The guiding principle of Six Ridiculous Questions is that life is filled with ridiculousness. And questions. That only by giving in to these truths may we hope to slip the surly bonds of reality and attain the higher consciousness we all crave. (Eh, not really, but it sounded good there for a minute.) It’s just. Who knows? The ridiculousness and question bits, I guess. Why six? Assonance, baby, assonance.
Say you’re a quail. Well, OK, say you’re an anthropomorphized quail with the power of speech living in a world populated primarily by anthropomorphized quail. Not all anthropomorphized quail are created equal; nor, it seems, are they all the bevy-devoted avians we might imagine. Take you for example.
Owing to your lack of focus on the bevy as a whole, semi-nefarious nature, and perhaps most of all your employment on quail Wall Street, you committed various financial crimes for which you were charged, tried, and convicted. Yes, apparently, the quail justice system functions a bit more reliably than ours does. Having bid a tearful goodbye to your three hundred(!) chicks, you show up at the doors of quail prison ready to pay your debt to quail society. What happens next?
Are you wing-printed? Forced to wear stripes? Forced to wear solids? What are the gangs like in quail prison, anyway? Sure, this is quail white-collar prison but there must still be gangs, right? How about the guards? What are they like? I mean, you know they’re not “nice,” they’re prison guards, but what species are they? Or are they, too, quail?
Go wild on this. You know you’ve been cooped up as an anthropomorphized quail WAY TOO LONG. Actually, you’re going to be cooped up a lot longer, but you get the idea. Bonus credit for a description of visitors’ day. I mean…three hundred chicks? Do they visit in shifts?
Dear Kurt, thank you for your recent letter and for attempting to send me the novel The Quail of Monte Cristo. Unfortunately, the book was confiscated as we are only allowed to read the Bible and The Art of the Quail. Your letter contained so many redactions all that was left were the words “heavenly” and “dove.” (Or at least I think those were the words. Your chicken scratch leaves much to interpretation.) In any event, “heavenly dove” has become a bit of a visual mantra for me, an imaginative link to the outside world. I shut my eyes and picture a heavenly dove cruising peacefully across a cloudless blue sky just as it is obliterated by a shotgun blast. As you and I both know; doves are the worst. So pious. Given the pervasive surveillance of our missives, I am not sure what words of mine will remain upon your receipt. But I keep writing. What else am I going to do with all this time? It seems as if I am a quail without a bevy. If I’d been a murderer I’d have more friends, but I have betrayed my own kind by preying on my own kind. So I must watch my back. I caught my cellie the other night trying to saw off my plume with the sharpened edge of a toothbrush. I was able to stop him due to my extensive training in the martial art of Wing Chun. This might be my key to survival. I only hope that my children will learn from my mistakes. Once a month they allow us to perch on the heavily-guarded perimeter of the prison wall as our friends family and visitors stand in a field and hold up signs of love and support. I only recognized a few of my chicks (they grow up so fast!), but the ones I did recognize weren’t holding loving signs but rather were firing an arsenal of potato cannons that sent me reeling off the wall and down into the yard where I was repeatedly kicked in the ribs by a Mountain Quail named Jebediah. I don’t know if I’ll ever be forgiven. Which is why your letters are so important to me, Kurt. If you are able to find the time, I would much appreciate a visit next month. Please write something nice on your sign, or rather, have someone with better handwriting write something nice.
Why are the colors of house paint given such extravagant names like, y’know, Butternut Biscuit Beige and Pearl-Lustered Tangerine? Is it simply to sell more paint by appealing to the whimsy of the apparently quite whimsical paint-buying public? Are the name-givers frustrated artists or, still worse, frustrated marketing MBAs? Or is there something even deeper and darker than art and MBAs at play here? What’s your theory?
I am not one to see conspiracies where none exist, so I can only interpret these naming conventions as a gift. Contrary to your assumption, these positions are not filled by frustrated marketing MBAs but by beautifully self-actualized, art-loving creatures known as liberal arts grads. (Incidentally, the field of cosmetics, specifically the departments of nail polish and lipstick nomenclature, are also rife with talent.) In addition to providing gainful employment to those who have chosen the noble but less than lucrative study of the humanities, these names also provide creative writing teachers with a generous well of prompts.
- Choose one of the following Sherwin Williams paint colors and use it as the small-town Vermont setting for a horror story involving religious zealotry and competitive apple bobbing.
- Mix-and-match the following Sherwin Williams paint colors into the former code name of your main character who was once a hired assassin now trying to live a normal life as a high school football coach.
- Choose one of the following Sherwin Williams paint colors as your signature wrestling move. Describe the move in detail.
Agreeable Gray
Gossamer Veil
Crushed Ice
Azure Tide
Spinach White
Lime Rickey
Nearly Peach
Real Red
Butter Up
Gusto Gold
Please solve the following unrelated set of simultaneous equations using only sentences:
(Entropy – Mount Everest) / (Blue + Potato) = (Milan Kundera x Land Shark)2
Vanity + (Hunger / Love) = Turing Test – (Napoleon / Big Mac)
A laugh is like a French fry, once you get one you’ll want more.
No matter how much power we give them, our computers will never be good at hugs.
What are you thinking?
More hugs.
You’re sad because yesterday you lost your job as a first-year barista. However, owing to the kind ministrations of techno-capitalism, you’re already been contacted by an executive recruitment firm tasked with finding a new Thanos for the Marvel universe. No, I don’t mean a new thespian to play Thanos. Josh Brolin, all his body paint, prosthetics, CGI and whatever are safe. I’m talking about the real Thanos.
Negatives: If you get this role, you’ll be forced to become a two-dimensional being in more ways than one.
Positives: The compensation and benefits package is simply incredible, otherworldly if you will.
Verdict: You want this job. Nay, you NEED this job.
At the end of a battery of interviews, personality and intelligence testing, and other borderline Orwellian processes you sit down with the firm’s CEO for a final interview. This CEO, let’s call her Z, is so well regarded in the field of executive recruitment that if the interview goes well enough, you’ll get the job. You will be Thanos.
A grueling six-hour interview ensues in which you are refused everything from water to Kleenex to a phone call. You feel like a prisoner. You, in fact, feel so much like a prisoner that you say to Z, “I’m really starting to feel like a prisoner here.” Z assures you you’re not a prisoner, that you can get up and leave any time, but leaving will impact your eligibility for this coveted role as 2 D supervillain. You get up to leave anyway. You’ve really had it with this Z’s bullshit at this point. However, she raises a hand to cut you off before you can go. “Just kidding,” she says. “There’s only one more question, and if you ace the answer, you’ve got the job.”
You sit back down. “What is it?” you ask.
“Instead of being able to blink half the beings in reality out of existence, the Infinity Gauntlet allows you to select one famous dessert to blink out of existence. You most choose the famous desert the absence of which from our timeline would have the most far-reaching negative effects on reality. Which desert do you choose? Please describe the effects corresponding to its nonexistence in detail.” Please be comprehensive and convincing. Your future career as a wealthy, famous two-dimensional supervillain is on the line.
Quite frankly, Z can take this job and shove it. With so much preventable suffering happening in the world, why would anyone wish to pile on to that suffering by eradicating one source of even the smallest bit of joy? So I refuse to answer this question the way it is asked, instead, I will tell you which dessert’s mass distribution would result in the most positive effect on reality. Every Friday I will blink into existence a slice of pie for every single person in the world. Free Pie Friday! You will receive your favorite slice without even thinking about it. You can have it anytime you’d like, yes, even for breakfast or in the bathtub or while commuting to work or at the gym after completing a set of deadlifts. If for some reason you do not feel like pie that day, you can share yours with someone who needs a little extra pie. In fact, there will be pie banks set up for surplus pie. You may take the slice from your six week old baby who cannot know the joy of pie just yet, and when you do, you will feel that the universe is rewarding you for the sheer exhaustive and relentless endeavor of keeping a small human alive for six weeks. Six weeks! There will be pie parties, where strangers get together in town squares to share pie and invent modern line dances. Children, taking their free pie for granted, will launch their slices at one another in fruit-smeared delight, and for a blessed moment they will stop staring at their screens. The hungry will have pie. The poor will have pie. The infirm will have pie. Those who cannot get out of bed due to the daily weight of the world’s unforgiving brutality will all have pie. Yes, even the powerful and cruel will have pie, except theirs will be full of razor blades so that they might be reminded of how they corrupt everything that’s supposed to be sweet.
Is God real?
Ask a quail.
Jeremy T. Wilson is the author of the novel The Quail Who Wears the Shirt and the short story collection Adult Teeth. He is a former winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award for short fiction and his work has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, The Florida Review, Jet Fuel Review, The Masters Review, Sonora Review, Third Coast, The Best Small Fictions 2020, and other publications. He lives in Evanston, Illinois and on the internet at jeremytwilson.com.
Kurt Baumeister is the author of the novels Pax Americana and the forthcoming Twilight of the Gods. His writing has appeared in Salon, Guernica, Electric Literature, Rain Taxi, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Nervous Breakdown, The Weeklings, and other outlets. An acquisitions editor with 7.13 Books, Baumeister holds an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College, and is a member of The National Book Critics Circle and The Authors Guild. Find him at kurtbaumeister.com.