Alan Trunngunner Misplaces a Soul

Alan Trungunner was ten, which is not a good age in Dirtworld. Although, no age is a good age here, so that’s not saying much. 

He walked with ghosts in the cemetery that wrapped around Siltville, and contained seventy-nine percent of the population, including Alan’s mother, father, half brother, full-brother, sister, grandmother, uncle, both aunts, dog, cockatiel (who flew into a windmill during a tornado and emerged looking like a feather duster, which is why Alan’s grandmother used it as a feather duster for six months before she was struck by lightning while showering on Yardarm Hill in a grove of coat-hanger bushes), and six chickens which were devoured by Alan’s new dog, Sinonaeg the Devourer. He walked with Sinonaeg, too, but the ghosts didn’t eat his neighbors occasionally, so he preferred to walk with them, even if they smelled like lint and liked asking how school was going. 

It wasn’t, so there wasn’t much to say. The schoolteacher was Alan’s uncle, a stooped and oatmeal-cheeked man who knew how to spell words and wouldn’t shut up about Greek philosophy, which nobody would have minded if his speaking voice hadn’t been a clarinet-sounding screech possessed of a peerless reverberative quality which meant that any argument he had about Greek philosophy could be heard in the outhouse behind the butcher building, on the far edge of town, and in the deepest gallery of Ironside’s Iron Mines, where the miners were gradually becoming fond of philosophy. He stabbed himself in the finger with a piece of chalk one day, and it didn’t draw blood. 

He turned out to be anemic (a word only he could spell), and the doctor prescribed iron supplements. Alan’s uncle mistakenly took that to mean that he should eat iron nuggets fresh from Ironside’s Iron Mine, which (indirectly) killed the tapeworm in his gut that was giving him anemia. What killed the tapeworm directly was being stuck in a coffin with Alan’s uncle’s dead body, which wasn’t doing much eating in its then-present state of decomposition.

They found the tape worm later, when a band of truck racers came through the cemetery and there was a great crash and an exploded gas-tank, and Alan’s uncle was exhumed amid the fire and smoke, with his guts torn open and a tapeworm thicker than Nikolaus Ironside’s left arm and longer than a jacksnake in heat spilling from the gash. The local dogs played with the flobby grey dead thing for a few days before Alan’s mother took it away from them.

Unfortunately, she did so with two fresh sewing wounds on the tips of her index finger, contracted Dobson’s Dog Pox, and spent her last weeks drooling and licking her hands. The whole town turned itself out like jean pockets to pay their respects from a safe distance: their own homes. It made Alan feel very loved, very accepted, and very hopeful that he would have a place in Siltville now that he had no parents, family members, or friends. But Alan was something of a contradictory naive idiot. He was also eight at the time.

And if he weren’t such a contradictory naive idiot, he wouldn’t’ve been able to talk to ghosts, and he wouldn’t’ve been talking to ghosts when he met Dora Sue Jenkins the Teeth the Ninth, which would have been an awful shame, because she wouldn’t have taken him to the big city to see a hunchback with whistling warts, or an open bar that sold soup topped with eyebrows and imaginary coleslaw (cabbages had all been eaten decades ago, after the Great Bok Choy Famine had left a void on the shelves of the culinary artisan pit down in Palooza, and nobody really minded that they were gone, except now coleslaw was imaginary).

Dora Sue Jenkins the Teeth the Ninth was actually only the third person to bear that particular moniker, but her mother was worse at counting than a Jackalope on methamphetamines, and the only lawyer who could legally change her birth name was buried twelve feet underground in Dorgtown (the townsfolk figured he was a vampire of some description). Of course, she could always stop introducing herself as Dora Sue Jenkins the Teeth the Ninth, but it had a regal and quasi-denticulate ring to it, and other than sometimes eating people, she followed the law in both letter and spirit, and was therefore unwilling to lie about her legal name.

She didn’t much like liars, but as it stood, she was pretty fond of herself, since nobody had gone off on some self-interested tirade about how “lichen yourself is bed for the other people,” and “pride is Satan and Hitler, and it made that there brown stain on your toe what matches that’un on them ceiling boards.” She didn’t much like old farts who went on self-interested tirades, but she had trouble telling decent adults whose thoughts hadn’t yet been wrinkled-up by fear and convention from adults who were like garlic skins inside and out, and who hadn’t got free of their delusions, prejudices ‘gainst new stuff, or brain-boiling fear of getting older. They’d been warped by the whole distorted mess. Trouble was, there were a lot of the second type of adult in Shoeshine, where she was born and raised, and most’ve the first type of adult (what few there were) kept quiet mostly, so they wouldn’t catch a trough full of mulch about old-time values ‘cause they were thinking different. So mostly, she lumped them together like soggy dog biscuits, and tossed them in the same envelope cubby in her brain, where all the useless things went. 

Grown-ups went there with chewing gum, postage stamps, ticks, clarinets, bookends, symphonies, gophers, golf (but not golf clubs), guilt, and the irrationally longstanding taboo against eating human flesh.

Dora Sue also had a hard time telling useless things from things she didn’t like. She often made the excuse that she didn’t like things because they were useless. But she liked Alan Trungunner, and he was mostly useless, so she was probably lying to herself about that. Lying to herself was the only kind of lying she’d do. She lied to herself about being honest to herself mostly. In actuality, she was a bundle of guilt, denial, and cannibalistic urges, wrapped in the skin blanket of a blonde and excruciatingly coiffured twelve-year-old girl who made pickles in her basement beside a rack of spare ribcages.

Though she’d never admit it to herself, what with the elaborate falsehoods she’d soliloquized to justify her peculiar dietary habit, she was mostly a cannibal because all the poor dead half-chewed schmoes in her basement gave her some folks to compare herself favorably with. Sure she’d just flunked arithmetic (again), but Two-Toed Ned was just a spinal column by the door and two femurs stewing in a bone broth on the stove. Maybe she oughta known how to tie her shoes, but Aaron the Cheesemonger was hanging blubbering in her closet without feet to put shoes on, and so, really, was it that handy a skill? Tying shoes wasn’t getting Aaron the Cheesemonger out of her closet (not that’d it do much good; Dora Sue was a wizard with a double-barrel), or doing anything to step the blood-loss from his pedal arteries. 

She took a bus to Siltville for brunch, and stopped by the cemetery to see if anyone fresh had saved her the trouble of killing them. 

Alan was there, arguing with his half-brother about the ballistic merits of buckeyes, the Siltville Scrotal Smashers chances against the Atomic Ham Wedges in the Killfarm Semifinals, and whether Jukeman oughta be in the Hall of Fame. Alan looked tasty. He was pudgy, balloon-like, and had a waddling stride that meant he wouldn’t be hard to catch. Not that Dora Sue liked brunch to come down to a flat-out run-for-your-life sprint. Most people got away at that point, unless they were missing limbs or needed a cane. Dora Sue tripped on her shoelaces when she ran. 

There was a funeral on the far side of the cemetery. Bagpipes and a wailed rendition of ‘Lenny Lumpkin had a Pumpkin.’ (Not a particularly appropriate song, given the circumstances, but the only one the town’s self-proclaimed chanteuse knew.) The mayor was dead, and Alan was saved.

Dora Sue brought her bundle of grave-robbery tools to the cemetery that night, and whistled Chopin while she dug. The dirt was soft, and damp with tears and urine. Her shovel struck rocks, and then a coffin. She busted the lid open.

The mayor was lying there with his stomach pressed to the lid, one eye open and staring, and his cheese-danish fingers wrapped tightly around his staff of office, which was already starting to lose the gold paint he’d hastily applied to the facsimile. (He’d sold the real one a month ago for twelve dollars to buy the velvet waistcoat his gas-bloated stomach was now attempting to burst.) A sandworm had already dug holes in the coffin and removed the mayor’s right hand and a piece of his chest. 

Something made a wheezing noise on the other side of Dora’s robbery hole. It was Alan Trungunner making fun of his Grandmother’s breathing machine, to the amusement of his younger sister. Dora Sue poked her head out of the hole. Her braids glittered in the moonlight with the dull sheen of a butcher knife. She stared. The pudgy, balloon-like, duck-footed boy was back for some infernal purpose. Dora Sue figured him for a demon in that moment.

Of course she went to talk. She wasn’t using her soul for much more than a celestial paperweight for her conscience, and she’d heard that demons’d pay up good in pure spite, corrupted rewards, and needle-sharp irony for a spare soul.

“You a demon?” She asked. Her face was smudged with mud. A beetle crawled down her forehead. She stank of death. 

Alan blinked. The girl appeared to be alive. She was breathing. Rather hard, he thought, for taking a midnight stroll in the cemetery. “You taking a stroll?” He asked.

“I’m stealing the mayor.”  

Alan made a noise like a steamroller. It might have been laughter. “Take him.”

“Do you want anything for him? I got three rusty pennies, a snail, and a soul I’m not using.” 

“Nah, take him free. He only talks in riddles. Anyway, he’s not mine.”

“Ain’t you a demon, master of death and murder?” 

“I ain’t.” Alan shuffled his feet, noticing the bloody color of Dora Sue’s irises, and the worms bunched in her collar for laters. She thought that meant he was lying. Pretending to be a succulent boy wasn’t a very nice thing for a demon to do, she thought.

“Then whatcha doing here?” She asked. “This a place of corpses.” 

“Talking. I got family here.” 

“Too bad. Which’uns?” 

“All of ‘em.” Another shuffle. “Trungunners ain’t got much luck.”

Dora Sue thought about that. Maybe she wouldn’t have to kill him after all. Maybe his death wouldn’t have to weigh heavy on what was left of her conscience. 

“So you won’t take my soul?” 

“Dunno. Guess I could.” So he was a demon after all.

He paused. A scowl tried to form, but was swallowed in the youthful chub of his cheeks and the over-padded skin around his eyes.

“How?” He asked.

“Here.” She said, and tried to give him her soul.

A minute passed. There was howling in the streets below the cemetery. Sinonaeg the Devourer was devouring a pig. Alan realized that he was probably going to die tonight. Either the bloody-eyed braided girl who was stealing the mayor was going to use his skin to summon a real demon, or Farmer Maginnis of the Putrescent Eyeballs was going to get a posse together, or a mob if he was feeling hasty, and Alan would be pitchforked to colander-like permeability before they dumped his body in a beetle pit. 

His younger sister tugged on his sleeve and told him that she was going to tinkle in the empty mausoleum. His grandmother squeaked over the top of an adjacent hill, lugging her breathing machine, which she didn’t need but kept for company and a reminder that she had once needed it. 

“I don’t think it worked.” Alan said.

“I don’t feel it no more. Did you lose it?” 

“I guess.” He started to feel around the dirt and tangled dandelions for some wisp of the metaphysical, but felt nothing. He pricked his finger on a cactus the size of a baseball that was nestled below the headstone of Brewery Bill (“may his tap ever flow”). He bled.

“You stupid fuck, you lost my soul.” Dora Sue wasn’t sure what a fuck was, but if Alan wasn’t a demon he must’ve been a fuck. She knew what stupid was, and Alan was assuredly stupid. He couldn’t even steal souls correctly. Dora Sue was sure she would be a maestro at stealing souls if she was ever given the opportunity to try. She would ask her next dinner date, she decided.

“You gave it.” 

“I thought you’d get it.” She shrugged. “No use crying over dead cows.” 

“What’s a fuck?” 

Dora Sue shrugged again. “Heard some grown-ups say it in the big city. Then there was a knife fight. Probably a large bird of some kind. Flippable, too.” 

“Like pancakes?”  

“Flapjacks? I guess.” 

“You ever been to the city?” 

“Obviously.” 

She looked like she’d been to the city. There was an asphalted sheen to her temperament which Alan was too country-stuck to notice.

“Neat.” 

“Yeah, neat. There’s a hunchback with whistling warts there. And a man who changes faces.” 

“Whose faces?” 

“Whoever’s, last I knew. I seen some of his work. Looks like cubism in flesh.” 

“What’s cubism?” 

“A rejection of single perspective and sappy old classical conventions which led out of the impressionistic movement.” Dora Sue killed an art critic four months ago, and had to live in his house because there was a political rally outside. Someone was trying to be the Caesar, but underestimated the value of large over-colorful banners emblazoned with slogans like, “Reject the Man,” or  “Take more of All”

“Dunno what that means.” She said. “But that’s what it is.” 

“Could you take me there? I think the town’s gonna kill me ‘cause my dog ate another pig. Trungunner’s ain’t got much luck that way.” He made his best imitation of a sinister grimace. He looked like a dog asking for belly rubs. “I’ll give back your soul.” 

“You did get it.” She wasn’t surprised that he would lie about not being a demon. It was just the sort of thing for a demon to do, even if it wasn’t very nice. “Sure. I’ll take you. Lemme just get the mayor bundled up. Road food.”

She got the mayor bundled up in twine. She had to cut his head off to get him in a tidy package. They left it in the coffin to bleed on the nice white lining. It soaked into the padding. It was a nice coffin before the shoveling and bleeding. 

“He didn’t use it for much when he was alive.” Alan said, and poked the head experimentally. It bled.  

They pulled the corpse between them, dragging him by his ankles. An arm dangled behind the netted politician. Fat fly. They got to the bus stop and waited. Dora Sue sorted through pocket change, and came up with fare, and pushed Alan around so he’d hide the mayor behind his bagel-roll legs. Somewhere in the murky rooflines and chimneystacks of Siltville, a mob was braying. Doors slammed.

Alan was reminded of school (when there was any), when all the children would play a game called emergency. The rules were fairly simple. First, the majority would elect a ‘volunteer’ by weight of volume and hand waving. Then they elected a ‘criminal’ to hit the volunteer in the head with a sharp rock. Then they ran in circles screaming “emergency, emergency!” until some grown-ups came to scratch their chins and look baffled, and take away the victim to get their head bandaged and be given an inadequate number of lollipops by the crag-faced nurse who smelled like air-freshener and mesquite. Alan was the volunteer about half the time, and had he been more circumspect, and less convinced of the family curse, he might have realized what kind of luck he actually had to have survived such chronic cranial trauma.

The bus arrived before the mob did. The children paid fare, and boarded. It smelled like cigars. It smelled like sage. They sat in the back where the chairs were frayed and dripping with loose thread. Dora Sue tucked the mayor under the seat, and gnawed on a fingernail while they waited for the bus to pull away. Dust in the tail-lights. Drifting like smoke.  

Torches were glinting in the back window when the driver finally put the geriatric engine in gear, and pulled away into the violet night.