[As August 2010 marks the close of our tenth year of weekly publication, we shall spend this month enjoying "the blast from the past" with selections from Poor Mojo's Almanac(k): Year Three (issues 101-150). Please, enjoy!—Your Giant Squid, Editor-in-Chief, PMjA]

[originally published in issue #137]

Dear Giant Squid:

Does Dyllin Stevens like me?

Jessica Andrews

My Dearest Jessica:

As you surely know, Dyllin and I are quite of the excellent comrades of the heart, and brothers-of-the-spittle-hand-shake.

I recall those halcyon days of youth when Dyllin and I first met, he in his strikingly handsome Chewbacca t-shirt (which proudly proclaimed that he and all who saw him would indeed "Laugh it up, Fuzzball"— so jovial) and I in my titanium-enhanced anti-bathysphere. We shared a love of the small rubber Muscles(tm) rubberized action figurines depicting the multi-faceted wrestling athletes, as well as of the Stomper trucks with their nubby wheels, and of the M.A.S.K. action playsets.

Also, the eating of dog flesh, and the traveling in time.

I said, I recall, once to the little Dyllin who lived in a trailer down the road from me, I said, "Do you like the Jessica who is surnamed Andrews?"

Dyllin, who was but of rosy cheeks and little of the fuzz on the lip scowled. "I don't know anybody named Jessica, and if I did I'd puke on her."

"Indeed. You are wise. Stun the female. Disorient her."

He was a canny lad, and I was happy to have met him. I composed a brief note for myself and had it emailed to my future self through the temporal tether that connected my Anti-bathysphere with the laboratory network in 2003 Detroit.

Vomit upon females. Re: sexual foreplay. Explore further. read the note.

"Anyway, what do you care about girls. You're a freaky-ass monster like C.H.U.D." said Dyllin as he pushed purple RHINO M.A.S.K. model along the linoleum flooring of his aluminum domicile. He got up onto his knees and pushed the truck faster and faster toward my glass-domed head which rested at the precipice of the door, the screened closure propped open behind one of my optically perfect eyes.

He launched the small ICBM which ejected from the exhaust pipe of the Semi-Tractor, and with a click it bounced off of dome.

He sat back upon the haunches. I stared at him with my one exposed eye.

"I didn't mean to launch the rocket at you."

"It is a common problem among males of your species."

"Yeah?"

"Indeed."

"Do you wanna walk down to the Pixie Mart and get Pepsis?"

"We still have not addressed this open issue vis a vis Ms. Andrews?"

"Visa what?"

"Dyllin, I have come to know you well and at your most impressionable and open to the emotional candor so that I can discern if you do indeed like this Jessica. Can you not turn your attention to this problem? I have been to your hole of swimming, and I have been to your bicycle racing and I have climbed the slopes of your gravel pit, and we have sat beneath the American Moon and exchanged spittle upon the gripping end of our limbs (though you did have to provide for me spittle as well as your own) and I believe we have spent this lazy of the summer well and become friends. So, please, the answer."

"Race you!" he said with glee, and charged at my eye.

When I pulled back instinctively I accidently released my ink to the water of the sphere and was momentarily blinded. Common to the males of all species, it seems.

When the cloud faded, scrubbed away by the intricate filtration system of my sphere, I saw that Dyllin had skipped two hundred yards down the sun-dappled and rusty line of the tracks-rail-road. I charged ahead to gain upon his skuttle-run, my spike-tipped titanium legs piercing the soft spring turf like a switch blade through birthday cake.

He cackled when he saw me in pursuit, turning, running backward, tossing loose gravel at me and sticking to the air his tasting muscle.

"Perhaps," I called out as we ran, "You are reticent to comment on Ms. Andrews' special-ness because you like her very much?"

As we came out of the tree line and onto the road where the tracks crossed, cars swerved this way and that to avoid both Dyllin and my razored legs. At the door of the Mart, Dyllin darted in, but I was unable to pass the minute little monkey door. Frustrated, I crouched down so that my sphere could pass part way into the vestibule.

"Dyllin!" I bellowed, the candy machine sphere burst and the women at the cash registers fell to their knees, trickles of blood running down their cheeks from their ears. Dyllin tumbled, as my lab assistant Rob would say, Ass Over the Kettle of Tea, with the force of my speaker's remonstration.

He rolled to a stop at the base of a pyramid of orange that were miraculously unfazed. Dyllin sat up and held his head. A bit of blood trickled from the corner of his eye.

"Shall I mark the box 'Yes, I like you' or 'No, you are gross'?"

Dyllin started to cry, and the floor skittered like the multicolored skin of an octopus in heat, the gum balls rolling the many ways across the linoleum superstratum.

That night, I followed Dyllin home. He would not look at me, or speak to me, or make any sounds at all, except to cradle his ear softly in one hand and whimper very quietly.

I speared a doberman with one leg, its colon ballooning tenderly from out of its rectum, its heart peaking from out of the bottom of its ribcage where the brown velvet of its coat was split and bloody.

I presented it to Dyllin. He carefully built a fire and I held the beast over the flames.

Later that night, after we fought over the last paw, his mother finally came home. She had run screaming away when I appeared outside of her bedroom window some six days before, and she returned with a policeman in tow.

Dyllin ran and hid in the swamp on the far side of the tracks. An Am-Track sped through and just as the policeman started to unload his second clip into my less protected electronics, I reached out with one leg and clawed onto the roof of the speeding train.

It was a slip stream moment, like the instant you jet forward on a large intake of seawater into a less dense pool of warm water just above. I floated just above the train, my leg piercing down into an empty sleeper car. One of my optically perfect eyes was turned back and I saw Dyllin run back across the tracks into the open arms of his mother while the Policeman pushed back his cap with his free hand.

As the train rounded the bend and zipped on past the Pixie Mart, I dialed up a short temporal jump and was back within the garage deep beneath the streets of Detroit in the present day.

And so I say to you now, Jessica, I could not ascertain the answer to your question, but I suspect if he comes close he may be preparing a mass of stomach acid in his throat. Be prepared: he is initiating mating (although the regurgitant may proceed too quickly. Do not hold it against him, for we all regurgitate too quickly at one time or another.)

With Fondest Regards, Hence and Thence,
Your Giant Squid