It is a tale as old as time. A love story. A fantasy from afar.

Quotas stood there in his wrinkled shirt drinking a cold beer. Next to him, there was a black rabbit, clearly hungry. He gave the rabbit a carrot. Teumessian was making them dinner that night. It was a quiet spring night, with light humidity, and pollen in the air. They ate their dinner quietly except for when Quotas complained of the smell of the mushrooms Teumessian made for herself. Shortly after, they went to bed in unison.

In the darkness, Quotas closed his tired eyes. In the darkness of his room and eyelids, he imagined a land of green, with livestock roaming around. A sheep. A horse. A few goats. Pigs making their sounds in the distance. He could hear a fiddle playing in the background, joyfully with energy. As he pictured the great and beautiful countryside, he could smell the grass waft around. It tickled his nostrils, and he sighed in pleasure, electricity running down to his toes. He continued to imagine the hills of green, like static waves of grass. But then as his eyes wandered in his mind, he pictured a bearded anteater in worn overalls, and muddied boots. Shirtless. His shallow breath began to speed up, and he could feel his heart beat under his blankets, thumping in excitement. He felt tingly inside, a special tingle. This was the love of his life, in denim. This was Sniffler.

That night, as Quotas soundly slept, despite murmuring every so often,  he imagined a life with Sniffler. A life of love, romance, and of course, great adventure. They romped through the hills, oftentimes, naked, with the grass and sunshine against their bodies, in innocence and purity, together forever entangled. They sheared sheep. Tended to horses’ hooves. Tasked goats with clearing weeds. They milked everything they could milk.

When Quotas woke up, he was in a heavy sweat. His sheets were moist. He moved out of bed quickly. He told Teumessian he was going to work, but he decided to call off of work that day. He went for a drive to the post office, speeding through town. He bought a postcard, and paid for international postage. He wrote on it, “Dearest Sniffer, tongue ever aflutter. I will book passage on a ship from the new land and join you across the ocean. We will be business partners. An emu and anteater together, with the love that dare not speak its name. Toodles, sweet tender loving strong and kind Sniffler.”

Quotas did not return home that day. He went straight to the Big City, filling his car with gas several times along the way. He parked the car, but didn’t pay the meter. After abandoning his car and grabbing a few items, he booked the cheapest passage to Ireland to make his love real and complete, on a ship leaving that same day. He cared not of his comfort, but only about getting to his destination. Quotas sat on the ship, ever dreaming, ever impassioned. He watched the waves in the distance, and he thought of the leaves of grass in the wind awaiting him. He wrote poems in a notebook about the anteater in boots. He drank wine alone and avoided the other passengers in steerage. He didn’t want them to interrupt his busy imagination.

Arriving in Ireland after many weeks, and many rats stepped on in steerage, bones crunched under his shoes, left ever sticky, he quickly sought out Sniffler. He found a deliveryman to give him a ride into the countryside on his wagon. He thanked the man profusely when he was left off. He breathed in the air, deeply. His heart pounding. His palms sweating. He walked off of the dirt road, guided by his daydream.

Eventually after wandering for an hour, he found Sniffler on a field, just as he imagined. His shirt was off. He was tastefully sweating, and his eyes looked off into the distance at the orange sunset over the virile green pastures, that would soon become their fields of love. Quotas paused, and tried to bury his head in the ground, but decided that now was the time for him to be courageous. Quotas shyly approached Sniffler, his emu feathers raised and erect. Sniffer looked at him, and stuck out his thin tongue, as anteaters do. They said nothing, but embraced. As Sniffler’s delicious sweat absorbed into Quotas’ wrinkled clothing, he knew he had found his new home. Sniffer and Quotas folded together, like socks. He knew this would be his heaven.

To Be Continued

Across the wide ocean, a tiger, Teumessian sat at a dinner table. The house was quiet. Quotas was nowhere to be seen. Dinner was getting cold. It was steak. Still, she sat. As moonlight crept in through her curtains across her dining room table, she began to dig her claws into the wood of the table with a calm face, but anxious paws. An audible crunching and scratching sound permeated through the stillness of the house with the smell of sawdust. Eventually, around midnight, she stood up. She had etched a Q into the table sweetly, but as the clock had begun to get closer to midnight, she violently had marred it with an X over it. She had realized what had happened. Quotas had finally done it. He had left her for another man.

Alone in the house, she began to plot her revenge broodingly. But first, she had to figure out where in the hell Quotas had gone to. Was it to DangerClose’s house? Was it to Spike’s? Was it to LongLeggedLarry’s? No, she knew the answer. She had always known. It was always. Always Sniffler. She went into Quotas’ night table drawer, after tripping over some of his scattered clothing on the ground. In the drawer, she found a picture inside the back of a small copy of the bible, just after the last page. A picture of Sniffler holding just a dandelion, only Sniffler and the dandelion… and his bare skin… in a holy book… concealing his sin. There was a lipstick kiss on the back of the photo, and it was signed R underneath.

Quickly, the tiger packed her things. She already had an orange coat, so she just needed a brush. She set off on a journey across the ocean. A journey for revenge, and blood. She strolled onto the ship, and didn’t buy a ticket. No one was going to tell a tiger no. She sat on the ship, and ate some of the passengers to kill the time as it sailed, because she’s tiger. Her taste for blood was insatiable during the ride. She was always hungry, always violent. But her journey came to a terrible halt. Once docked in Ireland, as she was getting off the ship, a large net was thrown upon her, and she was taken into a caravan, for a traveling circus. They gave her steak, and shampooed the blood of her victim’s off of her. There was an elephant in the caravan named Lou. She became friends with him. She didn’t try to eat him. She decided that maybe she was stuck in this circus life, and it wasn’t so bad. She was fed well. She got to travel. There was a lot of popcorn to eat, and no one bothered her about her wanting to eat mushrooms. She also enjoyed the crowd clapping for her, and the circus clowns even gave her a portable oven to bake things.

One night, while she was performing with some trapeze artists, she heard some voices she recognized. One was American, that of an emu, and the other was Irish, that of an anteater. She did not see them, but she could hear them. She looked over the crowd closely, interrupting her act. The circus master took the whip to her, and she became feral, and ran into the crowd fierce, and in a panic. One of the trapeze artists missed catching a rope, and went splat on to the ground. There was a small break in the chaos and cacophony of the crowd. The next sound heard was the fast paced and jumpy footsteps of anteater Sniffler and emu Quotas darting out of the carnival tent…

To Be Continued.

Off back across the ocean, a world away, he wakes in a daze on a mattress on the floor, RasAlGhul awakes. He rolls over, and reaches into some tin foil, and retrieves a chicken wing. It is room temperature, but delicious on his lips. He lights a rolled up cigarette, and stares at his ceiling for a few moments. He thinks to himself about what he’s going to do today. He scratches his nipple. It tickles. He decides he’s going to go play with Quotas. That’ll make it a great day.

He rolled out of bed already in his clothes, and he made his way across town to Quotas’ house. The sun was shining, and the neighborhood dogs followed him. No one was home. He continued to ring the doorbell repeatedly, but there was no answer. After a few minutes, he sat on the porch. A few days passed, as he made camp on the porch, and he decided that Quotas must have run away finally with Sniffler, and that Teumessian was getting her revenge. He figured it’d be fun to watch.

He packed his sweet steamy meat, and then he took a bus down to New York City. It didn’t take too long before he convinced a ship’s captain that he would be good at mopping the deck for free passage. It was a humid and long ride on the ocean. His pocket meat began to taste rancid as the hot days on the ship went on. He got seasick a few times during the journey. He threw up some spaghetti on his sweater, but eventually, he made it to Ireland. There, off the ship, he tried to find some farms, figuring that’s where Sniffler might be. He wandered into a barn and met the most beautiful female he had ever seen. They kissed and he drank her milk gluttonously, but then he was on his way again, looking for Sniffler, Quotas, and the angry jilted Teumessian.

One foggy night, he was walking near a town, with some dogs following him. He had just told off a pizza man for having cockroaches in the pizza shop, and the dogs decided he was their master. Off in the foggy and muggy distance, he saw some circus tents and a lot of commotion. He walked towards the mess with the dogs, and he figured that maybe he’d get some free circus food, and meats, perhaps exotic ones from the event. He was excited, and hungry, as his tinfoil was now empty and balled up in his pocket.  

In the darkness of the night, he could barely make it out, but he saw Quotas and Sniffler, running, and holding hands into the darkness away from the brightly lit red and yellow tents. Following them, he saw a grand tiger, Teumessian, with the hunger for blood in her eyes. He decided to walk over and follow them, with his team of flea bitten strays, to see where this was all going to end.