(~6 minutes to read)
(Note to the uninitiated—“Cholmondeley” is pronounced “Chumley”. Honest!)
The old year had been unceremoniously booted out the door, down the street, and over a convenient cliff nearby. The new year had been welcomed with open arms, ringing bells, popping fireworks, and as much general enthusiasm as a group of people who had celebrated the New Year exactly the same way for the last fifty-three years could muster.
In keeping with the Cholmondeley-Wellichuk dynasty’s tradition, they’d sat down to New Year breakfast at precisely 00:05hrs, the strains of Auld Lang Syne (played on the bagpipes) ringing in their ears and the echoes of noisemakers ricocheting around their slightly inbred crania.
The menu was always the same, honouring the family’s lineage as well as the past century or so of its Canadian history. It started with orange-and-poteen spritzers, the favourite beverage of Seamus O’Cholmondeley, a leading light in the Orangemen of Ulster in the 1700s. Next came kedgeree-in-a-blanket, a dish created in India as a tribute to the Wellichuk-Gill family alliance in the 1870s.
The centrepiece of the meal was the full Canadian-English breakfast; eggs (loon eggs), bacon (actually cured beaver hock), magic mushrooms, tomaytoes, tomahtoes, moose kidney, wieners, and beavertail. The family’s Ukranian heritage was honoured with the fourth course—cabbage and saskatoon berry pierogies served with cheese curds and gravy.
Dessert was maple taffy, made outside in the snow by Guillaume the faithful old butler while the fast-breakers were force-feeding pierogies to each other.
When the final piece of taffy had been consumed, Tyrone Cholmondeley-Wellichuk, the family patriarch, stood up and announced, “Gentlemen, you may now smoke.” And it being an occasion where ignoring family tradition would have been a shootable offence, cousin Algernon responded, “And ladies, you may merely smoulder.” There was much polite snorting and guffawing (as was traditional), and the Cholmondeley-Wellichuk males retired to the room reserved for human infumation.
Algernon pulled out his e-cigar and fired it up. The pungent smell of perspiring Cuban female thighs wafted around the room.
“Absolutely mahvelous how they were able to make the aroma so authentic, don’t y’think?” opined Algernon, betraying his penchant for the upper-crust English elocution of the 1920s.
“Y’know that’s a myth, Algie;” returned Sheldon Wellichuk-Cholmondeley (whose dyslexic father had caused the reversal of Sheldon’s last names at birth registration). “Created for suckers like you to fantasize about while you smoke yourselves to death.” Never one to mince his words, Sheldon—a non-smoker—was skating on very thin ice in his present company.
“I love these new-fangled things!” wheezed Randall Wellichuk-Farquart, activating his e-pipe. Randall was only the stepfather of Tyrone Cholmondeley-Wellichuk and therefore had been denied patriarchal status. “In my day, you could still get buffalo chip tobacco; now that was a satisfying smoke! But the buffaloes had to go and make themselves all but extinct, and regular cow chips ain’t near as good! But these e-smoax doohickeys taste and smell more like buffalo chips than the real thing!”
The smell of buffalo ordure mingled with the heady perfume of sweaty Hispanic upper legs to produce a very cosmopolitan aroma. The effect was intoxicating, and the mood of the assemblage—already having got a head start on the intoxication stakes—mellowed further.
“Y’know, with all these e-smokes we’re smoking here, it makes you wonder what’s real and what’s not,” drawled Casey Farquart, Randy’s half-brother. “Here we’ve got Cuban tobacco leaves infused with Cuban maiden sweat, and,” he gestured towards Randall, “here we’ve got Bison bison scat… yet none of it is real. Makes you wonder if they should abandon the whole traditional thing and get us hooked on new tastes and smells to match the technology.”
The group paused in various stages of inhalation and exhalation to consider the words of the heretic.
The silence became uncomfortable.
An e-cigarette beeped its impending shutdown, displaying a countdown in the mouthpiece.
Casey felt the need to continue digging the hole he’d just started.
“What’s the point of a cee-garr smelling of Havanan femur glow? We know that the juice in these things hasn’t been within a couple thousand miles of Cuba. It was probably mixed by a robot in some Chinese mega factory.”
Drew Cholmondeley-Wellichuk, who was leaning nonchalantly on the mantle, decided to spur Casey on.
“So what are you suggesting? That the e-smoax marketing people get us champing at the bit for the smell of robot oil or something?”
Casey’s face flushed. “Not exactly.”
“Would it be a female robot, Drew old thing?” asked Algernon, feeling a little protective toward his mock-Cuban cigar.
“Ask Casey,” laughed Drew.
All faces turned to Casey. His face was, by now, as red as the pointy arrowhead thingy on the Cuban flag.
“Uhm… I never said…”
“Do robots have a sex?” asked Randy.
“Perv!” responded several until-now mute family hangers-on.
“I said, ‘do robots have a sex’, not ‘do robots have sex!’” spluttered Randy.
“Good question,” said Tyrone, puffing thoughtfully on his old-school pipe, and blowing real tobacco smoke at the assembly. “Cuz if there are boy robots and girl robots, it raises the prospect of a whole new world of inequality and discrimination, not to mention perversion and por…”
“Don’t say that word!” yelled Algernon. “It’ll trigger the spam filters when they scan the transcript of this conversation, and nobody will ever get to read it!”
“Good point,” said Tyrone, beginning to feel the effects of the combination of pipe tobacco and magic mushrooms. “Let’s use the phrase ‘pork pie’ when we want to say por…”
“DON’T SAY IT!” yelled everyone.
A period of quiet ensued. Casey broke it.
“Has anyone found any good… pork pie websites lately?”
“Try rowbowsecks.com,” offered Luquass Cholmondeley-Wellichuk, the youngest of the gathered clan. “It’s as hard core robot pork pie as you’ll find anywhere.”
“So is it androgynous pork pie, or hermaphrodite pork pie, or does it prove that there are boy and girl robots?” asked Randy.
“Oh there’s boy and girl robots all right,” grinned Luquass. Just then, Tyrone’s wife (his third) knocked and entered.
“So what are you boys talking about?” she asked coquettishly.
“Oh just some gentlemen talk, honey,” replied her husband through a haze of pipe tobacco smoke.
“Well don’t be long be long be bzzzzipppbrrrrrrrrrrrrrpingzipppppp Otto-mate-for-life version 7.8 re-booting, stand by… zzzzippp Otto-mate-for-life version 7.8 has discovered…”
“I didn’t know your wife was a robot,” said Casey, a shocked smile spreading across his face.
“Even at my age, a man has… needs,” said Tyrone, defensively.
“Were the last two wives robots too?” enquired Casey, thoroughly enjoying himself.
“Hell, no! This is the first one. And she’s still under warranty.”
“Do you smoke in bed?” asked Casey.
“Is this another setup for a cheap joke?” asked Tyrone, his teeth clenching the mouthpiece of his pipe a little too tightly for his own good.
“Could be, but no,” replied Casey. “Actually I was going to suggest that perhaps that model isn’t built for smoky atmospheres. After all, you see what happened when she came in here!”
“Does she make up for the… loneliness?” asked Randy, his nonagenarian libido stirring from a lengthy coma.
“Not really.”
The newly-resuscitated libido slipped back into its former state.
Guillaume the faithful butler entered.
“Gentlemen, the ladies are waiting for the dancing to begin. May I tell them that you will be joining them directly?”
“You may, Guillaume,” replied Tyrone. “And when you’ve done so, please come back and pack Ursula into her box and ready her for a warranty claim.
“ I guess I’ll be dancing with myself tonight.”