Aintie Meps Picket Fence Photograph by Jim Williams

Aintie Mep's Picket Fence

by Jim Williams

Title

Aintie Mep's Picket Fence

Artist

Jim Williams

Medium

Photograph - Found Photo And Short Story

Description

This contains a nasty, biting satire of Westborough Baptist Church and its activities.

AINTIE MEP’S PICKET FENCE

We lost Aintie Mep to the Great Swamp in the Sky last week. She will be greatly missed by all since she is somehow vaguely related to everybody in Myassa County.

Aintie Mep was a large, hairy woman and mother to hairy children and hairy legends of Myassa. Her people were said to have been found inhabiting the swamp when the original Siberian refugees, the Myassa Tribe of the Apalachee Cree Nation, moved in. It is as hard to lose her as it is to tell how old she was at death, considering everyone in her large hairy multi-generational family has always looked like any, every, each, and all other family members. They have a family Myassa Bible which was left by the Gideon Society of Myassa in the drawer of a night table discarded during the renovation of the Myassa Burning Slash Pine Breeze Motor Motel/Myassa County Jail Building. It was intended to record births, marriages, and deaths, but record keeping was not one of her family’s strong suits.

Aintie Mep was recognized as an expert tree thumper, bush shaker, log beater, sapling thrasher, gutteral yelper and grunter, and other frightening subverbal vocalizations, gerbil wrangler, and Myassa Swamp Porpoise whisperer. As long as anyone can remember, she was the fire tender of the Myassa Swamp Volcano, aided by Myassa Swamp Porpoises and legions of swamp gerbils. She recycled old tires for Wrecked ‘em Auto Body Shop and Recycling Center.

Aintie Mep and her clan were natural tricksters, which made some wonder if she had really died, or if this was just another of their impractical jokes. Because of her large hairy nature, she and her close relatives have often been mistaken for Myassa’s Cabbage Patch Ape, elsewhere recognized as the Swamp Ape, Cabbage Ape, Skunk Ape, or Southern Sasquatch, and the children are known as the smaller Squat Squatches. All leave “squatch squat” which, when analyzed, reveals many animals, plants, bacteria, viruses, chemicals, and minerals which have never been identifiable by conventional science.

Aintie Mep, with her large hairy family, lived in a classic Florida Cracker house. It consisted of several separate buildings: (1) a large bare room in which all of Aintie Mep’s family members slept on the floor; (2) separated by ten feet, the traditional southern kitchen came next, followed a few hundred yards away by (3) the traditional wooden handicapped accessible outhouses, one for men, one for women, and one for changing babies. The baby changer is much farther away, so the smell won’t gross out the other outhouses’ occupants. At night, the inside of the main house looks like wall to wall giant sleeping caterpillars. The kitchen is traditionally separate to keep the inevitable kitchen fire from burning down the other buildings. The outhouses were equipped with large pointed sticks because many people feel great urgency after walking or running for several hundred yards trying to hold it in and must be repelled by the outhouses’ current occupants. The main house was surrounded by Aintie Mep’s pride and joy, the white wood picket fence.

As requested, Aintie Mep was thrown into her beloved Myassa Swamp Volcano. Aintie Mep’s special service was led by Rev Artois Heine of Myassa’s First Church of Beer Almighty. (Communion services are held at Myassa Liquors Bar and Grill nightly - Ladies communion free during Friday and Saturday night services.) After which the funeral procession, including the Rev in his pointy-toed Italian shoes, carried her body deep into Myassa Swamp to be cremated in her beloved Myassa Swamp Volcano, where we were met by her swamp helpers: Myassa Swamp Porpoises and legions of swamp gerbils, with which she had held a peculiar rapport. It’s kinda hard to tell if porpoises and gerbils really mourn, but there was a heavy turnout. They also acted as guards against the bootay, AKA the Myassa Terrible Tiger Gators, who also seemed to show up to mourn her passing. Nobody believed their crocodile tears. Because they are alligators. Upon return to Aintie’s house, no one could recall seeing Rev Heine on the way back.

(NOTICE: Humorless, hypersensitive, overly religious readers are advised to skip the next paragraph and maybe even the rest of the obituary. You are responsible for everything you read, so don’t come bitchin’ at me. You’ve been warned.)

Upon returning from Aintie Mep’s cremation, Westbozough Babtiss Church was found picketing Aintie’s picket fence protesting bestiality among beasts living in sin in the Myassa Swamp, Myassa National Old Growth Kudzu Forest, the Myassa State Endangered Invasive Species Flora and Fauna Preserve, and Aintie Mep’s house. They carried many protest signs, some of which must have been recycled from previous, unrelated, protests, like “If Inglesh wus good enuff fer Jeezus, it’s good enuff fer Merkins”, “Repeal the Great Satan’s Law of Gravity!”, “Jeezus M….. - F...ing Christ! It says so in the Bible!”, “I Forgot My Sign!”, “It’s Sagittarius You Moron!”, and “Jeezus Christ is Coming! now on Pornhub!”.

As was customary in Myassa memorial services, all the women brought their pine needle and Spanish moss weaving kits and all the men brought their shotguns. The men took up various positions on the veranda of the main house and proceeded to take out equipment to clean their shotguns. Everyone, that is, except Farmer Hawgpoler, who whipped out his juice harps and provided ambient music. Forebodingly he played “Dueling Twangers” (on two juice harps), his version of “Dueling Banjos”. The Westbozoughs, unfamiliar with the movie, kept marching around Aintie Mep’s picket fence.

Suddenly and spontaneously, the menfolk loaded their shotguns, cocked them, and, upon some unseen sign, simultaneously raised their guns and blew Aintie Mep’s white picket fence into thousands of toothpicks right in front of the Westbozoughs, who stared in uncomprehending disbelief, followed by completely comprehending belief, then scattered in every direction into the swamp. Much to the surprise and delight of the wild beasts they had been protesting, the Westbozoughs discovered that bestial beasts were not afraid of a little humaniality to whet their appetites. Bishop Brother Father Gluteus Maximus Bigga-Butz of Our Lady of Perpetual Sacred Collateral Damage gathered up the splinters, sprinked them with swamp water, declared that they had miraculously transubstantiated into pieces of the True Cross, and took them for the church’s reliquary.

As Myassa funerals go, it was pretty uneventful.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Photo from Florida Archives.