A Very Special Dirt

When Great Great Great Grandpa Hurscht emmigrated from Germany, the only thing he had to his name was a single cow. Having no land on which to graze it, Grandpapapa Hurscht would poach grass from the local graveyard at night. In order to do this, he had to muffle the cowbell with cotton blown from a nearby field. Now, at the time, this was considered base and immoral on two counts; suspending the natural course of a cowbell that was crafted with honest intentions, and using cotton to dishonor the dead. Dishonoring the dead was not such a big deal, because so few were even on speaking terms with the dead. It was the cotton that got Hurscht in trouble.

At the time, the sight of picked, unspun cotton was considered an omen of idleness. It was for this reason that ladies wore bonnets. Spinning cotton was naturally women's work, so ladies wore bonnets to shield their eyes from great, heaping piles of cotton at the side of their spinning wheels. Such a sight would undeniably send a lady into hysterics. Filthy orphans were employed to carry the cotton from the fields to the spinning floors. At the end of each day the orphans were whipped for such a callous display of idleness as carrying up to 4 tons of unspun cotton each day, paid their wage of 2 pennies, then flogged for being filthy. Hurscht was walking his cow from the graveyard to the town tree in the early dawn hours when a lady spied a spot of unspun cotton peeking from the cowbell. She immediately fell into a fainting fit. Grandpapapa would have helped, but he was fearful of letting go of his cow's lead rope (which he had braided from the hair of discarded bees) and letting his only earthly possession run away forever. He would pay dearly for this solitary act of selfishness. As it turned out, a passing throng of orphans saw the lady swoon, and they selflessly carried her to the town doctor. The orphans were burned for touching a lady, then flogged for being filthy. A week later she regained her wits, and reported that a backwards immigrant known as Hurscht had offended her with cotton.

The Town Assembly unanimously agreed to run Grandpapapa Hurscht out of town. It was decided to strap him to a cart pulled by his own cow for the greatest humiliating effect, and chase the cow away, leaving them both to be devoured by gypsies. The town had no cart, for there was no wood to build one with, save for the town tree, which could not be cut down for the sake of town pride. One would have to be purchased from the city at great expense. The Town Assembly reckoned that it would take over a year of saving and scraping profits from their crops of skinbeans to buy a cart. This was because skinbeans made for a pitifully poor crop, as they contained no actual bean, but the skin of a bean only. The fact that skinbeans were not seeds, like normal beans are, presented a problem at planting time. The skinbeans had no way of germinating on their own and required a great deal of shouting to get them going. The healthy-lunged farmers of the town did a bang-up job of shouting at skinbeans, but eventually even they became horse, and orphans were brought in to shout at the skinbeans through the night so the farmers could rest their voices. Every morning at dawn the orphans were beaten for speaking without being spoken to (for skinbeans had not the power of speech), then flogged for being filthy.

Now as a matter of town pride, landowners in the town could not be run out of it. Instead, landowners who committed moral tresspasses were lashed to a gypsie and rolled down a hill as punishment. In short, Hurscht had one year to become a landowner if he were to remain in the relative safety of the town. The members of the Town Assembly all smiled to themselves, for they knew that all the land within a mile of the Town Tree had been claimed, and it was considered immoral to build a homestead further from it. Hurscht was undaunted, and quickly concocted a plan. First, he wove reeds from a nearby pond into a berm that circled his cow's back. Next, he set about getting soil to place in the berm, thus creating his own land. For twenty hours each day he rubbed together rocks he found at the pond, eroding and liberating particles from the rocks' surfaces, letting the debris fall onto the cow's back. In the remaining four hours, he spent his time snatching specks of dust from the air, licking them, and sticking them to the back of his cow. He conducted himself so for 8 months. There was very little topsoil on his cow to speak of, and certainly not enough to impress the Town Assembly.

Inspiration struck as Hurscht passed by orphans shouting in the field on his nightly walks to the graveyard. He had learned to walk by the skinbean fields at night, so that the shouting would drown out the sound of a cowbell un-muffled by unspun cotton. Tying his cow off to one orphan, he snuck up on a second orphan that was on the verge of collapse from shouting. He gripped the orphan by the ankles, swung it over his head, and smacked the orphan against the back of his cow with such a blow as to rattle the little orphan's bones. All the filth was shaken loose from the orphan, and behold, a tiny pile of dirt was orphaned from its orphan. He released the dazed urchin back to its shouting and repeated the process well into the night. When morning came, confused orphans walked home to their mud pit with concussions but not with floggings (but obviously still beaten for their noise). Confused floggers gazed in wonderment, for they saw that the orphans were unfilthed.

Hurscht made great progress in this fashion, and the orphans, though still suffering beatings and burnings, were all too happy to assist in his dirtmaking in exchange for relief from their continual flogging. In three months' time a healthy layer of soil was now on the cow, and Huscht planted grass, skinbeans, and flowers on it. In the last month before Hurscht's sentence was to be carried out, the orphans shouted for his cow rather than for the fields of their cruel employers. The cow-bourne crop flourished into a bounty far greater than any of the townspeople. When the smirking Town Assembly strolled up to Hurscht, smirking smugly, he moved to the side and showed showed them his plot of land. He offered to buy the cart from them, for he was now far wealthier than those gathered. His neighbors were so shamed that they forgot all about tying Hurscht to carts or gypsies. Grandpapapa Hurscht took the cart for his home, and he sat down for the first time in three years.

Doctors like blood.

Doctors like blood. They must, otherwise they would not always have their hands in it, regretting that hygiene protocols place a latex barrier between it an their expectant skin. Doctors like blood so much that they keep collections of stale and otherwise unused blood. The accumulation of some of this treasure is a natural consequence of the craft of doctoring. However, discerning doctors seek out rare and antique bloods to impress their colleagues as much as to satisfy the sanguine hoarding urge that wells up inside. "Look at this sample," one beams, "It is O-Positive and laced with an infection of Whooping Fever from the 1978 outbreak. Just sniff it and see." The IV bag passes from nose to nose, and each nose in turn bobs up and down in a nod of agreement. "That's nothing," boasts another, "I've got a whole gallon of A-Negative, absolutely filthy with the Rhinoceros Flu; vintage NINETEEN-TWEN-TY-THREE." All those gathered drop jaws in awe, as if made ready to receive tongue depressors. Their friend with the jars of Rhino Flu will get referrals from all his peers now, regardless of how many dozens of patients he has lost.