After a while it was like being in jail. After a while you quit thinking about having a beer because no matter what, the ice chest is empty, the taps are dry and the guards aren’t bartenders.
So you get used to it and eventually your ice cold frothy beer dreams fade away.
And that’s what having no women on the island was like. Eventually. For several weeks it was weird, but by now the fact all the females had snuck out one night and paddled off to some other island was accepted. They were gone. Deal with it.
The men had settled in and were making the best of it, which was pretty good, considering. Oh, some of the nice etiquette stuff was fading away compared to the beginning when if someone sneezed in a big bowl of salad he’d get a punch on the arm or some profanity-laced scolding.
These days no one would much notice sneezing in or on anything, and as for salads, there weren’t any. Or other vegetables.
Mostly the diet was meat. When the parrots and turtles and monkeys had all been devoured the men began an assembly line of dogs and were encouraging them to copulate and produce litters, and thus provide puppies as a key component of their diet.
The older dogs made for good barbecue and the pups and young dogs were amusing. The meat, which they’d hoped would taste just like chicken, was a disappointment. Most of it, especially the pit bulls and Huskies, was tough, stringy and tasted like liver.
Golden Retriever chops and ear flaps were everyone’s favorite until the last Golden Retriever was dispatched and butchered before somebody realized Lulu was female. Oops. So until some chickens flew onto their island, the meals were mostly going to be Cocker Spaniels, labradors and chihuahua kebobs.
The island was good sized, although no one knew how big, as in miles or acres or square feet, because all that math-type knowledge had disappeared even before the women had all sailed off. But there were some big trees in a small forest, a clearing near the cliffs and it rained often enough to keep everyone pretty clean.
They amused themselves playing a game that their ancestors invented years ago. Two teams of however many wanted to play gathered at the clearing and took turns running and throwing and carrying a Pit Bull skull over the field and put it in the other team’s log box. One team wore shirts and the other team didn’t.
Everyone was still able to talk, though vocabularies had shrunk to a few hundred words. Sometimes at night they sang by making pleasant grunting noises around a big fire. There were only a few under the age of 10, and they learned to make slingshots, pick berries and catch fish.
Then the women came back, appearing along the horizon in little boats one afternoon, but not getting near shore until the next day. They all looked great, the way every woman does when you haven’t seen one in a while, and the guys regretted, somewhat, having neglected their own hygiene, diet and etiquette.
The little boats were gondolas and the little boat captains were gondoliers and they were from Italy and certainly hadn’t been neglecting anything related to their looks or fitness. Dressed real nice, if you go for that fancy sparkly stuff on tight gold pants, and pointy red shoes. And stupid looking hats.
The women were giggling and carrying bags when they stepped on shore. The gondolier dudes got off the little boats too, but since they were small and there were only 12 of them, the guys on the island killed ‘em all. They were going to barbecue them but the women had brought along cheese, salami, wine and bread so they fed the gondola pilots to the dogs instead.
A few days later the women realized the leftover gondolier costumes would fit the young men on the island so they tailored the suits just a bit and then taught the kids how to run a little gondola boat.
It was pretty easy, so a few weeks later, running in shifts, everyone got transported off the island and taken to Italy, which is how it came to be that rugby and soccer were invented.
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