Just shaving the dog
Preened on July 31, 2011.
“Wait, Ravna! No, not the coffee p—!” But I was too late. My eyes widened. Ravna picked up the carafe and suddenly the world went bright golden white.
I was flying: Flying along a graceful parabolic arc, flailing and gibbering like a pincer monkey that had just found itself outpinched in a pincer movement executed by a six-star general.
I reached the apex of my flight moments later and—despite a quick and desperate prayer to the voluptuous insect goddess Strahazazhia Kalamazoo-Kintaki-Meeps that gravity be eliminated for the remainder of the day—began my all-too-typical howling descent back toward the hard and pointy ground below. Between bouts of incontinent shrieking and babbling, stray thoughts entered my mind as I plummeted. Where was Alyssa Milano right now? Was she painting her toenails? What color? Were paper towels truly more efficient when hung overhand rather than underhand? Would a clutch of Gregarian Wheezing Gnomes visit me next Thursday and drag me back to their underground cavern to wheezle and nuzzle me to death? Why, exactly, did my family name have that little spingly-bongle over the first letter? Had it really been a good idea to wire my coffee pot to that barrel of dynamite that I had recently begun storing in my kitchen beneath the sink? I guess it didn’t matter now, though: That dynamite was long gone!
I hit the ground so hard that I got blown four whole weeks past when this whole coffee-potting disaster had started, and ended up landing in today. Amazingly, I was completely uninjured. I stood up and murped softly. I wobbled, but once again didn’t fall down. “Truly I must be turning into a Weeble!” I muttered, brushing myself off, and gave gravity the finger: “You might’ve pulled me back to this hellish world, Gravitor, but you can’t keep me down!” I continued to stand proud and upright—and preened in the manner of a peacock—for added oomph. Gravitor, dread god of falling objects, pretended not to care. I snorted and started picking up the pieces of my house, hoping I would be able to reassemble the millions of charred fragments within an hour or two.
Precisely 1½±½ hours later, I had rebuilt my house, restocked my bestiary with the bizarrest creatures I could find, and reconstructed Ravna Olegg-Thorssondóttir from the pink paste that I had found texture-coating the myriad pieces of what had been my kitchen. After six or seven hours of futilely trying to construct at first a Frankensteinian and later a Herbertwestian apparatus to breathe life back into my hoosie-fessed little skeetch-truncheon, I began to despair. But then the phone rang.
It was Ravna. She wanted to know where I had been for the past four weeks. My larynx lurched into action, concocting a realistic alibi before my brain was able to shift into gear and attempt to explain something that wouldn’t send me to the nut house over on Macadamia Street again.
“Oh! Just shaving the dog, Rav! Nothing to write home about!” I paused. “Wait a minute…” I eyed the mealy pile of pink goop clumsily shaped into a humanoid form and perched in the remnants of a kitchen chair. My eyes narrowed. “If this is Ravna on the phone, who are you!? …Yerk! Damn you, oatmeal cookies! You perfidious fiends thought you finally tricked the Grand Pnårpissimo good, didn’t you!? Well, you don’t fool me! Nothing fools the Grand Pnårpissimo!” I continued to rant, each sentence more febrile than the last. Not even the fear of another trip to the macadamia processing plant would stop me once I got on this feverish roll.
Twenty-seven minutes later (plus or minus one ear), completely out of both breath and spittle, I finally ended my denunciation of those perfidious oatmeal cookies and stepped down from the croissant upon which I had perched myself so effetely. The croissant alas was a total loss, crushed flat into the tabletop. Ravna had long since hung up her moose antlers, and somewhere around minute nine of my effluential tirade I had thrown my own phone’s handset to the floor and stomped on it with gusto and alabaster.
I murped again, deciding to leave the pile of mystery meat to its own devices and mentally putting the month’s hair-raising adventures behind me. I was hungry. I sauntered, goat-like, over to my kitchen cabinetry, cans of delicious and spongy potted meat on my mind. Time for another sandwich filled with mechanically separated goodness! But much to my chagrin, upon opening the cabinet door, I found not a single can of potted meat. My brow furrowed in dubious dubiosity. Had I not, just prior to my wild Brundlescapades, visited the local Spend-O-Mart and purchased six gross of canned potted meat?
I looked at the pile of pink goop clumsily shaped into a humanoid form and perched in the remnants of a kitchen chair again. The pink, spongy, greasy pile of pink goop clumsily shaped into a humanoid form. My eyes narrowed. “You vile oatmeal cookies! You unpotted all my potted meat!!”
Foiled me they had indeed. I was mad—madder than a wet hen locked in mortal combat against a glorpf-snake having nothing more than a dull toothpick with which to defend herself. I was just about to begin breaking windows and defenestrate myself, but then I saw him in a nearby portico: The man in the black suit with the glittering necktie, all fimbriated argent and gules. He stared at me—into me. I quailed in his presence. Had this mysterious, ensuited man followed me from the Brundlesphere? And—stranger still!—my house didn’t have any porticos!
“My house doesn’t have any porticos!” I blivened in a vain effort to both make the fimbriated man disappear and fill in yet another gaping plot hole in my life. Neither he nor the portico disappeared. I cranched. This was just like that time I’d found that filthy manganese pile-driver in a drainage ditch (next to the mesothelioma). My mind spun wildly, the centrifugal force throwing the hamsters off their wheels and right out my ears. (Dugongs, naturally, followed.) If this man had shadowed me all the way from the Brundlesphere, what other otherworldly creatures from the Brundlesphere would soon appear in my kitchen, too? Squamous gnomes? Fendippitous Eggmen? Howling harooloos!? An image slithered through my mind, a memory from the Brundlesphere: An image of tommygoffs flying in lazy circles above my palatial home while intestines sat around my very own kitchen table eating from bizarre and suppurthine bowls.
I glanced at the slowly melting humanoid form constructed of potted meat. Mechanically separated chicken, beef, salt, and… puréed sheep intestines euphemistically called “tripe” in order to protect the innocent. The spongy pink shape glistened. I queased.
I looked back at the fimbriated man. “Gnåaåaåh! Who are you!? What are you?! Why are you here?!? Is your name Borb, too!?!”
The man continued to be—silently. I just made borfnagle and snoozlekopf sounds. Where were Loquisha’s little brown feet when you needed them?!
And thus today ended a thousand-year period of the same old crap that the last thousand-year period offered. (Oddly, it was only a month-long thousand-year period.)