Calmly Considering what Clothing to wear Tonight (Part 2)
By Jim Meirose

Someone sounded louder’n him, pulling up beside the building, crush’unching up the crunchy new trap rock ‘rive. Pig stepped out, opened the door, but, found that here also, there’s not a thing at all to see, buh, then turned to get his clipboard and dictation recorder, which gosh, crap—he had forgotten again that in every one of his last hundred or so procedures it had crapped out o’ ‘im, buh, since it ‘lways ‘d so when so ‘xtremely close to the en’o’ t’ ‘cedure th’t to get any closer woul’ b’ the very end, so. Never’d a moment’s been fully lost, but—as footsteps sounded, at the back entrance, he palm’d the device, asking himself why, after every procedure, I say I’m going to fix this, but, as soon as that’s said, it’s l’ways gone all gain’s only known whil’st being spoke not ‘fore, ‘fter, ‘r since. But; this time—no, ush, eck—oh. Hippo! Ess the open door birthed at Pig a blue suit of a thin tallman, which ‘nded him brittlely tight crisped ole’ paperwork, prob bubbly ‘bout the procedure he’d been summoned by some governmental body to do, but a glance, first of all, showed it up as a blank of a normal form, wha’ no one atoll ‘f the doz’ns of fields to be filled and boxes to be checked—just only at the bottom a scrawled illegible signature with large block letters after-ti saying, acting deputy in-charge prime minister with blanket authority for all and everything—and he chuckled within, as it ought to have said amen, but the tall blue suit spoke out, before he could say this form needs—or whatever. He said, This is a special case from the top, get it, fill this out with whatever you can make up, so it’ll fly if ever looked at, that good?

Those words had come at Pig over the sight of the blue suit of a thin tallman’s mandatory government nametag being covered with a tatter of a ripped-off grey duct tape—but as Pig opened his mouth to offer the one or two immediate objections, which popped him up quite frontally, they buried back in down and gone as the blue suit swing to the side as though finely hinged being actually not a man, but a door, and two others identical to him, ‘xcept for one’s taller, ‘n one’s shorter, slid in a white sheeted mass, on a gurney. Pig took this to be the subject of tonight’s emergency operation.

Three minutes later, in the procedure room the blue suited men pulled off the sheet from the subject, which Pig immediately knew had been on ice for a while—metafanfully spraching, of course—after suiting up in the standard safe white clothes, he stepped up to the plate, warmed up with a heavy inner bat, flung it aside, and to the roar of the crowd, he opened his eyes, powdering up the slugger he’d been handed by the bat boy, and saw immediately something needing to be said, about which was, This man has no fingers—and he palmed up the stiff arm by the wrist—this man has no fingers, and has been dead a long time. What is this all about?