HARRIET "HARRY" DODGE

from High Five for Ram Dass
BOOK 2

Shortly after I was able to sit up, my mother strapped me to my potty seat and left me there for just over three years. I still have callouses on the back of my thighs to prove it. She managed to feed me now and then, empty the bowl on most days, and wipe me down biennially but she never said a damn thing in my direction. I was just like a little tunnel. Respirating. Memorizing the lines of the dim doorway, the knob, a glowing yellow shade over my left shoulder. Sometimes I heard her crying, padding around in her slippers, one day she killed a cat in the downstairs foyer. City workers eventually found me there, a little filthy pink Rodin, pooping. I was real skinny. At that point — so the story goes — I wanted to know the words for everything. Humans are funny and stupid. Why would I want to know the words for anything? We have like cookie cutters instead of brains.

I met my one good friend at the Agency though. There was a lot of feral kids there, or partially feral, but the best one was a kid they rescued off a Patagonian plateau a few years before. He had been in the wilderness there since he was four and half, tending sheep. Enslaved apparently and neglected. He never really cared to speak, was barely managing his daily chorus “I’d gladly go back” over a late lunch one day when he keeled over of a brain aneurysm. I tried to help him, but I thought he was choking on a french fry and was way into the Heimlich thing when the EMTs showed up and noticed the blood balloon forming on the side of his tender eager little enslaved head. I miss him though, don’t get me wrong. I can still hear his tiny whispering mantra. Probably he’s why I ended up on this land, trying to figure out how to get Marx the Authoritarian out of his hole.

I started submitting articles to the Food Insects Newsletter and the Society for Primitive Technology at the age of 13. The first one was called Hunter Gatherers Were Sometimes Very Labor-Efficient. The second one, Collecting Ant Pupae For Food. At sixteen I submitted an incisive piece entitled, They Ate What!? in italics with a question mark and exclamation point. There were too many to name. My annual Food Insect Festivals of North America garnered me the coveted Leppy in 1989 and Fried Grasshoppers For Campouts Or At Home is to date the one of which I am most proud.

My preludial phases are most effectively characterized by the sentence fragment that follows, “A bunch of ass-eating jumbos”. The assorted biological anti-fruits of my failed gene enhancements are — however — at this juncture quite striking and — I have to admit — have garnered a certain amount of praise and/or erotic attention. Chicks dig me. Life as an earthling without outer ear cones, less one arm, and with three spindly little brittle-boned birdlegs has not been as wholly joyless as one (not in the know) may imagine. There are thousands of us. Narrows we’re called. Our bodies are more cylindrical (although the difference is negligible and for the most part imperceptible) and our ribs are very flexible. When it counts, I can fit into places that are most certainly a pretty tight squeeze for the old garde.