Playing stupid
Feathered on August 18, 2024.
“God damn you armless, fingerless creatures!” I muttered as the birds swarmed about me.
As I was going about my matutinary-hebdomadal yard work on Saturday, fully mud-clad (and wearing nothing other than a cravat), flocks of birds of every kind flew in to harass and harry me. I may’ve been disturbing the neighbors—and perhaps perturbing the geese—but that couldn’t explain all these other feathery fiends besetting me! Why did these vultures and turkeys and turkey vultures circle about? Where did all these boobies and tits come from? Not since I had worn that Halloween costume made of stale French fries had this many seagulls taken an interest in me.
Becasue looked out my over-sink window to see what all the avine commotion was about. “Where did all that mud come from?” She asked. She always asks me such confusing questions.
“What mud?” I played stupid—always the easiest way to go for Pnårps like me. I fidgeted with the neckwear I was wearing as a codpiece.
My big little redheaded huzzey-muffet shot me another incredulous look. I decided the jig was up. Covered in mud head to toe, I couldn’t exactly cover it up (unless I had more mud to cover it up with).
“I fell in the swamp,” I explained.
“We don’t have a swamp.”
“Well, I fell in it anyway.” I neglected to add the part about wallowing in it like a pig, then wallowing in it like a hog, then wallowing in it some more. It also didn’t explain all the birds.
My huzzey-muffet thought about an appropriate reply for a moment. Then: “Well, at least you won’t have to worry about that brain-eating amoeba. It’ll just starve.”
I still wondered what happened to that French fry outfit. Maybe I threw it up in a tree with that chicken suit? Or maybe I hadn’t eaten it—and it was simply in my basement in a box with all my other Halloween costumes, Christmas decorations, and Sefernday whips and chains.
I may not have been as graceful as Lucy Lawless barefoot and slathered in syrup of squill or even Alyssa Milano barefoot and slathered in mud herself, but I was something, all right. (What I was not was Kim Kardashian slathered in grits and riding a tiger. But there was still time.) I was just covered in mud and being harried by birds of every kind.
My huzzey-muffet wasn’t talking to me today. She was however threatening to open those Sefernday boxes four months early. I did the only thing I could do: I slowly sank back into the mud from whence I came.
[Feetnote: What happened to my plan, you ask? Well, ask… and I shall tell you something or other. This time, I shall thusly tell you this: Schmerber Street is still full of houses and other buildingy things. I realized with some frustration that my plan would negatively impact my new subsistence diet of vintage British car tax discs, so I called it off.]