Common Oddities Speculative Fiction Sideshow, Autumn 2014



  THE COMMON ODDITIES

  SPECULATIVE FICTION SIDESHOW

  Issue 3, Autumn 2014

  Jessica E. Thomas, Editor

  Cover art by OddMrT.com

  Contributors:

  Melissa McDaniel

  Lawrence Buentello

  Mirtika

  Andy Decker

  Jill Domschot

  Lou Antonelli

  Ed Shacklee

  M.V. Montgomery

  Stoney M. Setzer

  * * * * *

  PUBLISHED BY:

  The Common Oddities Speculative Fiction Sideshow

  Copyright © 2014 by Provision Books

  www.provisionbooks.com

  https://www.commonodditiessideshow.com

  * * * * *

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  The Switches

  The Bells that Rang for the Reluctant Sylph’s Wedding

  Highlight on the Guided Tour of the Fairy Tale Museum

  It Takes a Boring Person

  Medieval Mars Review

  Bigfoot Fruit

  Will You, Cthulhu

  The Biggest Man in the Universe

  The Challenge

  * * * *

  THE SWITCHES

  By Melissa McDaniel

  The only thing I wanted were Helen’s hands. I would never be content without those elegant, tapering fingertips, those ten curling candlesticks of perfection. On hands like those, rings and bracelets hung themselves, like so many beautiful corpses. Hands like those were not like hands at all, but more like two golden paper fans, folded delicately in her lap. The moment I saw them, I was in love.

  I met Helen when she came to one of The Flying Hampsters’ shows, back when seeing The Flying Hampsters was the only thing we ever did, back when they played at a little dive bar called Tubby’s. Tubby’s was the kind of place you went at three in the morning after everything else was slowly folding in on itself, the night’s last, desperate gasp.

  On a rainy Thursday at nine o’clock, there was hardly anyone there. Just my friend Allison, the band, a few local groupies, and me. Allison and I sat at the bar doing shots with Josh the bartender, who was attractive despite his premature hair loss. The bar lights glowed through his thin hair like the sunrise spilling over a rain-starved field.

  Allison was telling me about the last in her string of bad relationships. “I haven’t even cried about it in a week,” she said.

  “That’s good,” I said, only half-listening. “That’s really good.”

  “Sometimes,” she said, “I have this dream that they’re all in the same room—all the boys I’ve ever dated, or might have dated, I mean. They’re all wearing matching sweaters, and I have to walk around in a blindfold and recognize them based on the smell of their breath.”

  I asked her how she knew they were wearing matching sweaters if she was always blindfolded.

  “I’m not sure how I know,” she said. “I guess in dreams, I’m never really weighed down by my body. My eyes kind of float aimlessly over the room, seeing everything all at once.”

  “I have a dream that’s kind of like that,” I said. “Only in mine, all of my ex-boyfriends’ body parts are scattered in a pile on the floor. And I have to do Switches, pasting all the best pieces together to make one perfect boyfriend.”

  Allison sighed. “That’s so you.”

  Allison didn’t care for Switches because she was pretty, even before Switches were commercially available. But I wasn’t jealous of her. I was only jealous of teenagers who had never suffered through adolescence with untamable frizzy hair or furry wrists that drooped like a gorilla’s. These days I spent all of my savings on buying Switches. I traded my dry elbows for smooth, soft ones; my murky brown eyes for deep, penetrating turquoise. My most recent prize was a set of full, pouty lips that I pursed nervously whenever Josh the bartender looked in my direction.

  I told Josh he should Switch his scalp for a full head of hair, maybe something dark and wavy, like the bassist’s in The Flying Hampsters, but he just laughed and shook his head at me.

  “There are other things I’d much rather blow a paycheck on,” he said, waving his eyebrows deviously.

  “You have to spend money to make money,” I argued. “Maybe with some more hair you could move up to a nice cocktail bar and call yourself a mixologist.”

  “But once you make a Switch,” Josh said, frowning, “you can never Switch back again. The change is permanent.”

  That was true. The operation was fairly simple, severing the organic nerves and replacing them with artificial ones. Once you made your first Switch on any particular body part, whether it was an arm, a nose, or an ear, you could always upgrade. But the nerves would never listen to organic signals again. Your old arm, or ear, would not function if you tried to re-attach it.

  “Is that really such a loss?” I asked.

  I noticed Allison glaring into her glass, but Josh just laughed and shook his head at me again.

  After he turned away, Allison told me she agreed with Josh. “Switches are risky,” she said. “You should be careful. You can get all kinds of messed up diseases from them. A bad part can kill you.”

  I rolled my eyes and sipped my rum and coke. I knew my body would outlast hers. One day, when she started to shrivel, she would change her mind about the Switches.

  “You’re just old fashioned,” I told her. “They have ways of preventing that now. And think about all of the amputees that now have beautiful new arms and legs. Think about how racial issues have almost entirely disappeared, now that everyone can be a mosaic of color?” I pointed to my dark brown elbows. “Think about—”

  I stopped, then, because someone new was beside us. She had slipped onto the barstool next to Allison, and she was watching me with raised eyebrows. She was somehow familiar, but I couldn’t seem to place her.

  “This is Helen, my friend from college,” Allison said. “You didn’t forget she was coming, did you?”

  “Of course not,” I said, although I had completely forgotten. I’d never met Helen before, but there was something oddly familiar about her. Something about the way she clasped her hands so steadily, encased in neat black gloves, unmoving. My heart started hammering wildly, and at first, I didn’t know why.

  Allison had already begun telling Helen all the particulars of her emotional state, how so-and-so really could have been The One, if only he’d been mature enough for a real relationship. It was all I could do to keep breathing as I watched Helen take her hands out of her coat pockets. She unwrapped them slowly, like a snake shedding its skin. Beneath the gloves, her hands looked soft, like ripe, golden apples.

  “Do you want something to drink?” Allison asked her.

  Helen shook her head. “I can’t drink,” she said, “because of my medication.”

  She was quiet. Pale and blonde, with yellow circles under her eyes, ears that stuck out too far, and eyes so light blue they were nearly white. A sickly girl. Her hands just sat there in her lap, quietly neglected. A girl like her didn’t deserve hands like those, I thought. Hands like those ought to be used.

  Finger by finger, the night inched away. When the band started, Allison and I had taken at least six whiskey shots, and Helen had drunk nothing at all. I knew all the songs, but tonight they were a soundless blur. My head was light, my pulse hammering in my forehead. It seemed like Helen was taking her hands seductively in and out of her pockets on purpose, tempting me. But she still refused to use them. She never picked up a glass or even clapped for the band.

  As one of the songs ended, Helen walked into the women’s bathroom.
Unthinkingly, I followed her in.

  She stood in front of the sink, just staring at her hands. When she saw me, she flinched and stepped back. Her mouth twitched, but she couldn’t quite seem to manage a smile.

  I took a step forward. The small distance between us seemed to crackle with heat.

  When I spoke, my voice was hoarse. “What do I have to do?” I whispered. “I’ll do anything for them. Just tell me what needs to be done.”

  Her pale eyebrows furrowed in disgust. “You don’t even remember me, do you?” she said.

  “Remember you? From when?”

  “From high school? We were friends for two years. Until you decided you didn’t like me anymore.”

  Dimly, I started to remember. There was once a big-eared, tiny girl who followed me around school with a worshipful expression. I couldn’t remember when she disappeared. One day she’d been there waiting next to my locker; the next, she wasn’t.

  I wanted to apologize, but her face was so full of hatred that I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  “I didn’t abandon you,” I said, trying to defend myself. “We just drifted apart.”

  “You thought you were so pretty after the Switches,” Helen hissed. Spit flew from her lips. “But you’re still disgusting.”

  Something snapped in me then. I told her to shut up, but she kept going. Saying horrible things. Awful things. I had never been hated like this before. I had never felt so ugly.

  I barely even pushed her. Her head must have hit the sink on the way down. She wasn’t bleeding that much. But her eyes were closed, her arms and legs splayed ridiculously on the tile.

  I crouched down to see if she was okay. Her limp hands were curled like two commas, beckoning me. I saw the thin line where the pristine artificial hand met the soft flesh of her wrist: a gentle, bloodless gap. Slowly, I unscrewed her left hand from her wrist. Then I removed her right hand. One by one, I twisted the new hands onto my arms. Tiny blue sparks shot out of the stump of Helen’s thin wrist.

  After I had replaced my old hands with Helen’s new ones, Helen’s pale blue eyes opened, rapidly blinking, her eyes circling blindly. She looked so pathetic that it made me angry. “Here,” I said, throwing my old stubby hands at her like dirty gloves.

  And as she lie there on the bathroom floor, clutching my old hands, Helen smiled. Blood stained her yellow teeth like red wine. I hurried out of the bathroom with Helen’s hands and didn’t look back.

  +

  I stepped outside. The rain had stopped, and everything felt fresh and drowsy. It was a gorgeous night, the kind where you seem to float in the stillness, untouchable to the rest of the world. A few feet away, two members of The Flying Squirrels were watching me.

  “Hey,” the drummer said, “Do you have a cigarette?”

  “Yeah.” I could feel myself smiling. I reached into my purse slowly, letting the pale glow of the evening linger over my new hands. I slid two cigarettes out of my pocket and handed one to him, then I leaned forward to light his cigarette.

  It wasn’t until the flame erupted from my lighter that I felt the shaking. As the flame moved toward the end of his cigarette, I watched my hand quiver in the empty air, like a wilted leaf shaking in the wind. Fear gnawed at my bones. My hand twitched, and the lighter clattered onto the concrete.

  Something wasn’t right. I tried to move my left pinkie, and the hand spasmed. It was as if the muscles were half-deaf to my mind’s commands. My head grew light, and suddenly I felt nauseous. Diseases could spread from Switches, Allison had said.

  “Are you okay?” The Flying Squirrels’ drummer said.

  I scooped up the lighter and shoved it clumsily into his hand. As my body crumbled onto the curb, I looked at my beautiful new hands again. I lay on the sidewalk and stared at the blurry lines on my trembling palms, two maps leading to nowhere.

  Author Bio

  Melissa McDaniel is a staff editor at The Newer York Press and one of the co-founders of Scintilla, a multimedia event in Brooklyn that features emerging artists and writers. She has been published in Stillpoint Literary Magazine, Stray Dog Almanac, and Liars’ League NYC, and she was a finalist in the NYC Midnight flash fiction contest. Melissa is currently at work on a speculative fiction novel. She can be found at pendulumproject.net.

  THE BELLS THAT RANG FOR THE RELUCTANT SYLPH’S WEDDING

  by Lawrence Buentello

  The sylph who called herself Adele was to be wed to the King of the Gnomes, because, as her mother informed her after accepting the dowry carried to their forest home on the backs of several gnomish servants, she was too beautiful to be anything but a queen.

  Adele, brooding in the branches of her favorite fir tree, would have nothing to do with her mother’s orchestration of her future. As much as her mother admired the gold coins mint in the bowels of the gnomes’ mountain industry, she wanted her future to have as little to do with gnomes as possible. They were, after all, rank and smelly creatures, and why would one gnome want to marry anyone other than another gnome?

  She was to be a showpiece, a pretty servant to a rich overlord, and this was completely unacceptable.

  Worse still, the wedding was to be held three days hence, which gave her no time to convince her mother to return the dowry. Not that she could convince her mother to return so generous a gift if she spoke for a thousand years. My, but her mother was greedy!

  Why had she gone to that festival on the far side of the mountain? Sometimes having wings to fly great distances was a curse.

  The gnomish king had seen Adele from his royal carriage, watching her as she danced slightly drunkenly with the other fairies who had joined the festivities. But beauty was no cause for servitude! She hadn’t studied the magical arts for so many years just to become some mud-king’s concubine.

  “I’ll never marry, except for love,” she told the sparrows in the nearby branches. “Or, if not for love, certainly for a much better reason.”

  The sparrows chirped quizzically, but, being sparrows, really had little to offer the conversation.

  Adele sighed, spread her wings and flew from the fir tree to where her mother sat before their grass hutch counting coins.

  “Mother, I simply cannot marry this creature,” she said as forcefully as possible. One had to be forceful in such matters, she decided.

  Her mother, not having heard her, continued rolling the coins in her palms, grinning happily.

  “Mother!”

  Adele’s mother cleared her throat and slipped the coins back into the sack at her feet, rather self-consciously.

  “My daughter!” she said, raising her hands as if to embrace Adele. “I’m so happy for you!”

  “You’re happy for someone,” Adele said, glancing at the bag of coins at her mother’s feet. “But mother, I’m not happy at all. I don’t want to marry this oversized mud-skipper. He’s hideous!”

  “Now, now, looks aren’t everything. Hasn’t your old mother taught you to appreciate the spiritual beauty in others?”

  “I must have missed that lesson. Was it before or after the lecture about selecting the perfect grog?”

  “Don’t be insolent. You’ll love living under the earth. You’ll never get caught in the rain again!”

  “Mother, I’m a fairy, a creature of the air. I love the rain!”

  “All the rain ever gave you was a wet head. Look at all these coins! Do you know what I can purchase with this much gold?”

  “A new daughter, I expect. But, again, I refuse to marry that creature, king or no. If I’m to marry a slouching, belching, filthy denizen of some reeking hole in the ground, I’ll be the one to choose him.”

  Her mother waved her finger sharply.

  “You’ll do as your mother tells you,” she said. “You are bound by my word to marry the king of the gnomes, and you will. When those wedding bells cease ringing you will exchange vows with your kingly, and very rich, husband to be, and that’s all I have to say. You cannot disobey me!”

  Ade
le frowned deeply, for she knew she couldn’t disobey her mother’s word. Fairies were notorious for their oaths, especially the oaths foisted on young sylphs by their conniving mothers.

  “I won’t disobey you,” Adele said, fluttering her wings in a fluster.

  But neither would she marry the gnomish king. Of that she was absolutely certain.

  Three days passed very quickly, or at least very quickly for Adele’s mother, who spent much of this time laughing over piles of gold coins; for Adele, the time passed somewhat more slowly, and all she could do was converse with the birds in the trees and try to divine some way of avoiding blessed wedlock.

  She even visited the little church at which she and the gnomish king were to be married, hoping a stray match might ignite the masonry. Thirty-five stray matches failed to accomplish even a little scorching, so Adele was left sitting on the eaves of the steeple contemplating the wretched bells that would ring in her misery.

  The world, it seemed, had no intention of letting her lead her own life, which was regrettable, since she was certain she knew exactly the life she should be living. To be the victim of the gnomish king’s odd proclivities and her mother’s infernal self-indulgence was a terrible fate for one so independently minded. For most, the bells would ring for a wedding; for her, they would ring as a knell for her freedom.

  Then a thought came to her, a really wonderful thought, and she turned to the great brass bells, now pleasingly silent, though they would only be silent until the morrow.

  “You’ll ring for me, all right,” she said.

  +

  When the day came, and the bells began ringing loudly through the land, great swarms of gnomes and great clouds of sylphs arrived at the church to witness the joining of unlikely betrotheds.

  Adele faithfully stood before the minister in her best ethereal gown, and the gnomish king, belching under his breath and waving a gnarled hand at the flies gathering round his ears, stood beside her. Adele’s mother beamed joyously at the front of the attendees, dressed in the best gossamer gown the gnomish king’s gold could buy. The little church was filled to bursting with witnesses, since this was so unusual a pairing. And the bells rang beautifully, loudly, ringing through the air as the music preceding so very special a union!

  The minister raised an arm, a gesture meant to silence the ringing bells so the somber ceremony could begin.

  But the bells continued ringing, and rather loudly.

  The minister, his eyebrows beetled in annoyance, snapped his arm again at the boys pulling on the ropes—except that the boys had ceased pulling on the ropes at the minister’s first gesture.

  The gathered hordes gazed around the chapel in confusion, each wondering why the bells were still ringing. The minister excused himself and hurried to the bell tower to investigate the matter, but the matter was self-explanatory. Without assistance from ropes, or any visible means, the bells swayed and rang, swayed and rang raucously in the tower, and seemed to have no intention of ceasing their motions. The minister investigated the ropes, grabbing at them curiously, and was unfortunately pulled six feet into the air before crashing back down to the marble floor. He rose, cursed roundly, which was terrible conduct for a minister, especially inside a church, and threw up his hands in surrender.

  All of the people attending the wedding, the sweaty gnomes and the fluttering sylphs, waited patiently for the bells to cease ringing so the ceremony could proceed. But the bells kept ringing, and ringing to Adele’s delight.

  Adele refused to cast a glance to her mother, who by now was frowning angrily and suspecting some collusion. The King of the Gnomes pulled his pocket watch from his baggy trousers and shrugged. And the bells kept ringing, and ringing, and ringing.

  After several hours the gnomes and the sylphs left the little church, and the gnomish king grunted furiously but also slipped away. The minister stuffed some cotton in his ears and fled to his sanctuary for a nap.

  Only Adele and her mother remained, Adele’s mother frowning majestically, as the bells rang. The ceremony was never fulfilled.

  The gnomish servants returned to Adele’s house and retrieved all the gold, and everything Adele’s mother had bought. Adele never admitted to casting a spell on the bells, though her mother knew better, and excoriated her at length, and eloquently. But Adele didn’t mind her mother’s blathering. She was free of her betrothal, and she hadn’t disobeyed her mother—at least, not by the letter of the law.

  Adele remained unmarried as she studied the magical arts more seriously, and spent time sitting in the branches of her favorite tree, chatting with the birds which really had nothing meaningful to add to the conversation. And she listened to the distant ringing of the bells, which continued night and day, on holidays, and every day. Her mother implored her to remove the spell, that the sound of those wretched bells was maddening—

  But Adele let them ring, and they are ringing still.

  Author Bio

  Lawrence Buentello is the author of over eighty published short stories in a variety of genres, including science fiction, fantasy and horror. He lives in San Antonio, Texas.

  HIGHLIGHT ON THE GUIDED TOUR OF THE FAIRY TALE MUSEUM

  by Mirtika

  It’s fabulous, yes.

  And as you can tell, no fable.

  Narcissus is a natural-born caretaker.

  He wipes it down every quarter-

  hour with a cloth of woven nymph hair lightly

  dipped in clear spring water.

  Some goddess in Japan first shaped

  and polished its eight sacred sides. One,

  perhaps, for every continent it handily

  displays and one for Heaven, or for luck.

  But it’s cursed all the same.

  The Beast borrowed it when he first lost

  face and gained a tale. It almost cost him

  Belle. Shortly after he got his beauty back,

  he chucked the mirror out of the castle

  window and took to staring at his wife.

  The ravishing witch-queen found it rusting

  in a garden of white roses. She stretched

  the glass to fit the size of her vanity. It reflects

  nothing but trouble since then, a world of it—

  literally and literarily.

  Go on, take a look.

  Author bio

  Mirtika lives in South Florida with her prince and thousands of books. She blogs at mirwriter.wordpress.com. Find her short speculative fiction at Amazon.com.

  IT TAKES A BORING PERSON

  by Andy Decker

  Partial Report, participant statements, in situ, etc., appended.

  Dr. Eric von Sleschellvine cured boredom in the early months of 2019. The dot, to be administered under the tongue on a dissolvable tab by a licensed health-care professional, was a proprietary splice of intelligent enzymes and an isolated sequence of DNA found in the common anisopodidae; nano-like in both scope and purpose, only smaller and programmable.

  Sleschellvine, nominated that year for a Nobel Prize in medicine, lost out when the award went to a South African woman who developed a gene activation mechanism allowing molars to be grown in a bowl. The doctor’s disappointment faded later in the year when, the world’s molar shortage alleviated, he clinched the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Four months later he was arrested for scientific malpractice and is still serving his term.

  In late 2011, he conducted his initial and self-funded protocols. These produced curious, albeit seemingly inconclusive, results. The control group of spaniels began sleeping more, stopped responding to their names and developed the habit of jumping on Sleschellvine’s lap at odd times while presenting their rear ends to his face.

  A year later, toward the end of the second round of what are now referenced as the dog-trials, Sleschellvine inadvertently left a strip of the dots on a laboratory counter. The facility mascot, a grey-black tabby named Gwen, hopped on the table, as was her habit, and managed
to consume a number of them1. Sleschellvine picked her up and tossed her on the floor after only a moment. But within the day, Gwen became much more responsive. When he called her name, she appeared and sat at his feet. Intrigued, he began further experimentation. Within a short time he taught the cat to bring him a leash. During subsequent Frisbee sessions, Sleschellvine had time to prepare his next hypothesis; positing that the distraction line and reversal of neural-interest polarities posed challenges that could be overcome and needed study with something other than animal intelligence.

  His next level of research focused on enzyme amounts and the targeting of specific loci in the brain.

  In late-2013 Sleschellvine published a paper in the internationally read quarterly, Perspectives on the Behaviorally Placid. He’d advanced his ideas to the point of something he called ‘out-bridging’. His theory’s primary tenant explained that, regardless of initial outlook, any subject’s neural-foci could be stimulated to push in new directions and that, in a classic case of nature-v-nurture, the individual could harness new interests into something, anything at all, that had prior proved disinteresting.

  Observational attendant data on chimpanzees purported that, post-usage, boring the primates proved impossible. Even in sealed concrete boxes the animals seemed content. If true, there would no longer be an overlap between alertness and distraction. Instead of the all or nothing or a little bit of something of human concern, it would be an all or all situation for anyone taking the dot.

  Shortly thereafter, Sleschellvine received notification from Intello-Dyne (ID) attorneys; their ADHD Division recommended a cease and desist from further research in the areas of boredom alleviation, based on international patent violations. Sleschellvine denied any laboratory plagiarism and continued researching. Six months later he was again contacted by ID, this time with an offer of employ. But, even more important than the lucrative contract, so Sleschellvine stated in later court proceedings, were promises by the firm that they could fast-track human trials of the dot.

  A deal was soon brokered with USP Lee, located in Virginia, USA. The solitary confinement lifers, subjected to a secretive double-blind study, experienced immediate results and reported, via counseling sessions with prison social workers, sensations of new horizons, elevated moods, and epiphanic fascinations over topics as minuscule as the number of scratches on stainless steel toilet lids and their perceived psychological evaluations of meal-tray placements. Of course, prisoner observations of such things had to be accounted as pedestrian at best, but their piqued interests proved the doctor’s case.

  Deemed a success, approval for a second trial was quickly obtained for a group of seventh-grade boys in the privately owned Spoon-Junction Adolescent Center, located on the island of Jost Van Dyke. As with the prisoners, the young boys experienced overnight changes in both mood and levels of interaction with the Center’s vigorous curriculum of discipline and education. Unfortunately, during the investigation, official documentation of the Spoon-Junction trials never materialized.

  At this point, according to Sleschellvine’s account, ID’s fast-tracking turned a corporate corner. The lead researcher and the marketers disputed briefly over whether or not to publicly call the substance a drug. ID submitted that drugs were easier to release to the general public than ‘mechanical-transformative-devices’, Sleschellvine’s term. On the legal end, however, ID held to the notion that the treatment was, indeed, a device, circumventing much red-tape. It further helped that the size of the active agents on the dot, somewhere between glucose and antibody in mass, were deemed negligible by the FDA. The doctor submitted to ID’s nomenclature trapeze act and soon control group sizes expanded in both number and scope.

  Treatments for conditions like alcoholism and gambling, as well as foci-supplementation therapy for air-traffic controllers, truck drivers, and logging-industry personnel ensued.

  It is at this point that official accounts begin to vary. What went unreported, until the hearings, were the numbers of suicides at both Lee and Spoon-Junction, particularly among those in solitary confinement, made all the more puzzling due to the difficulty of killing one’s self in such environs. More noticeable was the series of eight airliner crashes in January of ‘29. It took investigators three weeks to discover the uniting correlation of the controllers who simply walked off their job sites in the middle of their shifts. Personnel losses in the other targeted industries went unnoticed until much later.

  The airliner catastrophes culled significant interest from ID’s push-horizon of new products. Only two weeks before a slate of, “Ask your doctor about…” media-notes had been scheduled for release, the device was pulled from pre-market usage.

  Undeterred, and still receiving salary from ID, Sleschellvine broke both his non-compete and non-disclosure clauses by forming an independent LLC under an assumed name, marketing the first-ever MTD under the new name of ‘Magniday’. Whether or not this name had been peer-focused prior to release is under dispute. What is certain, however, is that those who used Magniday approached life in a significantly altered manner.

  In post-arrest studies, less than .08% of the 1,573 fair-market users maintained what they deemed normal life in-situ activities. Of the remaining MTD population, approximately three-fifths committed suicide in the first year. The remainder opted for new careers (in some cases, no career at all), life-partners (or no partners), and other significant and often inexplicable changes to what sociologists now term life-venues.

  Initially, Sleschellvine’s invention, already under the watchful eye of both USDA and WHO watchdogs, proved not quite calamitous but certainly societally jarring. One of the attorneys in the class-action portion of the proceedings found himself reverting to the term ‘schizophrenic’ when describing the impact of the substance, now legally defined as a medical device, on his client’s life and livelihood.

  Oddly in absentia were media accounts of the trial. During a briefly reviewed and even more briefly rejected FOI request, it was disclosed that the trial proceedings had been escalated to ‘sensitive’ by a DOJ oversight committee. Further, efforts to obtain Sleschellvine’s scientific papers have proven unfruitful. Coincidentally, Sleschellvine was sentenced to serve his jail term at the USDB at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, USA.