Free Can and Can'tankerous by Harlan Ellison (R) Page B

sliced papyrus, and finally she was able to sob a question. “What about your father? Wouldn’t he intercede for us?” And Osiris thought about his dad, who spent most of his time worrying about wheat and barley, and figuring out ways to con Osiris into coming into the family business, and he replied, “Much as I love Amon, I think Pop ain’t going to be much help. Mom’s got him pretty well whipped. I don’t think he’s ever gotten past the vulture head. You know, they were sort of betrothed at birth kind of thing.”
    But they knew what had to be done, and so they went to see Mut.
    It had been a particularly shitty day for Mut, that day they came, what with the sun halting in the heavens again, and the plague of murrain, and so when Osiris appeared in the throne room with Isis, Mut gave a little shriek with two of her three heads, shaking her plumes of truth. “Where the hell did she come from?!” she demanded. She was clearly distraught.
    “You know my beloved?” Osiris cried.
    “Know her…?” Mut screamed, “Of course I know her, you ignorant twit! She’s your goddam sister !”
    “Oops,” said Osiris.
    “Don’t tell me you did it !” Mut howled. One look at the young lovers was enough. “Oh, name of the Trinitarian,” Mut lamented, “no wonder I can’t get the sun to work properly. You useless brat. I told your father sending one of the twins away wouldn’t be enough, but oh no, not him , Mr. Soft Hearted!”
    And she proceeded to strike Osiris dead. And Isis fell to her knees and tried to bring him back to life. And she tried real hard, she really did; but nothing. Naught. Zip. Yet her power was formidable, and she gave birth to their child right there in the throne room.
    And Horus was looked upon by his grandmother Mut, and he was found comely in her eyes, and eventually she got it on with him, and when they cast the movie Mut was slapped around by Jack Nicholson till she admitted, “He’s my husband…he’s my grandson…he’s my husband…he’s my grandson…he’s my husband and my grandson,” and John Huston got off clean, no indictment at all, and the sequel lost a fortune.
     
    N is for NIDHOOG
     
    Amos Gaskill met the only tree on Skillet Six Mile Flats neck-first. It was a stunted, ugly thing, the only tree out there on Skillet Six Mile Flats: it came thrusting up out of the hardpan at a fifty-degree angle, its roots aboveground like a junkheap of a thousand wicker chairs broken and cast abandoned, black and tangled, clots of hairy dirt embedded in the coils, the roots twisted and joined the bloated ugly thick and oily trunk in gnarled sutures that could be imagined as charred open mouths sucking at pregnant bark; without leaf or bud, crippled limbs bent and flung in corrupt shapes against the gray sky; like a famously scorched corpse, all black and sooty, tormented in design, blighted in every particular; a single desperate shape gasping for life in blasted flatland.
    They had to cut the rope by a third, and retie the knot, before they looped it over the topmost branch: at its original length, circling the black neck of Amos Gaskill, as black as the bole of the unlovely tree, he would have been standing on the chapped, cracked earth, the rope hanging limply past his shoulder. And even when they had cut it by a third, and retied the hangman’s knot, and pulled him up tight, the best they could get was the toes of his work-boots barely scraping the hardpan, making irregular slashes in the ground as he choked and struggled and swung himself to and fro trying to get his legs to stretch that quarter of an inch so he might stand, and stop choking, and not die. But all he got was a shallow furrow below each boot, and the spittle and gagging and swollen tongue.
    They passed the bottle of McCormick bourbon from man to man, till all four had depleted the aquifer by half. They scratched and squatted and shifted from foot to foot, all the while fascinated by the dying. Amos Gaskill was