By. Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois

He shook his dog’s paw and said, How’s life in the dog world today? He had already inquired after the health of his parakeet and the hedgehog who’d been tearing apart the stone foundation of his barn just for something to do.

There are wild birds that inhabit these valleys. They do not understand the human obsession with virginity. They do not understand the relationship between virginity and purity.

The hedgehog was bored. Life in the country was as dull for him as it was for the human whose barn he was slowly destroying. The slow destruction vexed the man but made his life less boring because it gave him a problem to work on. He worked on it for quite a while because the hedgehog was a very clever creature and refused to be caught, no matter what new trap the human tried.

Vladimir Putin, ruler of Russia lost his virginity early. He forced himself on a young woman who had blond pigtails and had dreams of becoming a concert violinist. After Putin raped her, she gave up that dream. She felt that any music she played would be sullied, that the notes would bend in obscene ways. There was no social consciousness of rape and of women’s rights in Russia in those days.

Finally the hedgehog decided to go somewhere else, to travel, because he’d heard it said that travel broadens one, opens one’s mind, and he was hopeful that this was true.

Nowadays, in America, we have a lot of consciousness, and rape is also entertainment on television shows featuring police work. The birds understand none of this. Most of the birds only understand Chinese. Their birdcalls are in Chinese. They sing an opera about Romeo and Juliet in Chinese. They like eating crumbs of leftover Chinese food and fortune cookies. They like tearing apart the messages in fortune cookies and using them to build their nests.

Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over thirteen-hundred of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for numerous prizes. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition.

Antibióticos is a band from Córdoba, Argentina