The thing with the bing

A Berlin Tale by Marcus Jensen

Our vet! The stories he tells.

“Did I tell you the one about the thing with the bing? No?”

A customer came in, desperate, at the end of her leash, so to say. Her poodle in tow.

The poor dog’s ears were unnaturally red, glowing red, dangerously red.

“Are you sure she has to be put to sleep?” she asked.

The vet was her second choice of doctor. She’d already been to an energy healer for pets. He told her the pet had to be put down.

To arrive at his diagnosis, he used a metal rod that gave off a vibrating bing if you tapped it against a hard surface, kind of like a tuning fork. He tapped it against one of those musical bowls, a Tibetan standing bell: bing.

The great thing about this rod was, with it he could examine the animal from a distance, energetically. The poodle didn’t have to be there.

The bing-rod revealed the poodle’s dark secret: In a previous life, it had been a Rottweiler.

Now its big Rottweiler brain was pressing against the small poodle skull. Hence the overpressure of the ears.

There was no cure.

But she was a woman of little faith. She brought her darling to the vet, he injected the poodle with some kind of chemical that didn’t go bing and sent them home.

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Marcus Jensen is a novelist and editor in Berlin. “Vestalin",” his newest literary science-fiction novel, will appear in September 2024.

More info here: www.marcusjensen.de