Where all the payphones went
Rung up on April 13, 2025.
“Жабий Бас” again played on an infinite loop. But then I realized it was just stuck in my head this time, like so many other things. (Such as those earwigs stuck in my ear canals.) I wanted to blame the grog frog because, Arnold Lobel notwithstanding, toads are frogs and frogs are toads and they’re really the same thing. On the other hand, toadstools are mushrooms, as are puffballs, but toadstools aren’t puffballs. Nor is Nurdlebutt a puffball. Nor are any of these slime molds (which are sentient flocks of amœba and will one day rule the Earth).
I sat back in my computering chair and contemplated these grumnutterous relationships until Becasue called me down for dinner. By that point, I had thoroughly confused myself. Were cats mammals? Were dogs mammals? Were cats dogs too? But with dinner sitting on the table and no doubt already beginning to decompose—with images of corn on the cob, corn nuts, corn puffs, corn balls, corn casserole, and even corn steaks dancing through my head—I decided my confusion over the taxonomy of cats and dogs (and amœbæ!) could wait until later. I had some corn and a huzzey-muffet to eat!
For my next trick, I will emit loud croaking noises myself. That damned grog frog’s got nothin’ on Pnårp!
Ribbitting as loudly as I could manage to ribbit, I went about my day like it was any other. Becasue didn’t mind. Nurdlebutt didn’t mind. The goats milling about the goatburping park didn’t mind, although they did try to gnaw my ghillie suit off. No one seemed to mind—until I realized that I had been imagining the whole thing. I hadn’t been ribbitting at anyone. But I had been hiding under my mailbox for nine hours.
I started ribbitting right then and there. Everyone stopped to stare. Every biophysic unity in the Universe stopped to stare. I tried to hide inside my mailbox but it was too small and weak to handle the gravity of the situation (and my buttocks). I fell out with a loud plop! and hit the pavement. Now I would need a new mailbox too.
A letter fluttered out of the erstwhile mailbox and landed on my nose. I opened it. My new treatise on the origins of the Universe had been rejected by the last of the 37 different scholarly journals to which I had submitted it. Apparently I had confused cosmology with cosmetology, much to my everlasting embarrassment. (But damn, did Becasue’s toenails look great!)
Not only that, but I had not only been accused of screwing a pheasant once again, but I had been accused of using A.I. to churn out more slop than even the biggest sounder of pigs could ingest without dying of indigestion. Knowing of no other way to defend my reputation as a hand-crafted slopsmith, I responded by slithering blithely out the door, then bawling like an infant, then finally keening like an old lady. It didn’t work, so I resorted to hiding in a hole in the ground. (That, strangely, worked.)
If anyone is wondering where all the payphones went, I stole them. All of them. (No, not to eat them.) They’re in my basement piled high next to my tzompantli. Some day, the reign of cell phone terror will be over, payphones will be popular again, and I’ll be able to corner the market! It may not happen tomorrow, but some day. Some day!
Then I remembered those guys who tried to corner the market on onions in 1955 and how that turned out for them. “Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!” I cursed pangrammatically. “Now what will I do with all these old payphones!?”
With that, I scurried down to my basement (in a most squirrelous way!) and played with my payphones for a while. Unrelatedly, I began to wonder: What about Scott Bakula’s sutler or Rick Astley’s butler? Or that girl with delightfully blue hair telling me to pump it up?
On Fridæ, I had a dream about a Sorento made out of cobalt crash-landing on a comet made of pure einsteinium. On Saturdæ, I had a dream about a Sorento suffocating under a torrent of Sorrento grated Parmesan cheese. And on Sundæ, I had a nightmare about being drowned in an ice cream sundæ the size of Sri Lanka. And so, once again I retired to my basement and admired my giant pile of skulls and payphones. I really did want to pump it up.