A Man Walks Into A Bar

by David

A hunchback says “it seems a fellow with eight arms walks into a bar and…”

The guy with the slits interrupts him. “You don’t start a story like that. You don’t say ‘it seems,’ you just start right in talking. Like ‘A fellow with eight arms takes a head off the guy next to him at the bar.'”

“Yeah, Kelly said that,” agrees the fellow with the long neck. “He oughta know how to tell a story.”

“But that ain’t what happened,” the hunchback protests, “the other guy didn’t have any heads at all, and…”

“No head?!” A really thin guy glides over from a nearby table. His head is the widest part of him, because of the nose, and his expression says he couldn’t imagine having a smaller head, much less no head. “That meant he didn’t have no nose. How did he smell?”

Slits starts to answer, and the hunchback says “Now look, whose joke is this?” but that is as far as he gets. Just then someone comes in the door. He has a whole bunch of arms and is holding some kind of weapon in each hand. He starts shooting (which is completely illegal) and all the raconteurs dive for the floor. Octopus Boy is tearing the place up. The light fixture suspended from the ceiling partially explodes and the remains start spinning lazily, shedding sparks. Most of the surviving patrons are on the floor, some dripping fluids, and the smell of oxygen acceptors is harsh in the air. Suddenly there’s a shout from the back of the room:
“Finish the joke! The guy with no heads! What does he do?!” This elicits a brief volley from the heavily armed character in the doorway. When it ends, the hunchback quavers from underneath a table.

“He smells as bad as ever.”

Another volley, and the shooter speaks for the first time: “Who am I? Chopped liver?!

A different voice from the back of the room. “And the guy who walks into the bar? What happens to him?”

O. B. pauses to slap himself in the forehead.

The hunchback answers. “You fellows really ain’t heard this one? He rubs his head and says ‘ow!'”

Octopus Boy throws up several of his arms in disgust and just walks back out on the street.

The end

Subtext

by Edd

     We’re in a middling gallery, me with my pick and Paul his shovel. I’ve just pried a ‘harbinger’ out of the wall along with a number of one and two syllable words when the thumping starts. I take another swing, knocking a ‘dross’ and a ‘kettle’ away from what with a little luck will be a ‘dissolution’. But the blows from below unsteady me and my pick smacks ‘diss’ to the ground.
     Paul grumbles. “Hardly worth picking up,” he says, barely heard over the now incessant hammering.
     He leans his shovel against the mine’s wall. “That’s no test,” he says. “I think they’ve got it in operation. Let’s go see.”
     We take the rickety elevator down to the lowest gallery, taking on two or three miners every level. Once there, we see three carts waiting to ascend. The others walk down the gallery toward the deafening roar, but Paul plucks my sleeve and points at the lead cart. He sifts through the vowels and consonants, locating a ‘lorgnette’ and a ‘syncopate’. He puts his mouth next to my ear. “Not bad,” he yells. “They might get this thing perfected, and then where will we be?”
     “It will be easier for you,” I reply. “You know Japanese.” There’s not a machine yet can pick those symbols out of a wall.
     The machine’s pickings are thin. This first cart is chockablock with single letters, nonsense strings, and pre- and suffixes. Word is, once this machine works more accurately, they’ll challenge a miner to a race. Might be me; my percentage of polysyllables is more than satisfactory.
     I move to the second cart, and chuckle to see the words ‘blow’ and ‘almighty’ adjoining one another. Paul brushes past to inspect the third cart. Just as I spot ‘rickety elevator’ he laughs long and loud. “We have nothing to fear,” he yells. “It doesn’t even know how to spell.”
     Looking to where he points, I see the word ‘middling’. “That is a word,” I say. Attached to it in front is “we’re in a” and behind is “gallery”. Something about it seems familiar.