“WHAT IF” Hi, I’m Bonky. “What if?” The simple question that seems so queer to the average person, but to the storyteller it is perfectly normal. Without “What if?” I wouldn’t be able to write my stories. That’s right. We writers are accustomed to a very different type of thinking where we challenge our brain to come up with ossibilities that just couldn’t happen in real life. When I get stuck writing my world famous tales about Bonky, I just ask “what if?” What if Bonky could fly? What if Bonky were a little taller? What if Bonky went bowling? You can already see how just asking this one little question makes for some exciting and intruiging results. But it didn’t come easy. Creative writing requires years of sacrifice, training, and hard work. Not just everyone can become a writer, no. You need a special typewriter made for horses. You might need a secretary with a shotgun to kill other, better authors. You might need hay and apples, or a special milk that makes you write good you call “Bonky Milk”. Yes, the craft of writing keeps changing every year, but the essential foundation remains the same: “what if?” I’m with my pal, Pickle Horse-man. He’s dying. They have him on a ventilator and an I.V. and dialysis and just about every life-support machine you can think of. He’s dying of Daughter-Acceptance-Suppression-Disorder (DASD). It’s a very painful death. It’s probably THE most painful death a person can endure. I try to get him to accept his daughters, ALL of them, for who and what they are. For their dreams. For their individual, distinct voices. But when I tell him to accept them and also let them go, let them be themselves, to cherish them, a wave of pain and nausea flows through him. He’s undergoing many internal challenges and he’s hallucinating very badly. I hooked up my steamdeck into his aluminum brain and with the horse-man hallucination observation app I downloaded off github I can watch his hallucinations as he develops them. Seeing them isn't helpful in any way. It’s just funny to see how wrong he is, really about everything pertaining to life and reality - and on such a grand scale of wrongness. “I h-have no daughters.” His declaration takes all his strength to hammer out, and he’s exhausted by the end of it, his clenched fist has lost its grip, never again to regain the strength of conviction it held in the moment. It hurts me to see him like this. And it hurts me in advance to know the pain he’s going to go through soon, now that I’ve invited all one hundred three daughters to his deathbed. Such pain, brought on by a confrontation from this many daughters, with this condition, well, it would be unimaginable. There’s a knock at the door. "Come in," I manage to croak, expecting all three hundred eighty daughters to pile into the small hospice. The door swings open slowly, creaking on its hinges. The room is filled with the warm light of the setting sun, streaming in from the window beyond, its rays obscuring the figure standing there. Then, stepping into the room, Pickle Horse-man’s master, Master Horse-man, reveals himself. “Ah, shit.” Pickle Horse-man coughed. Pickle Horse-man is not overly fond of his old Master and considers him a terrible human being; Master Horse-man points out that Pickle Horse-man would not know this unless he were trained extremely well. “My young sensei thought he could leave this life without receiving his final lesson,” said Master Horse-man, approaching the bedside. Pickle Horse-man just regarded him in a sort of faded dying-guy kind of way. Then the old guy got somber, and stared down at his apprentice with glowering eyes, as if he had no eyelids at all. “You will be reborn...” He told him. “Ah, shit.” Pickle Horse-man twisted in his sheets. “You will be reborn as a hottie,” said Master Horse-man. “A hottie and a thiccie.” Pickle Horse-man just growled and twisted in his death-bed. “And you will be my fuck toy,” said the Master. Oh damn, I thought. Don’t do him like that. “You will lick,” said Master, and curled his hand towards his groin like he were reaching back past the taint, “lick my ass.” Pickle Horse-man roared in his blankie cocoon of twisted sheets. “Now, you will receive...” Master Horse-man knelt down, grunting, taking off his slipper, “...FINAL LESSON.” Then smacked the shit out of Pickle Horse-man with it. “Master Horse-man!” I cried, “I need him alive so he can be confronted by his three hundred fifty daughters!” Pickle Horse-man paused, then screamed in torment, the bedsheet cocoon went rigid in apoplectic fit. “Ah! Bonky! What you doing here? What is this contraption you’re in?” Asked Master Horse-man. “Oh this?" I splashed my hoovies around in it, "this is the sous-vide packet they keep me in to keep me cozy while I’m dying.” “Oh, no, Bonky! You are dying too? What is it that you are dying of?” “I got a compliment.” “No,” said Master Horse-man in disbelief, “everybody know not to compliment Bonky.” “It’s okay, Master. It was on the internet. They couldn’t have known that the compliment is the fruit of dukkha that Bonkeys must never eat.” Master Horse-man hung his head, “such a shame. Oh, Bonky - what will become of your media empire?” “My what?” “You have so many business dealings with the pornography and the football and the infosec.” “I do?” “Bonky look out the window don’t you see that big building towering over all of Sacramento? That is your building. You own it.” “Oh,” I said, kind of half-looking and sloshing around in my sous-vide bag. “Right. That thing. I dunno. Guess it’s just going to have to do its own thing from now on. Maybe I’ll bequeath it to Shotgun Secretary,” I said, looking over at Shotgun Secretary, who was also dying because people worldwide had lost their faith in shotguns and if people don’t love and believe in shotguns then the shotgun angels lose their wings. But Shotgun Secretary had that pallid E.T. look so I knew she was no more capable of running a corporate empire than myself. “I know! I’ll give it to my lawyer, Ashley, for all the outstanding lawyering fees I owe her.” I fished around for my cellphone in the sous-vide bag that was full of my warm, melty blood. But my gelatinous hoof was all gummy from being cooked and clogged up the phone with glue-y hoof-gloop. Master Horse-man tried to help me by getting Ashley on his phone but he’s so old that he couldn’t navigate his own smart phone and my directions to try and help him only created new problems that he didn’t have before we started the exploratory process. What a disaster. Our attention was suddenly alerted to Pickle Horse-man crying out like a vampire in sunlight, and we saw, in the doorway, the first of the Horse-men girls. “FATHER,” she shouted. “Ah, shit,” Pickle Horse-man grumbled, “not this shit again.” “You ABANDONED me.” “I didn’t do SHIT!” Pickle Horse-man said, weakly struggling to the furthermost corner of the bed from his daughter, but restrained by the chords of all the machines plugged into him. This was some daughter of his I didn’t even know. Instead of being able to enjoy Pickle Horse-man being owned in a one-sided argument, I was suddenly faced with a reality television style uncertainty. Was she lying? Was he lying? I needed EVIDENCE. “Oh my God,” she said, taken aback, “Bonky? Are you - are you dying?” She came over to the side of my sous-vide tub, tears in her eyes. “I’m doing okay. It’s just a little dying,” I said. Then another Horse-man daughter whipped into the room ready to confront her dad, but it was another one I didn’t know, and she too came over to my bedside to mourn my passing. Which is fine, but it’s not what I wanted. Not what I invited them all here for. This kept happening. More horse-men daughters, more mourning, more bonky dying. I get it, but sometimes you just have to let a guy die and go yell at your dad. This kept happening until the room was full up of Horse-men daughters, but finally the woman of the hour arrived, “Fuchsia!” I called to her over the the other Horse-men. “That’s not Fuchsia!” Pickle Horse-man croaked. “Sure it’s Fuchsia,” I said, waving her over. “It’s FUCHSIA, ‘Dad’,” said Fuchsia, former porn director extraordinaire. “IT’S CHARTREUSE,” HE SCREAMLE’D. She just looked at him pityingly. “You know why he can’t bring himself to call me Fuchsia?” She said. “It’s because it was my mother’s name. And he misses her too much for words to bear. Anyways, I brought Chart with me,” she called across the crowd of Horse-men daughters to Chartreuse. "He probably uses Chart's name because she doesn't have a mom. Because Pickle Horse-man is such a bad dad, she emerged from non-existence to yell at him for being a bad dad." Oh, daaaamn, I thought to myself, looking at Pickle Horse-man, how is he going to take the cognitive dissonance of having to deal with TWO CHARTREUSES? He was very still, his eyes completely locked on some distant spot on the horizon. THen, just as I hoped, he spontaneously combusts with liquid flames and agonizing death howls! But I can't enjoy it! Because at that instant I die! Oh no! But I don’t die the way Pickle Horse-man dies. He dies with every cell and neuron of his body all crying out in horror at their own extinguishment, like being trapped in a house fire; when I die I just take the elevator. So the ladies help me out of my sous-vide bag and I slouch over to the gate of the elevator and I get in. I shout and wave “bye-bye everybody! So long! Farewell! Auf wiedersehen!” And all the Horse-men girls wave and blow me kisses and Master Horse-man bows in equanimeous recognition. All the other bonkies in the hospital who just spontaneously died file into the elevator with me. Gets all stuffy. The elevator operator starts the ride. It’s Skullmund. He laughs, but it’s an evil laugh. The elevator starts going down with a crazy herky-jerky energy, like it's about to fall apart. Sparks ignite from the rusty metal rails, whatever brakes or dampeners were supposed to smooth the ride were long gone. The horrifying notion dawns on me that since an elevator should elevate the cargo it’s carrying, that this must not be an elevator at all... It must necessarily be, a Devilator! He laughs again as he sees the recognition of this horrible fate cross my face. “WELCOME TO MY HELLEVATOR,” he laughs. He is a huge industrial devil machine, built into the elevator, belching out smoke and hissing steam. And by correcting my term “devilator” with his “hellevator” he has given me just the horrible first taste of the hells yet to come. We drop down into the first hell, which is the hell of pollen. It blows in at hurricane force, we’re all blanketed with a thick yellow coat of pollen. Makes me itch. Some Bonkys get off but I’m like, “no way, pal. This ain’t no hell for a horse as fine as this!” We descend into the next hell, which is the hell of gross ketchup and mustard drying in a fast food hall. I start yakking immediately - the smell is overwhelming. I look out at the booths and tables all covered in drying mustard and ketchup smears. We all gag and wretch and some of us barf. More Bonkeys get off but I stay on, telling myself this is no hell for such a fine horse. We descend into the hell of star wars background extras. Nobody gets off. We all just stare at the Lak Sivrak, the cantina werewolf, in petrified fear. The elevator doors shut and we are saved from the peril of this hell. More hells pass and more bonkeys get off until I'm the last one. "THERE'S A SPECIAL HELL FOR YOU, BONKY," says Skullmund. The devilator cable snaps and we enter into a freefall. I scream! Skullmund's laughter rings out like the haunted echoing of a soviet steel mill. I try jumping to offset myself from the collision with the ground floor, so that when impact occurs I'll be up in the air, unharmed. The whole cage of the elevator thrashes around and I'm unsteadyed and knocked to the ground. The end is coming. I can feel it. I can feel the impact arriving any second now. The elevator dings. It's totally come. The gate opens up to my Bonky Administration and Football Colloseum and Porn and Infosec Division Skyscraper. It's a beautiful day in Sacramento. It is the hell of running the Bonky Fraud Empire. Skullmund's rows of metal teeth spread into a smile like piano keys. I quietly get off the ride and call Shotgun Secretary. For there is much work to be done.