by Colin Gee
Pester’s lawn was overgrown with chest-high grasses and vines and scrubby little trees, except you could sometimes make out the little nests in there where he would roll with his bottles of Schnapps. The sharp grasses were punctuated like Moby Dick every hundred pages with what you suspect is a joke with a hideous towering thorned weed like a praying mantis, with veined and baubled pods and gooey leering fissures, that hung in the grasses.
The barf-green carpets in Pester’s house, long flattened by his hairy flat feet, his bigfoot feet, reeked sourly of Vacation Bible School in the 1970s: frantic onanism, candy corn, and TV dinner. Pea/carrot medley with beef stroganoff, turkey with cornbread stuffing, buttered sweet potatoes and gravy, tender fried chicken pieces with butter-basted veggie platters, Yukon gold potatoes mashed with real milk by real milkmaids, thought Pester, in virginal Swiss hose and bonnets that they always take off. Now for a limited time only with mom’s blueberry muffin or apple pie, jammed into the top of the tin. But Pester’s mom had been dead for thirty years, gone dead.
Mr. Rufus lived on the same block with his partner Timothy in the immaculate three-story Queen Anne Victorian mansion with the Rapunzel tower on the corner. Leaded glass windows, parquet floors, and the gorgeously sculpted, meticulously trimmed lawn with tidy paired flower and vegetable gardens and the famous twin oaks. One time Pester puked all over their topiary and it was chunky mushroom tomato sauce and green beans, we speculated. Everyone saw it happen and went to look at the mess. Timothy came out on the porch, made it to the planters, and rushed back inside.
Later on I hooked up their hose and sprayed the chunks off the bush, across the sidewalk and into the gutter, but that was not enough. I had to get a pushbroom and nudge the chunks down the gutter to the drain, and run a lot of water until everything was shipshape.
How did Pester get into heaven? Who let him in here? And how can we get rid of him?
Colin Gee (@ColinMGee on X) is founder and editor of The Gorko Gazette.