Impossibly shaped bowls
Whiled away before July 10, 2011.
I awoke under a leaden sky that stretched out in all directions and met infinity at each horizon. The clouds writhed and beneath them things flew. They were tommygoffs—swooning overhead on courses and wings unknown and unknowable. Fnords cast about aimlessly on the ground—flopping and wriggling like eyeless frogs frappéd in a Cuisinart. Time seemed to move along in the same manner as the hideous and gnarled beasts flittering overhead. I couldn’t move. Or was it that time couldn’t move? I couldn’t tell. I murped—or thought I murped… or tried to murp—but then became aware that I was incapable not only of human speech but even of mustering my vocal cords to emit noises of an animal nature.
The smell of charred coffee filled the burning air.
The burning air.
Imagine a Bruce Springsteen concert as immense as the Universe. Now imagine another as tiny as a deer tick and with each song sung in a sweet falsetto. Such an impregnable analogy will hopefully allow my dear readers to somewhat grasp the quisimilitude of what lay before me.
Then I could move. And time moved. A sudden flash of familiarity struck me hard in the face. I surveyed my surroundings from the ashen sky above to the cold and hard—almost crystalline—ground below. Strange cracks radiated throughout the purplish and glassy surface in a queerly hexagonal pattern for as far as my beady little eyebulbs could glimpse. The ground was otherwise flat and featureless. I looked up. Time seemed to suddenly change course and run upwards. I flailed and lost my balance—but didn’t fall. It seemed I was incapable of falling over: Gravity had taken a holiday. Most of the other ordinary laws of physics seemed to have joined it in Bermuda too. I reeled.
Time reeled.
I regained my aplomb. I caught sight of a single tiny object on the horizon—the only object in sight for at least a million man-miles or more. And then I did murp—at least in my head. Murping echoed. I echoed. Time fell silent.
The tommygoffs continued brundling and writhing amidst the clouds.
I began walking toward the speck. Time walked with me. The speck drew nearer—or perhaps simply grew larger. It took on the shape of a man-made structure at last. I saw before me what appeared to be a decrepit cabin—bizarrely out of place and alien in this flat and infinitely dolorous environment. But here nonetheless. Walls made of rotting wood joined a roof made of moldering tommygoff feathers and bones. More ’goffs circled above as if waiting for their chance to join the roof. Smoke rose from a stone chimney and puffed away into the boundless gray expanse overhead.
Overhead where the tommygoffs swooped and circled.
I entered the cabin through a worm-devoured door. Hinges creaked out sounds not quite of the timbre one would expect from earthly metals. Harooloos howled off in the distance. Time entered the cabin with me; space folded and gnarled along behind us. It rippled and curved. I rippled and curved back at it. Gnomes glittered and danced their lithe and insane dances.
Human bowels shaped into near-human shapes sat upright in chairs and glistened. They sat upright in chairs surrounding a kitchen table, whiling away their time eating from impossibly shaped bowls using improbably fashioned spoons. A skeletal dog lay beneath the table and dreamed of woobly ooblalla-labloolloos amongst the ngorffee-bubbloos and snoobloobly-booboolees. Through a greasy window I could see more dark and ominous flat-bottomed clouds perusing the pallid sky. Strange. I departed the squirrelous cabin through the door whence I came. Tommygoffs continued on their courses above my pointy head—courses that necessitated a non-Euclidean perspective to understand completely. Squamous gnomes peeped out of the baleful clouds and sniggered at me cheerfully. A solitary comma greeted me cheerfully and then scurried off. I sighed; clocks everywhere sighed with me. It was the only comma I saw this week.
I fneeped quietly to myself and gibbered quiveringly under my breath… but then caught myself before I revealed too much to the wriggling fnords gnawing away at the corner of this brazen irreality. I had been here before. But where was I? Where was here? Why was I here? Where was my Y? This ungrulious place seemed so familiar… it was on the tip of my tongue—the tip of my nose!—but no rememberations were forthcoming. A telephone rang. I picked it up.
Muffled sounds came through the phone and poured into my ears like cotton. “A muffleupagus?” I tried to mooblespout into the phone. “A muffleupagus?” I reiterated. But no sounds issued forth from my curiously large and frog-like mouth: Time and the infinite plains beneath me had again stolen my speech. Or perhaps this was the first time and the last time was the second. Curiouser and curiouser. A man in a black suit and glittering gold necktie appeared—and then disappeared.
“Perhaps a disastrous dumbledoring accident has stranded me in this queer place!” I finally managed to fneep out in actual English. But then I didn’t: Time suddenly reversed—running backwards—I found myself before I had spoken—and once again unable to speak—or even gibber like a monkey. Dashes dashed and time followed.
A dumbledoring accident it most likely was. I once again found myself in… the Brundlesphere.
And then it was pitch black. I was suddenly eaten by a Fendippitous Eggman. And thus today continued a thousand-year period of the same old crap that the last thousand-year period offered.