(no subject)

[proximoception]

Once there was a dog who joined a circus. He was thrown through hoops high above the ground and put on the backs of prancing horses. These combined with a diet of discarded caramel popcorn gave him a tummyache. At the Sunday meeting of the circus performers he voiced his trouble:

"Mesdames and sirs, though I am sensible of the fair treatment I have here received, and immeasurably grateful to you for this suit of forty sequins and twenty tassels, my tummy, constituting much the greater part of my body mass, has an ache of such magnitude that I cannot continue any longer in your service and must go forthwith in search of cure."

The ladies wept to hear this said and the hat-shaped man was passed about to collect parting gifts. The dog thanked politely the givers of four additional sequins, eleven dollars, a button that shone so bright there was no identifying its color, a map of the world's many rivers, and a loaded handgun. With scorn he growled at the givers of stale biscuits and unwashed handkerchiefs. Putting on the hat-shaped man and adjusting his scarlet scarf, the dog decamped.

For several years he wandered the valleys of the Andes, in search of a tummy specialist charging less than eleven dollars. Though many a mad or lost or exiled doctor put his (tin or wood or imaginary) stethoscope or scalpel or ear to the dog's poor tummy, never had he come away with aught but drooping tail and contradictory diet plans. Many an evening he spent pushing the shiny button about the pebbled bottoms of the cool streambeds whose coursing waters provided his only relief, pushing it with his nose and sighing and crying so hard that the tears came out his ears and the sighs came out his eyes. The stars rippled in sympathy.

One day in Peruvia, after saving some oppressed sweatshop children from a cheap linen fire, the dog met a gypsy at a bar. The gypsy was a loud gypsy and given much to boasting. On seeing the dog he declared he could eat a dog bigger than that, uncooked, in a single bite. The weary, severely burnt dog replied, "Alas, sir, I am eaten already by a flame among my insides. It is six years old today and I am but seven. It will never be seven itself for, if it is not first put out, I will never be eight." The gypsy covered his tiny gypsy tummy with hairy gypsy hands in pained compassion and bought the dog several drinks. After some revelry best left undescribed here the gypsy leaned down and whispered the dog that he knew of an island off a nearby coast, where behind a mountain and through a glade was a well beside a house. And on the floor of that well was a false stone beneath which was a bag within which was easter grass hiding a bottle. "And in the bottle," promised the gypsy, "is the last drop of God's own antacid, left over from when he belched the world." The dog looked at him sharply. "Just one drop?" he asked. "Just the one, friend." The dog looked about to see if any were near, put a pillow on the gypsy's chest, and shot him dead with his loaded gun. The recoil knocked off two of the dog's sequins.

"For heaven's sake, why!" cried the hat-shaped man. "Because," the dog replied, "what if he had met a pretty gypsy girl with a similar ache, or his mother or brother came down with the like? Gypsies are fickle and without that drop I am done for." The hat-shaped man sat sadly in thought but said nothing further. He understood the dog but felt bad things might come of this shooting. In the morning they took a train to the coast and walked up and down the great beach there, squinting for islands.

The islands there were plentiful but elusive. To prevent spoliation by tourists their inhabitants had long ago dynamited the islands' moorings and now they drifted freely among the world's highest, grayest, most savage and cluttered waves.

The dog, resourceful, found a tall, bendy tree on a spur of headland and climbed it till his weight swung the top out over the sea, mere inches above the highest waves. He held on tight and waited, perfectly still. When you sit, alone, so still the sea can't see you certain things will happen, in this order: after about a minute the little crustaceans that live in the beach sands and pop up to feed while hidden among wave breakings -- no one ever sees them but they're a shy pastel blue and have apprehensive pudding eyes and soft pink hands they're always rubbing together -- anyway they pop each out of their little holes and scurry together into groups to gather news, advice, reassurance. The passage of a second minute brings the sharks to the surface, the foot-long lime green ones that seem all minivac mouth. They come up among beds of sea moss and each retains a streaming wig of it as they jump and play in toothy threes and pairs. The third minute's sudden flight sends shadows racing far across the waters to bring the islands. As the fifth minute begins the first island appears. It is always the smallest. Its green is the green of dark maple leaves after rain in late June, its many animals are lined up in temporary truce across the forward shore, licking their sundry shapes of chops in anticipation of a mainland holiday, however short. The frogs hop about on the backs of the boars. The squirrels join tails and dance.

That first island, wary, stopped a marlin's-jump away. Its raspberry bumps and fern eyes seemed to scan the beach. To the dog's good fortune it had approached for landing the very strand out from which his tree arced. But it had stopped somewhat further away than he could leap. Beneath the water a rim of white sand walked out past the horn of the shore to a lazy death in starfish-couching zigzags. The anchored island spun slowly clockwise, its animals pacing its green-pillowed edge contrarily, so that they seemed to a fixed observer to be marching in place, until a kind of natural gangplank of tangled treeroots and fossilized barnacles swung into sight and connected with the underwater pier. The dog sniffed in astonishment at the spectacle of the larger animals disembarking one by one amid a forward rush of frogs and flies and purple hummingbirds. The largest and slowest -- a dwarf elephant, a gouty old boar and two fat flamingoes -- took up the rear. Uncertain whether the island was to stay or merely leave them there, if it was omnibus or residence or another thing, the dog took his chance and leapt onto the elephant's head; bounding immediately to its behind, thence to the back of the indifferent boar and onward, awkwardly, into and out of the birds, landing on the moored island amid a snow of panic feathers and hissing. A thousand raspberries gleamed surprise from all around at the panting besequined dog.

The dog awaited the island's reaction but none forthcame. Some of the passenger animals could still be seen at the edge of the trees on the mainland, gorging themselves on the yellow melons the hummingbirds freed with their sharp beaks. Surfeited naps followed, twenty species of head gently bobbing with twenty sounds of snore over twenty sizes of round belly. The dog, convinced his each breath was weaker than the last, snarled "No time, no time!" and ran several circuits of the beach, looking inward. The bushes and vines were thick but the midmorning sun forced glimpses of a cleared rise in the island's middle part. Flattening himself as much as possible the dog crawled through. A single thorn stuck itself in the very center of his stomach. But before this sensation even registered the dog was transported by the next sight. A little hillock wrapped in short green specklish grasses drew itself up to an absurd culmination: a gigantical million-eyed raspberry on a bed of inch-thick leaves, barely visible through a cloud of multifarious insects. Strengthening sunrays diaphaned the crown a most beautiful blue and gilded the flies there. Scattered raspberry bushes across the hillside were perceptibly sprouted from nodes of a madly-planned labyrinth of appearing, disappearing, reappearing roots that radiated into the jungle in all directions: could it be that the whole island was held together by the one monster plant? The dog's supposition was supported by observation of a caravan of red ants, bearing six dew-filled walnut shells upward to the mother berry. Each ant segment had the exact shape, tint, and every other feature of a tiny raspberry eye. The very legs and feelers seemed braidings of raspberry whiskers. Their scent sealed it for the dog, who trailed them to their destination. At their nudging a tunnel pulled itself into existence in the queenberry's side, and the mock-ants dissolved themselves into threes to reform as a sort of catapulting ladle to hurl each nutworth of dew within. The dog sniffed aggressively at everything about and had soon dispersed the flying bugs. The great raspberry too showed evidence of alarm at his presence. Its great tapered bedleaves rustled slowly and its uncountable component gleams seemed all somehow fixed on him. The dog lay down in frowning canine concentration.

Noon gave him the necessary new information as it rendered the whole upper half of the berry transparent. In the very center was a dark mass, entirely mysterious in every feature but presence but that was enough for the dog, who opened his jaws and flew at it as if nothing separated them. Raspberry gore ran and rained and formed odd accumulations all about the dog and hilltop. Shaking his head madly from side to side to retain some sight amid so much juice the dog homed in on the center and, on reaching it, licked away all remaining obscuration. A terrible, bitter taste made him recoil: revealed as the motivating force of the impossible plant, wrapped and tangled five coils thick around the throne stem, was a thin, black, hairy, slimy worm. It blinked at him. He bit off its head.

The island spun around, bounced madly against the shore thrice,