A Story by Geoffrey

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.