Happy Birthday

A moral of public outrage for those who seek spiritual guidance in a taboo terrain by Kaufman.




The night was ablaze with explosive sounds of invertebrates on kamikaze missions. Electricity had few friends, least of all being those who failed to discern her significant advantage, whether a friend or foe. The wooden porch seemed ancient against the teal and grey pinstriped cladding. A decaying pig's head, the sole flesh-based remnant of a mid-week celebration of near indecipherable reasoning, afforded insects of all manner and beetles few in variety a 360-degree doorway into the twenty-four-hour smorgasbord of bovine delights. Empty bottles and cans of assorted alcoholic beverages seemed cheap and bored by the steady diet of unprotected intercourse with human body cavities.

Curiosity had long ago reached an all-time low amongst neighbours on either side of the street; instigated two weeks into the present occupants' tenancy, the neighbourhood betting pool had jackpotted to four figures, largely due to the real estate company's hesitation to evaluate sooner. Spurred by a gambling addiction, Dr Dreyfuss, a bearded psychic gynaecologist to daytime TV soap stars and animals traumatised from being rescued from a fate worse than spontaneous combustion, had kept the interest stakes afloat with a generous donation and a three-inch column in the local rag, The Meninga Bugle. He sniffed what others had failed to recognise; the aroma of over inflated self-importance within the group dynamic.

Urged by a wind most repugnant, a rocking chair creaked amid a swarm of suicides.

'Ahem,' Elmer coughed as the steel-capped toes of his boots raked the side of the porch.

'Wha chu wohn now?' demanded his brother Clarence with an air of startled scepticism. The monobrow on his skewed face rose by ten degrees to the right.

'Oh, nuffin',' Elmer retorted throwing a gold and platinum bracelet into the direction of Clarence. 'Jus dis,' he added.

As the bracelet beamed Clarence in the eye socket above his fake rubber-enamel eye, he expelled a single-syllabled curse word unfit for any modern day Bible.

'Wha chu do dat foa?' he said a short while later nursing the tingling sensation with one of his perforated knuckles.

Elmer shrugged his shoulders. 'I gis what ah mean to say is hapee birfday browe,' he said.

Clarence held the bracelet close to his abled eye. He snickered like a mutt thrown onto a whale carcass at what he saw.

'Mrs Jameson?' he questioned by way of intonation.

'Nah,' Elmer said. 'Shee gits berried toomorrah; it's from dat dawg lovin' reetard, Dreyfuss.'