I sat down at that rock next to him and spun one of the wheels of the dolly to test it out. This opened his stone eyes and I could tell by the feeling that he was looking at me.

Did you get something to eat? He asked me. I said that I did and that I felt good.

I asked him if he was hungry yet, and he said no. If he had been hungry, I could have gotten him something from that filling station.

I asked if any of the agents had shown up yet. There weren't any of them standing around, but I thought it would be polite to ask anyway.

He said, No, none of them have shown up. Maybe they won't even show up. He said that. I guess he was doubting himself, just like I was doubting him.

So I sat around a little longer and he was part stone so he wasn't going anywhere.

After a while I asked him what we were doing next. He was quiet for a while

I've been thinking about that, he said to me. He said it to me in his part rock voice which made it sound a little bit like thinking wasn't the easiest thing to do. I guess I just now made the connection that his brain would have been part rock too if the rest of him was, and that would be hard thinking thru that stone.

There's only us, he said, and he was right, at least for as far as the eye could see.

We have to do what we started to do, he told me. We have to take on the Horizontalists on our own.

I asked him how many there were of them.

He said that there were probably millions. Maybe hundreds of millions. Maybe more. There were a lot, that's what he told me.

And the two of us were going to have to take them on. We'd have to attack them. We'd have to go to war with them if we were going to stop them.

I didn't have to say it out loud to say with my eyes that those weren't very good odds.

If I was a gambling man I would have bet against us then and there, and maybe made some extra money to buy you a new overcoat, but I'm not a gambling man, and if I was I wouldn't even know where I would have placed my bet.

So I set the dolly down on its wheels and loaded Agent Only up on it. I asked him if he was comfortable and he said he was.

Then I started rolling it. I started rolling it back the direction that we had come from.

It was a long way back, but going back always seems faster than going away in the first place.

So we would be back in no time.

And I had a long stick with me so I could write this note to you in the sand so you would know where we are going.

We will be at the gates of the Horizontalist compound soon.

I wonder if Agent Only is thinking out a strategy.

It's probably pretty hard to think out a strategy if your brain has so much rock in it, and that's what the Tall Stone Energy most likely did to his brain.

Now I see those walls. If you are reading this, you can probably see what became of them, or didn't.

That would be like the picture that is the thousand words to tell you how it all turned out.

I don’t know how it's going to turn out. I just have to push that dolly and make the wheels move so that Agent Only can get around.

That's what I'm doing now, but what I'll be doing next I cannot write out with stick on dirt because I do not know that thing.

I hope you are doing well. I am fine at the moment.

When the snow starts to fall you might think it is pretty. Little bits of ice in the air, like white dots that if you catch one in your mitten and look closely you will see the detail like a stained glass window.

All those twirling little dots of white. What a lovely sight, you must just say to yourself.

But you know something about those snowflakes? They're all made of water. And water is out to get you.

Which means that those pretty snowflakes are all up to no good. All six sides of them. All those gothic curlicues of them. Out to get you.

Sometimes the snow melts, and then it becomes water, and water can wash you out, can wash your things away.

Sometimes the snow turns into ice and trips you up, and makes you slide around, and causes car crashes, and just makes everything icy.

And if it's a glaciar, it can move too. Maybe it can even sneak up on you, and you know how big a glacier is. It would squash you like a fly.

Pretty good for a cute little snowflake.

But there's never just one cute little snowflake. By the time that one has fallen, more have fallen. Maybe one fell in front of you, so you could see it. But meanwhile five more fell behind you, and they are ganging up on you. That first little cute one was nothing but a diversion.

And while you're humming White Christmas, or some other piece of frozen water propaganda, the water and snowflakes behind you are massing for your destruction.

And when they get it in their mind to destroy you, they destroy you.

As I pushed Agent Only, part stone that he was, in the dolly back to the compound of the Horizontalists, we got to talking about things. I told him about the empty town and the empty filling station, and how the filling station was empty of people, but how the town was empty of both people and things. He told me that none of this surprised him, and I asked him why none of it surprised him and he told me he couldn't quite put his finger on why it didn't surprise him, but none of it did surprise him.

I wondered if his being not quite surprised had something to do with him being part rock, but I didn't say this out loud, because I didn't think it would be polite.

So I asked him if he could tell me some more about this Tall Stone Energy thing that he had tapped into, and he seemed quite happy to have been asked about it.

So he told me about it. And as I listened to him, and he had all kinds of technical and scientific and mineralogical jargon that all seemed like so many things and powers and nonsense, it all seemed to me to boil down to the whole idea of patience. Stones get their energy from being patient, from just sitting there while everything else would panic or flee or just get irritated. And the stones just sit there, and that is pretty powerful.

And so, Mintyfresh, he told me, I found the great and tall stone ways to be patient and to be tall, and I took them into myself just a little bit too far, and he couldn't quite tell me what those secrets exactly were, and how they made him turn into rock, but I have to tell you, Sisterine, that I did pretty much believe him now.

It all seemed to be very interesting, but also not really for me. I know and you know, Sisterine, that I'm not all that patient, and I don't know if I'd ever want to be as patient as a stone, even if it meant a sure way to fight and win over those Horizontalists. Maybe I could just leave the Tall Stone Energy with Agent Only, and I could use something else, like guns or pulling out plugs or something that might help the cause.

Plus I kind of like my legs and being able to get around on my own. I'd just feel so helpless and sad if I had to have somebody cart me around with a dolly.

And we were just chattering away and what do you know but before too long we had come up to the barbed wire and the concrete gate of the Horizontalist compound. It was very horizontal. It all just went left and right as far as the eye could see.

Agent Only told me about how invincible this compound was, and how we would never get inside. He talked about booby traps, and he talked about how rigged the whole place was with Hypnotic Trip Therapy. Even if we got beyond the walls, we would just be tripping all over the place and never get anywhere because we'd just be tripping so much.

And first I was seeing it with his eyes and it seemed so invincible, and then I looked a bit with just my plain eyes, and doggone it, Sisterine, but that wall and barbed wire were real horizontal. They were so horizontal in fact that I figured that if I just made a big giant step I could just step over the whole dang thing.

And so I tried it. Agent Only was talking at one moment like we'd never make our way in and I just stepped over the wall. I said, Ta-Da, and then I stepped back.

Agent Only looked at me a little different now. He looked at me as if he really had to hand it to me. He said, Mintyfresh, I do believe that you are growing in stature.

I'm glad I was growing in stature and not growing in statue. I wouldn't want to be rock like Agent Only was.

And when I stepped over the wall again I noticed that the key was still in the lock of the gate, so I was able to unlock it and wheel in Agent Only on his dolly.

And I was feeling so good about myself then and there that I wondered what would happen if I put the middle finger of my right hand in the air and made like I was writing. And by trying I was able to sign my name in the sky. I was skywriting with my right hand's middle finger.

So I took some time to do this skywriting to you, Sisterine. I wrote this note in the sky to you so you could see how I am growing in stature and maybe be a little proud of me.

And also know that we were back inside this place that I used to be pretty scared of. And I might be scared of it again, come what may.

So I just wanted you to know all about this, and I hope you like this message in the sky from me to you, Sisterine.

When you're thirsty you drink water, right?

Wrong!

Water is exactly the thing you shouldn't drink when you are thirsty. But water makes you think you actually need it.

The last thing you need when you are thirsty is water. That's just the water trying to take advantage of you.

When I'm thirsty, I drink only whisky. Sure, the whisky has water in it, but I figure the alcohol content of the whisky will kill off the water.

What do you drink when you are thirsty? If you said water, you might as well have said poison, because that's what the water is like when it gets inside you.

It might take years before you really feel it, but when you feel it, you will know it.

It'll be that water. It'll be like eating you up from the inside to the out.

It'll just jam itself in between those organs you need to keep you living and it will just get stuck there and jam them all up.

It'll jam up your stomach so you can't digest.

It'll jam up your lungs so you can't breathe.

It'll jam up your esophagus so you can't swallow and then all the spit in your mouth won't be able to get out and you'll pretty much drown in your own spit.

Now isn't that gross!

That's as good a reason as any to cut back on the water.

I'll drink to that (whisky, that is).

And so, Sisterine, I was feeling good and feeling pretty proud of my right hand middle finger, and if I could have patted it on the back I would have but none of my fingers really have backs as you and I might have a back.

So I didn't pat it on the back, but you know what I mean.

And I pushed Agent Only forward on his dolly, and we were now back inside the Horizontalists compound, but this time we were deciding which way we were going to walk, so we decided to walk this way, and not any other.

And there were signs but we didn't care about the signs. We got a feeling, or at least I did, and so I pushed Agent Only that way. And he didn't tell me to stop or slow down so he must have had a similar feeling, but I also bet it's kind of hard for him to have a feeling these days seeing that he's part made of rock and has a big crack in his side.

And as we were moving forward it seemed like we kept on walking over all these balloons, and first I thought they were some kind of Hypntotic Trip Therapy, but they weren't about to trip me up.

I said to Agent Orange, these balloons are a sad and ineffective form of Hypnotic Trip Therapy. They're not tripping me at all. They're not even slowing me down. I just walk right over these balloons.

But Agent Only told me, and he looked about as sad as a stoneface could look, They're not balloons. Look more closely at one.

And so I picked one up, and I saw that it looked and felt like a popped balloon, but when I looked closer I saw that it had a face drawn on it. And it also had some clothes, some had dresses, some had underwear, and some were drawn up like naked people too.

I was looking at one and seeing its face, and thinking that the face was pretty well drawn, and then I decided to look for the part of the balloon that was like the middle finger. And you know, Sisterine, I couldn't find that middle finger because there was no middle finger. Both the middle fingers had been cut off.

I guess I still wasn't ready to believe what I was seeing with my own eyes, so part rock Agent Only said, I have long theorized that if both middle fingers are cut off, most people will deflate like a popped balloon.

So they weren't balloons, Sisterine. They were people who had been popped like balloons. They were the skin and the fingers and the insides, but it was all like a popped balloon. And the further we went, the more popped balloon people we saw. There were more and more of them. There were like thousands, or maybe even millions of them.

I kind of freaked out then and started lifting all of them I could to see if any of them had your face.

I really didn't want to find one with your face, not at all, because that would have meant that the Horizontalists got your middle fingers and popped you too.

Not you, Sisterine! Not you!

But I didn't see your face, and besides there were just too many, so I just resolved that I would have hope that you still had your two middle fingers and you hadn't been among the popped peoples here on the ground of the Horizontalist compound.

And then I couldn't look any more because a mess of Horizontalist guards surrounded us on the left and on the right, and in front of us and behind us. We were surrounded at all horizontal sides by the guards.

We were caught.

They grabbed me, and with Agent Only, all they had to do was grip onto the dolly handle to take him wherever they wanted to take him.

And so, Sisterine, they captured us again. The Horizontalists captured us and put us both in this room.

And it's a pretty horizontal room, and real uncomfortable, but I thought I'd check out my right hand middle finger again, and also my left.

And when I tried either middle finger on the wall of the room, I found that I could write with it.

So my middle fingers were like pens that could write on the sky and write on walls. So I am writing you this, Sisterine, with my right hand middle finger and my left hand middle finger.

The stuff that looks a little sloppier is from my left hand, because I am right handed, and not used to writing with my left.

And part-stone Agent Only is lying on his rock side, because our room is too horizontal for his rock to stand all the way up.

But you know he has all that Tall Stone Energy to make him patient, and to hopefully come up with a plan to get us out of here so we can stop the Horizontalists before they pop the whole rest of the vertical human race, and maybe the animals too, at least the ones with middle fingers.

You might think that you like water because it makes things clean. You might like to get your body clean, or your clothes clean, and that's all good when everything is nice and clean thanks to water.

But you know what happens when you clean, don't you? Thinks disappear when you clean. Things get rubbed out when you clean. You know what rubbed out means, don't you? It's what gangsters say when they want to get rid of things. And you know what, water is just the biggest baddest gangster of them all.

Sure, water is going to clean things up. It's just going to clean up everything. It's going to clean you up. That means it's going to rub you out. That means it's going to get rid of you. That means it's going to kill you dead.

Ouch.

I'm not going to let water rub me out.

Listen to me, and if you are wise, you will do the same. I don't clean with water.

That's right, I don't clean with water.

Really, I don't clean at all. It's a bad business, that cleaning is. I prefer to go dirty and smelly.

I get used to it, and you know, the people around me who care about me get used to it to.

Well, actually nobody cares about me, but if they did, they would get used to it.

And they probably wouldn't clean either, because they would know how dangerous water was and how you don't want to get rubbed out by it.

And you ought to really think twice about the cleaning you do. Better safe than scrubbed, that's what I say.

You ought to say it too.

And live it.

And so Sisterine, we were once again in the Horizontalist prison room, but this time we were together, and this time was later, and this time we were in an even more horizontal chamber.

And we sat and we thought for a while, and then the door opened.

In walked Guy Flat. Remember him? He was the very short and stout leader of the Horizontalists. He was the one with the middle finger that went so far left and right but didn't go one millimeter up or down.

He took one look at us and he laughed. He laughed from side to side. He laughed from deep within his horizontal.

Guy Flat said, So, you two have returned. I knew you would return. Hypnotic Trip Therapy always brings enemy agents back to our compound. It is the horizontal law of eternal returns that makes this so.

And now you see that we have harvested much middle finger energy. We are ready to make all remaining middle fingers into horizontal stumps. Nobody will ever tell anybody else where to go, and so nobody will have the freedom to tell somebody else off.

Think of what a better world we will have without all those insults.

But the way I see it, we still need to harvest four more middle fingers. And I see that we have captured them. And I see that they are yours!

He called, Mortimer, and a short and stout man with the longest sword from side to side entered the very short room. And that sword was shining with its sharpness. And my middle fingers looked like toast.

Guy Flat was laughing some more. Hey agents, he said to us. I think it is time to deflate you. I think it is time to make you into empty balloons and put your middle fingers into our energy synthesis machine to make more middle finger energy. Your four fingers are really going to help us out as you make your middle finger sacrifice.

And first Mortimer walked up to Agent Only. And the other guards came in and they pulled back on his part stone neck. And they grabbed his right hand first and they spread out his fingers. You could tell that they were having some trouble. They had to strain a bit to separate them, but then they got just the middle finger out and onto the table in the middle of the room.

It kind of looked like Agent Only was trying to tell them off, and the guards and Guy Flat and Mortimer all had big frowns like he was giving them all the bird, but then Mortimer drew forward with his big horizontal sword.

Mortimer, Guy Flat said, do your worst.

So Mortimer drew the sword back like it was a saw and then he moved it left and right over Agent Only's right hand middle finger. And I had to turn my head because I couldn't look and because I couldn't think about anything else but that my middle fingers were going to be next, and that would hurt so much, and that sword looked so sharp, and Mortimer was so squat and had big squat muscles to saw off anything.

And I was turned and I heard the sawing sound but I didn’t hear Agent Only squeal out in pain. That must have been the Tall Stone Energy in him. What a hero he was, even during the great pain of middle finger sacrifice.

What's up with this guy's middle finger!

And then I heard a voice, and it must have been Mortimer the blade's voice, and I turned around, and he had given up sawing, and then I saw it. Agent Only still had his middle finger.

Guy Flat said, Try the other one!

And so Mortimer tried to saw off Agent Only's left hand middle finger, but he couldn't get that one either. The sword just went back and forth and made deep marks in the table, but it couldn't cut the finger off.

Guy Flat said, What is this? What have you done with your middle fingers?

And Agent Only raised up both hands with the middle fingers still upraised and the rest of the fingers splayed out and he said Granite F.U.

And I bet the Horizontalists didn't know at all what he meant but I did. He meant that his middle fingers were made of granite, and you can't saw rock with a sword for flesh.

And I was feeling fine from seeing all this when I felt the guards grab me and spread out my hand and get my middle finger down on the table, my good old right hand middle finger first.

And I pretty much fainted then and there. I pretty much fell into a hole lined with bloody fingers. I must have been seeing all the middle fingers that had been cut off from everybody. Maybe I was seeing their middle finger spirits.

And all those middle fingers could have been telling me off, but it wasn't like that. It was like they were all lifting me up. Like I was ascending in a very vertical direction with all those middle fingers supporting me like a middle finger mattress. And a feeling of peace and prosperity and middle finger massage spread over me. And it was Mortimer's yell that woke me up to the real world of Horizontalist prison.

F that! Mortimer said. And I could see that he couldn't saw off my right hand middle finger!

It was still there! I could still raise it up to his face to tell him where to go.

So then and there he tried to chop off my left hand middle finger by raising his sword up in the air, but when he raised it up in the air I guess he got too veritical and put his back out. He doubled over in pain.

Guy Flat told one of the guards to saw off my left hand middle finger, but that guard couldn't do it!

Guy flat said, What's up with your guys and your middle fingers?

And Agent Only answered for him. Agent Only said, Don't you know the old prophecy? The middle finger pen is mightier than the sword.

And I knew he was talking about me and my amazing middle fingers that can write this message to you, Sisterine, because they have saved themselves and me from a full deflating death, and they can write this message to you right on the sharp sword blade so that you can read of our victory dance which we made with our amazing fingers. Of course my fingers danced a lot faster than Agent Only's fingers of part stone.

Water is so sneaky. I could cry about how sneaky water is, but that would be more water. See?

You might like to go swimming, but I have to tell you that swimming is dangerous.

You should stay away from the water.

And if you do have to swim, don't wear one of those bikinis or swimming trunks. If you go swimming, you should wear an iron suite so the water can't get to your skin.

That's just crazy to dress so skimpy when you get in such close contact with water. You ought to wear your most clothes, not your least.

And if somebody goes skinny-dipping, well, I don’t even know what might happen to them then. Boy, would that be a mess.

Because the water can just cut you up. It does it with lots of little incisions. It has sharp blades, and they eat thru your skin.

It's like millions of little knives when you go swimming. Each drop of water is a machete and you are its lunch.

Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it? Well, it is bad. And you better remember.

And you should wait longer than two hours after you eat to go swimming. That's not very safe. You should wait forever after eating before you go swimming.

Now that would be safe.

Sisterine, we had one victory against the Horizontalists, but we were still their prisoners. We were still trapped in that very horizontal room, Agent Only and I, tho we were victorious in our middle fingers.

I complemented Agent Only and he complimented me. I told him that he was so Good God Granite finger and he told me that I was right on with my Write Ready Middle Right and Lefts. It was one good old back slapping fest, but we were still in that dingy small space, and Agent Only was even so down that he was down on his back, flat so completely, and I had to lean over so far that my tongue was nearly eating my toes.

We sat there a while, but then I got tired of sitting. I saw where the Horizontalists had all come in and gone, so I thought I’d try that direction. The room was long that way, and I had to walk a bit like a crab, but I made it into a game with a set of rules about how my crab feet would move, and what kind of claw-deal I would make with my hands, and that made it all work better, and actually kind of fun.

And it was a flat space, but at the end of it was a door. And if I would have tried pulling back and forth on the door knob, nothing would have happened, because the Horizontalists were sure to have locked the door horizontally. But I thought I'd try it up and down, to see if they were missing anything, and sure enough, when I pulled the door knob up and down it wasn't locked, and it just opened.

So I opened it and took a peek and there were no guards out there, so I closed it back up and went to where I had been so I could get Agent Only.

I told him about the door being locked back and forth but able to open up and down, and Agent Only made his gravelly laugh, and I put my muscles behind his rock base and slid him to the door.

He must have been putting on some rock weight, because he was a big deal to try to shove forward. My muscles were going to ache tomorrow for all the push I was putting on them today, that's all I could think, especially because it's tough to push a big rock guy when you are doing your crab walk with all those crab walk rules.

We got to the door and I opened it up and down and I looked both ways like I was going to cross the street. I remember learning that in Childhood School 101 with Only Mordred at the next desk, and he learned it to, so when we walked home we both looked left and we both looked right and we both looked up and we both looked down for traffic from cars and falling leaves and rising steam and everything else we should watch out for on the street. and we did that looking in big gestures. We did the looking more than we looked back then, and once we went out to a street and a big car nearly clipped us, because it was from the right, and we had spent so much time looking left and up and down, that things on the right had time to change from when we looked.

And here he was, only he was Agent Only, and now I had to push him because of all his Tall Stone Energy, and also because the Horizontalists had confiscated our stolen dolly.

But you know what, Sisterine, they had taken our dolly but they also just left it outside the prison cell door, and so I could load up Agent Only on it and I was home free again. I could stand him up on his base because we were no longer in our narrow horizontal prison room, and I didn't have to push him because I could push the dolly and move him too with its dolly wheels doing some of the work.

I didn't see any Horizontalists right outside our cell, and I made sure to look down and left and right to try to see them. And maybe they had given up on us, or something, being that they couldn't take our middle fingers. Or maybe they were waiting for us to walk into their next troublesome trap.

I didn't know this, Sisterine. We could be walking into their next big soup pot and they'd boil us dead and get to our middle fingers some way. I didn't know what I was headed into. So I thought I'd write this note to you on the door we just left so you'd know about our escape. I thought I'd write it with my right hand middle finger. And so I did that, and now you know.

You might not hear from us, because we might be headed into battle, and we have nothing but our middle fingers, we don't have any guns or artillery, and I'm sure the Horizontalists will be going after us left and right, so I don't know if you better expect any next message from me.

But I do want to get some kind of message to you, so I'll tell you this one, and I hope I have a next one.

I used to like water. I used to think that water liked me.

We were best friends, me and water. At least that's what I thought.

But water led me on. It only made me think that it was a friend to me.

We used to do everything together. If I went to the store, water came along. If water wanted to go swimming in the river, I'd go swimming in the river too.

People used to say, you and water, you're just like that, and their fingers would come together about as close as they could come.

Water and me went to school together. We studied and got bullied and blew exams together.

We sat in nearby desks in study hall.

We collected frogs and butterflies together

One day he even pressed our lips together, water and me, to see what kissing was like..

Those were the days when I had a real sweet spot for water, and when water was real nice to me.

Or at least was setting me up.

And then came the day when water just unleashed on me. Made me all wet and it was my big moment. I was giving my report in class and it was going so fine, and then water threw itself at me and I was all wet.

Everybody laughed. Water was laughing too.

Since that day it's never been the same between me and water.

Now I know what water is really up to. Now I know how two-faced water is.

And you ought to know these things. Especially if you think you might have a close relationship with water.

Don't get burned. I'll tell you about it.

Sisterine, I have to tell you that as we left our cell and got deeper into the Horizontalist compound, we could hear that the battle was already going on. Agent Only told me to go slow, and I did. We ducked behind the edges of walls and did the crossing left right look so many times before we proceeded forward. We were careful, and we heard all those gunshots, some with that ricochet sound that you know so well from Westerns.

As we got closer to the battle, and we knew that because the sounds were getting louder, Agent Only kept on saying, I think it is... If I'm not mistaken... It just might be... And he seemed to be listening to something with his Tall Stone patience, and he seemed to hear some kind of pattern or repetition that I wasn't hearing.

And then we could see the short backs of the Horizontalists. We saw their short muscles bulging with guns shot and rocks tossed. The Horizontalists were facing some kind of awesome enemy, and you could tell by their backs that this enemy was tough on the Horizontalists.

Maybe they were outnumbered. Maybe they were out-fire-powered, but in the commands of the Horizontalists you could tell that there was some distress. Sometimes was going on and they didn't like it.

Maybe they had been sneak-attacked. This is what actually happened. They got caught putting on their horizontal trousers and shirts and blouses in the morning, and by the time they could turn their heads left and right, the bombs were already falling up and down.

So what was going on? Agent Only had his stone sense, and thru the sounds, put together his own picture of the cause and the effect.

And the names that had something to do with it were Felix the Raven, Phyllis the Spiny, and Burping Peter. And Julio the Finisher, too.

They were the vertical agents in charge of a great Verticalist thrust against the Horizontalists.

They were bombing and they were throwing stones and they were cursing the Horizontalists, and the Horizontalists were trying to get back at them, but the Horizontalists didn't have the height advantage, plus the walls of the Horizontalist compound weren't high enough to protect them from the up and down trajectory of most bullets and slingshot rocks.

Agent Only said that the others were on the outside, and we were on the inside. We were perfectly situated to give the inside thrust, to attack them from the rear and cause much consternation. But how were we to attack?

But I told you that the Horizontalists on the outside were throwing rocks into the inside, and the Verticalists were throwing some of those rocks back, but some were rolling further, and some were rolling near where we were.

Agent Only said that I must gather up rocks, but gather them and not throw them until I had accumulated a massive stash that would last for some throwing. So I ran around near where I was, far back from where most of the Horizontalists were at war, and gathered the rolling rocks into one pile behind a short wall.

I ran for another rock and looked back to where Agent Only was. There were like dozens of rocks that weren't in my pile that were rolling from all directions straight to him. They were coming home to daddy. He was using some powerful Tall Stone Energy to do all that rock calling. Or maybe he just had a way with rock words.

When I had a good stack of rocks I got behind the short wall and started throwing them at the backs of the Horizontalists. Some of them turned around to see where the rocks were coming from, but some just got hit and knocked down cold. The ones who turned around started throwing rocks at me and Agent Only, but then they'd get hit by rocks coming from the outside Verticalist army so they'd turn to fire that way, so I could once again renew my attack at their backs.

I noticed that the rocks thrown at Agent Only didn't really hit him. They flew thru the air to him, but when they really reached him they did something more like peck him on the cheek. They were kissing him, and letting him gather them up so he could slowly throw them at his slightly accelerated stone speed.

I don't know how this battle is going to come out. There are so many Horizontalists, and all together they make such a wide threat. So I may not make it out of my wall rock retreat, and that is why I am writing this message to you, Sisterine. That is why I am writing with my middle finger in the air as I throw each rock to the destination of the back of some Horizontalist. I have knocked some of them over, but some are waking up, and the waking up ones sure look angry, and some of them are really looking hard in my direction.

I don't know how this battle is going to turn out.

I can only hope for the best.

Your dedicated soldier in middle finger defense,

Mintyfresh.

Hey, you. Better watch out. I think the water is coming to get you.

Have you been listening to me? Do you know what I've been talking about? I've been trying to tell you some serious shit, here, and I don't know if you have always been listening.

If you were paying any attention, you would have taken some drastic action by now.

You don't believe me, do you?

But don't I look trustworthy? Is it the tone of my voice? Is it my odor?

Or are you somehow connected with the water menace? Maybe the water has been paying you off, and so you have a bit of a conflict of interest in the water department.

You're not passing on my information to the water, are you?

Is that why my shoes feel a little wet now?

And my socks?

And its' up to my ankles already. That water can sure come on strong when it starts coming.

I think I'll head to higher ground.

You better do that too. Even if you're connected to the water. Even in you are in league with the water.

You might think that the water is looking out for you now, but that water is two-faced.

Trust me. Don't trust the water.

I can hear it coming. I can feel it. I can hear its evil waves in my dreams.

And you better watch out too.

For the water.

Sisterine, the battle raged on, and while we had rocks to throw from the rear, the Horizontalists had guns and bombs as well. They had been directing their guns and bombs forward at the attacking Verticalists outside the gates, but as our rocks were running short, they started firing more bullets our way.

I had a couple near misses, Sisterine. Luckily I was able to quickly squat back on my hands and knees behind the short wall I shared with my now almost empty rock pile.

Agent Only actually took a few dings. But they were just dings. He wasn't wounded by the bullets, they just nicked his rock face up just a bit. I was still soft and flesh for the most part, so I had to watch out very carefully.

But we kept on hearing encouraging yells from the Verticalist army. Maybe it was Felix the Raven who was shouting out, Buck up, Agents Only and Mintyfresh. And that gave me greater courage, hearing that I was called Agent Mintyfresh and not just plain Mintyfresh.

At some point I noticed the growing water.

See! See!

It was kind of like maybe the Universal Water Line was rising. First I felt it on my toes, then it went up to my shoes. The water was rising, as if some big dam behind us sprung a slow leak, or as if we were living the life bathtub, and it was cleaning time again to fill the big tub.

Now when the rocks hit, they made a splash. My nice suit had lots of splash marks, but that felt kind of nice after all the dust and war.

The water got a little higher then, and it was covering my shoes. In a little while, I wouldn't be able to squat so well behind that wall, because doing that would drown me. But I still had a few rocks, and with each rock I tried my hardest to bean a Horizontalist on the back of his or her horizontal head, so that they would fall and be out of commission for a little while, and have an even bigger headache for a while after that.

At first the water was a fun little diversion. Then the water was just a minor annoyance. Then the water got my socks all wet, and that didn't make my day. Then the water got up to my ankles, and ankle deep is alright, but not if you can't take a few steps out of it, not if it's the whole world around you that is ankle deep.

Calf deep, tho, is another question. But it is even more of a question if you are a Horizontalist. Because my calf deep was more like waist deep for them. And it just isn't so easy to be at war when your genitals are underwater and you don't really have a working middle finger in the flip off sense.

In other words, the war was getting harder for the Horizontalists to carry on. The water was a strong disadvantage to those who are short and squat. It was interfering with their ability to aim and fire and deal with casualties. It was just making it more of a mess for them than for us.

There was no shore so there was no tide, but the tide was turning, and it was turning to our vertical faces. I heard a call of Charge from outside the walls, and I knew that the Verticalist army had chosen to move forward.

The water was now up to my knees, and then over my knees. But that means that it was up to the necks of the Horizontalists, and tho they could float, it is kind of hard to aim a bazooka when you are doing the back stroke.

As the Verticalist army made its charge, the Horizontalists started plopping up and flailing their left and right limbs and losing their breath under the sea as far as you could see, and they were drowning one by one, and we were winning the horrible war.

Some made valiant last tries, but their swords were too slimy, and they couldn't control them. All the Horizontalist bullets and guns and swords and rocks just sunk to the bottom. And then the Horizontalist army started sinking to the bottom too, because the water was all the way over their heads.

The Verticalist army, led by Felix the Raven, said to Agent Only and I that we must head to high ground. They even brought a dolly, but that wouldn't work so well with the rising water, so another Verticalist brought an inflatable raft that was fully inflated. Julio the Finisher helped me load Agent Only onto the raft, and we sailed it to the hill by the filling station.

And that is where I write this message to you with my amazing middle fingers, and where you can read it on the bottom of this raft. We drank beer from the filling station to celebrate our victory and made a fire from sterno logs. It was a good day to be vertical, but I also felt bad for all the Horizontalists who had drowned in all that water.

I felt bad for them even tho they were so mean to me.

The water is coming, and it's coming like water. It will drown your little doggy, it will drown your little daughter. It will make your breadsticks mushy, it will dampen your hair and tushy. It is evil rising water, and if you don't fear it, you oughta.

The water is coming to get you if you don't watch out. The water is coming to get you so you better watch out. You better watch out with your best dry eyes, because you don't want to be surprised from the evil that is water.

It is coming in waves and in ponds. It is coming like drops on the windowpane. You may build those windshield wipers, but everything isn't just windshield. What about the flowers and trees – you're not going to squeegee those off all alone, are you?

I am sick and tired of this water, and all the bad deeds it is up to. I wish I could just blow it away, but that would only make some waves. I wish I could dry it all with a hair dryer or with Arizona. But I can't dry it all up. I can't put it all in the dehydrator.

The water might pass up you, but it is out to get me. Maybe you don't care, but I do, because I want my skin, I want to live. I want to live in a world safe from the ravages of water, I want to live in a place of prosperity and drought.

I want the weather conditions to be fair and never cloudy, because you never know when a cloud might be a rain cloud. The rain clouds are the ones full of the stuff, and they are quite dangerous. They should be the ones on the walls of the post office. They should be on the ten most wanted TV show.

Because I don't like water. And I have some very specific reasons. And I've been there, so I know.

And the water keeps on rising. I'm not surprised.

On top of filling station hill, where we found high ground and beer to drink, we pulled Agent Only out of the raft. By now he was mostly rock, and not much person left. We found a nice spot and there we sat him so that he could be a statue of himself and we could always remember his observations and his ways of knowing that saved the day when we were so threatened, when day was so dark.

And the other agents raised up their secret agent hollyhocks and by batting them around, and by falling them on my shoulders, they dubbed me officially an agent, Agent Mintyfresh.

And we all sang out the Verticalist national anthem, the one that Agent Only taught us to sing. The song was, Up See Daisy Me, Up See Daisy Me.

And as we were celebrating with beer and with spy songs, Phyllis the Spiny asked me if I had a girlfriend. So I told her the long story of you, and how I talked to you with my voice and my fingers, and I left you all these messages so that you would know, and so you would forgive me.

And she said that my love must be strong and so true if I am writing all these messages to you, and I said that I knew it, and it just made me happy thinking about it.

And tho I was having a good enough time with the agents and all they were doing, and winning that war had been pretty exhausting, I also thought about you, and I was missing you and wondering if you were okay. And I was wondering if you were one of the balloons that were people that we saw all deflated back in the Horizontalist compound.

And I said out loud about the balloon people who were so sad to have their middle fingers cut off and then they just deflated like popped balloons, and the agents didn’t know this, but then suddenly they were thinking, Oh, so that's where all the people went.

And I said we have to do something, we had to help out all those popped balloons, and we had to celebrate too, but maybe we had to take a break in our celebration to do something about all the people who had been flattened.

We left the hill, and our person-statue of Agent Only behind us, and this time I led the agents back to the Horizontalist compound to show them what I had been talking all about.

By this time the water had receded a bit. The ground was so soggy, but we could easily walk without galoshes this time. And as we walked back to the Horizontalist compound, we saw the gullies from the flooding, and the marks of the waves on the stones and the sand.

We stepped over all the little bodies of the drowned Horizontalists. If only they were just a little more vertical, then they would have lived, then they would have kept their heads above water, like we did. But they didn't have that extra inch, and so they drowned, and we could push them aside or walk around them to get thru their gates and find the place of the flattened balloons.

The other agents noticed them now, all the flattened balloons, but now they were wet too. The agents looked among the balloons like at rugs at the bazaar as if to find a lost loved one, to find a flattened familiar face.

How do we re-inflate them? and Felix the Raven was asking me that.

I didn't know exactly, but I wondered out loud if it might have had something to do with all their missing middle fingers.

So I was curious, like anybody might be, and I wondered out loud about that manufacturing plant that the Horizontalists had built. It was the big brick building that said Middle Finger Industries, Inc. on it. It also said, Keep Out, and Dangerous, High Flip Off Factor, but we weren't going to be warned like that because there were no more Horizontalists to scare us any further.

We had to bust down the door with some of the rocks that were still around. We had to go inside to see all the vats and test tubes and beakers. We had to go inside to see the big tub of missing middle fingers, and they were floating in a vacuum that derived their flip off power as they spinned and shined.

But how do we get them back on all the bodies? Do you know Sisterine? Are you one of those balloons? We all had to sit and think about it, and that is when I wrote this message to you on the wall with my amazing middle finger, and that is when we were stumped by all those middle finger stumps.

You better watch out for that water. Sometimes it comes, and sometimes it goes. I guess it went away, but it still might come back.

You mark my word on it. And in the meantime, those puddles could cause you harm so beware of them.

You might fall into one and get muddy. You might look down at your reflection and get confused.

If the water doesn't wash you away or drown you, it might confuse you. Water can do that too.

And then it will come back, and it will mean business in a bad way. I don't mean business like it might buy something from you; it means business like it is going to hurt you.

That's water for you. When it means business, it doesn't mean commerce and the economy, it means that it's going to hurt you or somebody else.

Maybe it's going to hurt someone you care about. Maybe you'll care about that person after you hear about how water has hurt them.

Maybe you will. If you believe me.

It was nice to see that the water went away after it came. Because when it came, that was sure bad. But it's better now, and I think the sun might come out.

And then the rest of the water will dry up.

That's good for now, but maybe later you better watch out later.

Sisterine, we were all sitting and thinking, and then after a while, Phyllis the Spiny just took one of those rocks and broke free all the middle fingers so they didn't have to spin in the big vacuum container. And when she broke it, those freed middle fingers stayed in the air, and some of them stayed spinning, but some of them moved thru the air like birds, and flew over to where all the empty balloon bodies were.

Those middle fingers had that natural middle finger homing action, and they all flew in flip off style over to the body of the person that once had them. And those fingers teamed up, two by two, and they wept middle finger tears over the body that once held them and could straighten them when so offended, but was now a big popped balloon of skin and wardrobe and lying there on the cold hard soggy ground.

So we had a new puzzlement to puzzle over and think about. Was there a way to bring the bodies back to life with all the life and energy that was still concentrated in their middle fingers? For tho the Horizontalists had been powering their compound and their whole world domination campaign by sapping the power from all those middle fingers, all those middle fingers still had so much life and energy inside themselves. Those middle fingers had like probably enough energy in them to reignite their former human bodies, if only we could find a way to re-fuse them in reunion.

Julio the Finisher, as true to his name, came up with some idea that he just tried out on the spot. He took a big deep breath, and then he lifted up a big balloon body, and he put one hand on one hand of the balloon in order to plug off the middle finger hole, and with his other hand he put the other balloon body hand up to his mouth with the middle finger hole where he could blow into it, and he blew his air into the body like you might blow up a balloon, and I can tell you that wasn't easy, because of those fingers in his face, but he did it, and when the body was all full of air again, an amazing and astounding thing happened: those fingers found those places and they fused so then and there, and then the body had its air, and it had its middle fingers, and all that middle finger energy shook that whole body back to life, and it was so happy to be that way that it did a little dance, and then it held up both its middle fingers to flip off all the dead Horizontalists.

And if that is what could bring one dead balloon body back to life, that would be just the thing to bring thousands of other balloon bodies back to life. And not only could all of us special agents in the Verticalist agent army do the work that way, but as more former balloon people were blown back up and had their middle fingers self-fused in place, they could blow up another balloon, and instead of a sky full of balloons there was a space of ground full of bodies filling their lungs and flipping off the dead Horizontalists.

And then it was such a gas that we had to make up the song of bringing the balloon bodies back to life, and we all had to sing it to make our work go that much faster.

Dead is sad so blow up the body

Blow up the body so it has a life

Dead is so sad but the middle fingers come

The middle fingers fit

Like the ring on a wife

Life is so sad, so use the middle finger

Use the middle finger to flip off the bad

Life is so short, so blow up a body

Blow up a body so it isn't so sad

And it wasn't a great song, but when you're singing it with a whole bunch of people who used to be dead, and it certainly does the trick, Sisterine. And I was so busy blowing up whatever body was near me, man or woman, that I didn't see if any of those bodies was yours, but I'd hope that if you were one you got blown up too and not overlooked in the muddy ground, because it still was pretty muddy down there.

And as I was blowing up those bodies, I thought I'd take a short break in between each balloon body, and in those breaks I wrote this down to you, Sisterine, I wrote it with my middle finger in the muddy ground that was drying up so you could read about how we blew up the popped people bodies and made them whole with their middle finger energy, and how Agent Only watched over us from that nearby hilltop with all the empty beer cans, and if you looked closely at his statue of self, you might just see that it had a great big smile on it.

Maybe someday I'll make my peace with water.

Maybe someday. But I'm not there yet.

Maybe we'll get that friendship we had back again. Maybe.

Then maybe we could go to a movie together, water and I, tho water would probably insist on seeing a sea picture like Moby Dick or The Pirate of the Outer Harbor, or something like that. You know water, it's all washed up.

Maybe I can see that water is a person just like me, and I have to give it a break someday. Even if it might not always mean to do exactly right, sometimes it can do the right thing. Sometimes it can be better than itself. Even water can stumble upon greatness, or at least goodness now and then.

And I can recognize that capacity to change, which makes me a better person too. Maybe even a better person than water.

Of course, that'll take water forgiving me. And I don't think water is big enough for that.

I think that if I'd apologize to water for hating it so, it might just laugh at me. It might just laugh at me and call me a real sad sack.

And then I'd just feel bad, because I was trying to be nice to water and it was just laughing in my face.

And if you are insulted by water, it's not like you can throw some water at it, like I do when other people insult me. You can't throw water at water, because it's water already. That would be like throwing dirt at dirt if dirt made you dirty.

And I'm not that crazy. Maybe water is, but not me.

I always have a reason for my stuff. I don't think water always has a reason. Maybe that's part of its problem.

Maybe I realize that, and I can help water out. Maybe I can save water from itself.

If I do save water from itself, I hope at least that it can recognize my hard work and thank me for it.

But I bet it won't. And that's why I hate water.

Sisterine, we blew up all the balloon people until we couldn't see any more flat ones. We blew them all up until there were no more weeping chopped-off middle fingers. We blew them all up and then we had some more pizza and beer to celebrate.

We blew them all up, and the balloon people who had their breath back helped us too, and then we all had a victory dance, and then we all got a little tired.

We were tired, but then all the birds came out. The birds came out and they started singing to our dance. The birds came out because we could give the bird, and we gave the birds the bird with all our middle fingers, but that only made them sing louder.

The birds had been gone and now they were all back. So many middle fingers had been gone, but now they are back. We were all so happy, and we had to dance a little dance.

It was time to go home. We said our goodbyes, and that was sad, and I said goodbye to all the agents of the Verticalist army, and I said goodbye to all the re-inflated balloon people that I could say goodbye to, and I said goodbye to Agent Only. He was my last goodbye for he was still a statue of himself on that hill.

I said a few things about our old times, and about how we had such a friendship. I said a few things and he didn't say a thing back, because he had gotten more and more patient, and I guess he had gotten more and more rock.

Once you get started with that Tall Stone Energy, I guess that is that. That is what I learned from Agent Only and his tall stone standing.

Sisterine, I walked home from the scene of our victory, and I walked among the saved balloon people until I got to our home district, and once I was here I noticed that all the Don't Walk signs had all their fingers, but they all also just said Don't Walk, and I was walking, so I had to disobey some of them.

And I walked until I got to our building, and I still had my keys, and they still worked in the downstairs door. And I walked up the stairs and I was wondering about you all the time. Would you be home? Would you be mine? Had you read my messages, or was it all a mystery to you?

And then I walked in the door and there was no greeting, and there was no handshake, and there were no meatballs. I walked in the door and there was simply silence, and there were no footsteps, and you were not here.

You were not here, and first I wondered if maybe you were one of the popped balloon people who just hadn't made your way back here yet, or what was up, and I looked around for a while, and then I opened up the freezer and made a TV dinner in the microwave.

And I turned on the TV and everything seemed back to normal. The doctors in their actor coats were still searching for clues, and the cops in their blue revues were still at the operating table.

And I thought I would check the phone for messages, and I saw all the flashes that must have been me, and I wondered if you had read my messages in the right order or what, and then I saw your note.

I saw your note and I read it and it didn't exactly make me happy, and I still could wonder if you wrote it and then you changed your mind, but I did read your message, and it did its kind of attack on me.

I read your message with the little drawing, and it was on the table by the phone, and it had my name, so I knew you meant me. It said, Mintyfresh, Fuck Off. I'm leaving. And you had that drawing of the middle finger all stretched up and the other fingers curled way down, and it was a drawing of a flip off, and you meant that drawing just for me.

And so I am alone here, and I don't think you are coming, but you might just change your mind, so I will continue waiting. I am waiting and I am writing, and I am doing all these things for you, because I still want you to like me and to love me and to live with me.

You are not here in our apartment in our home district on the day that is today. So I have to leave you a message, and so I am writing you this message.

I am using magic marker because my magic middle finger doesn't seem so magic anymore. I cannot write it on the sky or on the wall because of the landlord so I must write it on this paper, the paper next to the paper on which you wrote your note.

And I'm not sure now if I should mail it or I should leave it or I should throw it or I should hide it. I don't know how you will get it but I will write it first and worry about that later.

Because I have to explain all this to you, because I started it and I must finish it, and I would like you to understand, so that you will know how much I care.

So you will know how much I dared to do, so you will know that it is, the whole thing, true, so that you will know how hard it all was, and how many days it took to make a victory.

I don't know how you will read this note, but I am leaving the room now, and I will go looking for you. I will look for you in the streets and the hills, and I will ride the bus to far away, and now it will be you I will be looking for, and not Agent Only.

Because Agent Only is now still a statue of himself, and I don't think he is saying much, but he might know, so I might ask him, but he will just be one stop on my great search journey to look for you and find you and ask you to have me back.

Sisterine, I leave this note for you so you know that I am coming. I am leaving it somewhere so you will find it and understand. I hope you aren't so mad anymore. I hope you can be mad and then not so mad anymore. I hope you can use your middle finger, and then save it for a rainy day.

I am coming, Sisterine, and I hope you are still there.

Yes, you guessed it.

I married water.

Maybe it was hard to guess, but maybe you saw it coming.

Water and me, well, we got married. We made up and we realized that we both love each other so much, so we got married.

It took me a while to realize it. I guess you know that pretty well.

It wasn't easy in coming, but when that love did come, I knew it had come.

I know I said some harsh things about water, but I guess that proves how much I really care for her.

And she can forgive me, but sometimes I still do want to strangle her.

She is water after all. Sometimes she can be pretty deceptive, but now she is my wife, so I have to live with it.

And I do enjoy it. I really am happy.

She is going to be a great wife.

It was hard for me to pop the question, because I wanted to warn everybody about her some more and then I saw her sitting there and making waves.

And I just felt so proud of her, and I felt so much in love, that I had to ask her to marry me.

And first it was like she wasn't listening, and she didn't say a thing, and she just made waves, but then she made some sparkles with the sun, and that's how I knew she was smiling.

And then she said yes in her watery way. And then I felt so completely happy.

We had a small service. Just our closest friends. But that was the happiest day of my life.

I know I said some things about water, and maybe I even regret some of those things, but they felt like the right things to say at the time.

And now water and I are talking about having kids.

Well, isn't that part of the whole getting married thing?

And I know it might not exactly be a decent thing to talk about, but I already said it.

We got some wedding presents that seemed to show that our friends thought that kids were inevitable.

And it kind of makes me happy to think about that. It kind of makes me happy to think that water and I will make a new life between us.

It's kind of like I'm living all over again. I am kind of like a new guy with all my love of water.

I do wonder what our kids will look like.

Minneapolis, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, November – December 2007

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