10/11/09
Field Recording
By Jarrid Deaton


I had no real idea what Slammy Bob was thinking when he wolf-marched his way up my broken steps, one red medicine bottle in his left hand and a blue bottle scattered in candy pieces across the concrete sidewalk.

"Gergelesims," he said. "I can't, can't aposedex. Kibbytaste. All slogwater and none fisty brainforms."

I flipped the latch on my screen door, but he shark-rushed it anyway. The mesh ripped open and Slammy Bob flopped like bad lunch meat on my living room floor.

"Urgle," he said. "I felly, floordirt."

I turned up my field recording of bobcats regurgitating and tried to enter my safe zone to get some rest. I had many things to attend to in the upcoming hours, but Slammy Bob paid that no mind. He was a creature of
seconds, not hours, not days.

"Bob, I have more animals to decode," I told him. "I'd appreciate it if you could keep the noise and limb flailing to a minimum."

"Lungs for boiling," he said. "Batter stingloli, rogplumper. Visit switchbaddy, ohtime."

I stood over him with my sketchbook and recorder.

"What are you, Bob?" I asked.

He heaved toward me and clamped his meat-paw on my shoulder. His eyes rattled in his skull like loose sea stones. He focused his buckshot vision and his tendons unsnapped as his boiled crab back straightened. His ball-of-feet balance and straight shoulders mirrored my stance as he shoved his knuckle bolts deep into my gut.

"A modern scholar and gentleman," he said, taking the recorder and turning it on. " I specialize in exotic animal movements and sounds."

"Yatterwet," I said, and leaked the last of my knowledge on the pressed pulp pages of my sketchbook. "Poncerical and nightymare snore. Newy subjectoli. Flippy place and done."

- - -
Jarrid Deaton lives in eastern Kentucky. He received his MFA in Writing from Spalding University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Underground Voices, Thieves Jargon, decomP, Pear Noir!, Zygote in My Coffee, Verbicide, and elsewhere.
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