In Finite Jest

By Martin Smith

Hold onto your sides! The author of the uproarious The Llama Who Had A Hole Through His Head is back with a second book of stories of humour. Martin Smith and his motley troupe of players return to present In Finite Jest, a collection of fourteen madcap tales filled with absurd surrealism, sharply observed insight and, above all else, endlessly entertaining fun.

A woman unlucky in love purchases a micro-husband on-line. A snobby wine enthusiast applies for a grant from the Arts Council, then seeks to enhance his chances of success through his "lived experience". A young lamb comes of age, only to struggle to find his true place in the world. Five friends and an unexpected other race to determine who is the fastest amongst them. A garbo attempts to win a much-coveted gold medal. Two brothers setting off to the Great War make a solemn promise to their new brides. A lonely hippopotamus finds friendship and fame when she becomes a comedian. And the first couple are in therapy. These hilarious stories are sure to have the reader laughing out loud and leave them wanting more. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: martinsmithstories.com
• Release date: Apr 19, 2024
• ISBN: 9780975630631

Book preview

Cover for IN FINITE JEST

IN FINITE JEST

Stories of Humour II

MARTIN SMITH

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2024 Martin Smith

All rights reserved.

EPUB3 Edition

No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.

ISBN 978-0-9756-3062-4 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-9756-3063-1 (ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

Published by martinsmithstories.com

Cover image © kbeis / www.istockphoto.com

Author’s Note

The following ebooks were published concurrently in 2024:

The Llama Who Had A Hole Through His Head

Stories of Humour

In Finite Jest

Stories of Humour II

The Cannibal’s Guide to Health and Wellbeing™

Stories of Humour III

martinsmithstories.com

collected stories of humour - volume one

On the first day of every month, a new Monthly Story is published at martinsmithstories.com. The stories in this ebook are or eventually will be available on that site.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Author’s Note

Dedication

Epigraph

Six Inches of Wedded Bliss

Three Cheers for Hemingway

Larry the Lamb

Queue

Bragging Rights

This Laugh’s On Me

The Garbage Games

Blind Date

The Simile Simulator

War Wounds

Dying in the Second Person

In Finte Jest

Golden Delicious and All That Jazz

Hippity Hip-Hip-Hooray

Acknowledgements

About the Author

For my parents, Peter and Monica

‘The merry Fool, in motley at the Fair

May hide in jest and laughter, his despair.’

—Martin Cynicus Anderson, The Satires of Cynicus

Six Inches of Wedded Bliss

There was once a woman unlucky in love. For years she searched for the perfect man, a Prince Charming with whom she could share her life. She tried online dates, coffee dates, wine bar dates, dinner dates, impromptu dates, speed dates, blind dates and even caught all her friends’ wedding bouquets. But all to no avail. Mr Right seemed in a land far, far away.

One day, when sitting in a dentist waiting room, she came upon an advertisement in a bridal magazine: Unlucky in love? Looking for happily ever after, but at a fraction of the cost? Why not try a micro-partner? Six inches of wedded bliss. Online marriage certificate. Guaranteed 7-day delivery.

She sat straighter in her chair. Why not a mail-order husband? she thought. Hadn’t her Uncle Ted ordered one—a bride barely of legal age, that is—a few years back? Hell, if Uncle Ted wed a bride a third his age, why couldn’t she order herself a husband a tenth her size? She tore the advertisement from the magazine. That night, she went online and found Mr Gorgeous.

Seven days later, a parcel sat on her front doorstep when she arrived home from work. In her excitement about meeting her new husband, she tore the parcel open, only to rip her marriage certificate in half and her husband’s head off. ‘Oops,’ she said. That night, having wrapped him in newspaper with the potato peelings and popped him in the compost bin, she went online and purchased his twin.

A week later, an identical parcel arrived. She carried it inside and eased the packaging open. Husband Number 2 leapt out and stood upon the dining room table.

‘O my Chérie,’ he said, ‘you are the woman of my dreams.’

She had to admit he was amazing: dark hair, blue eyes, taut buns, a six-pack to die for, and he smelt so good. She soon discovered he knew how to make a woman feel wonderful and complete. He made her espresso the way she liked it, painted her nails with precision, read her romantic poetry, cleaned up after himself and let her talk without him interrupting her or micro-mansplaining. And in bed he proved a marvel, sprinting between her erogenous zones and applying great attention and satisfaction at each stop.

She invited her girlfriends for lunch to show him off. He dazzled the girls with his charm and wit. After her third Chardonnay, she realised he was missing. She searched the house. Standing outside the powder room, she heard groaning behind the door. She knocked, opened the door and caught her best friend, Mel, pulling up her knickers.

‘Sorry. I was just doing a number two,’ said a blushing Mel, who then straightened her dress and hair.

A muffled cry of ‘O my Chérie! You are the woman of my dreams’ came from within Mel’s undies.

She returned Husband Number 2 to the retailer under their 30-day no-questions-asked refund policy.

That night, when searching online for a new micro-husband, she filtered for loyalty and faithfulness. As she clicked Buy, she whispered, ‘Third time lucky.’

Husband Number 3 arrived in a micro-human transport crate. She opened the box, and he jumped into her arms and planted licky, wet kisses all over her face. When he looked up at her with his puppy-dog eyes, her heart melted. They ran together and sat at cafés together and snuggled on the couch at night and watched chick flicks together. When she arrived home from work, he fetched her slippers. He loved her cooking and licked his plate clean. And that wasn’t the only wonder he did with his tongue.

A week into wedded bliss, old Mr Wilson from across the road left the front gate open when dropping over some lemons. Husband Number 3 escaped, only to be flattened by a passing car. She buried him under the apple tree in her backyard.

She searched online for another Husband Number 3, but all the retailers had sold out. She checked her credit card balance and applied for a credit limit increase. Later, she searched under Specials and found a blurb announcing ‘best value micro-husband, pound-for-pound’.

Seven days later, a delivery guy arrived and wheeled a small cardboard box into her lounge room. She tried lifting the box onto the coffee table but couldn’t budge it, so she sliced the top and sides away with a Stanley knife. And there, wearing a grubby singlet, ball-hugging shorts and thongs, Husband Number 4 slouched on a micro-couch. A triple chin with a three-day growth shadowed a beer gut the size of a tennis ball.

‘Where’s the remote?’ he shouted as he reached into his mini bar fridge for a micro-beer.

That afternoon, he slumped before the TV and watched sport, and when bored, he hunched over the computer and perved at porn. He acknowledged her presence with either a belch or a fart. That night, their consummation proved a three-thrust non-event. When he rose at three a.m. to watch basketball, she’d had enough. She placed a cold micro-beer and a bowl of crushed beer nuts on the micro side table next to him. A whole pistachio lurked amidst the other nuts. He scoffed down the nuts and guzzled the beer, never taking his eyes off the screen. When he shouted ‘Foul’ at the TV, he gagged and choked. As he frantically pointed at his throat and blued in the face, she took the opportunity to empty the dishwasher. When she returned to the lounge, she scooped him up in a dustpan, went outside and dropped him over the fence as a tidy snack for Ronnie, next-door’s Rottweiler.

When husband shopping online later that week, she saw Husband Number 4’s line had been discontinued, though to her surprise he had a quarter-star average rating. All the reviewers gave him a zero rating except for a Mrs Myrtle Simpson, an eighty-three-year-old pensioner from Watford, who rated him five stars because she liked her micro-boys big and bad.

Maybe what she needed was a young and malleable husband, she thought, someone she could shape to her needs and desires.

Husband Number 5 came in a plastic egg and with a mould. Just add boiling water, the instructions read.

As she sprinkled the powdered contents of the egg over the boiling water half-filling the mould, a sweet, soapy smell like baby’s talcum powder filled the air. She placed him in the chiller, and every half-hour she checked whether he had set. After three hours, he remained liquid, so she placed him in the freezer. Quicken things up a bit, she thought. She sat down with a glass of red and a book. Thirty minutes later, a thump-thump came from the kitchen. She went to investigate. The thumps came from the fridge. The freezer. She opened the freezer door, and Husband Number 5 fell out, frozen stiff except for chattering teeth. She laid him on the back deck in the afternoon sun to thaw. He soon started bawling his eyes out and whining about wanting his mummy. As he sucked his thumb, two ravens swooped, tore him apart and headed skyward with their oozing half-catches.

Husband Number 6 never arrived. ‘Lost in transit,’ her local post office said. ‘We’ll look into it.’

She purchased Husband Number 7 using her credit card reward points. He arrived in a flat pack from France. Why not an exotic, mysterious foreigner? she thought. She opened the box and pulled out an assortment of plastic bags. There were 246 pieces. The instructions came in 37 languages but not English. She tried to follow the diagrams. When she finished construction, a few nuts and bolts remained unused, and Husband Number 7 stood before her with a beret on his head, a baguette in his hand and what suspiciously looked like an Allen key protruding from his arse. He spent the next half-hour hopping about and flailing his arms and pointing to his behind. She thought he was playing Charades. When she guessed he wanted the Allen key removed, she obliged, and he farted ‘Mercy’ from his backside, before dropping dead.

‘Good God!’ she said. ‘What am I? A black widow?’ She needed to rid herself of the body. Quickly. As she fed him through the mincer, she realised she’d held the instructional diagram on page 69 upside down during construction and mixed up the placement of his anus and his mouth.

Next day, she popped over to Mr Wilson’s and gifted him a couple of containers of meaty bolognaise sauce in appreciation for the lemons.

Husband Number 8 and Husband Number 9 came as a two-for-one deal. A spare wouldn’t hurt, she figured, given her luck to date. They were a pair of party boys. They spent most of the time either admiring themselves and each other in the mirror or snorting white powder off it. They kicked off the wedding feast late on a Tuesday afternoon, and after three nights and three days of non-stop partying and some pretty wild and kinky sex, she pleaded with them for a quiet night at home. Infuriated because it was Friday night—party night!—the boys decided three’s-a-crowd and packed their bags, and following a parting wave, they headed off, arm-in-arm in elopement.

She decided she needed a mature husband who focused more on the intellectual than the physical. She purchased Husband Number 10 using funds garnered from pawning her beloved coffee machine. He arrived with a pipe, a turtle-neck jumper and a salt-and-pepper beard.

On their first day together, he captivated her as he filled her world with existential titbits. Problems started on the second day when she asked him to put out the rubbish. He took a puff of his pipe, rubbed his beard and delivered a half-hour soliloquy entitled: To bin or not to bin, that is the question. She ended up taking the trash out herself. Things didn’t improve after that. All he wanted was to discuss, to hypothesise, to pose the rhetorical question. Even foreplay proved a nightmare—she wanted to get physical; he, metaphysical.

And. He. Would. Not. Shut. Up.

Ever.

One night, at two a.m., she taped his mouth so she could sleep. Next day, she woke to a blissful yet eerie silence. She looked at his still, pallid body beside her and saw tape over his mouth and nose. Good God! The existentialist no longer existed! But, she pondered, what to do with the wordy bastard’s body? If she buried another corpse in the backyard, sniffer dogs and earth diggers were sure to arrive. That night, wearing a scarf and sunglasses, she shoved him inside a dog-eared copy of Sartre’s Nausea and placed the book in the return chute at her local library.

Next evening, she searched under Used Goods. Sure, she thought, a second-hand husband wasn’t perfect and no doubt came with baggage, but who was she—or that online fast-cash loan with a third-world interest rate she had taken out—to argue?

When Husband Number 11 arrived in the post, she placed the package on the dining room table. She went for a run, showered, made herself an instant coffee, checked her emails and painted her nails. Only then did she open the package. A familiar aroma filled the room.

‘O my Chérie,’ a voice said, echoing from within the package, ‘you are the woman of my dreams.’

She pulled him out by the collar, walked to the bathroom, lifted the toilet lid, dropped him in the bowl and flushed. But he put up a fight, swimming against the tide of his fate. It took the toilet brush, half a bottle of toilet cleaner and nine full flushes to push him beyond the S-bend.

‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘No more. I’m through with men.’

Next day, as she settled with a trashy magazine, a tub of Rocky Road ice-cream and widowhood, the phone rang.

‘Hello. I’m Sam Wright. From down at the post office. How are you today?’

‘Good.’

‘I’m following up on that package you reported missing. It’s just arrived here at the post office. Someone sent it to Bermuda by mistake.’

‘I don’t want the package now. Could you please return it to the sender.’

‘Certainly. I’ll arrange that. And thank you for your patience and understanding.’

An awkward silence ensued.

‘Say,’ Sam said, ‘I know this may sound a bit bold, but would you like to go out for a drink? We could meet outside the Post Office at five.’

‘I’m not sure. Are you handsome?’

‘Why, yes, I suppose so.’

‘Are you tanned?’

‘Of course. I deliver mail all day.’

‘And are you tall?’

‘Yes, if you call six foot tall.’

‘Mr Wright, you sound perfect.’

Three Cheers for Hemingway

‘Mary, my dear,’ Hemingway Whyte said to his wife late one afternoon, ‘I’ve decided to apply for a grant.’

‘Should I get your medication?’ Mary said.

‘My medication?’

‘Yes. For your blood pressure if you’re going to try have a rant.’

‘Not a rant, Mary. A grant. I’m going to submit a grant application to the Arts Council. See if we can supplement our meagre retirement annuity.’

‘But wouldn’t you be depriving others more deserving, more talented, more in need?’

‘No, my dear, it’s the principle. I’m a taxpayer and a creative.’

‘Really? I never knew. And under what art form will you be applying?’

‘Sadly, there isn’t an Oenology category, so I’m going with Plan B: Literature. I’ll have you know I’ve nearly completed a volume of what I think—and I hope the grant assessors and the reading public will also think—is a rather brilliant collection of short stories.’

‘What, a little tome of enlightened literary fiction? You?’

‘No, not a weeny, whiny, woke Whyte work of serious literary fiction, my dear, but a big, blithe, bawdy black book bursting with buffoonery and belly laughs.’

‘So that’s what you’ve been doing when locked away in your study while I’m out in the garden. Who’d have thought? You, my dear Hemingway, attempting humour?’

‘I most certainly have, my dear. What’s the point of reading a book, let alone living a life, if you can’t have a few laughs along the way? There’s enough dreariness and horridness in this world without having to open a book and read about others whining about things. If you want a good whine, sample a tipple of Château Mouton Rothschild 1945, I say. Humour, Mary! That’s what the world needs more of. And less of that self-absorbed, self-flagellating, woe-is-me, back-of-hand-on-forehead, couch-swooning serious lite-ra-ture. And don’t get me started, my dear, on those morbid memoirists. Good God, am I the only person in the history of humankind who didn’t endure a beastly childhood under patriarchal tyranny? Mark my words, Mary, humanity will read my book and be left in tears!’

‘Have you thought about entering a writing competition? Winning some prize money?’

‘No point, my dear. No one of my ilk gets shortlisted for writing competitions these days, let alone wins. It’s as if the world is too scared to be seen laughing. Alas, it’s all about doom and despair. And diversity. Every shortlist’s the same: three chicks, a gay and a they. No, it’s a grant for me.’

‘And you think the Arts Council and the reading public will part with their hard-earned for your little—sorry, I mean big—collection of humorous short stories?’

‘I can’t see why not? Besides, why shouldn’t I hop on