by Andy KRAMCSAK

If I tell you and I know I must, it all start­ed af­ter an al­ge­bra test I took. I was the un­der­dog in this, un­der­stand? I had no great ex­pec­ta­tions. But I per­formed above and be­yond and re­ceived an A. Oh! The joy that coursed through my veins! And then it was up­on me, hordes of peo­ple, some I knew, oth­ers that I laid eyes on for the first time, con­grat­u­lat­ing me for my vic­to­ry. And they want­ed more. Worse, they ex­pect­ed it! You do not un­der­stand this kind of pres­sure! It was then that I be­came hooked on the two things that de­stroyed me: an­gel­dust and Russ­ian mail or­der brides. Cut to three weeks lat­er, and I was legal­ly bind­ed to eight women of the Russ­ian coun­try­side and Bar­num and Bai­ley had set up camp in the bath­room. Thurs­days were the worst. Pick­led eel for din­ner and those in­fer­nal clowns and their tam­bourines un­til day­break. There was no com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween my wives and my­self be­cause I had no in­cli­na­tion to learn Russ­ian and they did not care to learn Eng­lish. What about the lan­guage of love, you ask? Well, I don’t know about love, but we were all no stranger to dirty, shame­ful sex. We were flu­ent. In truth, the on­ly time the house was qui­et was Sun­day. That was the day the wives would go to Home De­pot and the day the mimes would per­form. It was the on­ly day I could study. And the A’s just kept com­ing, the same with the Russ­ian brides, fif­teen at its high­est point. The crawl­space and shed were packed. The worst was Natasha. 6’-3” and as shape­ly as the Iron Cur­tain, she could pack a wal­lop. Be­ing the house cook, she found I was tak­ing the left­overs to feed the ele­phants. She did­n’t be­lieve me and sad­ly, our re­la­tion­ship was cracked in as many places as my bro­ken jaw. And then it hap­pened. I failed an al­ge­bra test. From there it all came fast and sud­den. Over the course of a week, all my wives left, promis­ing to write as they went. The cir­cus was slow­er to leave, prob­a­bly be­cause of all the equip­ment and an­i­mals that need­ed pack­ing up. I can say now that I am a hap­py man. I dropped Math, nev­er to re­turn to it again. I reg­u­lar­ly re­ceive post­cards in the mail from my wives and some­times, when I’m tak­ing a piss, I find my­self be­tween a clown and a tiger.

Filed under Fiction on September 20th, 2006

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