SPECIMEN
& Other Stories
by
Alan Annand
Copyright © Alan Annand 2015
Specimen & Other Stories
© Alan Annand 2011
V.16032016
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. Distribution of this electronic edition via the internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal.
ISBN 978-1-927799-11-6
Table of Contents
Bananarama: Reformed meat-eater embarks on a 15-day bananas-and-orange-juice diet, with surprising side effects.
The Date Square Killer: Mild-mannered hit man finds love, social justice and the meaning of life in non-random acts of murder.
River Girl: Middle-aged bureaucrat takes a detour on his morning jog that leads him to an unexpected rendezvous with Fate.
Specimen: A wealthy butterfly collector visits his twin brother, warden of a penal colony, who is building his own unique collection.
The Bassman Cometh: My night with Margaret Atwood: Hapless university graduate student in 1975 ruins famous Canadian author's poetry reading.
The Naskapi & the U-Boat: A German U-Boat in WW2 visits northern Quebec to install a weather station, but a native family compromises their secret mission.
Introduction
Cormac McCarthy once said, “I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.” Indeed, like many other novelists, for me the short story form has been more of a diversion than a devotion, sort of like a marathon runner taking an occasional jog around the neighborhood.
These stories, however, reflect the diversity of my interests and style. Three are humorous, two involve murder and violence, a sixth is a wry combination of both. Two are autobiographical, the other four pure fiction. Two are set in my native New Brunswick, two in my adopted Toronto, two in remote climes as divergent as the tropics and the Arctic.
Ultimately, this collection is an appetizer. If you like some of these, perhaps you’ll enjoy my crime novels, all of which feature heroes and villains with a wry sense of humor and a lust for adventure in all its forms.
~~~~~~~~~
Bananarama
Many years ago, inspired by the stellar example of the Buddha, and a bizarre association with one Wild Bill Periwinkle, an American New Age writer I’d met in the backwoods of New Brunswick, I decided to become a vegetarian.
It was a sensible thing to do, although desperation played a part. After years of struggling to make it as a writer, I was ready to emulate the virtues of any good role model, and since Wild Bill had already carved a niche for himself in the publishing world, I figured that if it worked for him, it might also work for me. According to Wild Bill, if only I’d free my body from the bad karma of all those hapless animals sacrificed for my dining pleasure, my luck would turn, and I too could soon see my name on a book jacket. Equally important, Wild Bill explained, there were also significant health benefits.
“After years of eating meat, the heavy mucus coating in the colon thickens to the consistency of truck tire rubber, becoming a host of putrefaction. As noxious debris seeps through the bowel wall, the capillaries to the colon suck up these toxins and distribute them freely among the organs and tissues of the body.”
Wild Bill took a long draw on a skinny joint and passed it to me. He was a normally reticent fellow, but as soon as he had a lungful of ganja smoke inside him, he became as gabby as a talk-show host on amphetamines.
“Thanks to years of encrusted fecal buildup, some colons under autopsy have measured nine inches in diameter, with channels no bigger than a pencil through which one can barely pass a rabbit pellet, never mind the super-sized leftovers of yesterday’s fast food meal. I’ll bet you didn’t know, Elvis had 60 pounds of this crap jamming up his exit route.”
“Is that why he died on the john?” I said.
“To rid your body of all that intestinal gunk, and pave the way for a better life, both now and in your next incarnation, you’ve got to undergo a cleansing diet,” Wild Bill told me in his most seriously spiritual tone.
It seemed like a worthy goal, and although I’d followed Wild Bill’s advice on any number of other quasi-mystical regimens that had failed to manifest any noteworthy benefit, I was always game for another adventure in consciousness-raising. According to Wild Bill, it was simply a matter of faith and perseverance before my colon would be running as clean as a mountain stream.
The program was deceptively simple, as outlined in The Canadian Whole Earth Almanac, a copy of which Wild Bill loaned me as proof this wasn’t just another of his crazy ideas, but was in fact endorsed by one of the flagship publications of the counter-culture. In the best New Age tradition, with a strong bias for all things cosmic, the diet would start on the new moon and finish on the full moon. Fifteen days, in which I should eat no more nor less than nine bananas a day. To wash it down, I could drink all the orange juice I wanted. And if I needed to suppress any gas resulting from the consumption of enough bananas to feed a small tribe of monkeys, I should add three cardamom seeds to this daily regimen. That’s it, that’s all.
This being my first diet, I decided to keep it simple. I’d never been one to suffer from gas, so I didn’t trouble myself with hunting down the exotic cardamom seed at a natural foods emporium. Instead, I went to the nearest supermarket and bought a case of almost-ripe bananas, and a gallon of orange juice. The checkout girl looked at me kind of funny.
“Do you have a pet monkey?”
“Yes, but he’s a naughty little primate, and I frequently have to spank him. Do you love animals? Maybe you could help. What time do you get off work?”
She hurriedly gave me change and turned her attention to the next shopper in line. I shouldered my case of bananas and headed home.
My first day went something like this: two bananas for breakfast, three bananas for lunch, three bananas for dinner and one banana for a late-night snack. The first couple of days went fine. I liked bananas and they seemed to like me. I noticed, however, that despite all this volume, my bowels seemed to have gone on strike. Maybe they were just trying to adjust to this pH-neutral food that was so good for them that they didn’t know how to deal with it, somewhat like the aboriginal peoples who didn’t get it at first that the arriving colonists would, contrary to all the initial evidence, eventually improve their quality of life, turning them from itinerant hunter-gatherers into business-savvy casino operators.
Finally, on day three I had a bowel movement that should have prompted me to get a photo and/or a witness to register it for the Guinness Book of World Records. It was the size of a banana-colored anaconda, and took several flushes of the toilet to banish it to the netherworld of the sewage system. My inner monkey got quite a primal fright in seeing this snake-like phenomenon so up close and personal, but after it was gone, I felt distinctly lighter in all respects. Maybe I was now on my way to cleanliness of body, soul and spirit, just as Wild Bill in a temporary lucid state had prophesied.
Around day five, I began to suffer gas attacks the like of which World War One trench soldiers had never experienced. At first it was just a minor thing, a bit of intestinal bloating, followed by a relieving wind that smelled distinctly of bananas. It had quite a sweetish odor, actually, and in the volumes being emitted,
quickly precluded the need in my apartment for incense to mask the odor of stale kitty litter or the catnip my feline friends were fond of smoking day and night.
I rushed out to the nearest health food store and bought a hundred grams of cardamom seeds. I didn’t have anything with which to grind the seeds to a powder, so I just gobbled a handful. An hour later, I lay doubled up on my bed, nearly paralyzed by terrible stomach cramps.
Meanwhile, it was obvious that the cardamom seeds had none of their desired effect, and by day’s end I was discharging gas almost continuously, at an industrial rate of production. My lower bowel had been transformed into a banana methane factory.
I called my girlfriend and cancelled our usual Friday night date. She was miffed but I preferred not to explain. On Saturday night I skipped a movie I’d planned to see with some buddies. I didn’t go to church on Sunday morning. I missed classes on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday, however, I had a test in American Lit 409 that was so important I couldn’t avoid it, so by hissing wind all the way to the class, and then completing a multiple choice questionnaire in record time, I made a beeline to the washroom where I cut loose a wicked one that nearly blew the door off the stalls. Temporarily deflated, I retreated to self-imposed solitary confinement in my apartment. Ironically, my reading assignment for the weekend was Gone With the Wind.
Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, Nietzsche said, but he never had to go through this. Suffering in the name of a good cause, however, I maintained a stiff upper lip and a flaccid sphincter. Four more days and my colon would be ollie-ollie-toxin-free. Although I desperately craved pizza, beer, potato chips, pork rinds, salted peanuts – anything but the sweet mush of another banana – I hung tough. God in his wisdom had something good for me at the end of all this, I believed, my faith as unshakeable as those Kamikaze pilots who rode their planes down to destruction with what they called a divine wind at their backs. Trouble is, when I looked over my shoulder, the wind at my back was nothing short of diabolic.
The hiss of gas was a constant background noise. My upstairs neighbors called the utility company to complain about a leak. When a technician arrived with his gas monitor, I told him to go ahead and check the place, I was just going out for a walk. I hurried across the street and into a cemetery where I hunched behind a gravestone and liberated some bowel steam. Squirrels in the trees above swooned like canaries and hung from the branches with sick expressions on their furry little mugs. When I returned to my apartment half an hour later I found a note from the utility man saying everything was fine with the gas lines, but maybe I should empty my garbage can, which was overflowing with rotten banana skins and empty orange juice cartons.
On the afternoon of day 15, the full moon, I was down to the short strokes on this inhuman diet, which by now I was convinced must have been dreamed up by Hanuman, the fierce monkey god of Hindu cosmology, as some bizarre rite of evolutionary progress. No dessert until you eat your vegetables, and no rebirth until you eat your fruit. I was counting, if not the hours, then certainly the bananas. 131 down, only four more to go. I could do it. Before me lay only dinner and a bedtime snack, and then one last night’s restless sleep, during which I would toss and turn and billow the bed sheets with enough banana methane to heat a house.
The doorbell rang. It was Wild Bill, come to town for his once-a-week grocery run, during which he invariably dropped his wife off at the local health food store while he popped around the corner to shoot the breeze and share a joint with me. As was his custom, it was already dangling from his mouth, his lighter cocked in his right hand ready for ignition. As he ambled in, he said, “Whew, that’s some funky-smelling shit, man, you need to open a window and vent this place out.” But before I could say, wait, don’t light that up in here, he flicked his lighter and a tiny flame erupted in a fiery cloud of gas.
They said the blast was heard a dozen blocks away. A fire truck was there in minutes, followed shortly thereafter by a hazardous materials unit and an ambulance, and later by the police and the arson squad. Wild Bill and I were released from the hospital that evening, after criminal intentions had been ruled out, suffering only minor burns incurred at ground-zero of what the haz-mat team called a low-concentration methane explosion of organic origins. I returned to my apartment, whose broken windows had been temporarily sealed with sheets of plastic. I opened two of the windows to create a cross-draught and set a place for dinner at the kitchen table. I pureed one banana in the blender to make soup, ate two more normally as the main dish, and diced the last one to eat for dessert. Exhausted but full, I went to bed.
Aside from the diabolic wind, I slept well, and on awakening to the smell of rotten banana skins, I emptied the garbage and swore that occult vegetarian diets would no longer be a part of this writer’s lifestyle. From this day forth, I resolved to revert to my omnivorous ways. With the dawning of a new day and a new lease on life, I hastened off to my favorite breakfast joint and ordered one of everything on the menu – eggs, bacon, sausage, ham, grits, beans, cereal, muffin, hash browns, toast, and a big pot of coffee.
Recognizing a ravenous man when she saw one, the waitress asked me, “Do you want a fruit cup with that?”
After a moment’s hesitation I said, “Yes, but hold the bananas.”
~~~~~~~~~
The Date Square Killer
Ken liked it at the Mercury Café. No one there knew he was a killer. He could drop in for a coffee and a date square and sit in one of their dumpy club chairs and read the newspaper. No one would be talking business – explaining to him their beef with someone, and asking him how much it’d cost to have their beef turned into hamburger.
It was a slack day and he had time on his hands. He took out his mechanical pencil – a beautiful red Pentel he’d taken from an accountant who’d borrowed far more cocaine money than he’d budgeted for – and worked on a Sudoku puzzle. It was a beginner’s level because he wasn’t that good with numbers and if he got frustrated and started to hear the voices of his grade school math teacher echoing in his head, terrible things could happen.
As he worked on his puzzle, he nibbled on a date square. He patronized the Mercury Café because of their perfect date squares. If she weren’t dead, he could have believed his mother had made them. They had just the right amount of date filling, husk-free and not too sweet. They stuck together perfectly, so he could hold one in his free hand and eat it until it was gone and it wouldn’t fall apart on him. Some of these other places, you needed a whisk broom to finish the damn things.
He was sitting in his favorite chair in the back corner when these two kids came in. The guy was maybe 21, 22, but looked like he’d got stuck in high school mode and couldn’t squirm out of it. He had a skateboard in one hand and a can of Red Bull in the other, tats up and down his arms and calves, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of those ridiculous baggy pants that came down to just below the knee.
There was a girl with him, she looked maybe 19 but stretching for a few years beyond, like she couldn’t wait to graduate from being a kid and turn into a beautiful young woman. She wore a sleeveless white cotton summer dress, briefly translucent as she was framed in the sunny entrance, and had a thick tangle of blonde hair that obscured her face.
They stood at the counter while the guy ordered a couple of coffees from the barrista. End of the afternoon, the place was pretty busy and the good seats in the front half of the café were already taken, so after they cased the joint and came to the same conclusion, they walked into the back and sat on the old sofa that was kitty-corner to him.
The guy propped his skateboard against the sofa and put his feet on the coffee table. The girl sat beside him, but closer to Ken, keeping her knees together and smoothing her dress around her thighs as she settled in. Her tanned legs were the color of coffee ice cream. She carefully removed the lid from her takeout cup, took a brief sip and grimaced at the heat. She blew on the surface of the coffee and Ken noticed how pretty her lips were, pursed
like that, as if she were blowing a kiss.
“Are you coming to Mom’s birthday party?” she asked the guy with her.
“I dunno. I want to go to a party in Oakville.”
“That skank you met on Facebook?” she said.
Annoying rap music erupted from somewhere inside the guy’s pants. He pulled out a cell phone and said, “Whazzup, bro?”
It turned into a long conversation, something about a girl that the caller had a hardon for, but it was apparently going nowhere fast...
Ken knew the feeling. Women didn’t dig him. It was like they had a sixth sense, they looked at his hands and knew he’d done so many bad things with them, and they couldn’t stand the thought of him touching them, and they ran away as fast as he appeared on their horizon. He could write a book about unrequited love.
“Are you finished with that section of the paper?” the girl asked him.
Ken looked at her. She was looking at him. Her eyes were like emeralds with lights behind them. He was blinded, like a raccoon in the middle of the road, and a Jaguar bearing down on him. Whump. That was the sound of her tires running over his heart.
“Uh, yeah. Help yourself.”
She took the newspaper, the Entertainment section, and began to read the cover story.
Ken looked at the numbers on the Sudoku grid and couldn’t make sense of anything. His mind was like one of those paperweights that had been shaken, little snowflakes cascading down upon a landscape vaguely familiar and strange, hiding his tracks so that he wasn’t sure how he’d actually got here or how he was going to get home again.
The guy was still talking on the phone. Ken couldn’t believe how rude he was, ignoring the girl beside him. He understood from their three-line dialogue they were probably brother and sister, not boyfriend and girlfriend, but still. People with cell phones didn’t deserve to have friends, or family for that matter, if they were going to behave so badly.