The Beavers (short fiction)

We cannot discount the possibility that beavers are making fools of everyone who ever worked in the field of developmental psychology.

Yes, beavers. The kind you find building dams in streams and waterways across this great country.

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Hello, Jake. They told me I'd find you here. You look better than I expected you would, all things considered. I should have known you'd wind up back in the small town. I'll bet you weren't smiling when you heard the news. But I'm sending you my greetings, friend, and you can take from that what you will.

Jake, they got me. You deserve to know. They own me now and there's nothing I can do about it. No, there's nothing you can do about it either so you'll save us both a lot of trouble if you just don't go there. It's written in stone now, they have without a doubt got me. They shot me up with a good dose of that forgetting juice that people pay good money for. But that juice simply doesn't have the horsepower to wipe clean your memory from my polluted mind.

So maybe I deserve this. Is that what you're trying to say?

Jake, I don't think you have a clue. You don't know what you're talking about. You think I hadn't long ago learned all there is to know about the forgetting juice? You have underestimated me to an unforgivable degree. They've got me...there, I think I've said it three or four times now, hopefully you're seeing it as a series of red flags. Selah.

I was waiting right here when they arrived. Word on the street was that they were intent on carrying out the orders of some prophet from Uranus and that this particular seer was of a mind to see me swinging in the breeze. I don't enjoy working with prophets, to a man I've found them to be generally rude, unsettling, buzz-killing burps in the grand illusion. Furthermore I happened upon some scuttlebutt the nature of which was the accuracy of the word on the street. Indeed the word on the street's reputation has been severely lacking over the course of the last few years. But I wouldn’t trust the word on the street, you can take that sucker to the bank. Wouldn't trust 'em with my worst enemies.

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That stupid prophet says it's about time I told you the truth.

"The truth?" I asked him, incredulously. "If there's anyone in the world who can't handle the truth, it's Jake. He's constructed his own paradigm and has been trying to work within it for more years than he can even remember. He's been disengaged from reality for so long he wouldn't recognize verifiable truth if it spit in his face, preferring the collage of occult beliefs that have always fascinated him. Those hidden teachings vie for attention in his dream world with selected morsels of Eastern philosophy, a crude understanding of Schopenhauer, an even more skewed reading of Camus' The Myth of Sysyphus, leftover doctrine, wrongly interpreted, from him mother's Pentecostalism and a hodge-podge of countless conflicting ideas he's placed on the scales and decided were equally worth championing."

The prophet from Uranus winced at the litany of idiocy I was ascribing to Jake. He knew full well I was telling the gospel truth but he hated to see so much vitriol projected at a man who had very sincerely looked into his own values and beliefs. The only thing that kept him from defecting from his mission was a jealous streak the size of the Magma Belt (in case you're unfamiliar with the Magma Belt, suffice to say it's mighty big, mighty wide, mighty long, the perfect simile for an uncontrollable jealous streak).

Jake, I know it sticks in your craw something severe to find out we were talking about you behind your back. Even more unforgivable that we were speaking of your "universally-recognized-as-wack" philosophy of life. But you have to come to your senses at some point and see it for the circus freak sideshow that it is...

...or perhaps it really is just the beavers.