In the barn-city of Minimil, small creatures from all across the literary canon live as one people, from Lilliputians and Shakespearean fairies to myrmidons, homunculi, and Wonderlanders.  Their lives are tenuous, valuable as they are as pieces in the proxy game of Little Wars, where conscripting countries can use them to spill thimbles of blood rather than buckets.

Worse still, someone has petrified their goddess, Hestia, and it falls to her nephew Vesperos, the god of love reduced to a mere bumblebee, to find out how and why.  He’s joined by a ragtag group of woodland critters who have heard the wind in the willows, and wish to help him rescue the reputation of their good friend Mrs. Toad, who is somehow caught up in the hatching of a cock’s grand scheme.

This is the beginning of The Challenge Obscene, the second novella trilogy of the Challenging universe.  It’s best to start with the first, which can be found here: The Challenging Handful, The Left Challenging Handful, and Challenging Applause.

(estimated reading time: 24 minutes)

(estimated reading time for entire novella: 3 hours, 11 minutes)

The Challenge Obscene

Challenging Cock

by

Blaine Arcade

Tease the Cock

Only one creature found themselves caught out in the rain, but it should have been zero, scheduled and announced thoroughly as the precipitation was, the notice posted all over the city and found in the weather & events section of the Minimil Minutes: the only newspaper circulating in the entire barn.

Just under an advertisement for the concert of Fadfid Paganinny, the world’s smallest violinist, itself just under, and in fact cutting off, a complaint letter to the editor, the announcement was printed thusly:

On Monday the 18th of October 1926, on the hour of seven until one in the morning, there will be rejuvenating rainfall over the neighborhoods of Banker’s Dozen, Hopalong, and Tin Junction, graciously provided by the cloud, water, and wind nymphs of Bonsai Park. The cost of enjoying the rain and its spiritual benefits is nothing, afforded to us once again by our lady and master Hestia of the hearth-throne.

Scheduled to stop shortly, it really didn’t make sense for the strange wretch to roll himself down a Hopalong street at such an hour, the streetlights weak and blurry under the downpour, the overhead lantern that mimicked the sun snuffed and its smoky scent utterly dispelled. He was drenched, or was he, being an eggty and all. Surrounded entirely by shell, he was waterproof, but only if that shell counted as clothing and not part of his person, a debate never-ending among those non-eggty residents of Minimil, always complicated by an equal mix of bare public eggs and those in smart little vests or cushioning caps on either end.

The one in the dark wore nothing, bore nothing, except for an emblem of some kind printed in black and gray upon his pale bumpy side, which could no longer be made out now that its ink was running in the rain while its owner rolled in the same. Typically, though only here could anything be described as typical for an eggty, rare as their survival was in the world abroad, a creature such as himself, a humble hen’s egg, would paint a face on his surface: something for other residents to focus on while they interacted.

But this gutter egg was not in the amphibious neighborhood for conversation; he was there to plead. False eyes could not shed the tears he felt in his underdeveloped, swollen, embryonic features. Blind they all were, for they were never born. An eggty was any type of egg, from any type of creature that lays them, that knew a defect of body and fate, instilling them with all the intelligence they would ever know all at once, endlessly drawing resources away from the maturing of the flesh and into the processes of the mind.

Such ill-fated animals had to fight hard to reach Minimil, especially in the raging age of Little Wars, which had been the law of the land, no longer for lads alone, for nearly a decade now. When they did they were welcomed, compensated, treasured, and they knew wealth and luxury thanks to their abilities to calculate and manage feats of both engineering and economy.

Instead of turning to any of the others made his brother by rolling out of the nest, the cold wet gutter egg stopped at the side of a new street he had apparently intended to find. Small bumps printed into the stone underneath him, braille placed for eggties, told him he was at the residence of a Mr. and Mrs. Jeremy Fisher.

Hoping it was just the Missus, the eggty swiveled on his shell and turned into their little path, finding some difficulty notching his way up the slippy-sloppy steps frogs and salamanders so liked to keep. Every motion was lethargic, energy only found when it was absolutely vital, like when the tip of the egg swung back and forward to knock on their door, the motion carefully calculated to not result in cracks. Such constant tabulation took its toll on him more than most; with all his effort put into it there was none left for the justice sought.

Cathartic thunder, low and rumbling like the hunger of a cow ambling overhead, mostly hid the sound of large rubber feet approaching from the other side. The door cracked open and out peeked a golden eye with a wide pupil. The eggty refused to speak first. If met with a man’s voice he would simply turn away and roll along.

“Dreary dearies, are you lost master eggty? Banker’s Dozen is a few streets off, and probably dry by now.” Mrs. Jeremy Fisher.

“I am not lost,” the stranger hidden in his shell answered, voice passing through a humble tin grate, the only modification to his form, inserted to enable speech and intake of both food and water. To the lady frog he sounded far off, down low, trapped in a well. “For I have found you.”

“Are you aware your face has run off?” she asked, disturbed by his impolite lack of painted eyes.

“If I had one it would only make my desperate plea all the more awkward for you, kind Mrs. Fisher. Please, I beg you, as it took my last of everything to get here to Minimil, all to implore…”

“Implore for what?”

“Please missus, will you sit on me?” Before she could answer the door was pulled further open, preceded by feet that slapped much more audibly. A larger male frog was stood there, no longer relaxing in his smoking jacket. Cigar fumes could be seen swirling in his ballooned transparent throat, which escaped in an angry puff when he spoke.

“Where do you get off talking to a lady like that, much less my wife!?” The eggty didn’t budge, as if suddenly hollowed. Despite the silence, beat back by only the patter of rain on his delicate shell, Mrs. Fisher felt cold anger radiating off the miserable creature. He looked like a chicken egg, but carried himself like the embryo of a vengeful viper, a bitter biter.

“Now Jeremy, I don’t think this fellow is in his right mind,” she admonished lightly, ignoring her own twinge of fear. He didn’t have so much as a jagged chip; what could he possibly do?

“He’d have only as much sense as a cockerel omelet to ask what he did!” Mr. Fisher croaked crabbily. The manphibian was a gentle soul, but not, as he was just learning himself, when his angel of a wife was accosted in the dark by a creeping yolk, sputtering pressurized blasphemy.

Stepping forward, splashing on his slippy-sloppy homestead, the bullfrog ribbited full-throated, inflating it again so it would knock the eggty back and off their steps. The gutter egg did nothing to slow himself as he bounced, freewheeling all the way back into the lane where gravity took him toward the next houses in the row.

“What sort of fools does he take us for?” the frog grumbled even as the vagrant vanished into the foggy streetlamp blur. “He knows precisely what he’s asking. I’ll have none of it.” He took his wife’s hand and pulled her back inside, her golden eye lingering on the downpour for but a moment more before the door was shut firmly, locked lividly.

There were other lady frogs, the eggty assured himself, mustering strength when gravity stopped rolling him. But how many? Some were no doubt veterans of the Batrachomyomachia, which led him to believe they would be lacking in maternal instinct. Too much of it would not be favorable either, as that likely meant they had a froth of tadpoles in a tub already, and would take no pity on him.

Next in his set of bumps to seem viable was the home of Missus, and again, to his chagrin, Mister, Dan’l Webster. Different approaches played in his head, none making him sound any better. It had to be the right frog, not the right words, someone as raw and downtrodden as himself.

Tunk tunk. This time the door opened all the way, to a taller more slender frog in her nightclothes, a hand on her cocked hip, a horizontal candlestick gripped in her tongue. By its light she saw the gray and black smears of what may once have identified the eggty.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “And why are you being such a person at this time of night? I know you eggs can sense and feel the sun on you, so that’s no excuse.”

“I have no excuse,” he answered her, “only shame. I come to you, humble as the day I was laid, fully aware I am skulking, slinking, but not bearing dagger under cloak. Please miss, I am desperate. I want nothing more than to emerge into the light of this wondrous city.”

“Spit it out Nestor.” A slight slur he had gloss over.

“Miss Webster, I crave, no yearn, for your touch. It will bring me to completion. Please, I beg you, please sit on me!” In his insistence his tip swiveled over her threshold, which she took, along with its dripping rain, to be far too much the slavering slobber of a hound dog. She would have kicked, but even touching the webbing between her digits to him was too close to what he wanted for her taste, so she grabbed am umbrella out of the nearby stand and used that instead.

“Hopalong’s got more than enough vile perverts without you Nestors rolling into town!” she shouted. “You’re lucky my lead-footed husband isn’t around; he’d sit on you and have you running down the storm drain to where you belong. Go on, get out of here! Louse! Cheeping Tom!”

This time the eggty fled under his own power, her tone having made pursuit seem likely. Her shrieking had been bad enough. Another door like that and he might have the goddess of the hearth descend from her throne to investigate, hard-boiling him with her gaze alone. It should be his gaze, he vowed once more, that achieved such paralyzing power.

Each set of bumps seemed less inviting than the last, the sensation of them closer and closer to piercing spines, scratching at a shell that already felt paper thin. Then the city sought to tax him further, for the latest address was long, longer, on and on until traveling down it had him bouncing like a carriage pulled by kangaroo:

You, esteemed visitor, are welcomed to the most extraordinary Second Toad Hall -commissioned by Mr. Toad – an eligible self-contained gentleman’s residence, very unique – built in majority part by Mr. Toad – its design -courtesy of the storied Toad family – dating from the fourteenth century, but replete with every modern convenience. Up-to-date sanitation. Like its forebear five minutes from church, post office, and golf-links. Suitable for any and all meetings and gatherings and parties at but a request – and invitation – to the excellent and clever Mr. Toad of Second Toad Hall. -Also home to the lovely Mrs. Toad-

After all that his shell was practically sore, but there was a Mrs. Toad to be found. Now he just had to make it all the way across the grounds and to the manor itself, no easy task given he quickly became lodged in unexpected mud. Catering to amphibians, Hopalong nonetheless had few full gardens, as real estate in the barn-city of Minimil was at its highest premium yet.

Immigration, mostly in the form of refugees, had cluttered the neighborhoods, many beings now willing to live in the sand castles of Loftplace despite how often they came tumbling down, sometimes on heads with no warning, only to be quickly rebuilt with different layouts, all to appease the curious experimenting of the chief landlord there.

It was worth the crowding, worth legally declaring worship of the goddess Hestia, to be spared conscription into Little Wars by way of butterfly net or mousetrap. The lady of the hearth-throne defended the city with an army of volunteers whom she showered with blessings every time they survived, reinforced in the hundreds by myrmidons practically bred by their queen to defend their home first and live their lives second.

The gutter egg knew these things, having researched thoroughly before setting off, so after his ordeal with the address that counted as strenuous exercise he assumed Second Toad Hall would be very noisy, full of guests and celebrants at all hours, but heard none of that on approach.

By the time he felt along the manor’s wall to a door he was surprised the rain hadn’t ceased, the probing having exhausted him all the further. Perhaps the mud could have him, and he could finally serve a purpose, as a lawn ornament. Tunk Tunk. His last knock, for he felt the ripple of a crack through his buoying albumen.

“Darling you’re home, forgive me I’m all a- oh- hello there, good egg.” The egg graciously assumed to be good had not sight of her, could not tell she was still in her day dress despite the darkness, or that her cosmetics were running down her eyes as badly as the streaks on his own shell. Yet her tone was highly informative, richly nicked with snivels, hiccups, snorts, and gasps, so the image that formed was not far from reality. She was distraught- and alone.

“Mrs. Toad, I presume?” he said softly as he could, so as not to topple her flimsy constitution; he had to be under her before that happened.

“Yes, good sir,” she replied to pay him the compliment of learning his sex from voice alone. There wouldn’t be any Nestors out of her. “Is there something I can help you with? Are you lost? I’m lost on my own grounds half the time, curse this gargantuan place.”

“I’m so sorry to trouble you my lady, but I’m in the roughest of ways, and only you can give me hope… and you can do so by granting a simple request… one that would require you only to relax.”

“I’m hardly relaxed at the moment,” she huffed, staring into the gloom over him, “seeing as my husband’s off doing who knows who- I mean what knows what- I mean who- oh bother. please come in, get out of the rain. I already rue the day I put in a request for it.” She stepped aside and ushered the egg in, her paw brushing his top as he passed, elating him more than the already substantial rush supplied by the plush rugs just over the threshold.

Warmth inundated him, like the panting breath of a loving dog positioned as shower head. This could be a nest, a home, and a home base. First the lady of the house had to be convinced of it, learn of her own power to transform it.

She helped him onto a soft piece of furniture he couldn’t identify, having instead learned about the residents from the plentiful bumps across the carpet. There was clutter, and a wide variety within it: glass, wood, metal, bottles, toys, corked needles, and more. Her floppy feet navigated them all nimbly, having had much practice.

“There, much nicer,” she said after sitting down opposite him, igniting a lamp on the end table that bathed them in dancing candlelight through hazy glass. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name, good Mr. Egg.” The sound of her tears had receded somewhat.

“Zamshy Lamshy,” he said, feeling safe enough to divulge it for the first time in his search. “I’m new in Minimil, hoping for a fresh start.”

“We haven’t been here too long ourselves, my husband and I, just six months ago it was that our home had its,” she held herself, “finishing touch.” She fed the fires, had so many candles lit they practically sang like trained parakeets, and still the chill of abandonment moved through her. Now was the time to press the matter of her husband; that was her crack.

“But Mr. Toad was here longer, was he not? The inscription out front says he built the cat’s share of it.”

“Tosh!” she squeaked. “The excellent and clever Mr. Toad might pick up and lay down one brick, so that he might boast to those doing the actual building, but when he finds himself in other company, in dire need of boasting again, it has become two bricks. So on and so forth until he is both the pharaoh under the pyramid and the slave under the whip.

It’s just his nature you see, Mr. Lamshy. Always he has been about his hobbies, and it’s never a matter of money mind you, his father left him half the pence ever dropped out of holey pockets in England, no it’s that they come over him like an illness. Where a typical toad would get the flu he gets a motorcar.

And like an illness, so many things can trigger it. I might have a bad meal worm -don’t let a bug in the mouth become a bug in the stomach they always say- and be in bed for a week while the same meal convinces him he was born to be a master chef, and that he should buy two restaurants so he won’t tire of one cuisine too quickly.

He’s been in, and obsessed, with everything: boats, motorcars, they even had him in prison for some business with those, before I knew him you understand, carriages, cookery, fencing, running a laundry, I talked him out of signing up for Little Wars only by the skin of our-“

“And what hobby has he taken up with now?” Zamshy asked cuttingly, despite his complete lack of an edge. Mrs. Toad’s throat swelled, squished under chin. The poor woman was never meant to bottle anything up; only her straightforward eagerness had managed to hold her husband’s attention in the first place.

“Adultery!” she cried out, darkening the room since half the candles she had raised couldn’t bear to listen to her sorrows. Into her paws she sobbed, allowing the eggty to console her, disturbing as it was to hear his gentle soothing out of a still faceless object, like a voice hallucinated out of the shadows of an open cupboard.

“As with the bricks he cannot have just one mistress,” she continued, finding no answer to her agony in the warts of her palms. “He’s collecting them! Says he won’t be satisfied until he has more women than any other man in Minimil. When I bring up our vows he dismisses me with a single disrespectful syllable, and when I demand an explanation he says I should know it’s just another one of his hobbies. He’s collecting these women, not loving them.” She quieted. “He says he only loves me… and since absence makes the heart grow fonder I should be thankful he’s saving up a mighty explosion of fondness for me upon his final return. Meanwhile the Minimil Minutes has their gossip pages, and I’m known more as a doormat than our actual doormat, seeing as no one wants to pay social visits to such a disgraceful family.

I’m… good Mr. Lamshy I’m sorry. I’m babbling; it’s the worry. I want him home and safe is all. There are all sorts of beasts skulking these urban streets. I’m happy to meet one as adorably rounded as you. Tell me what it is I can do for you, now that you’ve already done me the service of listening.”

“Your concern for your husband even after what he’s done is touching,” Zamshy said, desire barely filtered out of his tone by his speaking grate, “and it is touch that brings me here. Mrs. Toad, would it trouble you so to sit on me?” How he wished for sight just then, to read her expression, to get this interminable waiting over with. It was possible, that he felt. He’d rolled into a soft sheltered life, and an unwise one, given what she tolerated from her spouse. She might not know the old adage, and if she did she might think it only superstition.

“S-sit on you? Did I hear you correctly Mr. Lamshy? Whatever for?”

“For incubation. There are certain circumstances under which an eggty might finally hatch. I am too weak for this life, and the kindness of incubation could give me the strength to go on. It would take only a few hours of your time, and some sitting still.”

“I can’t say that it seems a very proper thing for a lady to do,” she muttered, paws searching for a cup of tea that hadn’t been made or served. “I’ve not touched a man apart from my husband in any manner friendlier than a peck on the cheek in years. Why would you not request this of someone without obligations of faithfulness? There are Minimils roaming on every street who would happily sit on you in exchange for one fried breadcrumb.”

“Right you are Mrs. Toad, but their desperation is precisely the problem. They cannot be trusted. The moment their weight is on me I will be at my most vulnerable. Such an unsavory character could then extort from me anything I had, even an oath of servitude, given away for the slightest promise of not bearing down with their weight and crushing my shell, killing me.

Only someone of status can be trusted, and only someone kind and soft-bodied. Incubation also fails unless performed by a woman. Others have rejected me for my own lowly status, but not you Mrs. Toad. Only you have valued me enough to take me in and hear me out. Hatching me would certainly ingratiate you to my people, and I think before long you won’t find yourself the subject of inked gossip. You will be the charitable Mrs. Toad, and that could make everyone also forget your husband’s… generosity.” She was silent. “Forgive me if I scheme too openly, there is little else to do locked away in this box without hinges, key, or lid.

And as far as your concerns about impropriety… I am one who subscribes to the notion that we eggties have never touched anything. The shell does not feel. Sitting on me is no more intimate than taking a coat from someone’s shoulders or straightening their lapels.”

“I’ve never thought of it that way before…” She didn’t know; if she did it would’ve been mentioned by now. The egg had his sitter, only needed to wriggle under now. Zamshy rolled himself off the furniture, toward her voice until he hit the lip of what she sat on, then he swiveled his tip into her lap like a dog begging to be pat on the head. What could be asserted beyond his shell was: a wave of needy anguish.

“If I may be so bold Mrs. Toad, to suggest this meeting could not be more fated? If you and I were to do this it would grant me a new life, and it might be confused for something inappropriate and bring your jealous husband hopping back, and all while being no more uncouth than us standing in separate rooms, tapping out coded messages to each other.

I want to see you Mrs. Toad, and I want you to see me. We can stun with our eyes, once we tear the wall down. Truth is so liberating isn’t it Mrs. Toad!? Imagine what it will be like to redeem and uplift one another, all out of kindness and trust. Is that not something you want? A heartfelt desire that could not be so perfectly demonstrated to Mr. Toad any other way? This could open both of our shells, and there will be no confusing what is on display.

For me there will be a cock standing tall and proud! For you a lady’s golden heart, more flagrantly displayed than even the gilded shells of the goose that lays golden!” He stopped as something soft brushed his exterior, sopped up what little was left of the rain. The edge of her dress. Unconcerned with inky stains from his running mark. Her voice showered him gently.

“Oh yes Zamshy. Yes.” A sniffle of relief, giddiness. Her bulbous frog fingers touched his top, held him steady. “I will sit on you this evening! And we’ll have such a time together. But where? Is there somewhere soft?” She looked around, but none of the debris from Mr. Toad’s obsessions was particularly forgiving, save perhaps the thighs and rears he was currently buried in.

“A laundry basket would be perfect,” the eggty suggested.

“A laundry basket! We have plenty of those upstairs.” She asked permission to roll him, received it, and then helped him make his way to the second floor. Each push up the next step was a countdown of final dangers. Once he rolled again he would never know weakness, and his enemy would never know rest.

“Here we are,” she told him upon arrival in a neglected nook, a room that had not been used since settling in, cluttered with stacks of empty laundry baskets and racks of croquet mallets. One basket was half full, so she set her candlestick aside and pressed a divot into it, about his size. “This feels right.” The weak light of her single candle shrank the space, turning the surrounding wicker of the baskets into a golden nest that silently promised more and more of the outside world was erased with each passing drip of wax.

Into the basket went Zamshy Lamshy, placed as delicately as any babe. Mrs. Toad did not have to be walked through the process, fully swept away as she had been by his rhetoric. Comforting tears rolled down her face as she spread her legs and found the most natural position across his curve. Her dress covered every spot of his shell, kept that way by an insistent tuck all around.

“Am I any good at this?” she asked after a minute.

“You are perfect my lady,” he said truthfully, for the evidence of her technique already coursed through him and his aqueous medium. Keeping the quiver out of his voice proved difficult once the forces of mischief began to toy with his body brazenly, swirling him in his own current.

“Should we talk? Or would you prefer silence?”

“Please Mrs. Toad, talk to me. Tell me all your troubles and feelings. Free yourself as you are freeing me.” The eggty felt that was his last coherent sentence, and that he best keep himself to one word responses, which would be possible since he’d requested just the right thing. Mrs. Toad talked for hours, of joys founded and unfounded, of the English countryside, of arguments with weasels and stodgy old badgers, and of being swept off her feet by an arrogant clueless toad who now swept other slippy-sloppy welcomes.

All the while Zamshy gritted his pickled beak and embraced transformation. Toads were not warm-blooded creatures, yet a boil crept into his shell, turned him into a hearth’s bottom most red coal. The hand of an unseen demon perhaps, bearing digits of many joints, able to find all the old lightning strikes and tuber roots in the ground that connected and created that rarest passage from the eternally burning underworld of the damned to this innocent and nubile surface.

The process was old, written in blood and mucus, and none could wash it away. If you tore its page out of the spell book the words would hang still in the empty air: a sneeze of the devil smeared across the glass through which the gods viewed their collaborative creation.

Any who invoked it knew what power they were seeking, and so it was granted passionately, and so it fired Zamshy Lamshy inside his kiln under the clueless incubation of an animal that frequently served as a witch’s familiar.

Outside Second Toad Hall, outside Hopalong, everywhere in the barn of Minimil, a blue flash was witnessed as the rain came to an end. Dismissed as amateur lightning mostly. Only a few had the magical knowledge to feel something else afterwards, and none of them were fast enough to worry or act. But soon every soul would know that they’d seen the flash of the cock, the first and last look at him, if they wanted to keep their lives.

Continued in Part Two