Wally
A man became very passionate about pulling weeds from his backyard garden. For a long time he’d never pulled a single weed, but his wife had been complaining that he was useless around the house and just to prove her wrong, he went out one morning to tend to the garden, thereby discovering that nothing is quite as satisfying as yanking an unwanted shoot, sprout, creeper, or bush right out of the soil — especially when you get it by the roots — and tossing it aside like so much chaff. And by the way, when I say this man became passionate about pulling weeds, I mean he really became passionate about pulling weeds. For instance, in order to deal with a handful of butterfly bushes that had been left untended so long their stems had turned wooden, he invested in a battery-operated hacksaw with which, in the midst of sawing down the aforementioned eyesores, he managed to lop off one of his own fingers, and all he did was shrug and say, “I guess that’s gone,” and go right on sawing away, which was all well and good since it wasn’t even a particularly important finger, but then, a couple of weeks later, a whole hand popped up out of the ground right in the area in which the disconnected digit had dropped.
“I’ve got to pluck this monstrosity,” the man said when he saw it there.
“No!” cried the hand. “Please! I want to live!”
“Hmm,” said the man (since that was what he always said when he was mulling something over). And then: “I’ll tell you what — I’ll let you be if you promise not to replicate and spread. I can’t have a garden full of hands on my hands.”
“It’s a deal,” said the hand.
“Then shake on it,” replied the man.
The hand was more than willing to comply, since shaking on it was actually one of the only things it could do, but the man double-crossed the gullible extremity; instead of shaking it, he yanked it right out of the ground and tossed it onto the compost pile without so much as a sorry about this, friend.
The bigger problem, however, was that no matter how many weeds the man pulled, it seemed there were always more weeds to be pulled, a phenomenon for which there is an obvious explanation — nothing technically distinguishes what’s not a weed from what is a weed other than whether or not one looks upon it as a weed, and in his passion for pulling weeds the man had come to look upon everything that hadn’t yet been pulled as, precisely insofar as he passionately desired to pull it, yet another weed. In this manner, he eventually emptied the garden of its contents altogether, in so doing turning it from a garden into a big old mud pit.
“Now what are we going to do?” grumbled the man’s wife when she saw it. “Nobody wants a big old mud pit behind their house. Our property value is going to plummet!”
“Hmm,” said the man. “But what if that big old mud pit wasn’t actually a big old mud pit?”
“How could a big old mud pit not be a big old mud pit?”
“Leave it to me.” With that, the man headed straight for the nearest livestock store and bought himself a sixpack of pigs. “Check it out,” he said to his wife after depositing them in the former garden. “Now it’s not a mud pit — it’s a pigsty. And considering the way people are so into backyard farm animals these days, our property value is probably going to skyrocket!”
While his logic may have been bulletproof, it only took until the following morning for the man to realize he couldn’t stand that disgusting snuffling sound pigs constantly make. So, one by one, he loaded the passel of porkers into the car and drove them back to the livestock store.
“Nothing doing,” declared the proprietor when he saw him amble through the door, sixpack of pigs in tow. “Like it says on the sign, returns will only be accepted when the merchandise is in its original condition. These pigs, meanwhile, are clearly all covered in mud.”
“Damnit,” said the man. “Now what am I supposed to do? I could put them in a pillowcase and beat them against the side of a tree until they stopped moving, but I’m pretty sure that would go against my principles as a dedicated vegetarian.”
“You’re a dedicated vegetarian?”
“I sure am.”
“One hundred percent vegetarian?”
“If not more!”
Well, all this talk of vegetarianism got the proprietor of the livestock store thinking that the man’s dissatisfaction with his porcine purchase might be just the opportunity he’d been seeking to rid himself of a certain opportunistic carnivore he’d accidentally ordered from his wholesaler the previous fall, and which had since then eaten ninety percent of his rabbits and no fewer than one goat. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and retreated to the storeroom, returning momentarily with an alligator tugging eagerly at the end of a retractable dog leash. “As I was saying earlier,” he told the man, “I’m not going to be able to give you a refund for those muddy pigs of yours. However, I would be willing to take them as an even exchange for old Wally, here.”
“Hmm,” said the man. “Okay, why the hell not? I’ve heard alligators actually make great companions!”
And in the weeks that followed, Wally more than lived up to this reputation. Among the many activities he and the man who’d exchanged him for six pigs engaged in together during that happy time were:
- Going to the movies
- Swimming
- Hiking
- Parcheesi
- Watching TV
- Prank calling numbers selected at random from the phonebook and asking whoever answered if their refrigerator was running
- Smoking Dad Grass-brand CBD cigarettes
- Becoming frustrated attempting to learn the cello
- Collaborating on contemporary rewrites of traditional folktales
- Electric boogaloo
Then one day, Wally disappeared. Simultaneous with this disappearance, the man’s wife underwent some peculiar changes. To begin with, her skin, which had previously been generically Caucasian, turned scaly and green, and her teeth grew several centimeters in length and in addition appeared to have become as sharp as daggers. Moreover, when the man asked her whether she’d seen his missing crocodilian pal, rather than answering with the regular human words she’d always employed in the past, she instead let out one of those loud, throaty roars, also known as “chumpfs,” that alligators commonly employ as a mating call.
For a time, following these changes, their marriage continued on as strong as ever. Then one day, the man disappeared.
—
Care to Share?
Consider posting a note of comment on this item:
—§—
Previous Post
« How to Throw Hands Like a Modern Man
—
Reader Comments
The illustration makes me feel a little… tingly. Is that wrong? Fun read.