Tim Horvath's "The Gendarmes" can be found in Sleepingfish, issue 0.9375. It's a wild little story that has the narrator wondering what the noise is coming from above - turns out it's a group of men playing baseball on his roof, or are they?
Posing as a group of Frenchmen who have named their baseball team the Gendarmes are a group of scientists. The story goes from one with a fabulist feel to it to one with a hint of mystery as Horvath has some fun with wordplay and identifications.
"There were two buckets. One filled with peanuts and crackerjacks said positive reinforcement. The one next to it, labeled negative reinforcement, teemed with a leech-cauliflower salad.
'We're scientists,' admitted someone wearing a badge that read Pitcher/Spokesperson. 'We're conducting an experiment.' On careful inspection, I could see that the word running down his pinstriped uniform was Scientists, not Gendarmes."
"The Gendarmes" works very nicely as a playfully written piece that still maintains a bit of a kick to it at the end.
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