"Hey Sheth; how can you tell if a elephantsh been in your refrigerator?" 
    "Fuck you, Wyatt." 
    "It's cold out! What do you think the wind chill ish?" 
    "How the fuck should I know?" Seth's eyelids were starting to freeze together. "The bank clock Uptown said it was 37 below zero, but that's the straight temp." 
    It was just past eleven PM and the brothers had been stomping through the ice-glazed snow that blanketed Riverwood Cemetery for almost a half-hour, the wind shoving at their backs. 
    "Which one, again?" demanded Wyatt, breath steaming through his scarf. 
    "Osmolagnia. Cody Osmolagnia. Carmen used to babysit him when he was little. He drowned swimming in Lake Ida last summer," Seth mumbled through his ski mask. He was dragging a white laundry bag that held a boltcutter and a prybar. 
    "Here we are." 
    The pair stood in front of the Osmolagnia family mausoleum. It took both of them to shove open the heavy iron door after Seth snapped the lock with the boltcutters. 
    Stomping the snow off their boots, they switched-on a penlight and shined it on the coffins. Cody's was on the floor, underneath a shelf holding the casket of his grandmother. Grasping the handles, Seth and Wyatt dragged the coffin to the middle of the vault and sat down on it. 
    "At least we're out of the wind!" Seth pulled a glass pipe and a carefully folded piece of chewing gum foil from inside his blaze orange snowmobile suit. 
    "Fucker! I knew you'd bring shum!" Wyatt pulled a mini-torch from the pocket of his parka. "I thought you shed you had a eishcream habit." 
    "At least I'm not into 'kibbles and bits', Ratboy," said Seth, referring to his brother's custom of popping Talwin and Ritalin together. Each held the torch while the other sucked the heroin smoke into his lungs. 
    "I never been shucked-off by a Chineesh chick, before." 
    "Fuck you, asshole. Carmen promised me a hundred buck and a blowjob if I brought her Cody tonight. You can have fifty bucks, but I get the blowjob!" 
    "Can I watch, then?" 
    "OK; but you can't take any pictures!" Seth was starting to feel as happy as a baby in a barrel full of titties. "We better hurry, or we'll miss the last bus back!" 
    They stood up and Seth banged-off the coffin lid's lugs with the tire iron and lifted it. 
    "Groash!" 
    Seth played his penlight up and down the green-and-black eight year-old in the moldy suit. Holding his breath, he grabbed Cody under the arms and dragged him onto the cement floor. 
    "Groash!" 
    "Quit saying that and hold the bag open!" Wyatt did as he was told and by bending Cody in half at the waist, they were able to fit him into the laundry bag, dropping in the boltcutters and prybar after him. Each grabbed a drawstring. The brothers steeled themselves for what lay outside. Together they counted, "One, Two, THREE!" and stepped outside. 
    "FUCK!!!" They screamed into the wind. It had rained two days before and everything had been coated with a quarter-inch of ice. Even the gibbous moon had a halo of ice crystals around it. To Seth, it all looked so... pretty. He couldn't wait to get his present back to Carmen's apartment, fuck her pretty face and spurt between her lips if she let him. 
    "We going out the shame way we came in?" 
    "Yup." 
    The bag slid easily over ice-crusted snow, the wind blew icy twigs onto their heads. Wyatt smiled behind his scarf when he saw all the evergreen wreaths decorating gravestones and hung on the doors of mausoleums. "Look, Sheth, a Chrishmush tree!" He pointed at a small balsam leaning against a crying marble angel with its fingers broken-off. Most of the tree's cheap ornaments lay broken and scattered around it. 
    Fifteen year-old Wyatt had always been wildly sentimental about Christmas. He demanded his parents put up the decorations the day after Halloween and always helped his dad string-up the outdoor lights. It was his proud duty to assemble the manger scene in the front yard, for which Wyatt would pilfer outdoor decorations from miles around. He wore foam antlers everywhere he went starting the day after Thanksgiving, he shoplifted presents for everyone he knew, and wasn't shy about letting them know what he wanted for Christmas. Wyatt despised the day after New Year's, when his weary parents made him take the decorations down. 
    The pair had arrived at the hole dug under the iron-spiked fence they had slid under. Seth went through first, so Wyatt could push the laundry bag under the fence to him. After Wyatt squirmed through, the boys each grabbed a drawstring and shuffled down the sidewalk in babysteps, trying not to fall on their asses. It was four blocks against the wind to the bus stop at Hennepin and Lake. 
    Wyatt started reciting out loud one of his favorite books, Dr Seuss' GREEN EGGS AND HAM. When he finally finished and started reciting HORTON HEARS A WHO, Seth told him to shut up. 
    "Don't tell me to shut up! Dad shesh to tell you if you don't go back to shcool, he'll quit paying your rent!" 
    "You can tell dad to shuck my dick!" 
    Seth knew it was an empty threat. He would have to move back home, and knew Mom and Dad couldn't handle that, anymore. Fuck going back to school. He heard reading text books gave you syphilis. 
    "I'll tell him you shed that when he picksh me up from your apartment Shunday night!"
    "Go ahead, ash hole!" Seth hated having a younger brother. What he really needed was some more smoke. He remembered there was a dealer named Scooby, who lived a couple of blocks away. If they didn't stay too long, they would still have time to catch the last 21A that went east on Lake Street that would take them to the office furniture warehouse where he and Carmen had apartments on the third floor. When they got to Aldrich, Seth forced Wyatt to go left. 
    Standing in front of the dealer's house, with all the lights on and dogs barking, Seth had a hard time believing anyone lived in the house with all the windows broken and aluminum siding stripped-off to about ten feet. 
    "Wow! A haunted housh!" 
    They walked onto the porch and stomped the snow and ice off their boots. Seth pounded on the door. After a minute, a steroid-addled bodybuilder with no eyebrows opened the door while holding onto the leash of a snapping pitbull. 
    "Is Scooby Doo here?" 
    "Who you?" 
    "Tell him it's Seth." 
    The door slammed shut and the brothers flopped down on a broken couch. Ten minutes later they were about to leave when the door was opened by a scrawny guy with ink blue hair and a matted maroon beard that fell to his belt buckle. 
    "Seth! My favorite trust fund baby! Come in." 
    "You know I don't get my trust fund for another year-and-a-half, Scoob!" 
    "Who's your bud?" 
    "That's my little brother, Wyatt. He's staying at my apartment this weekend." 
    They walked into the foyer, dragging the laundry sack behind them. Scooby gawked at the pair's cargo. 
    "You're doing laundry, tonight?! Radio says it's a 65 below wind chill!" 
    Seth giggled. "Its not laundry. We just stole a kid's body from Riverview Cemetery for Carmen!" 
    "Carmen the Cambodian? I know her! What does she want with a dead boy?" 
    "I dunno. Carmen used to babysit him or something. She promised me a hundred bucks and a blowjob if I got him for her tonight." 
    "That sounds like Carmen! Let's go downstairs and do some business, but leave the bag here." Scooby led the boys past cracked walls swarming with roaches and through a minefield of dog turds. Upstairs, they could hear men laughing and shouting over a woman's screams. From the filthy kitchen, they descended down rickety wooden stairs to the basement. 
    A single fluorescent shoplight illuminated three pitbulls chained to fast-moving treadmills, the bodybuilder watching a small, black-and-white TV with the sound turned down, and a sobbing, shirtless man kneeling on the packed-earth floor with a hand crushed in a vice attached to a workbench. Fresh cigarette burns dotted his torso. 
    "Wow!" exclaimed Seth after taking off his ski mask. "A black-and-white TV! I heard of those but I never seen one before!" 
    "Traded for it with a rock." He peered past Seth to Wyatt, who was unwinding his scarf. "How come your brother don't talk?" 
    "What time ish it when a elephant shits on a fensh?" Uh oh, thought Seth. 
    "I dunno," said Scooby. "What time is it when a elephant shits on a fence?" 
    "Time to get a new fensh!" Wyatt burst out laughing. 
    The dealer looked confused, then angry. "Why did the shicken crosh the road?" 
    "To get to the other side?" asked a wary Scooby. 
    "Awww... you heard it! Why did Jeshush crosh the road?" 
    "Huh?" 
    "He wash nailed to a shicken!" 
    The bodybuilder sitting on the folding chair twisted his tiny, shaved head around. "That's blasphemy!" 
    Seth jerked a thumb at the whimpering man with his hand in the vice. "What's his story?"
    Scooby looked ready to explode. "Fucker comes here looking for crack with his wife, when he already owes me $450! Me and Casper drug 'em down here and gave him one choice; we entertain him down here, while his wife entertains our customers upstairs for $10 a pop 'til his debt is paid-off! We wanted to charge more, but she's ugly as a hat full of assholes. That's her on the TV. Jinx is on the camcorder upstairs." 
    "Hey, it's Big Boo Boo's turn!" Casper shouted. 
    "You guys gotta watch this," said Scooby. "Big Boo Boo's got the biggest prong you ever saw on a white guy!" 
    Huddled around the small screen, the brothers gasped when they saw Big Boo Boo's tool rise from between his knees. 
    "That fucker ish deformed!" 
    "Your old lady will be able to do squat thrusts over a fire hydrant when Big Boo Boo gets done with her!" Casper told their vice-clamped guest. 
    His sobbing increased in volume and intensity. 
    "Let...me...go!" he wailed. 
    Scooby cackled and turned the TV so he could get a better view of his wife's violation and cranked-up the volume. 
    "What can I do for you boys?" asked Scooby, suddenly all business. 
    "Howzabout fifty bucks worth of skag on credit?" said Seth. 
    "You got it." Scooby pulled two bindles from his ragged jeans and stuffed them in a pocket of Seth's snowmobile suit. He pulled on his ski mask and mittens. "Time to go, Wyatt." 
    "Before we go, Shcooby Doo, will you let me do shumthing?" 
    "What?" Scooby sounded suspicious and annoyed. 
    "I alwaysh wanted to carve The Cat In The Hat on a guysh back with a rashor blade." Wyatt looked directly at the crackhead trapped in the vice. "Or Curioush George." 
    "Go for it," Scooby grinned. 
    "You don't have time for that, Wyatt! If we miss the last bus, we'll have to drag Cody six miles down Lake Street!" 
    "But Sheth, I got a rashor blade and I wanna shtay and wash TV!" Wyatt protested. 
    "You're not the bawsh of me!" wailed Wyatt when Seth grabbed his hand and started pulling him up the stairs, struggling the whole way. Seth slapped him with his open palm, causing Wyatt to start bawling and Scooby and Casper to burst-out laughing. 
    "When they got to the top of the stairs, Seth wrapped his brother's scarf around Wyatt's snotty nose and mouth. He was still quietly blubbering. "Shut up!" 
    "I'm...gonna...tell... momanddad... you ...hit...me." 
    "Like they're really gonna give a shit!" They each grabbed a drawstring on the laundry bag and dragged their ghastly cargo outside. The cold hit them like a mallet. 
    Shuffling down the icy sidewalk toward Uptown, Wyatt's crying got softer and softer 'til it finally ended. "You shure got shum neat friendsh, Sheth!" 
    They arrived at the business district as the bars were closing and people were drunkenly sliding and slipping toward their cars. They laughed uproariously when they saw a guy slip and bash his head on a parking meter and crumble unconscious or dead on a dirty snowbank. 
    The trio joined a small crowd huddled at the bus shelter at Hennepin and Lake. Wyatt nudged a woman in a silver ski jacket standing with her boyfriend. 
    "Hey lady, how can you tell if a elephantsh been in your refrigerator?" 

the end