Roger
never spoke with punctuation.
“Makin’
a sandwich?”
“Hhrg”
“What
kind?”
“Human
pancreas”
Not
much to say to that. Pliny crossed the room to their imperious sofa
and jackknifed backwards into its pompous folds, spreading his arms
companionably over the couch back and whistling loud and hearty.
“Do
not” Roger turned from his nascent sandwich and used flamethrower
eyes on Pliny. Pliny raised his eyebrows and the pitch of his
whistling.
Roger
left the kitchen, crossed the room to Pliny and threatened him with a
mayonnaisey spatula. “Stop yourself and your whistling or I will
stop yourself and your whistling and then of our faces yours will be
the more shredded”
Pliny
furrowed his forehead, which suddenly felt imperiled. “Mr Kapt took
from me my badge,” feeling in the sofa for a pen, “so I must lift
my spirit from the muds somehow.” He removed an encruddened pen.
Roger
felt pity but didn’t recognize it. So he chose rather to be witty.
“Maybe the muds would be a better place for your whistling than for
your spirit”
Pliny
did not like Roger’s wit. “I think the muds should be removed
from the picture entirely and replaced by properly fertilized potting
soil, wherein could grow the velvety velvet blooms of opportunity and
joyings.” He waved his excavated pen around.
Pliny
got very boring to Roger when he said things like this, so Roger
returned to his sandwich while Pliny was still speaking. He had been
trying to cut the sandwich lengthwise, holding it up on its end and
sawing at it with the spatula, but he now saw what he had to do. He
got out a sharper knife, impaled the sandwich through the center, and
walked over to the sofa. He stabbed the ensemble into the couch near
Pliny, and mayo squished
sickeningly. Pliny recoiled, violently spasming over one arm of the
sofa.
“My
spirit nearly departed me!” he yelled at the sandwich-knife. Then
he turned on Roger. “EXPLAIN?”
“I
wondered if that would raise your spirit from the muds wherein it is
beprisoned”
“NO.”
Pliny reclaimed his bum’s own and resettled in the sofa. He tried
to remove Roger’s sandwich-knife, which the sofa refused to give
up. So Pliny gave up. “Anyway, now to talk about: me.”
Roger
bespoke his disapproval without words; Pliny did not hear the words
that Roger did not say.
“Mr
Kapt has little Consideration for Those Beneath Him,” began Pliny,
prepared to continue for hours, “and those beneath him have little
consideration for him. So my opinion is: that we should replace all
positions of authority in the organ-I-zation” (That’s the
nominative case of the first-person pronoun in there, which speaks
eloquently of Pliny.) “with positions of impotence and leave
ourselves to our own demises.”
“I
agree completely Pliny” Roger’s wit made him feel more
intelligent than Pliny. This is why he exercised it so often.
“Furtherfore,
I don’t know why there are so many small departments in our large
company. It seems unto myself that a large company should have
somewhat large departments, in order to preserve its prosthetic
unitication.”
It
was about at this point that Roger realized Pliny had no idea what
Pliny was saying. He tried to guide Pliny back to the narrow path
which Roger perceived that Pliny had left. “Should a small mind be
paired with a small mouth because that would be very pleasing and
convenient to others”
Pliny
thought about this, but not very hard and not very long.
“Yessolutely.”
It
was about at this point that Roger realized Pliny had no idea what
Roger was saying. So he stole his sandwich back from the couch and
began to eat. Pliny finally heard Roger’s unsaid words; he unsaid a
few of his own.
I
need company in the muds, Pliny thought to himself; it is
lonely here. So I will attempt to submerge Roger also, and then it
will be equally bad for each of us therefore
I will be less relatiftly unglad.
Pliny
began to be friendlier than normal. “Hello, Roger,” he said
friendlily.
Roger
looked at him, annoyed. “You have been here for several minutes
Pliny that hello was massively superfluous”
Pliny
was disappointed. His deceptive friendliness had not really deceived
at all. “Well, I had not yet greeted you, and I wished to comedy
that situation.”
“You
cannot help doing that Pliny” Roger realized that he greatly
preferred the company of his sandwich to that of Pliny, especially
this new and eerily friendly one.
“Why,
thank you, Roger!” Pliny exclaimed loudly. “How KIND OF YOU!”
Roger
stared for a few seconds at Pliny, who smiled gleefully. Roger
frowned very hard and got up to leave with his sandwich.
“Well,
this is a tragedy!” said Pliny, pretending to be saddened by
Roger’s departure. “We had just started having such a
debilitating time!”
“Exhilarating
is I believe your intended term and we really had not” Roger
obviously wished to leave with his sandwich.
“Well,
exhilarating is futile without inhilarating—and both are necessary
to physical life’s continuity,” declaimed Pliny, kindly
attempting to chat about something he knew nothing of. He also made a
point of ignoring Roger’s idiotic slip of the tongue: Roger made
them all the time, and Pliny had grown acrustomed to them.
“Ex
or in”— Roger sounded tired— “hilarity will follow you
wherever you go” He again began to walk toward the kitchen.
It
is being successful, Pliny said to himself, he is starting to
trust me. He remarked on and was impressed by my melisma! Soon I can
befray his trust and catapult him headlong into the deepest towels of
the muds—ha, ha, ha.
