The Farting Story Teller
On paper, I was employed as a research assistant and performed in that capacity for the firm, but the real reason I was hired by one of the senior partners was for my ability to pass nearly lethal SBD farts on command. My one real job was to lie in wait and strategically use my weapon of ass destruction whenever there were enough Mexicans in the room around the senior partner’s mom, who was also part owner in the firm. The son was tired of taking on immigration cases for pennies and wanted to move into more lucrative forms of legal work, but the kind-hearted mother, an ex-hippy flower child turned lawyer, had built the family business around immigration law, trying to help as many people as possible. She was old but feisty and had the final say for the several decade old partnership, and more importantly, she wouldn’t retire to let the next generation take command. As she wouldn’t retire or let the others change their business plan, I was secretly brought on board as part of a psy-ops campaign to turn the mother against illegal immigrants. At one angle, he was getting her to watch more Fox news, you know to “understand the enemy,” and the other was my farting. I was paid a bonus every time I was able to let one go, and he could see her reacting to the wretched smell as if one of the poor immigrants had shit his/her pants near her desk.
I had let a particularly powerful one off the chain at the right moment while a crowd of migrant farm workers were gathered around her desk trying to get her interested in helping them with a potential law suit against an employer that was shorting them on their pay and making them work in dangerous conditions. The fart actually caused everybody to have to leave the room. When the mother made some comment about why “these people” have to eat so much beans, the son who had hired me could barely contain his glee. Standing outside the office, he high-fived me, slipped me a fat wad of bills, and told me to take the rest of the day off.
I went from the legal firm to my other job with a firm that handled forensic work. This was also a family affair, at least in the owners/management. They had gathered together a group of gifted, high functioning autistic savants to do the field work. My job was to keep the workers on task. When they were focused, they worked like an ant colony, machine like and quick, but if they got distracted and went off track, it got chaotic. They were on a dig in a cold case, excavating and documenting evidence in a mass grave outside an old mental asylum. Rumors of mass murder led to the hiring of the company. I had a couple of duties in my role as a co-supervisor at the dig sites. I had to watch them for any break in their routine, apply sun-block when needed and apply eye drops as some of them wouldn’t blink for long periods of time. Most importantly, if the train started going off track, I had to call for a story time break. The story was the same each time, a Manchurian Candidate type ritual and trigger to refocus them.
As the day dragged on, I could see the focus slipping. Several of the crew began passing around a rather large femur bone down the line. When they went from just handling it, to smelling and licking it, I had to call story time. Happily, they came out of the pits and gathered around me. The story was a sing song Dr. Seuss like ditty. I began reciting the rehearsed lines, and the workers began to sort of hum and sway in unison. The ritual was working, and then it hit. I farted, not silent but still deadly. The noise and smell broke the ritual mid-story. The group went from happy and calm to highly agitated. They began making a rhythmic noise like a bird call, choppy and continuous. I noticed for the first time how dark and alien their eyes looked and how their faces seemed as if they had massive reconstructive surgery, pulling back the crepe like skin. Still making the choppy call, they began to close in on me. One of them lunged for my legs digging her thumb nails into my thighs…
I woke up to one of the dogs standing on my legs where the worker had grabbed me with the loud sounds of the savants actually being the several guineafowl calling outside my open window. I also had to take a giant dump. Happy Saturday morning to me.
