Wednesday... Day
Oog smells trouble. It smells like fish. It spells danger (literally). Join the Glanders tribe as they march into battle against a foe that might just lick them to death. A hilarious prehistoric romp.
Amidst the raw laughter, the “hey diddle-dedee and hey diddle-dedum,” and the general humdrum of the feast, Oog sneered. He froze in his chair, his head cocked to the side like an inquiring bird. There was something in the air. Something alive. Something that wasn’t slaughtered. Something with four legs and a pulse.
Living food within the boundaries of the tribe.
On a Wednesday!
Oog shook himself free of his reverie and rose in an instant. He tilted his head and sniffed. His nostrils flapped like the wings of a butterfly drifting over a sunny meadow. Oog stood in a trance, much like a dog hearing a sound from yonder, trying to determine if the noise implies danger or dinner.
None of the tribesmen noticed Oog’s abrupt and unprecedented use of his legs, other than Dlorg and Mlag, who unconsciously sensed their table space had doubled and subsequently filled it with legs, arms, and knuckles from the wild. The others just continued making offensive burping sounds—which weren’t offensive to anyone present—and telling crappy jokes. These jokes invariably contained the word “rock,” or variants of nose-picking, belly-scratching, or pointing at privates. As long as one of these elements was present, roars of laughter followed.
Dlorg, Oog’s second-in-command and the most versatile of the cavemen, was all the rage this evening because he could combine at least two of the said elements in a single joke.
He be turnin’ feastday to’is private hump day, Mlag thought, grinning as he gobbled down a square thing that looked suspiciously like meat.
Suddenly, Oog jumped. He furrowed his unibrow.
Most of the cavemen around Oog stopped eating, whilst the ones at the far end of the table started throwing half-eaten pieces of meat—pointy little bones still protruding—at one another. The food fight ended abruptly when the Glanders saw that neither Oog nor the other cavemen-in-command were joining in the merriment.
At this point, it might be wise to inform the casual reader that the inhabitants of the Oogland area were not “the Oogmen,” or even “the Boogeymen,” but “the Glanders.” Male Glanders, female Glanders. All Glanders. And Oog was the head of the Glanders: the President. Unanimously voted to office during their last hunt. Oog had stayed home that night, and since female Glanders were restricted from voting, it all came down to Oog’s vote. Oog, as the new President of Oogland, judged both the election and the ballot to be valid, even though the vote was rather shoddily chiseled.
He didn’t much care for being President. Too much stress when the important issues came up. The budget was particularly demanding, but to Oog’s good fortune, creative accounting was a trait given to him by birth. His usual method was to embezzle everything on account of being President, and then refuse to sign any papers on account of his lack of writing skills.
Oog recognized the smell. It was a Brontosaurus. Never mind that the dinosaurs had ceased to exist millions of years before Oog crawled out of the gene pool. It was a Brontosaurus. Oog would know that smell anywhere.
And dinosauruses spelt trouble. Not literally, of course. Oog knew that some words were longer than others, and he knew that “trouble” was spelled differently than “dinosauruses.” It was all in the wossname of it. Anyway, a Brontosaurus isn’t dangerous. Oog knew that too, despite having a small brain, a big head, and a body reminiscent of a monkey. But Brontosauruses got eaten, and not just by Glanders. No, there was something out there that ate Brontosauruses, too. And anyone who could eat a Brontosaurus and wasn’t a Glander... well, Oog knew enough to know that spelt trouble, albeit not literally.
But knowing what he smelled didn’t mean knowing what to do. Far from it. Years before Buffalum Springfield wrote their little song, Oog noticed that something was happening, and he wasn’t quite clear what it was. What was clear, Oog decided, was that he was going to do something about it.
“What’re yer doing standing up, Oog?” cried a voice from his left.
“Gawds, Oog, this ain’t no darned gymnastics hour!” voiced a Glander from his right.
“Bur, bur, and gettum your butt down on yer rock, Oog!” cried Dlorg, pointing at Oog’s rear end. Roars of laughter followed.
Oog looked about him. He saw hundreds of his subjects laughing with their mouths wide open while food, mostly meat, tried to jump back onto the plates. One hundred and fifty-three, to be exact. One hundred and fifty-three Glanders, and himself. Big crowd, chow chow, but not big enough to tackle a Brontosaurus-eater. Yes, Rock-ee, there was trouble up ahead.
Oog snorted. “Yah, Glanders, stop yer eating and lissen to Papa!”
Most Glanders looked up at Oog with a mix of surprise and malicious glee.
“I smellum big rat.”
“I smellum nuttin’,” Dlorg said, proving it by picking his nose with both hands at once. Roars of laughter followed.
Oog looked dismayed—or as dismayed as a Glander trying to keep from bursting into laughter could look. He bit his lip and kicked the rock table with his toes. He brained Dlorg with his mug’o’beer (the rocky kind). Dlorg managed to utter, “Look Ma, no hands,” before his head crashed into “the piece of meat formerly known as the cow’s ass.”
Much to Oog’s surprise, the Glanders actually stopped laughing. Oog displayed a row of broken teeth in a singular, victorious grin and jumped up onto the table.
“Lissen to me and lissum well, for I will only say this once!”
Mlag made a sound that reminded Oog of a frog, but Oog shrugged it away, and then shrugged Mlag off the table by virtue of his boot.
“I smellum big trouble. Brontosaurus in our yard. Big animal that doesn’t go mooo.”
The Glanders looked at each other with puzzled frowns, but since no one understood what Oog meant, the action resolved nothing. Moments later, all eyes returned to the unmistakable figure of Oog.
“There’s Brontos in our yard and we gottum clean it up with our backs.”
The Glanders gawped, though their level of understanding had reached a new low.
“They’ll bring us mowntains of bad luck and Gawd knows,” Oog shook his fist at the sky, thinking of Thor and Odin and Valhalla and Brontosauruses, “we’ve gottum enough bad luck to bring the sky down on our heads!”
A dank smell of fish pervaded the air in that instant, adding tremendous effect to Oog’s half-plea, half-command. Of course, it wasn’t fish, Oog knew. It was Brontosauruses.
“Brontos!” cried a voice from the far end of the table. The outburst was followed by cries from nearly every Glander present.
“Glanders!” Oog bellowed. “Silence! Lissen to me, for ‘tis a time of speeches and greatum deeds.”
Oog coughed and prepared to speak so that everyone—even those with no sense of dialect—could understand him.
“Glanders. The word has new meaning fer all of us now. We’re reminded not of our petty differences, like Dlorg there with’is biggum ears, or Gorgle with’em funny toes. We’re reminded of our common interests.” Oog scratched his belly solemnly. “Maybe it’s fate that today is Wednesday, glorious Feastum-Day, and we will once again be fighting for our freedom. Our freedom to eatum barrels of food and dwellum in largish caves all of our own, sitting in our customum-madum rocks. We will fight not from tyranny...”
But tyrannysauruses too, Oog thought.
“...or oppression, but from annihilation and starvation. We’re fighting for our right to exist! To live! Should we win the day, the weekly Wednesday Food Feast will no longer be known as a Glander holiday, but as the day when we Glanders declared in one voice: We will not go gently into the night! We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on! To pick another nose in a new tomorrow! We’re going to survive! Today, we celebrate Bronto-Feastum Day! OOG!”
The Glanders cheered and applauded. A single female Glander cried a salty tear. To the trumpeting hums of the Glanders, Oog marched on toward the source of the smell.
Yard after yard he walked. Minute after minute ticked by. The gagging scent of fish grew stronger until Oog felt he could take it no more. His band of Glanders was diminishing, the smell overpowering them one by one. When they finally reached the outskirts of their little region—signalled by two unbelievably huge, elongated stalagmites growing out of the earth like the teeth of a sabre-toothed tiger—there were only fifty-nine left.
Oog turned to look at them and gave his third look of dismay that day. With a sigh, he covered his nose with his left hand while motioning forward with his right.
“Godda be righd aroud the dorner, now,” he said, pinching his nostrils shut. “Fowad marsh!”
Every Glander grabbed a firm hold of their positions—some hugging huge rocks, some grasping at cactuses, some picking up handfuls of pebbles—and stayed exactly where they were.
“Musd I doum everyding round’ere?” Oog cried. It was a cry mixed with resignation. Oog sighed, knowing that you could lead a horse to water, but you couldn’t make him take a bath. He sympathized with the horse; he didn’t bathe much hisself.
Oog walked up to the stalagmite, blissfully unaware that he was about to make three very stupid mistakes.
He got close enough to feel their stony presence—in fact, close enough to breathe dust and sneeze wads of goo. Face to face, he stood in front of the stalagmite, knowing that Bronto was right around the corner. Oog grasped his club and took a deep breath.
That was his first mistake.
He sneezed and coughed and cursed and almost knocked himself out with his own club trying to brush the dust off his nose. After the fit was nearly over, he jumped to the side of the stalagmite and ran around the corner shrieking: “OOG OOG!” He banged his club, he shouted, and he sneered.
And then he was knocked unconscious.
His second mistake, of course, was to charge without thinking ahead. His third was to bang himself in the head. But forgive him, will you? After all, he’s only a caveman.
When Oog woke up some time later that evening, his eyes were sore, his nose was big and red, and his forehead had grown a stalagmite all of its own. Mlag—or what Oog thought looked like Mlag through the fog—whispered to him: “We gotch’yer Bronto, Oog.”
“Up with yer speak!” Oog replied.
Mlag was talking in a normal pitch but raised it dutifully. “WE GOTCH’YER BRONTO, OOG!”
At the same time, a small beast walked up to Oog and licked him on the forehead. The beast was larger than your average dog, but far smaller than your regular horse. It smelled of fish, and its skin was reminiscent of a very dry lizard.
“This’s Bronto?” Oog said, astonished.
Bronto coyly pushed Mlag away with its tail and licked Oog again, intent on winning his friendship.
“You stinkin’ beast,” Oog said, but his voice revealed that he was far from angry.
His vision was still a fog, but Oog saw the gleam in Mlag’s eyes, and he was darned if he was going to be taken with his pants down in this matter. Of course, Oog was unaware that he really didn’t have any pants on, but even if he had known, it wouldn’t have mattered much. He’d find a different saying that fit the bill.
Fact is, he had already forgotten the implications of his speech. He declared with a rusty voice: “Bronto willum be symbol fer our Bronto-Feastum day! OOG!”
Mlag thought it best to cheer, conveying the news to Dlorg. Dlorg also thought it best to cheer, conveying the news to the amused Glanders outside. The sound of the cheering Glanders, all of whom thought it was a good idea, removed any doubts from Oog’s mind. Content with the day’s work, he made a smell of his own from his rear end, turned over, and smugly closed his eyes.
Thank you for reading!
Now here’s the backdrop: I wrote this in 1996. Published Oct 6th ‘96 as a matter of fact, and I have noted I started working on it Sept 28th.
I was a part of a small writing clique back then, known as “The Soup Council”. We chatted on IRC and sent stories over email. I was the youngest in the group.
It dissolved, as things generally are prone to do, but for a short while, it was a great experience and I treasure the memory of the small community.
This story is the one that made it through time. The others are less cohesive, but I think there’s some genuinely funny moments here that were worth publishing.
OOG OOG!! great story, made me laugh a lot!