You can count on seeing three things at every Shape's County Spring Parade: the cucumber float, the homeschooling marching band and the (appropriately separated) baby brigade.
The baby brigade was tradition circa Depression/ Dust bowl era. Recent mothers promenade their new offspring before envious old maids and unfortunate fiances of girls with baby fever.
This year would be special. Due to Pharmacorps. testing, local women had given birth to a record fifteen hundred and sixty children within the first six months of 2008. Usually, the brigade is regaled to bring up the rear with such banal acts as The Old tappers and the Banner Lodge. But not this year. This year they would, all in strollers, roll, in rows of fifty, right before the cucumber float, right before the Mayor of Constant City.
Aubry Davis should have been playing tuba that day, he truly should. Through years of practice, his fingers had become delicate, graceful ballarinas dancing on the plungers of his instrument. He had not only developed an ear for music but, also, an educated grasp on the science of it, the type usually reserved for increasingly lonely graduate students. However, ten months before, his audition had turned into a nasty debacle and he received only A) laughter from the Mayor who was acting as a guest judge B) paper balls from the veteran teenage boys, and C) an injured reputation.
Gina Portnoy, the karaoke Queen of Sharpe's County, had dropped three sticks of Big Red down his tuba. Hoping for a date with Allen Glish D.D.S and fearing the smell of smoke would put him off, she crammed her mouth full of gum. Lacking respite for wad, and being that well-formed thoughts avoid Gin Portnoy, she spat it straight into Aubrey's tuba. Even the newborn child had rolled his eyes at this action, then returned thinking about his jazz musician father presently touring Holiday Inns of the southwest.
Aubry Davis often laid awake at night remembering the fleet of women covering their baby's ears. They all exaggerated solely to mock him. Therefore, Aubry Davis was not accepted into the coveted fold of the Sharpe's County Home school Band and today, if never again, he would exact his revenge.
The Marching Band passed him playing When the Saints Go Marching In (a particular favorite of his) and he eyed them with a mixture of excitement and hate. A witness recalls Tara Jenkins giving him the finger mid C#.
Then came the the YMCA, Local Hardware Go-Carts and , most importantly, the baby brigade. Aubry unlatched the large black case he'd been resting his chin on for the previous hour, seething.
The brigade was at him and he brought the tuba to his lips. His cheeks did not inflate, he didn't even seem to breathe...but he did. He did breathe, Aubry Davis was, in fact, playing a note, a very low note inaudible to anyone above the age of three. A note so low it rumbled the infant's tummies and relaxed everything else. Aubry slowly and patiently blew into the horn until, looking from the corner of his eye, he saw the gentleman next to him curl his nostril.
Something fierce had reached the intestines of the baby brigade. Practically in unison, one thousand five hundrd and sixty infants released their bowels. Quickly, the odor was aloft and on the crowd with a vengeance. Aubry had rounded the corner and had the key in the ignition of his mothers car before handkerchiefs could leave their pockets.
© 2008 J.benjamin Rose
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