Ollanthorpe Savings Bank
Puréed on October 1, 2006.
As Thomas Jefferson said in 1937 when he basted a turkey with cream puffs and sewed up a mincemeat pie: “Don’t clatter your floozies while the oven door’s still open.” I spent most of Monday contemplating this advice, and finally had a revelation: Thomas Jefferson was surely a genius of unparalleled effrontery. Armed with this knowledge, and an oven door I tore from its hinges—and my trusty isosceles valise—I stalked into the Ollanthorpe Savings Bank and demanded my savings back. For good measure, I even demanded back the thirteen buttons I lent one of their tellers two years ago.
They just giggled at me, so I stomped around and—dingleberry, hamster!—muttered incarpacious plenitudes and flagranulous instoppelopathies at them. A witty double entendre followed when one of them mentioned my mother and his “deposit” in the same sentence. Then I punched him in the nose. It didn’t do any good; they sat there wheedling and needling… like a pathetic clutch of garden gnomes.
“Hideous gnomes!!!” I roared as I overturned a desk and used it to build a protective fort to defend me against their onslaught. (It was slow in coming, and hadn’t even started yet, but I knew it would eventually. I named my barricade Fort Grårp in honor of my dearly deceased brother.) The gnomey little men just sat there at first, staring at each other, but then they started to wheedle and needle louder. Some even had gilt parachutes growing from their backs; red caps (fezzes?!) emerged from their pockets!
“Whores of Haldûrburðgar! Quislings and collaborators!!” I wanted my AK-47, but all that I ended up with was the sound of their snickering and snorkering. It sounded like drops of molten lead hitting my duct-taped forehead from high, high above the ground. I got a plunger and mooned one of them.
They vacillated inflatedly; I saw my chance. I leapt abruptly from the protection of Fort Grårp, catching them off guard, and stabbed four of them with a fountain pen wrapped in banknotes. Before they could catch their breath, I burned Fort Grårp to the ground—no need to let it fall into enemy hands!—and ran out of there like the Third Coming was coming. Those bankers are collaborators—I swear it on my dead Mamårp’s grave!