Dinner at ‘Gaststätte des Flußmädchen’
by AlexM
Our food arrived quickly. My wife, still not quite well, had only ordered bread and water. For me, the waiter presented a plate of spaghetti with fish in a creamy sauce.
I twisted a mouthful onto my fork and, on eating it–saw a woman, pale hair falling waist-long down a tall figure, standing atop a cliff with a fair-haired man. They argued. The river rushed past below them, frothed white by rocks. The woman shouted of secret wives and lies, and threatened exposure.
The man pushed– tasted something good, I think, but barely remembered it after the strength of the hallucination. Trying to ignore the residual unsettled feeling, I ate a chunk of carp.
–and she fell, screaming. Cold struck her hard, so hard, or was that the rock? Flailing in the water, light and dark playing havoc in her eyes, her mind, and pain spreading from her chest. Water against her.
Water wrote eddies of curiosity across her skin as the pain slipped away. A whisper in her ear. A greeting.
The water is home now and the rock your seat, said the river. Sing for me, maiden, sing sweet songs, sing to fill me–
“Rob, are you all right?”
I realised it was Susan talking. “I… don’t know. I think I might have your flu.”
Concern coloured her voice. “You should try to eat a bit more. Then we’ll go back to the hotel.”
Nodding, I ate more of the pasta.
–A song on a stormy evening. A small fishing boat tossed by waves, fighting the white.
The teenaged boy paused in his terror-screams. The song laced his ears, stirred thoughts of home, bed, love.
He felt nothing as the rocks sliced his boat to pieces, as the river tongued him downwards. As the maiden wept.–
“We should go,” Susan said, and called for the bill.
Several minutes later we left. I stumbled into the street, as if feverous. The husband’s face lodged in my mind. And I thought of the woman, trapped in the river.
“Tomorrow,” I said, “we need to visit the Rhine.”
The Zanzibar Vertebrate
by Rudi Dornemann
It began simply enough, with a TV overheard out an open window on a summer’s evening in the mid-1980’s on the suburb fringes of St. Louis. Over the buzz of the lawn trimmer, I heard snatches of a Monty Python rerun and, as I wound up the extension cord and swatted early mosquitoes, I thought I heard an exchange that went as follows:
“Not?”
“Yes.”
“A Zanzibar invertebrate?”
“A Zanzibar invertebrate.”
“A Zanzibar invertebrate!”
“Indeed.”
If there was more, it was lost behind my brothers’ shrieks and howls of laughter. I looked in the window in time for a blurred glimpse of British comedians in pith helmets batting each other with taxidermied ostriches.
By the time I got inside, the show was over and something else was on.
For a couple days, I wondered what I’d missed. Then, I forgot about it.
A few years later, I went to college and lived down the hall from a clutch of python-philes. Hardly a conversation went by without some chance word being taken as an oblique cue, and off they’d go, launching into elaborate, multi-voiced recitations.
One night they compiled an alphabetical list of every python sketch.
“Hey,” I said, “You missed the whole Zanzibar invertebrate thing.”
I did my best to describe what I remembered, and we were up until three while they spun theories as to why they’d never seen it — which season it might have been an outtake of, which lost episodes or rehearsal tapes had been aired during PBS fund drives.
Two years later, in a different dorm’s dining room basement, I overheard a different group of enthusiasts. The words had shifted slightly, but there was no mistaking it: “A Zanzibar vertebrate?” “Indeed.” And much laughter.
I wound up behind one of them in the next day’s breakfast line. I asked for more details — did he know what the ostriches had to do with it? He didn’t. He hadn’t seen it any more than my old friends had.
It was years before I heard of it again, mentioned in passing on some documentary on British comedy. I checked the web, and found full scripts, annotated with analysis, sketches, links to fan reenactments. I searched Google, YouTube and Wikipedia with every term I could think of — no sign of the original footage. I think I know why: it never existed.
Whatever I misheard, the sketch didn’t exist until the fans began rehearsing and repeating it.
