Issue 22 - 1992

Coe Review • Issue 22
and descant upon Timmy the Tubercular Seal, for such questioning
and tirading would lubricate and tumesce (respectively) her to a
startling degree and effect the mode of reproduction whose spawn
was the creepy crawlers, who would rise from the slime of her litter
to form trucking companies, run banks, auction pictures, and
reconstruct the private driveways damaged in the last outbreak of
blacktop madness (in which God-granted regulations regarding
carports and their runways were scotched, breached, and otherwise
ignored in a feeding frenzy instigated by a petulant pelican named
Rusty, which left tarpaths honeycombed, not to mention
impassable). These purposes revealed change Timmy’s situation not
a whit as he lay in feeble proneness, his lungs expanding and
collapsing; incidentally, whose frangible lungs made steel taverns
out of balloons and showed the white man how to bowl.
It was clear and well-known that the fifty-eight methods
were the preferred methods, for as a by-product they involved the
generation of luminous orbs observable from inside the Pouch Dog’s
brain, that is, via consciousness, such luminous orbs being coated
with happy scenes of woodsy frolics and kneebreaking leaps from
theater balconies to stages of wood chips and crumbled bas reliefs of
Achians leapfrogging with glee as mortal Hektor is dragged round
and round moribund Troy, such luminous orbs also being coated
with what gives candy its sweetness, such luminous orbs also being
conceptually bountiful in terms of notions to live by, such luminous
orbs also engendering the good old rush in the loins lickety-split.
And so the Pouch Dog questioned the consumptive, blood-breathing
seal posthaste. Her questions revolved around the tying of shoes and
the debasement of currency, the hardening of water as it freezes and
the viscosity of certain grades of motor oil. His answers, cogent and
concise from his point of view only, consisted of almanactic facts
describing fifty years of snow falls in the Piece of Shit Mountains as
well as the average tundra temperature of Timmy’s home continent
during the cruelest month as well as the wattle density of an
umbrella bird, such bird symbolizing sexual potency to the
anaphrodisia-stricken seal. The Pouch Dog was pleased by the non
sequiturs her questionee offered, not knowing, of course, that what
the Tubercular Seal’s autistic mind thought something was did not
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