What’s Next?
Look for Book Two in this series where we’ll see Irish Benny head up to Arse du monde to officiate his baby brother Four’s polyandrous marriage.
Rumbles in Arse du monde
Excerpt
He gently pushed the testicles away from his nose. “Stop wiggling. I’m not gonna bite.” It shouldn’t have taken so long – his knees were starting to ache. “Hold still, will ya.”
“Jesus! Your hands are cold.” Irish wouldn’t look down. “You remember how to do this?”
It had been more than fifty-five years since he had put his head between a man’s legs. “Bit rusty. But I learned all I need in high school.”
“Home Ec class?”
“Drama club. Mr. Euripides taught me a thing or two behind the scenes … never thought it would come in handy.” The left testicle sagged four centimetres lower than the right. He lifted it slightly to tuck it under the penis. “And they called me the freak,” he muttered pulling the fabric taut as he grabbed the pinking shears to make the final adjustment.
“Oh no, no you don’t! Not while I’m wearing the pants!” Irish yanked on the drawstring to haul them down. “No way! It’s one thing to drag me up here to Arse du monde to be your best man, and to build the damn canopy for the ceremony, and then parade me around in a white robe with a pointed hood in the middle of the night planting those burning crosses on your neigbours’ lawns....” The white silk pants puddled on the floor. “Four, you know I love you, and I’d do anything for you, but I am not letting you near my pecker with those scissors.”
His baby brother stood, stretched his crooked back and laid the scissors on the table. He unstrapped the wristband that held the pins and wrapped the thread around his darning needle. “I already told you…they aren’t crosses. They’re burning fertility sticks.”
“But Nixon is fifty-four! And you’re seventy-three. And neither of you are Catholic … there goes the Immaculate Conception.”
“They aren’t for us. They’re for the villagers. It reminds them of the Festival of Lights, of Diwali. I don’t know,” he mused, unplugging the sewing machine and wrapping the cord around its pedal. “I kind of like it. And the Indians like it, so what’s the harm?” Folding the pants he slipped them into a bag with the white robe and peaked hood.
It had been a little over a year since the Natives sold Arse du monde to the International Indian Call Centre Corporation, and with the Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Islamic, and Christian celebrations overlapping, the villagers had no shortage of parties to dress up for. But the parties they looked forward to the most were weddings.
“The Indians, eh. Was a time when folks called us the Indians. How many ‘Indians’ are in this village now?”
“Me or them?”
“Them.”
“About a hundred and twenty. ‘Bout ninety percent of everybody. Then there’s the Ohs, you met them at the restaurant, Bobbie Oh is great, a real mother hen, and there’s a few Frenchmen, and Nixon – she’s the only American, I think, except for Mouse, and then there’s me. And you. That makes two Old Indians.”
“But I’m not staying. Four, this is just a visit; I’m going home to Bella after the wedding. You knew that when I promised to come up.” The wedding had been postponed three times and each time he had signed his little gold-trimmed RSVP with “Yes, but I’m NOT staying.”
“We’ll see. The longer you stay the more you realize there’s something about Arse du monde that’s hard to shake.” He handed his brother his jeans. “We’ll see, big brother, we’ll see.”
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