AUDIT: Last Nov's Forgotten Muskrats

ROAD JOURNAL: November Cape Girls

1. A dead beach town is autumnal murder mystery make-up; good DNA for a story, rough on a work week. Disconcerting. Chucks one off. The sand dunes, more so the weedy bluffs, scored by the cool nothing of an empty town behind, all feels awry.

2. I estimate this motel has sixty rooms. We are the only vehicle in the lot. Two teenage hoodlum girls meet us at the side entrance, and, like gatekeepers, try scrounging us for a lighter.  There is something in the approach I feel obliged to reject. Teen girls shouldn't be in a shit motel lot approaching working men. And by handing them a lighter I'd feel as if I was complying in something near to inappropriate: a yokel goshes, gollys, and winks while handing over the lighter with a wolfish eye. This is all my thing; a dead girl story in my mind recently, and this creep town, and these young girls too familiar around men, all of it sitting wrong. I could have told the girls, no lighter, but that would have felt more.. What? Lying to avoid rejecting a forward child seems .. perverse? So I say, "How old are you?". I say it with some pretty square indignation.
She misreads me, and says something she thinks is sassy cute.
"No." I say.
The girl calls me "fucking loser".
Now I'm giggling. Not at the language.  At the look on her face.  To parking lot girls everyone is either a pervert or a shithead daddy.
3. I walk upstairs to the next motel room on the circuit with an improved mood. Thanks, Girl.

The Death of Albert Muskrat Jr. by Vampires

No matter what they tell you, AM didn't kill himself. While he was discovered strung up by a jump rope on the loading docks of the East Dinksborough Sam's Club, and while he is infamous on Google+ for his fondness of amatory asphyxiation, this is not the open/shut case Chief Redblatt told us. AMthe2 was murdered, my friends. Murdered by vampires.

I see you doubt me. You think I've read too many Stephen King books from back when he was good. Do not doubt that the undead walk among us. East Dinksborough, what with its Maine state record three Wendy's, and many "healthy" residents, is a town with an excess of blood. Ally the Musk knew this. He tried to tell us. Every one of you avoided his vociferous warnings before you got him fired from the Hess, because, as Lucille has told me, he was "freaking customers out" talking about vampires. Here I will quote from a call A to the Rat made on Late Night, Early Mourning with Norman Mourning on April the 12th of last year --
NM: Musky in Maine, you are on the air.
Musk: Greetings, Norm.
NM: Where in Maine, Musky?
Musk: I'd rather not say...
NM: Why is that?
Musk: Vampires.
NM: Tell us more, Musky. Are these sexy vampires?
Musk: Not at all. Anything but. Vampires are not sexy. If pedophiles had spent a thousand years weaving lies into literature that their ignominious kind were sexy, you'd probably .. Oh, wait. Nabokov. Let me --
NM: Musky--
Musk: Norm, let me remetaphor.
NM: Fine.
Musk: What if Americans had written books. Sexy books. For cows. Written in a cow language, or having invented a helmet that gave the bovine ability to read books, these stories tell lonely lady cows about how erotic it should feel to them when humans eat a hamburger. You see? Lady cows.
NM: I'm bailing on this call --
Musk: Hold on! Third time is a charm. One more. Si?
NM: Sure.
Musk: Imagine we live in a world where air was water and water was air --
(Mourning hangs up)

You see, my friends. He was trying to warn us. This is why the undead strung him up with that jump rope, and left that condom on him.

MUSKRAT RAMBLE

Objectifying women is nearly as troublesome as womanizing objects. For instance, Albert M. claims to see womanly shapes in everything. Sometimes an apple is just an apple, Albert, not an apple-bottom. Sometimes two softballs nestled in the gym sack of a gym teacher are not the breasts of an amorous Dutch milkmaid. Sometimes the triangulated country intersections of colonial Plimouth viewed in aerial photography are not as Albert M. Is quoted, "All the vaginas in the world". In a time and place where the objectification of women is both superfluous and taboo, what has happened to Albert M. can't be a surprise. Last week he described the eyes of an owl as being like a Spanish woman's nipples.

DOG MATH

In that way the old man considered himself righteous: full of
properly scaled contempt for the ignorant, he would take one of the poor saps under his wing despite it, and this protege' would serve a term to learn a few things.  In this case the Wall youngest, Demmy Wall, this particularly precocious little tweety bird of an already abnormally precocious lot of dirty neighborhood kids had crawled under the fence of the Old Man's neighbor to the east, Elton Farr, and been bit a good one on the forearm by one of Elton Farr's Rottweilers, Mr. Pickleboy Jr., and thus had come sniffling over to the Old Man's place to the west, and thus had been taken in for a bit of doctoring, (the Old Man could still mend a wound; an amateur mend, a professional wound), and thus he
said to young Demmy, "Would you like to learn something about dogs?"
"Mr. Pickleboy I play with!"
The Girl had her feelings hurt worse than her arm.
"Yes, yes, outside the yard you have played with him.  But inside the yard heis inside his yard, and more than that, he is with Augustus and Cicero.  Can you imagine how difficult it must be for him to be with his brothers Augustus and Cicero when he is called Mr. Pickleboy Jr.  There was no Mr. Pickleboy Sr."
"There was.  It was Mr. Farr's cat."
"A worser travesty couldn't be perpetrated to a dog.  And even so Pickle is quite sweet outside of his yard, Si?
"Yes." She said.
"Dogs are math, my dear.  One dog is a person.  You see him, and he sees you.  He cares for you as you would like.  Two dogs are dogs.  Don't expect two dogs together when they smell another dog peeing a mile away to care as little for it as a human would.  Now here is your lesson, girl: Three dogs are wolves.  Never forget it.  Three dogs together will never get the smell of meat out of their noses when you are around them."
"I see." Demmy Wall said with such earnestness that the Old Man loved her.  She calculated his advice, and he smiled.  She thanked him, and he hurried her out of the house.  She waved at his figure in the window, and he waved back.  
Children can have a similar math is what he thought.