This is fiction.
by Rob Eckert
Let’s say you
walk through the double swinging doors into the saloon where Rob Eckert tends
bar, and you order a sarsaparilla. Pleasantries properly exchanged, you then ask
the question that haunts you like the lone rusting fire hydrant in a ghost town:
is Rob deliberately trying to blow your fuses? Looking at you with that
matter-of-fact and laconic expression he does so well, he would answer, simply,
"No."
Of course, by doing so, he’s deliberately trying to blow your fuses.
That’s why we here at Desperado Press are glad we operate on turn-of-the-nineteenth-century technology, our giant presses powered by four stalwart, dappled horses. Our horses have been bred by the nation’s leading animal husbandrists, and have evolved to the point where they operate entirely without the use of fuses.
Technology can be a wonderful thing.
Thus,
fuseless, we are happy to present Eckert’s postmodern masterwork This is
fiction. This elegantly-designed manifold broadside contains twenty-five
sections of poetic fiction (or, if you prefer, fictional poetry), as only a
tenderhearted, brokenhearted, lighthearted, hardhearted saloonkeeper can offer
them. Twenty-five also happened to be the official number of letters in the
alphabet when we started the press in 1853 (the letter k was added in
1867 when Russia threw it in for free with the purchase of Alaska, in a treaty
orchestrated by Secretary of State William Seward). Since we received the
manuscript, our accountants’ abacuses have been flummoxed with steam, and to the
best of their calculations, Eckert appears to successfully have used each one of
those letters, including the newfangled k.
But we prattle on. Since Rob often allows us to taste the new batches of bourbon straight from the casks when they arrive from Kentucky, we felt it would only be fair to treat, you, dear reader, with some deliciously intoxicating sample sections.
Unfolded, the broadside measures 5½" by 17", but it folds down to about 5½" square, about the size of one of those compact disc cases our youngsters have taken a shine to. For only $3, it’s like a pinch of postmodernism for your pocket, a hunk of humanity in your hands, an island of illumination for your eyes.
They sell fuses down at the hardware store for fifty cents a bushel. Why not let your current ones explode in a kaleidoscope of light?
