Associated Pressure
By Chris Dougherty

The Man and The Milk and The Fairytale
Wiff Von Blunderjohny decided to take his first vacation in three years. Actually, it wasn’t his decision. His boss at the post office said to Wiff, regarding his nine weeks accrued vacation time, "Use it or lose it, jackass". So, with great trepidation, Wiff booked a one way flight to the one place he always wanted to visit, Outer Mongolia.

He meticulously planned the vacation and recorded every detail in his electronic personal organizer. At any moment of the trip Wiff would know such minutiae as his sock and underwear rotation and where to rent a decent camel. He also followed the advice of his colleague and mentor, Lenny, and took a crash course in Mongolian just in case he found himself in an "amorous situation". Wiff felt very uncomfortable sitting in first class. He was an extremely frugal man by nature and couldn’t believe his own ears when he booked the flight earlier that month. However, his guilt subsided a little as he eased back in the oversized leather seat. He would have even cracked smile if it were not for the odd looks he was getting from some of the more affluent passengers. This was probably due to the fact that he was still wearing his threadbare postal uniform with matching floppy winter hat. Wiff never really cared about the latest fashions from Paris or Milan. He owned a pair of boots and seven identical postal uniforms in various stages of disrepair.

The flight was delayed and the plane sat on the tarmac for over four hours. Wiff began to feel a little ill at ease when the bomb-sniffing dogs worked their way up and down the aisle. A ninety-pound Doberman snatched his cocktail peanuts and almost took his fingers too. Wiff pulled out a pen and pad and began an angry letter that he would personally deliver to Air Mongolia.

His fears mounted as the plane continued to idle on the runway. He had the sinking feeling that something was dreadfully wrong. He felt he had overlooked some major aspect of his trip. He began to feel claustrophobic. Had he forgotten something? But what? He knew he didn’t leave the toaster on or forget to bring the dog to the kennel. He didn’t own a dog or a toaster. He tried convincing himself that his feeling of dread was just a manifestation of his irrepressible fear of flight. He downed a sixth apple juice to calm his nerves and decided to do a headstand against the lavatory door.

Finally, after two days on the tarmac, the pilot muttered something in Mongolian and the 747 lurched onto the runway. Wiff immediately began his superstitious pre-flight ritual of humming the tune to Gilligan’s Island while violently boxing his ears. The jet roared down the runway. As soon as its hind wheels left the ground Wiff realized what had been troubling him for the past two days. The milk. He smacked himself in the forehead and muttered thrice under his breath "Criminy!". He had left an unfinished gallon of milk in the refrigerator. It was to expire on Saturday, the twenty-third. Wiff had the powerful urge to leap from his seat and scream "Go back! Go back!", but he knew it was too late.

Before leaving his apartment he promised himself he would chug the entire remaining half-gallon of milk just as he walked out the door with his suitcases. He quickly consulted his electronic diary and, sure enough, there it was under "Last minute things to do before going to the airport: 11:17 a.m. Finish milk (with cookies?)". How could he be so careless? He had a sickening feeling at his lack of thrift and looked around the first class cabin with utter disdain. He grabbed the airsickness bag and wretched up a bucket of appy juice. It drove him bananas to waste anything. It was more than just a carton of milk he had left to rot. No matter how small and inexpensive, Wiff felt a strong bond to everything he owned. He thought of common things like toothpaste, cleaning fluids and even his briefs as little friends and would often speak to them using various childlike voices. He had a sudden and powerful rush of nostalgia remembering the milk; how well they had got along, how he had used the milk in his coffee the entire week before he left. The coffee was good and the milk was consistently fresh and creamy. On Saturday too, he used a quarter cup in some blueberry pancakes. Wiff tragically thought of how many more pancakes he could have made with the remaining half gallon. How many strawberry milkshakes or bowls of Captain Crunch?

Wiff sniffled. He looked out the window and smiled bitterly at the tiny Manhattan skyline. He remembered something his foster parents once said to him, some term or phrase he never quite understood something about being a feckless piss-ant. But that was many years ago. Wiff thought he had changed. He flicked a tear off his chin and smiled weakly to the gorgeous blonde sitting next to him.

"Are you okay?" she asked with genuine concern.

"I’m fine," said Wiff.

The sympathetic young woman assumed he was off to Mongolia to bury a loved-one. "I’m very sorry," she said touching his wrist.

"Thank you" he whispered, "But its not too late, really"

"No? Is there hope?"

"There is hope today and tomorrow, but on Saturday, the twenty-third."

Wiff stared down at his finely painted fingernails. "Saturday, the twenty-third? Are you certain?" "Quite"

"That’s terrible. and odd" she said with arched eyebrows.

"Sure"

Wiff fought back a river of tears and gazed out the window. His vacation was off to a horrendous start. Meanwhile back in New York, inside Wiff’s refrigerator, things looked grim. The milk knew her time was up and couldn’t bear the thought of going unused and turning rancid. Who knew what ugly form she would take after nine weeks? It was an utterly macabre situation. The rest of the food items knew this as well and there was very little of the usual banter and practical jokes. The entire bottom shelf had already taken on the unmistakable stench of death row.

The apricot jam tried to lend a few consoling words. "We all have to go sometime, dear," she said delicately to the milk. "Some of us just go sooner than others"

"I know its nearly my time, but." sniffled the milk, her words trailed off to a mutter.

"Wiff turned the fridge up high before he left, love. Maybe you’ll last a few extra days. Perhaps you’ll age gracefully like a nice gorgonzola"

"I don’t feel so good already. My nerves are shot. I need a Valium! Got any Percodan?"

"Quit your bitching" snapped the honey dijon mustard from the door rack.

"I haven’t been used for months! I’m all dried up over here. I wish he would just toss me out already"

"Don’t say that! Don’t you ever say that!" warned the crumb and jam speckled stick of butter. "We all have a reason to be here. Each and every one of us has a purpose!"

"Listen sister, I got no vinegar anymore. I’m as dry as a ninety year old Mexican whore"

The cantankerous mayo, of course, had to butt in. "Yeah, and I’m all yellow and becoming opaque, like a sixteenth century window pane, especially ‘round the edges. I’m ready to go too"

The unpaired D battery, who rarely uttered a word, yelled, "Shut up! Just shut up! I’m sick of your shit! All of youse. I’ve been jiggling around here in this egg holder for three

and a half years. No one gives a damn about me. I have no clue where I’m supposed to go, why he even brought me home in the first place. Not to mention the fact that I’m freezing my testicles off. Who the hell puts batteries in the icebox! I’m sorry, but this guy, Wiff, has a screw loose"

"You’re just a bitter freak!" shouted the butter.

"Yeah? If I had a few more volts left in me I’d shock the shit out of him the moment he got back. The good for nothin’."

"Please stop! I can’t take it any more!" cried the milk.

Everyone fell silent. The butter wept. The whir of the refrigerator’s cooling fan never seemed so loud.

The following days carried on in much of the same way; bickering between all the basic condiments, but the milk, the milk was mostly silent and hopeful.

It was Wiff’s first blast of opium. He had never experimented with drugs or alcohol before, but he needed something to get his mind off the milk. He felt a little better and soon found his brain relocated to somewhere just off the coast of Pluto. He opened the flap of the yak-skin tent and looked out over the great plateau. Mongolia was a beautiful, but cold and dangerous country. Wiff walked a great distance (and ran a little too when he hallucinated that he was being chased by a rabid two-humped camel). He reached the edge of the great steppe and watched the angry pink and orange sunset cool to midnight blue. When the sun fell below the horizon Wiff stood on a massive boulder and screamed down into the valley "Daga, daga nooga fiskin bali!" Which translates roughly as "Who the fuck stole my passport?" He took his electronic diary, hurled it off the cliff and began to sob.

Wiff reckoned, if he rented a camel and headed straight for Ulan Bator he could make it back to New York by the sixth of February. Only fourteen days past the expiration date. Maybe, just maybe, thought Wiff. His expression flashed a glimmer of hope. With hot tears freezing to his cheeks he began to run toward the smoldering fire of the base camp, triumphant music played in his head, but he stumbled and landed face first in a den of scorpions.

This time Wiff flew coach. Many of the Mongolian passengers saw Wiff as a strange, desperate, but rather stupid, white man. He was wearing his tattered postal uniform and his head was swollen to twice its regular size from multiple scorpion stings. His floppy hat was no longer so floppy. It was more like a yalmuke with wings. To make matters worse the plane had standing room only as everyone was trying to flee the country before the democratic coup d’etat. Wiff stood in the back of the plane for the entire seventeen-hour flight. This didn’t help his throbbing head, but he was better off than some of the natives who, in a desperate attempt to escape, had strapped themselves to the tail wing.

Back in New York the cold stench of death filled Wiff’s fridge. Once in a while the mayo would play a snappy tune on the harmonica, but it didn’t seem to lift anyone’s spirits. The milk had expired in a most horrific way. On the twenty-ninth of January the microbes had completely taken over. They devoured and regurgitated the milk in infinitely tiny particles, which then regrouped, multiplied and formed large chunks of something so vile it could fell a water buffalo at sixteen paces.

At the airport Wiff left his luggage on the carousel and took the first available taxi into the city. He bounded up seven flights of stairs to his apartment door. In his delirium he heard triumphant music in his head again this time the music was similar to the closing scene of Star Wars in which Luke was given the key to the galaxy. Wiff had his own keys stolen in Outer Mongolia along with his passport and wallet so he broke the door down with his oversized head.

He ran to the fridge and popped the top off the milk. The stink sent a blue phosphorescent shock wave through the building that was powerful enough kill every roach and rodent in a fifty-foot radius, but Wiff didn’t wince. With tears streaming down his cheeks he poured the fetid, yeasty mass down his throat. When finished, he calmly looked around, belched with great satisfaction and daintily wiped his mouth with his postal tie. He then collapsed to the floor. His bloated head felt worse than ever and his stomach began doing back flips that would have impressed the Russian Gymnastics team. But his spirits were lifted. He felt euphoric. The rotten milk brought back and redoubled the effects of the opium and Wiff began to recite Shakespeare’s Othello in perfect Old English and backwards. Later that day he crawled to his telephone and tried to dial emergency services, but only got as far as nine-one.

Wiff’s funeral was attended by very few. Some of the guys from the post office, who were more crazy than he, showed up to take pictures. The rest of his colleagues chipped in and sent a bundt cake. Wiff’s next of kin, a few distant cousins, never showed, but there was a great family feud over his rent-controlled one bedroom on Madison Avenue. The Von Blunderjohny family quarrel raged on for months and even found it’s way to the front page of the Daily News when Wiff’s half-cousin stabbed Wiff’s quarter-cousin with a sharpened zucchini.