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(out April 2011)

What Could Have Also Been
(alternate endings)

Robert Baumann

She can’t bludgeon her own head with a chamber door because of physical difficulties, because the runner does not want to die.

No, the runner has to figure out something else to do.

1. So she, the runner, who was even now, if you can believe, not beyond acting with remorse and autistic tenderness, gathered up the rest of the other one’s face goop and fashioned it into a head-like thing, not unlike what one might do with Bentham’s head should it melt, and set it at the foot of the bag that the rest of the other one was in so that at once both of Bentham’s heads were evoked and the greatest possible pleasure attained for all who remained—in the morgue—to be pleased by such a thing.



2. Unless, of course, the Bob Hope hologram beams from the chamber wall, calling the runner to the Safe Beyond.
   
   Which it does!
   
   We hope the other one in the bag is James Franco; the runner, a young Billy Crystal with tits.



3. But then here the janitor comes, missing his front teeth again, pronouncing poltergeist, Portuguese.
   
   “Boo-heh-heh-heh,” he sweeps up the other one.
   
   Booheheheheh runs the runner.



4. It is written:



“It is now easy to understand why a savage should desire to partake of the flesh of an animal or man whom he regards as divine. By eating the body of the god he shares in the god's attributes and powers. And when the god is a corn-god, the corn is his proper body; when he is a vine-god, the juice of the grape is his blood; and so by eating the bread and drinking the wine the worshipper partakes of the real body and blood of his god. Thus the drinking of wine in the rites of a vine-god like Dionysus is not an act of revelry, it is a solemn sacrament. Yet a time comes when reasonable men find it hard to understand how any one in his senses can suppose that by eating bread or drinking wine he consumes the body or blood of a deity. When we call corn Ceres and wine Bacchus, says Cicero, we use a common figure of speech; but do you imagine that anybody is so insane as to believe that the thing he feeds upon is a god?” ¹



5. Is it not unlike the problem of the coughing horse? Consider:
   
   A yard (in England) has pretty average, normal-quality hay; however, sometimes there is a dusty batch. Usually when this happens, people do different things: some soak the hay, some hose off the hay, some use haylage instead. Some say to just shake it and then hose it for ten minutes to get rid of the dust. Some say submerge completely. People also say things like, “The dust swells up but when the hay dries, the dust unswells so you have to feed it wet.” Someone said that soaking for much longer than ten minutes gets rid of the nutrients in hay, which one doesn’t mind if one’s horse is on a diet and one can’t convert to haylage because one wants to keep that extra weight off him. Apparently if hay is soaked and left, it will go moldy.
   
   So basically the main things I need to know are: Should I soak hay? For how long? Should I drain it or is it better wet?
   
   ANYTHING ELSE ABOUT COUGHS IN HORSES.

Metroid: An Appreciation
by Mike Meginnis

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