A Nasty Rumor
Antarctica | Candy Bar | Sympathetic | Minister | Patrol | Commonality | Auction | Bandage | Crush | Dive
When it’s 44 below, it takes twelve minutes to freeze a candy bar solid. But I’m jumping ahead.
Not playing to be a sympathetic figure, but let’s see you spend half as much time in Antarctica as I have without shitting a kitten. After one month, you dive behind the nearest workbench when the airfield needs to be cleared again. Two months, you don’t raise your hand to patrol for leopard seals anymore. Three months and you enter ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ territory, if you smell what I’m stepping in. You’d happily crush your bunkmate’s skull in exchange for a ticket home, commonality be damned.
To stay straight we run a weekly “What’s in the box?” blind auction. The minister won last week, so it’s his turn to bring a gift. He sets it on the table, this thing that’s about six inches long and wrapped in a greasy Ace bandage. The bids start.
“I’ll give you four smokes for it.”
“That could be a sausage or something, right? I’ll wash your bedding, chappy.”
“You been wanting to read Fight Club. It’s yours for two weeks.”
I don’t bid. The minister jumps on the Fight Club offer and starts flipping through the pages as Dano removes the bandage to find the smeared, leaking Three Musketeers with the top two inches missing. Not like someone took a bite, but like it got snapped clean off.
“What the fuck is this, chappy?” Dano says, as the minister limps down the hall like he has a stick up his ass.
This candy bar, chappy told me? After twelve minutes it was stiffer than a tadalafil dick.