Out of the mouth of Babes

Out of the Mouth of Babes

By

Chrispy

 
The wind down the alley was made of icicles and shadow strewn madness. Its bite was filled with teeth and sucking hunger. For the last time that night, he reached into his stink stank stunk parka and pulled out his last drops of essence of Angels in liquid form.
Just when he was in the middle of his final drippity-drop freeze and hold moment; with the bottle upside down and the last dregs being dragged into him by seemingly magical invisible gravitation… he heard them coming.
The lunatic moon bore silent witness.
About a half a block down the darkest part of the alley, where the monsters would come from, if there were any in play… or maybe not… fuckin’ monsters.
“I fuckin’ told you, left, but nooooo, you wouldn’t listen… again. There goes a half hour I won’t get back.”
“Here boy, com’on Babes, deres a good boy, I got treats!!!” youngish guy, maybe thirties? Skinny.
“Fuck you man, you know that shit’s a trigger for me.” Gruff, damn, I dunno, maybe DeVito?
Can’t be… really? …No, can’t be.
As they come into one of the slices of moonlight, the fucking dog, continues.
“Dude, sometimes I forget why I hang around with you.”
“Probably the treats…” bone and skin shrugs should never happen so fast. His laugh was a baby snake with a serious case of the hiccups. He was thin, but not junky thin.
“K, that’s enuff, just for that I’m not gonna show you the next door.” His mouth was moving and trying to shape the words, but there was another source for the voice to take up where his doggy lips and tongue fell short…it must be mental… ahem psychic. He seemed to be some kind of shepard cross maybe?
As they slide back into shadow, I see the dog’s head turn and his eyes dog stab me in dead center of my private darkness.
My brain skipped the tracks, and I careened off the rails of my normal life.
Dogs can’t talk. But, clear as moonlit brain fog, he looked right at me and said,
“Shit.” Yup, definitely sounds like one of the DeVito clan.
Holy crap.
Their combined frozen form stares drilled down deep and pulled forth one of my best, little girl giggles….
Nope, not a little girl, not me, not now, not ever…
I squared my shoulders and stare right back and try desperately to look not desperate at all.
I would have bought a blink from my own eyelids for good money. But nope.
“Ee-hay an-cay ear-hay ee- may.” I could somehow sense the words were supposed to be coming out of the side of his mouth? Snout?
“What??” the skinny dude looked a little stoned.
“Dummass, he can hear me.” His paw, front left, aimed his little black claws at me. I felt impaled.
The skinny ghost of a kid scans me with his old-fashioned sonar-based bullshit. “Hmmm.”
I crack like the sticks under a very big stick cracker thing, and pray to whatever Gods are out there that these two will buy a really convincing idiot imitation on full duck mode. I pull out my best wide-eyed stare, do a slow unfocused turn, blink and bring up the dumb look face please.
According to my Oscar winning performance, I supposedly saw nothing, and they saw right through it.
“Shit.” Said the skinny man this time.
Suddenly he freezes solid, very theatrically, and his wild eyes turn his whole head to the left in a crack fire twist and hold.
And he says…
“Squirrel!?!”
The dog is a blur of head-turning Angel of squirrel death dealing; and about half way around… his shoulders slump and he sniffs the air in the skelington’s direction,
“Really?”
Then his half growl voice grew tired and a little sad.
“Dude, I thought we talked about this?”
After all the bullshit and craptalk, skin and bones looked like he felt a little bad. And humans looking that way towards a dog is warm and comical.
My tiny snigger brought me back into their spotlight eyes.
“Shit.”
The chorus of their voices was stern, but right on the edge of pants pissing laughter.
I have, never to this day, been able to recreate my sudden fascination with my own cuticles, in such a nonchalant fashion. Probably. I’m thinking Oscar worthy, but maybe just an Emmy for tv movie of the week. K, maybe not.
The dog, Babes I guess? trotted over to me and showed curiosity and a very large-toothed vehemence towards my faked good vibes. And my very real boundaries. His tongue smelled like three-week-old tuna on the sidewalk melt, it made a weird slithery sound as it moved its way up my face, and across my one good eyebrow. I think I tried not to blink but the stink got me, got me bad.
My hands moved voluntarily to wipe away the slime of its passage but didn’t want to touch something so vile, so I kinda looked like an old native shaman one-handed-smudging invisible smoke. For a bit.
I started to say, “What the fu---” and Babes paw laid itself across my lips, gently, but with authority and patience.
“shhhh…” I never thought a dog could speak with such sibilance. His psychic filler must have been on full.
“k” he said, with his many molar backups…
“I don’t think this is gonna be a problem.”
The world held its collective breath while he slowly turned his quivering snout towards the seriously inconvenienced face of the skinny bastard with him.
By some form of mutual psychic agreement, they both stood back half a step.
And then the dog, Babes, (I could read it on his collar now) said,
“Watch this.”
Then he slowly raised his front right paw again, and, with his little brown eyes locked right on mine, he began to swirl his paw in a clockwise spin, milking the moment…
And he said, with all seriousness,
“These are not the Droids you are looking for…”
Their laughter was a shared flashfire, not put out until they’d each rolled on the ground for quite some time.
Then, in the blurred horror that this night had become, the dog did a swift sniff around his paralysed terrified body, paying close attention to the clenched buttox of his suddenly sphinx-like statue, the rictus smiling Budha he’d become, and moved on.
With a knowing nod, and some indeterminant mumbling, they moved down the alley a little farther. Their small furtive backward glances, the only hint that they’d acknowledged his presence at all, a solemn oath of their realism in his mind.
Then he heard the dog, Babes, once again,
“K, let me pull up the map one more time…”
He side nodded his hairy head, and there was a faint click, from his collar…
Then it glowed electric, a swirl of colors around and about, and then …
Directly from the tag on the front, a rainbow hued beam emerged, flickering and flashing until it solidified into a neon lit wire frame map, it was meticulously projected onto the cinder block wall beside them. A map of the end of the alley where they stood, there were many flashing circles around the object’s unseen in the shadows before them.
The dogs’ eyes focused on the highlighted points on the map, one by one, and he began to recite directions.
“K, see that busted tricycle? K, turn the back right wheel, a full spin, at least…”
“Uhhh, counterclockwise… that’s it.”
“Perfect, alright, now see that dolls head? The blonde one, no, the shorthaired one to the left… that’s it.”
“Turn it towards the guy without the sense of humor…”
“Yes, bud, the only other person in the alley, great detectorin’ sherlock.”
“Alright, now, see that sandal, the yellow kids one, with the white daffodil on the front?, pull the heel out from under that old newspaper and let the moon shine on the glue gems along the right bottom side.”
There was a slowly building hum that had just became loud enough to be registered by my slowly sobering brain.
“Now, finally, pull that broken umbrella out from under that pile of mulch and swing it around your head three times… yes, of course, counter-clockwise.”
The inaudible rumbling became a rumbling roar, a quiet jungle cat on the prowl.
“K, now slam the umbrella down at your feet and say, Shwumballah. Shwumballah, Shwumballah.”
When the skinny stoner had completed all the steps, there was a small puff of coloured smoke from the end of the umbrella, and then a laser seared out from the tag on the collar, the map was cut off and pencil thin, straight cut started to march it’s way across the brick wall of the factory behind the recently manipulated pile of trash.
It slowly etched an electric blue line into the form of a large doorway… and then, with a grinding crumbling crackle of enormous energies unleashed… the door opened…
It was filled with blinding white light, flashing pink from time to time…
Another psychic link formed between them, and by some mutual consent they agreed to the terms of my exposure to this madness. The skinny dude, shrugged off his backpack, pulled out something and walked over to where I sat, stunned beyond words or thought. He knelt down before me and placed a bottle of 12-year-old scotch on the dirt in front of me, then rejoined his canine companion.
The freshly created portal to wherever or whenever stood waiting and they walked towards it, and then at the last minute turned towards me, in sympathy I think, they both looked at me, then looked at each other and shrugged, then they walked into the light-filled doorway to wherever…
The last thing he heard from them was a slightly miffed dog voice saying how they should try to take a more professional approach next time they were so rudely interrupted.
And then the doorway to wherever closed behind them, and the darkness of the alley was black on slightly grey. He would have thought it was a bad drunk dream, except he could still smell dog. And the slobber was still damp on his face. The scotch was good though… so there’s that.                                                                                  

The end