Postmodern Short Fiction

Farina Olivine

One of Fourteen Semolina Pilchards

What is a Semolina Pilchard?

John Lennon became frustrated enough by efforts to interpret his lyrics that he wrote “I Am the Walrus” and introduced Semolina Pilchard climbing the Eiffel Tower to the world.

The playful language, the hotchpotch of musical styles, and the samples from radio broadcasts combine to make it one of the most inventive and intriguing songs The Beatles recorded.

It is the epitome of postmodern absurdism.

In September 2017, I heard “I Am the Walrus” on the radio for the first time in ages. I immediately looked up the lyrics and backstory.

That research led me to a write something about a person with an absurd name like Semolina Pilchard.

I came up with Plethora Peruke and Agouti Periwinkle right away.

Determined that the names ought to have no significance and that Semolina Pilchard climbing the Eiffel Tower must be referenced, I indulged my stream-of-consciousness bent and produced pieces using each of the names as the title character.

They are postmodern literature. They are situational investigations that take detours to pursue a topic sparked by a word or idea.

There is no story.

After about 15 months, I had 14 Semolina Pilchards. Seven were published before the pandemic.

Before that, beginning in August 2019, I took a break from sending my work to literary journals and publishers. I also wrote very little.

I had 19 projects published or produced in 2019. Except for making almost no money from writing, I considered myself successful.

The only problem, which continues to exist, is that I have a small audience. It has a lot to do with my writing style. People love it or dislike it with intensity.

So here I am, offering my writing at its quirkiest. Dig in or log out.

Farine Olivine

It had taken some doing, which is saying a lot even though that’s only five words. Someone had finally managed to choke out of the gasping man’s throat the pit of the pluot he had been consuming moments before. Of course, it had to have been moments before since otherwise he would have to have had the pit in his mouth for a considerable time. Aside from that, the yellow-veined-with-purple juice of the fruit was still trickling down his wrist from the palm of his left hand.

Isn’t it nice that time is never inconsiderable? Wait. Perhaps that would be inconsiderate, except time is never considerate either. But while we are on the subject, does anyone ever use ‘inconsiderable’ without putting ‘not’ before it? It’s unlikely, since no one in her right mind would use a word as lengthy as ‘inconsiderable’ in place of ‘small’.

On the other hand, right-minded people might very well jump at the opportunity to use ‘considerable’ or the even better ‘not inconsiderable’ in place of ‘great’. Who can resist the temptation to use the most grandiose terms when dealing with greatness?

People who use languages other than English (and we are told they do exist) never even consider these things. They can’t. They rarely have more than one word for anything. Not the word ‘anything’, of course, just ‘anything’ when it means everything, although this proves the point that English has more than one word for everything. That is, the word ‘everything’.

Anyway, those who use languages other than English sometimes have multiple words to describe an action. Everyone knows verbs are difficult in every language except Chinese. For example, French verbs are much, much easier when they are translated into Chinese.

Then again, French is so idiomatic, it is best left untranslated. Indeed, the standard text for courses on the idiosyncrasies of French is a dictionary of idiomatic expressions. But no language other than English requires a rather substantial reference book to keep track of synonyms.

Even the thesaurus entry for ‘concise’ is anything but. Not really anything but, but rather anything but concise. However, that might lead the less careful reader to think the thesaurus entry under discussion is anything but concise. It isn’t. But it is. Concise, that is.

Not only that. The synonyms of concise, like epigrammatic, compendious, and breviloquent, are anything but, too. Before trying to figure that one out, go around and ask people if they are breviloquent. You will see just how snippy they can be.

As for the choking man, someone first tried to dislodge the nugget using the traditional method of abusively hugging the victim from the rear and trying to push a fist into the place where a gall bladder or spleen would be more appropriate.

The hero of the minute was having some difficulty because the choking man was wearing an Ohio State sweatshirt. The problem had nothing to do with Ohio State this time. The cloth of the sweatshirt was too thick for the Good Samaritan to gauge how far in the abdominal thrusts were going.

Just as he was getting the hang of it, a nearby, genuinely softhearted, young woman let out a scream thinking the man was being dry humped. Why Farina Olivine would think that is almost beyond belief.

Of course, beyond must be qualified by almost in this instance. The evidence clearly shows the lady actually did think a sexual act was being performed right there among the piled fruits of the produce section.

Aside from screaming, she was vigorously pushing one finger in and out of the hole created by the not completely clenched fist made by her other hand. Once it was established she did not know ASL, the intent of her gesture was clear. When things calmed down, she claimed it was only a nervous habit.

The young woman’s outburst caused the gentleman performing the lifesaving action to drop the body he was holding and run off in embarrassment. We could call it a lifesaving maneuver.

Frankly, we spent so much time trying to figure out where the oh goes in maneuver that we gave up just after we became so frustrated, we almost asked someone. And asked must be qualified by almost in this instance because we realized at the last moment no oh goes in maneuver, meaning we no longer needed to ask someone.

Why it was the last moment ought to be obvious, but probably deserves some explanation. Needless to say, but we are still saying it, we don’t have enough time. At least we weren’t silly enough to try to stick eau into the damned word. Let’s just leave it at that.

A second gentleman leaped to the rescue of the gasping man now prone on the floor. He wrapped his noteworthy long-fingered hands around the neck of the victim at the spot where the neck connects to the shoulders and breast, just below the sweet spot for beheading someone.

That sweet spot, by the way, is quite difficult to hit when using an axe or sword. King Henry VIII went out of his way to hire a professional from France to do the job on his second wife. There’s some nobility in that. By the time he had his fifth wife beheaded, he didn’t care if he appeared noble or not.

Not that wives three and four were beheaded. The third died as a side effect of giving birth to the son the second wife did not produce. Come to think of it, the second died as a side effect of not giving birth to the son Henry so feverishly wanted.

The fourth was too ugly to bed and too pleasant to execute. She was retired into the legal status of sister of the king. That was an even nobler thing to do than hiring an expert executioner.

Wife one was divorced and wife six was widowed. And we all know what happened to the fifth, because it was mentioned three paragraphs ago.

Of course, everyone also knows that the French eventually fell behind in the art of decapitation until Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin came along. The good doctor only thought of the machine as a more humane method of execution while he and his compatriots worked on eliminating capital punishment. That project did not succeed until almost two centuries later. By then, most everyone had agreed that humane execution must be one of the most horrific oxymorons ever devised.

The second rescuer wasn’t thinking of removing the head of the choking man, even though his actions might have appeared that way. He yanked the man up by the throat, thereby causing the throat to react the way a toothpaste tube reacts when it is squeezed. In this case, instead of toothpaste spurting out of the poor man’s mouth, which sounds absurd if it did, the pluot pit was ejected out and onto the floor.

The choked choking man could barely stand. This meant his savior had to quickly move his hands from the throat to the trunk to hold him. At this point, any effort to find a chair would have been welcomed, but no one seemed inclined to move from the scene.

Someone helpfully asked for someone to get water rather than getting it himself. No takers there either. Perhaps if he had said “Quelqu’un d’obtenir de l’eau!” there may have been a reaction. As it was, the small crowd was transfixed by the drama before them.

Miss Olivine cautiously looked to see where the rescuer’s arms were in relation to the rescuee’s never-public parts. She would not have done so normally. However, another onlooker had noted that oftentimes men will attempt to rescue women from nonexistent troubles merely to cop a feel. She had no reason to doubt this was true.

In her experience, men were as likely to be hazardous as helpful. Why that applied here was not clear. Yet it was just the kind of thing a young woman capable of screaming when she sees two men who she thinks are doing it in the produce section of the market would consider applicable.

At least Miss Olivine was open minded enough to make the observation gender neutral or, at least, we want to believe she was open minded. Otherwise, we are back where we started with her mistaking the first rescue effort as something X-rated.

That would make the second attempt just as prurient. Before long, we would need to explain why it is a second attempt when the result was a success. If we call it the first success, we may be implying that other successes might follow. That would not be the case here.

One could always label it a ‘successful attempt’. However, is that a gaseous simpleton? We could have said oxymoron again, but some people consider the word a portmanteau of oxygen and moron. We wanted to flush out those who do. It’s not a very good portmanteau if it is one, which it is not.

Oh, but we did manage to use a word with eau that didn’t require using French again. Congratulations all round! In another time and place, we could explore such things in greater depth. Here and now, we have expended far too much energy on useless maneuvers.

Now, here Farina Olivine was observing the consequences when one eats a piece of fruit without paying for it. While she had never actively participated in any discussions or research on the topic of karma, Farina recognized irony when she saw it.

Perhaps for some people it is perfectly normal to snag a piece of fruit and consume it in the market while still shopping. And by ‘perfectly normal’ we don’t mean the kind of normal that has been perfected, but rather the kind of normal that most people consider odd, as in thinking nothing of Semolina Pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower or Farina Olivine screaming in the grocery store.

These things happen. But if one is continuously saying ‘These things happen’, one must be living a far more eventful life than most or is incredibly clumsy with knives.

When we get right down to it, not one, but two considerate men came to the rescue of another man inconsiderate enough to eat a pluot before paying for it, thereby causing a considerable amount of confusion when the inconsiderable pit of the pluot lodged in his throat.

The whole time, Farina Olivine just wished the commotion would die down so she could ask someone what a pluot is.