army of moose had left me in quite a pathetic state.
I covered my head quickly when I saw the grenade bounce up much too short - it didn't even get a chance to roll down the hill into the rivers of oil. I yelled as a piece of shrapnel tore into my arm.
---
"So how did you do it, daddy?"
I coughed, and the doctor intervened. "Now, now. Your father should rest now. Eh's been through a lot, you know, saving us from moosekind."
"It's okay, doc. I can't leave the brat on a cliffhanger. He might come back tomorrow. So, kid, here's what I did: I found a Pepsi can, and scooped up as much oil as I could in it. I stole Charlie's lighter - don't smoke, it'll kill you - and lit the can on fire. Then I rolled it down the hill."
The kid waited. He still wasn't very good at telling when I'd reached the end of a story. "Then what?"
"Then, whoomph! That's what. The tastiest-smelling victory you'll ever have."
Posted mine over here.
Andy Rodigliano was dreaming of deep-fried moose. He wasn’t, strictly speaking, asleep, but he was so lost in his thoughts that he may as well have been. The scent of the moose dish was in his nostrils, hot and smoky and musky. His tongue twisted in his mouth, scraping against the sides of his teeth in search of the elusive muscley piece of heaven. Saliva would have flooded his mouth if there had been any moisture available for such a thing.
A bird startled from a bush nearby and Andy’s eyes snapped open. He whimpered a little as his moose fantasy flew away just as quickly. Then he slapped himself.
“Snap out of it,” he said out loud, startling another bird into the air. “Daydreaming is not going to help you get out of this. And if you never get back to town, how are you ever going to kill McPartlan for having this stupid idea?”
Andy was ignoring the fact that McPartlan was probably already be dead, of course.
“ ‘Let’s go out toward the glacier,’ he says,” Andy muttered. “ ‘We’ll take along some beers, catch us some fish, and leave our worries behind,’ he says. Fun bachelor’s weekend, just the two of us. HA!”
It might actually have gone that way, to be fair. Probably would have been better if they’d stuck to the beer. He blamed McPartlan for that too. His friend had brought along a king-size bottle of Jack. “To keep us warm,” McPartlan’d explained with a laugh. Now Andy knew it was liquid courage he’d brought along. His friend would never have opened his mouth if it weren’t for the Jack.
The first night hadn’t gone too badly. They’d managed to set up a decent camp and get a good fire going. A lot of hikers came that way and the rangers made sure the firepit was in decent shape, plenty of firewood and a box of kindling nearby. The two didn’t bother to fish that night either, just unpacked the brats they’d brought along and rolled them over the flames until the skins burst open and the juices sizzled onto the coals. When they’d finished all the brats they’d brought – the outdoor air made a man hungry – they cracked open a couple more beers. Laughing like idiots and licking their fingers, they’d let loose with some wolf howls, then made up cowboy songs to shout tunelessly to the stars. Men in the wild, that’s what they were.
The next day, they’d packed everything up, cleared the campsite, and headed off again. After their merriment the night before, they’d both been in quiet moods, content to hike and see nature – watering it occasionally – and listen to the sounds of birds and wind and the jangle of buckles against the skillet McPartlan had tethered to the outside of his pack. They’d slept late so they didn’t stop for lunch until around two. They heaved their packs off their backs, McPartlan’s hitting the dirt with a muffled clank, Andy’s with a nylon slither—he had the tent. McPartlan turned toward his bag with a groan, but Andy waved him off.
“Don’t worry about it, man. We’ll catch some fish tonight, eat from your supply tomorrow,” he said, rooting around for the baggie of Power Bars in his own pack. He tossed a couple to his friend, and ripped open his own, munching thoughtfully.
McPartlan was tearing into his bar like he hadn’t eaten in days. “Man, this is good,” he said, spewing little flecks of granola in front of him. “I never remember how good these things are until I get out on the trail.”
“They say hunger is the best sauce,” Andy said solemnly. McPartlan stopped chewing to stare at him incredulously. Andy snorted. “It’s a saying, McPartlan. Geez, read occasionally.”
McPartlan started chewing again. “Whatever. It’s a stupid saying. Nobody puts sauce on a Power Bar.”
“You’re such an idiot,” Andy said. They chewed companionably for a couple of minutes.
“Hey, you think sauce would help Rita’s moose balls?” McPartlan asked innocently.
Andy choked and sputtered. “What? Oh, please don’t remind me of those things! That was the worst idea ever. And yes,” he said, raising his hand to forestall what his friend was about to say. “I know it was my idea. I had those moose steaks from Hobson’s last hunt and I was also very drunk at the time, if you’ll remember. Someone should have put a gag in my mouth before I came up with that plan. There is not a sauce in the world to make those edible.”
“I still say it would have gone better if she hadn’t used the doughnut oil,” McPartlan said. “I mean, moose fat combined with that? Who wasn’t expecting disaster?”
“Rita,” Andy sighed. “She watching those cooking shows and thinks it means she’s freakin’ Emeril. The other night, she told me she was thinking about teaching a cooking class at the CC. I shudder to think of what she’d come up with.” He shook his head. “I love her, though. She can’t cook and she’s a little delusional, but I love her. I don’t even have to be drunk to say it, you know? I don’t get it, but all she has to do is smile and me and I get all weak-kneed. Moose balls and all.”
McPartlan cleared his throat uneasily and Andy looked at him. “What?” he asked. “Am I making you uncomfortable?”
“No, I…it’s fine,” answered his friend. “It’s just…well, we should probably get going. The next camp is eight miles and we still have to catch our dinner.” He crumpled the wrappers and shoved them in his pocket, then reached down to sling on his pack. The skillet smacked him in the elbow as he hoisted it and he yelped, dropping the pack on his foot.
Andy snickered. “Did you have a beer this morning already?” He slung on his own pack and waited for McPartlan to recover.
McPartlan was a lot more chatty that afternoon. He rambled about his truck, the trees, whether or not they should see if they could sneak into Russia from the island one of these days, and a whole lot more. Andy was happy to join in. They were bonding, right? Girls talked about all sorts of stupid stuff to bond; maybe it worked for guys, too.
When they’d set up camp, though, he’d noticed that McPartlan was acting kind of klutzy again. He kept tripping over dust and forgetting things in his pack, having to make ten trips when he should only have had to make one. He even managed to slice open his thumb on a hook before finally settling into a relatively still position on a rock by the water.
Andy stood next to him, casting his own line into the river. “Dude, are you okay?” he asked. “You’ve been acting awfully squirrely, even for you.”
McPartlan’s fishing rod jerked and the line spooled out too fast as he jumped. “What? No. I mean, yeah, I’m good. Just want to catch my dinner is all. I’m starving. Cause you know, like you said, hunger and the sauce and life’s better with food and all that--”
“Oookay,” Andy interrupted. “Forget I asked.”
They actually managed to catch a couple of fish, in spite of McPartlan’s fidgety bouncing leg making his line dance around. Andy figured it was some kind of divine intervention, taking pity on the idiots so they didn’t starve.
McPartlan was quiet as they cleaned their dinner and built the fire. When the fish were settled into their new frying pan home, he turned to Andy with a tight, dopey grin. “Say,” he said. “How about that little something extra for our first wildman hunting success.” He pulled out a lumpy bundle—the bottle of Jack wrapped in long underwear. “Good thing it didn’t break when I dropped the pack, huh?” He looked fondly at the bottle as if it had accomplished something and he was the proud parent. Then he looked at Andy. “I thought a little before dinner cocktail might be in order.”
Andy wasn’t complaining. “Don’t mind if I do.”
They got kinda drunk kinda fast. Not falling down drunk, just the kind where stuff starts spilling out of your mouth before you realize it. Where consequences aren’t quite as thought through as they could be. Where you forget that there’s fish cooking over the fire because you’re too busy talking to your best buddy in the whole wide world ever.
“Seriously, McPartleum, you know I wouldn’t want to be out here with anyone elsh, right?” Andy was slurring just a little, but he was serious. “It was a good idea, man. Good. Next to my Rita girl, you might be my favorite pershon ever. You get me, man! And I’m hard to get, I think. But you do!”
McPartlan started to cry. “No, stop it! Don’t say that! Why’d you have to go and say that?”
Andy blinked and tried to focus. “What did I say? Don’t you like being my best friend?”
McPartlan wailed. “No! Yes! You’re my best friend, too, Andoo. But I’m not a good friend. I’m a bad friend. You shouldn’t want to be friends with me. Not me.”
“Shut up. You’re the best friend a guy—”
“I’m not,” McPartlan broke in, gripping Andy’s arm earnestly. “I’m the worst friend. Andy, I have to tell you something. You should sit down.”
Andy looked down. “I think I am sitting down, Mishpartlan.”
McPartlan looked down too and patted the ground with his free hand. “Oh. Okay. Me, too.” He looked up. “I’m gonna stand. But you stay there.” He got up and started pacing a little, just two or three wobbly steps back and forth. “Okay, you know Rita?”
“The love of my life?” Andy said. “Yeah, we’ve met.”
McPartlan burst into fresh tears. “Just nod! Don’t say stuff like that!”
Andy nodded obediently.
“Well…about two months ago when you were at work, she asked me to come over. She wanted to make you something special for dinner for your anniversary and she wanted me to taste stuff and tell her what she should cook. I went with the chicken enchiladas, by the way.”
“Oh, those were actually good!” Andy said. “I thought she got someone to bring them in!”
“No, she and I cooked them together. I made her take out the nutmeg and add some salsa, cause I thought it would…wait! That’s not my point.”
“Oh, sorry.” Andy wasn’t quite sure what he was apologizing for.
“My point is that she was really fun, Andy. Lots of fun.”
“Sure. She’s fun.” Andy figured he was supposed to agree here.
“She is! And really sweet and thoughtful, too,” McPartlan continued. “And so pretty. She’s got this hair and it’s all curly and in the sunlight sometimes it gets all sparkly like gold and when she smiles her lips turn up all cute on one side more than the other and when I kiss her, her eyes close and it makes her lashes look super long…” he trailed off, smiling.
“Wait. What?” Andy asked. McPartlan jumped and stared down at him. Andy slowly struggled to his feet and McPartlan took a step back. “Did you just say, ‘When I kiss her…’?” He was feeling soberer by the minute. McPartlan moved another step back, looking panicked. “Did you just say you kissed my wife?!?”
“Umm…yeah, I did, but wait a minute!” McPartlan begged. “I…well, that’s sort of why I brought you out here, man. I wanted to tell you face to face.”
“Tell me that you kissed my WIFE?”
“No. Well, not just that.”
“WHAT?!” Andy shouted. “There’s MORE?”
McPartlan stumbled backwards, tripping and landing on his butt in the dirt. “Take it easy!”
Andy growled at him. “What. Else.”
McPartlan clenched his jaw and took a deep breath. “We’re in love, Andy. Rita and I. We tried to fight it but there’s nothing we can do. I love her, I do, and we both love you so much and I promised Rita I wouldn’t tell you but you were being so nice and this was the only—”
His voice broke off abruptly as the skillet full of burnt fish hit his head and he pitched backwards.
“How much do you love me now?” Andy screamed at McPartlan’s prone body. He spun around and kicked some dirt at the fire, then turned again to kick some at his former friend’s face. Then he grabbed the bottle of Jack and stalked off into the trees to find some little furry critter he could kick around until he felt better.
That was about four and a half days ago, he thought. The Jack had been gone in about half an hour. He’d gotten lost about five minutes later and realized he was lost about three hours later. By the time he sobered up, it was the next day and he’d had no idea where he was or how to get back to the campsite, his pack, a compass, or anything helpful.
Turns out hunger really was the best sauce. He would kill for some of Rita’s moose balls right now.
Wow. That's really long. And for some reason, the paragraph separation didn't really make it through. Sorry about that, guys.
Monda stood at the kitchen window, blowing across the top of her Masonville Mystery Spot mug and waiting for her coffee to cool a notch. She could've put cream in it, but she'd been doing real good on her diet and didn't want to screw it up by messing with her coffee.
"Do you think they can really do it?"
Val had her own cup of coffee, but was over by the fridge doctoring it up. She looked up from putting the skim away.
"Doubt it. That thing barely held last year's turkey, and that bird was only maybe thirty pounds." She joined Monda at the window.
Milo and Dave had emerged from the storage shed out back, wrestling a turkey fryer through the corrugated plastic doors. They came up on the back deck with the thing and set it up on its spindly metal legs. There was some arguing. Dave whipped a little tape measure off of his key chain and some measuring was done. The two men stood in silence for a moment; Milo took off his Vikings hat, scrubbed the back of his hand across his forehead, and put it back on. Wordlessly, the two men headed back to the storage shed.
"What do you figure those two are up to now?"
Val offered Monda a maple leaf cookie from its plastic tray. Monda thought about turning it down, but figured that she'd saved enough calories not putting cream in her coffee.
"I can't say I know. I haven't been in that storage shed for ten years. Dave could have anything in there and I wouldn't know about it."
"'Cept for porn."
"Yeah, I've always been real good about sniffin' out his porn stash."
"Milo doesn't even bother any more. Not since we got the chipper-shredder."
"Nice one."
"Yep. Didn't even chip a blade when I put that old computer of his through it."
Milo's back appeared through the shed door. Monda absent-mindedly reached for another cookie.
"This should be good."
Milo back up slowly, his arms clasped around one end of an industrial oil drum. Dave slowly followed, hunched over under the weight.
"Well, I'll be."
"Uh-huh."
"Thought I'd gotten to the end of these hunting trips when I told him he couldn't bring home something he's couldn't cook all at one time. "
"Hmmm."
"Damn, that's gonna take a lot of oil."
"Might not be a big deal."
"Whatcha thinkin'?"
"Big as that drum is, I still don't think the antlers are gonna fit."
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