P.J. Jason's (kpjason@aol.com) short stories have appeared in such publications as African Voices, Mississippi Review, Fiction International, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), River Styx, Rosebud, Salmagundi and many many others.






Collard Oysters


< by P.J. Jason




In a basement flooded deep in the not too traveled 13th Sprocket of the Southern most Bronx, a pustulux 1000 feet under a crack house where playaz stuffed crystal up their noses and B-Boys vomited their yellow guts into multi-colored trash bags Dis-it Raheem Jones, a Bioderm, a B-Baker by trade, discovered a new ingredient...kind of.

"Woe, wassup with that?" he yelled, even though he was by himself, his bullhead, his probe sunk deep into the scum below the basement's murky water. "Check these out! Collard oysters!?"

Eggs were bigger, and clams, but not as gelatinous as these-- the oysters filled as they were in the middle with green stuff which leaks from a frog's nose. With a dab of Vaseline, Dis-it rolled a collard between his fingers to make-up for this creature's absence of lubricant. It was completely dry...even under water and it fed itself through a red, hot ventricle, and a purple sphincter muscle that latched onto Dis-its bullhead with teeth hissing as it released a tectonic plate gas which was once the subject of a paper by Dis-its thesis advisor, the unlovely Dr. Nicklis-sin, an Imitatus and Director of the now infamous Bund for Multi-Racial Food Works.

Dis-it cautiously put a gelatinous smear of collard into his Tommy Hilfigger dive pouch before he rose to the gutter to study his find. But his new collard proved resistant to lubricant for any extended period of time. The one in his pouch shriveled and died in the street light.

Determined to make his mark on Race Cookbooks, Dis-it quickly returned to the basement. With a borrowed bilge pump, in eight Spinco seconds, he filled a dozen trash bags, balloon size, with fetid building scum. Each bag (with its own collard oyster) was then hauled onto a charred rooftop over looking Dis-its fecal strewn streets with its septic fumes hung low in E-coli clouds and phlegm spat windows.

But to Dis-its great relief these very conditions, this rancid mess, made it possible for his oysters to thrive, as long as the septic fumes were daily injected into his plastic sacks, the collard homes; for it was now Dis-its task to extract the stomach altering, intestinal churning, tectonic plate gas from each oyster, thrashing about the bags; and ship this all to his esteemed mentor Dr. Nicklis-sin at the Bund.

Now he was making excellent progress. Dis-it was taking small shavings (in secret) from his slimy charges and boiling them and frying them and rolling them into pancake dough and butter, planning to rock the culinary world with his new down home concoction; knowing as he did that these creatures had gastro-altering, intestinal properties...everything gave him hope. There were all kinds of stomach ailments out there from Polyps to Conks... to Kabobs and the Shanks. Talk about soul food!

But then, one morning, an accident occurred. Jumping for joy, imagining some long awaited prize, Dis-it overturned a stir fry filled with collard shavings. His apron string caught the jagged edge of the Coleman stove and his most gelatinous brew, which he called Big Burp-a, slid over the roof's edge and went six stories down and plop into a B-Boy's yellow vomit mouth. (He was sleeping on a piss stained mattress in the alley.)

And the incident would have ended here if Big Burp-a hadn't begun to liquefy in this Boy's mouth and bubble into an embryonic jell that made itself evident in a sudsy foam that dripped green from the Boy's nose, pooling onto his chest where it whipped itself into a frothy pea-green pool. Dis-it was disturbed by the B-Boy's high pitched squeal and how the body suddenly hurled itself slap dead against the alley wall.

Dr. Nicklis-sin, Imitatus and Director, now gave his young protege a deeply troubled look when they met for dinner and drinks at the Bi-valve Bar. He read Dis-its paper on Collard Oysters & Brews.

"I believe," he said, "you're at a forkroads. You're one medicine man. You can obviously produce noxious substances and make them go into pink convulsions, yellow halos, powder trains and air hammers. You can read their twitching. You can see that their mutterings have prophetic significance. But believe me, young man, death will supervene, but...Cookbooks...they are the real codices, the black grains and the glass, the kidney plates, the dinners licked clean on the rubbish heap... utter heaven."

Dis-it understood completely, raised his glass and gave the Doctor his salutations.

"And, to my goblet?"





P.J. Jason back to author list