Buffalo Tale continued


The boy stood less than a thousand yards off. Perfefect range. He reached back down into the tank; brought out a bullhorn.

He yelled at the boy to hold it.

Eros bunched his cheeks on either side of a smile, held his crotch and said nothing; amused that his father - a man so preoccupied with heritage - should know no better than to use a pronoun without an antecedent.

Through his binoculars Mars caught the smile. He ground his molars in fury, till he drooled. One last time he put the bullhorn to his lips.

He screamed at the boy a lesson was about to be taught. He howled how after this the cosmos would remember the folly of a babe's insolence.

So saying, scowling, he vanished down into the bowels of the tank. The hatch slammed behind like a spastic colon. Mars pressed his cheekbones to the goggles surrounding the gunsight. Eros made a pink asterisk typed on the horizon.

Venus, from her satellite vantage, radioed down instructions. She fed Eros vectors. Funneled his arms into the appropriate attitude. Caressed his eyes with logarithms of motherly love engendering precise aim. She synchronized his brain on a frequency where thought failed to interfere with the rippling of his pudgy muscles drawing the bow to zero error.

The child, the way an orgasm comes, released…

Down through the prism, Mars took a direct hit. Tears jerked him out of the tank. Choking with lust, he sat astride a tomahawk and flung his head from side to side, wringing out tears, struggling to regain his sight. The iridium arrow had vaporized on impact and ringed with tinsel the warrior's eyes.

The instant he could see again - rainbows circling his irises like swarming bees - his eyes latched onto the target less than a thousand yards from his Cadillac. Mars leaped off the tomahawk and was racing toward the cherubic nude before his feet even touched the prairie. He was in love.

Now, to a dedicated warrior, love is just another way of looking at hate. So Mars, exhilarating in the chauvinism of all baldfaced killers, knew only he saw what the blood of which he had to take alive.

"My son! My son!" he screamed. "You must take me! Our hearts shall be as one. The child is master to the man. Take me, I am your slave!" 

Not unlike the Italian back in the alley in Paris, the tank, with its spears, tomahawks, nikes and plutonium, sat abandoned as a beer can. Nothing like this had ever happened. Once unsheathed, they had always been fired till barrels melted, treads buckled, blades smoked with blood like poinsettias at sunset…

Eros grinned. His mother, from on high, beamed; swooped down to whisk her boy away.

The furs, like barrels of dandelion fluff, fell…

And as he hurried into the sky, the boy cried, his cheeks cherries under twinkling eyes, "Dad! You never had it to begin with! Sex, you see, is cruder than violence. The ritual you practice is over-sophisticated, calls for too much equipment. You're a physics junkie - I'm a sex queen. Dad, forget it - we don't even know what each other mean!"

In all the vacuum of unrecorded history, never again would a Martian interfere in earthly affairs. Mars receded. It was against his religion, but he couldn't help it. He loosened up a bit. His gravity relaxed. He recovered his sight, although he still lusts after boys whenever he reads the newspaper. He hasn't slept with his wife since. Venus, reclining, wanders through further action constantly.

Onto the Cadillac landed the furs. The treads became legs. The twelve guns fused into twin horns. The gunsight calmed down into forlorn eyes. The tomahawk carved itself into an exquisite backbone. The first herd of buffalo was born. They browsed, brooded and stampeded over the prairie like the alloy of Sex and Violence that they are.

END
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