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.
1.Say you’re a buffalo. Well, OK, say you’re an anthropomorphized buffalo with the power of speech living in a world populated primarily by anthropomorphized buffalo. Not all anthropomorphized buffalo are created equal; nor, it seems, are they all the herd-devoted bovines we might imagine. Take you for example.
Owing to your lack of focus on the herd as a whole, your semi-nefarious nature, and perhaps most of all your employment on buffalo Wall Street, you committed various financial crimes for which you were charged, tried, and convicted. Yes, apparently, the buffalo justice system functions a bit more reliably than ours does. Having bid a tearful goodbye to your twenty-five(!) calves, you show up at the doors of buffalo prison ready to pay your debt to buffalo society. What happens next?
Are you hoof-printed? Forced to wear stripes? Forced to wear solids? What are the gangs like in buffalo prison, anyway? Sure, this is buffalo 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, buffalo?
Go wild on this. You know you’ve been cooped up as an anthropomorphized buffalo 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…twenty-five calves? Do they visit in shifts?
(Note: I’m not going to pretend I was smart enough to know the difference between buffalo and bison before starting my answer, and unfortunately I didn’t look it up until after writing this whole thing, at which point I realized I’d actually been writing about bison, which are the large creatures native to North America and Europe, which we commonly call buffalo, whereas actual buffalo are the large creatures native to Africa and Asia (picture water buffalo) but I’ve come too far now, so I’m going to stick with the American colloquial usage of buffalo)
After intake, which involves a full-body sonogram (because buffaloes are much too civilized for cavity searches), and removal of my personal effects (which are none, actually, because I’m a buffalo, but they go ahead and lock away a box containing my last breath of air as a free buffalo, out of principal, because buffaloes are just that civilized), I’m escorted into a nice warm decontamination bubble bath. Lavender suds. Privacy. Fluffy towels. Candles. Because, again, civilized.
After decontamination, I’m escorted into a room with a couple dozen other buffalo, also presumably new, based on their nervous shuffling and snorting. We’re all a little wired, anxious about what happens next. A massive buffalo with a series of medals pinned to his fur enters from a door on the opposite side of the room and climbs the stairs to a raised platform.
“Residents, your attention please.” His voice booms with authority, compelling us to approach and face him. “I am Colonel Huff, and I’m here to brief you on your mission.”
Mission? A murmur rises from the crowd. None of us were expecting a mission.
Colonel Huff continues. “You are about to enter a new phase of your lives: your court-ordered restitution to society. Whatever landed you here is behind you. That is your past, and as of this moment, that does not matter. This group, now, is your present. If you focus on the present, you will earn a future. And to enter the future, you need to go through the past.”
We all look around at one another. A few baffled snorts rise from our ranks.
Colonel Huff smiles the smile of someone who gives this speech often and enjoys the bewilderment of his audience every time. “You are about to become the warriors of the past who led to this present.”
At this point, the whole wall behind him begins to move, rising slowly to reveal a rolling plain behind him.
“This, recruits, is the American West. The year, 1860. The stakes: annihilation. Your task: determine which species remains.”
Gasps erupt around me. In my mind, I grasp after the wisps of facts I learned back in school. The Great White Invasion, the horses and rifles, the massacres.
“In one version of this story,” says Colonel Huff, “the invasion was never repelled. Our kind almost died out. The invaders slaughtered our kind, as well as the indigenous human companions we’d shared the land with for thousands of years.”
My head spins. I’d never thought about what could have happened if we hadn’t wiped the invaders all out.
“This portal ensures that our tragedy will never happen. Your mission: charge. Show no mercy. Match their ferocity. Gore first, ask no questions later, because that’s what they would do to you given the chance.”
I shake my horns in disbelief. What happened to our civilization?
As if he heard me, Colonel Huff says: “We are defending a future way of life here. We need you to go back to the past to protect our civilized future. This is your opportunity to earn your way back into society. And we know you’re up to the challenge.”
I gaze past him into the rolling hills, watch the Great White Invaders gallop past sagebrush with their rifles, then stop on a crest and point them toward an ancient family of buffalo below. A rush of anger courses through me. Around me, my fellow buffalo paw the ground, ready to attack.
Colonel Huff bellows to warn the buffalo family on the plains. The Invaders, startled, look up from their weapons toward us.
“Ready, soldiers?” Colonel Huff asks
Our platoon erupts into a bellowing roar. We stampede around the platform, streaming into the sagebrush, and hurtling into the past to save the future.
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?
Those names are a massive distraction to lull us into complacency in our enclosures. The aliens give us these names for paint the way zookeepers give watermelon birthday cakes to the pandas in the zoo. We sit there and munch sloppily on our watermelon paint names so we don’t even think about trying to escape from planet Earth. It’s kind of embarrassing, really.
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)
The square of the unbearable lightness of being a landshark is the goal. That’s the state of being we hunger for. But how do we get there? One might think it involves the sense of achievement after a vanity ascent of Mount Everest, but no. It’s partly a function of the climbing party falling apart, splintering, each person going their own way until they wind up frozen and blue, hard as a new potato. Once they’re gone, neither love nor Big Macs can bring them back. Once those conditions are achieved, all that remains is for Napoleon to pass the Turing Test.
What are you thinking?
Exactly.
You’re sad because yesterday you lost your job as a first-year barista. However, owing to the kind ministrations of techno-capitalism, you’ve 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 a 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.
The answer is clear: Turkish Delight. The White Witch sold us on this substance as children, through that kid Edmund whose addiction led us to believe it’s an absolutely life-changing flavor sensation. I mean, Edmund totally sold himself out for it, betraying his whole family and staying with that ice queen just to get more, thereby insinuating into our young, impressionable minds a yearning for this seemingly delectable substance. We fantasized about this magical candy, waiting for the opportunity to sample miracles from a plate. We worked and saved, and when we finally got our hands on it—perhaps even funded a whole-ass trip to Turkey for proximity to the original Ur-Delight—and bit into the sugar-dusted, gelatinous cube, and chewed while brushing powdered sugar off our shirts, and waited for our lives to change… and waited to fall under the spell of Turkish Delight, this luxurious offering from a frosty woman that made Edmund forsake everything else… and waited to even actually like it… and took another bite, thinking maybe we somehow mis-tasted at first… and waited to be transported… and sucked the sticky dregs off our teeth and dabbed a napkin in water to try to get the goddamn powdered sugar off our shirts, then finally realized that the actual Turkish Delight was that hot faun we hooked up with the night before, and finally the real spell was broken, and we realized that, ironically, tasting the Turkish Delight was the very thing that destroyed its hold on us.
So, no thank you, White Witch, I won’t be taking the job.
Is God real?
Sure, for whomever needs her to be. Why not?
Tara Campbell is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, and fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse Magazine. She teaches flash fiction and speculative fiction, and is the author of two novels, two hybrid collections of poetry and prose, and two short story collections. Her sixth book, City of Dancing Gargoyles (SFWP), is a finalist for the 2025 Philip K. Dick Award and is on Reactor Magazine’s “Best Books of 2024” list and Locus Magazine’s 2024 Recommended Reading List. Find out more at www.taracampbell.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.
Photo: Hillary Deane
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