Chapter 1

Wherein we meet our hero and his servant, who, after a slight delay, announces the arrival of a mysterious parcel.

Late one morning, following a night steeped in revelry, M Benito Rose de Pascale awoke to an ecstatic clattering of glass. The tempests of winter were gone and the countryside was budding once more. Wild blooms covered the land’s belly in a rash of small white spots.

We, that is, you and I, dear readers, can find pleasure in this uneasy beauty, for we naturally feel something of it in ourselves. But, I must ask, are we so fond of it that we lose the grace necessary to dig in our pockets for pity, to find something to lend to our hero, who, being made of a second substance, and thus following a separate cycle, is oppressed by our very seasons, who can find nary a refuge from our nature’s ignoble swell? A pair of storks were rutting outside his bedroom window. He heaved the thing nearest at hand towards the bustle, as we all would have done, and in drowsy frustration threw himself back against the bed. In an effort to block out the wispy huffs of the birds, he pulled all the cushions he could atop his aching carapace. The unsuccessful missile, a mere slipper, fell limp, unnoticed, amidst the mocking concupiscence of two jade nudes. In the bug’s weary eyes, the flames of last night’s punch bowl continued to cross and uncross their legs.

You will notice soon the character of this bug, my friends, for he is ever trying to wrest the story away from me. In my eyes, he is not unlike a toddler who grabs madly at his feeding spoon. If he does manage to wrap his fat fingers around it and pull it away from the guiding hand, there follows no more feeding, as you already know, but only a dumb spray of sauce. In the darkness of his pillowed cave, the bug thought to pass the time by writing something poetic. Here, I present to you uncensored the splattered piddle with which our hero tried to surmount me that morning: “Light struggled through the drapes, heavy and somber, with the rough trills of some northern song, exciting the dust, risen with the sun, that still hovered, roused in tired criticism of circadian persistence.” Sauce, readers, sauce! He actually repeated it once or twice more, if you can believe, hoping to dictate this to his typist after lunch! Continue to chuckle, my friends, but our fun has cost us some precious moments. We are pressed for time, and you must excuse me for forthwith proceeding in earnest.

With his few free fingers, the monsieur opened a peep hole looking out from his silk and feather fort. For the moment, the birds were granting him a reprieve from their offensive maneuvers, and Benito hoped to spy some more on his besieged chamber. A small yellow bee, he saw, was surveying the crystal cup overturned on his nightstand and sniffing the sticky remnants of burnt rum and sugar. M de Pascale studied the pitiful visitor, the poor scavenger of nectar. He noticed the pollen stuck to its prickled hide, fat pearls that reminded him of acne on an adolescent whore (a revolting image to call up, I agree). And when, with an awkward vibrating dance, the bee coaxed the glass to buzz in a sympathetic swoon, and at the same moment the bells began to ring from some distant church, it fled in a state of quivering consternation. What grand echoes its chance enchantment had caused, and all entirely unmeant! If these sounds were true sisters, as in the yellow mind of the bee, what amplification could possibly follow? Did this succession impel you to make a sound, too, my friends? The opening of your neighbor’s garage? The cough of that man waiting under the streetlight at the corner? Did it cause that sudden surge of white noise from your AM radio? The sudden demolition of the old newspaper office five blocks away? Are you so sure of your answer?

The monsieur counted twelve tolls before stirring, and his still half-sleeping eye alit on a few fertile beads left behind on the cup’s lipstick-marked rim. The bee had, obviously, imprudently fertilized a barren glass. But the bug, being but a larger version of the same scrawny-brained stock as the bee, who did not even know his own folly, wondered if it was not recompense for the snatched sugar. Had it offered a trade?

The noise of the storks returned.

“Stork!”

Johann Seifer-Stork, the monsieur’s servant of the past three years, presently entered the chamber with a large shepherd’s crook in his hand. At once the drapes were cleared and the shutters flung open. He cursed the nestling pair and teased them with the gnarled curl. I can assure you, my friends, that this Stork was no animal. He was a reserved man, a man not terribly younger than the bug himself, but when the birds trifled his employer, he would, as the servant code demands, become violently ashamed. An orphan since birth and a servant shortly thereafter, Stork had never had a proper family, and on asking the bug’s allowance of raising a pair of storks in the pasture surrounding his hovel, he proposed it as a way to find something of a namesake, a surrogate ancestry. “It is only natural,” the bug had said. Indeed, he found it a healthy idea (to think the boy thought of it himself) and expedited the arrangements with a local aviary, where an acquaintance of his kept the books. But perhaps this too-quick summary leads one awry of the bug’s true thought, so let us clarify.

A few years back, when revolutionary feelings flitted high among the spheres, a fear trembled through all noble parlors that those in their employ would soon turn. These tremors were not unfelt by Benito, who keenly saw the servant’s wish as an opportunity to distract him from political fraternity and its fetching subversions. He let him know as much: “You desire to rule a gang of songless ninnies, Stork. But if they one day found a voice, would you then fear a coup?” The servant gazed suspiciously at the fat old beetle, pausing to read his eyes, to read those sooty orbs where nothing shone but the dull gleam of smug satisfaction, the self appreciation of soothy wit (as is often, unfortunately, the case with this bug). He reminded the monsieur that even among the dumb birds, it was he who would sweep up at the end of the day. They, and not he, were the ones with the luxury of indifferently dropping their indifferent droppings.

But to return to the present situation. The trouble-makers, successfully offed from the window ledge, were now two empty sets of wings set in static span, diminishing slowly towards the servant’s marshy field. Johann stood with his head hung low, burning with a potent blush. One hand wrung the other behind his back. He stammered his regrets.

“Many apologies, sir. I will try again to entice them towards the nest which I have fixed for these urges.”

“Yes, please do.” The bug wouldn’t press the issue just now.

“A package has arrived for you this morning, sir.” At this, the servant’s face flashed small glee. Perhaps it arose merely from the opportunity to advance the conversation, as would be the explanation offered by an orthodox rationalist, but, seeing as one can never tell from where a servant’s odd emotion might come, I am tempted to offer a countertheory to you, my friends, and propose that the servant was intrigued by the unmarked, unsolicited package itself. Perhaps he had already opened it, as servants often take the liberty to do when the master himself is indisposed, and knew already what surprise awaited inside. And if this was the case, then we should be quick to call the man a fool, a fool and a terrible spy, for he was spilling the beans, all of them, with this wry grin.

“Let it wait, Stork. First I must take a gray leave. It will be something of a stone, I fear.”

“Well done, sir.”

“And then we must eat a bit.”

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Choose your Chapter 2:

• Wherein we suffer further description of our hero’s residence and personal habits
• Wherein our hero relieves himself
• Wherein we first hear the name of The Yellow Finn