4
The Galapurred Forsendyke
He remembered —but never dreamed its source -~ the old poem which began, "A swibosh is an Indian," and as he leaned back in his chair puffing on a pipe, his lean bronzed face darkly serious against the moonglow, a little echo hooted from the hills as if an owl'd cried.
Then Edris called. At the alarmant tingle of the bell, like a tinnient tang of a rattleshake's tremor, he ran to the telephone and shouted eagerly, "Edris! My darling" Then he remembered to take receiver off the hook. He was answered by dead silence. Then, to his amazement and utter horror, a long damp tongue swished out of the mouthpiece, lapped his cheek and disappeared in a puff of acrid steam. "The Martians!" was his first thot, as he tremblingly buttered his toast. Then he heard Edris' voice. It floated easily from the ceiling as if it were inverted steam. He looked up, and discovered overhead that the planet India had vanished from the map. It had peeled itself loose and inched over the wallpaper and was now wrapping itself like a second skin around a baited potato. "But that's impossible!" he breathed, "There aren't any potatoes in August, and especially in bathtubs," Again Edris' voice reached him. What was she saying? "Go with the pretty men, dear, they'll feed you an orange." But that sounded crazy. He was worried, and clung to a red-hot radiator which melted into a puddle at his touch, burning a round red hole in the rug.
Seventeen puffs of black vapor—he counted, them—whiffed up winsomely from the charred circle. "Around and around," he said, dreamily, remembering the second line of the poem, "When Fifthly is perplexed," Edris oozed out of the shadows to him, longlike and snaky, with fearthy fettles adorning her foresome, and a blaze in her eyes like the hurmwurst of Whidby. Island, island, he repeated to himself,, thrusting an negatory hand thru the farthing of hor wrabdy — and her mouth parted to disclose another mouth, from which issued visible words like ticker tape of steam in chilly air, so surprising him that he could only stand rooted, like a tree. It was then that he noticed the snakes in her snakes in her hair, as the leaves sprouted from his cheeks and from every simple vascicle of his tubular perpendages sometimes cursorily applellated, eyebreams.
Among the amiderie of her fascinating fingers, which she waved before his face like the shimmer of phosphorescence on a salty sea on hot midsummer moonlight, took shape an elegant form, something reminiscent of a redchief. within his sore heart a black thot grew, spurred by the excess of his agonized birdtwitters, bidding him to slay and do so ouickly. He reached for a weapon. There was nothing at hand but a slug. He groaned. A slug against snakes? What chance of victory? As tho she'd read his thot, she moved nearer, her laffter lifting and lowering like a fragile boat on waves of honey. One by one her eyes —390 of them - popped out with hollow slaps like corks from bottles, while within the dull draperies of scarlet which adorned the farthest lamp-post stirred an unnameable bloody something which sent forth a thrill of foreboding into his anguished heart, and he remembered the 4th and las lines of the poem "He who dines alone is hexed," He uttered a gurgling scream as she leaped upon him, and her snales torn and the steam of her bare eye-sockets scalded him then the ensanguined thin crawled limply over the face of tho blinding desert and the vacant sun stared sitelessly at nothing.
