ISSUE 19,
AVAILABLE NOW,
IN WHAT APPEARS TO BE
A CIGAR BOX.
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Our latest and bravest issue of the quarterly brings together pretty much every type of exciting written object we could find, from the 1890s to now, singular things that held up and felt relevant and should be treasured. There are pamphlets, there are guidebooks, there are desperate letters and horoscopes for Republicans and trumpeter-recruitment cards and declassified maps of South American military installations. And because we needed a way to contain it all, something somewhat less dangerous than one of those metal desk spikes on which papers can be impaled (that's Issue 29, we think), we made a sturdy box, a handsome one, the lid of which alone offers absorbing entertainment. There's also, as always, some excellent fiction inside, written in the world of today but with at least one eye toward another time. To prove it, below is an excerpt from "The First Chapter," a story by Sean Casey. For the rest of the week, the full issue is $5 off in our online store.
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Before Poppy left for war, he decided on a girl. A sixteen-year-old from Rye, New York, Barbara Pierce had all the right parts: hair, anywhere manifest, was intoxicatingly soft and incapable of wrongdoing; breasts, two in number but manifold in possibility, had character and an honorable ratio of sass to nurtureliness. Her upper torso made Poppy alternately growl with reproductive gusto and swoon through light fits of sleep. Barbara Pierce also had legs, feet, and most of a face. While her mouth was incongruous and a lantern jaw hung beneath, teeth checked out across the board. She mawed all manner of hard fruit and frozen meat into submission in seconds. She was, by the way, a night grinder, and her dentist had provided a leather harness and mouth guard as sleepwear to keep what teeth she had in her possession. Her gums weren't firm and had been prescribed a toughening regimen, but Poppy could overlook that. Her leadership skills and overall relevance did not remotely match his, but Pierce showed the ability to bolster Pop in the few places that needed it.
This was, of course, the impression Dad got of Pierce from the scouting reports. He had yet to examine her contours and cavities, let alone meet her at the luncheonette. Poppy wasn't even at the getting-to-know-Barbara-Pierce stage yet. She hadn't sold Pop; there remained work to be done.
Poppy readied a special force of men, fellow students and teachers from Andover, all good patriots prevented from serving their country in war by some bodily woe, men for whom Pop had immense respect. One, an English teacher, Wm. Quincy, light and old but soldered tightly at the hinges, was still very capable of extracting pleasure from life and women. Another was the poor savant Joseph, a Jew squeezed of any social sense by elderly parents, his brain squeezed into the humorous rhombus that was his head. The head held his brain in awful discomfort and certainly prevented thoughts from proper circulation. He never shaved a hair from his face, which looked like a deflated basketball with a lot of hair on it. To help Quincy and Joseph were three blacks and Poppy's closest pal: the inimitable Hugh "Poops" Wilson.
The squad met in a basement room of Samuel Phillips Hall. Poppy gave them their orders as well as life-sized, inflatable body maps of Barbara Pierce. The weak were prescribed an afternoon lifting workout, but all underwent intense cardiovascular training. Each morning at 6:30, the squad carried its dummies to the snow-covered lacrosse fields. Barbaras were arranged in parallel, dummy heads pointing toward Rye. All stripped nude, including Poppy, and under his scrutiny engaged and traversed their Barbaras. Tactical and strategic approaches to spelunking Pierce were variously and vigorously employed. At 7:45 each morning the squad finished on cue. Giddy yelps of pleasure skipped across the shiny, ice-crusted ground like tiny ponies. The whinnying rattled the windows of the dormitories surrounding the fields.
After the dummies, surrogate Barbaras, women with identical statistics and emotional pitch, were practiced on.
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When Poppy left for war, surrogate Poppies left for Barbara Pierce. What considerable feats Dad accomplished in those theaters among the clouds paled to the feats of heroism and selflessness deployed by his surrogate suitors on Pierce.
The surrogates traveled to New York and made the considerable acquaintance of Pop's prospect. From 1942 through 1944 they conducted operations on, in, around, and with Barbara. They tested Barbara for emotional density, took note of locations of indecision and pliability as well as patches of steadfastness. If she consented to intimacy, they took full advantage of her offerings and rooted out as much pleasure as possible, forgoing their own jollies at all cost.
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In 1945, Poppy returned from the war and called his surrogates back to Andover. They met at the dining commons, each with notes, statistics, and stool sample. The latter served no romantic purpose, but Dad gingerly buried Mom's stool in pots of sand under a heat lamp. It hardened and turned white. In future years he carved each into a topographical map of a country he had no interest in visiting. Mom's geographic stool still sits strewn about the floor of our family's Kennebunkport home.
The surrogates' job was done. After a light meal, Dad instructed the squad to strip, hung them from ceiling fixtures, and surgically drained them of semen. Their seed was collected in jars labeled with their names. When the men were empty, Pop buried the jars out on the Main Quadrangle. On top, the men and Pierce's pleasure stats were burned in a neat stack; ashes scattered wherever the wind cared. One resolute corpse, probably that of Poops Wilson, burned but refused to scatter. Into the ashes Pop dropped a seed; the tree, still young by tree standards, stands to this day.
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OTHER McSWEENEY'S FEATURES:
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Issue 19, Available Now, in What Appears to Be a Cigar Box
Scott McClellan's Replacement: AOL Instant Messenger Bot SmarterChild By Michael Patrick Brady
Horrible Segues, With Local Anchorman Clive Rutledge By Christopher Monks
Lady Macbeth on Ambien By Laurence Hughes
I'm a Little Unnerved by My eHarmony Profile By Jim Stallard
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