The Bay It Buzz
by Harris Tobias
I knew they were lying.
"Don burry Bill, ebry thing
bill be all bright," in that crazy accent of
theirs with their "B's" and "W's"
crossed.
The house was a horrible mess. The
furniture was dirty and old. What pictures there
were were crooked and not of anything anyone in
their right mind would hang on a wall--a photo of
a toilet seat, a painting of a crumpled sheet of
paper. The yard was littered with trash; the lawn
was some sickly tufts of wiry grass; the gate was
hanging by a single hinge.
"Ebry thing bill be just the
bay it buzz," he had said.
But it buzzn’t…er, wasn’t..
It wasn't just that the house was a
mess, it's what lay beyond the gate that really
stunned me. Desert. There were a few forlorn
little houses like mine and then nothing but
scrub and dust and tumbleweed as far as the eye
could see.
"You call this the way it was?"
I said to Bork. The alien stood a full seven feet
tall and grinned down at me with its idiotic grin
and its shiny suit. It looked human but you could
tell he wasn't really.
"Bell, it buzz harder den be
thought. Wut, all in all, not too wad."
I could only groan for what was once
a lovely Midwestern town in the corn-belt. Put
through Bork's analyzer it was supposed to be
digitized and reassembled exactly the way it was.
But it didn't take a genius to see that the
reality that went in wasn't what came out. In
went my gorgeous sofa with the art deco arms and
the fabric I searched all over Chicago for; and
out came this dumpy Sears hide-a-bed I wouldn't
even sit on. In went my little dog, Muffy, and
out came this cat-like fur beast.
"Stop" I yelled.
"You're getting it all wrong."
"Don burry," Bork said and
squirted me with something that knocked me out
for a week. When I came to, things were
pretty strange and Bork and his pals were gone.
He paid me though, just as he promised. I have a
stack of hundred dollar bills in the basement.
Every one has a picture of George Bush on it.
|
