'Three,' He Entitled It, With Great Pretention

They took me along a familiar path, across the flatlands. A distant spot, something of an obstacle ahead, appeared and seemed to grow as we approached it. Out there, in the middle of the flatlands of the desert, stood a ski resort.

Now, it wasn't what you'd call a top-notch ski resort; from my angle, it was just a sledding track with a t-bar running up one side. In fact, I'd put the elevation at somewhere under two hundred feet. Nonetheless, it was a strange thing to see in a New Mexico noon.

As I got closer, I could hear the children--it was all children on the slope--laughing and shouting. This was good wholesome exercise. After all, snow is soft.

Yes, the kids were happy; they were very happy. Still, I wondered at the marvel of it. A boy on a tube veered off-course, and a cloud of snow flew high overhead.

I said to my companions: "How can such a thing be? Here in the desert?"

One of my companions replied: "You find the play of children somehow alarming?"

"No, rather, it's a hundred and ten degrees. Why doesn't the snow melt away?"

"Because it's actually cocaine."

 

*

 

The open-house all-invited sex party we hosted last night went pretty good, ma. I myself did four of my neighbours, while Jilly did three (one of them twice, so we were statistically even). Really glad we got that pool put in in the spring, along with that heavy-duty filter. Thanks for that piece of advice, ma!

Morning after, we were for a walk. We saw four muggings and a murder. Now, I know there's some wet blankets who get all in a fuss about this stuff, but I say: Why so few? Back in the day, when I was growing up, in my little one-room schoolhouse, we'd get brutally punished if there wasn't enough peer-to-peer violence. Times have changed, ma, and I'm not sure I like it.

In the evening, we settled down. We'd gotten a new shipment of drugs from China. We read the recommendations but they were so complicated we ignored them. We ingested them by sizes, with the littlest ones first. It took four hours (so we believe, ha-ha, ma!) to even make a dent in the stash. Now it's three in the morning. Jilly's out cold. Suddenly I'm bored with her. Should I kill her, ma?

 

*

 

Isn't this the way scruples work, most of the time? For a spell, I thought the machine would work almost certainly alright even though I'd threaded the paper over the capstans rather than between them, but then when Lily showed up in the print room, I suddenly knew there wasn't a hope in a hundred years that the recorder would work right.

"This machine isn't going to work right," I averred.

She gave it the once over and agreed. "It'll have to be re-wound."

I was happy to hear her make the machine the subject of the sentence precisely as I had done. (That's known as 'framing.')

We pressed the big rewind button together to empty the spool, then fitted the paper between the capstans. We played it past the leader, and the paper was ready.

In the next room, from which we could control the printer, we started scanning. First we scanned the rectos, and second we scanned the versos. We were being monitored all the while, through one-way mirrors on all four sides of the room. We got to the end of the folio, then proceeded into the record room.

Then came the plot twist, and the zinger.