A Sefernday to surely forget
Sefernalized on November 19, 2023.
I have terrible news, dear readers! Horrible news! Terrifying news! Horrifying news! This year’s Sefernday celebratorials have all been cancelated! Cancelified! Canceled!
There shall be no pepperoni races nor any sausage beatings: A pig intestine shortage has made those wondrous tubular meat products unavailable and put the kibosh on the Sefernday games!
There shall be no sleet shooting: Global warming has put an end to sleet ’round these parts. Back in ’21, I saved some sleet but it all melted. Last year I saved even more—and remembered to store it in a freezer for safekeeping that time—but when I took it out this year, it all melted when I tried to wash the frost off. So that’s it for sleet shooting.
And according to the best science available today online, ducks are now extinct. So that’s it for whack-a-duck too. (The older game of whack-a-lion is out of the question. Don’t even ask.) I insisted that I recently encountered a whole badling of ducks, but everyone just looked at me like I was a moron and called me a nincompoop, a conspiracy theorist, and a science denier. So I slunk home, tail between legs, and resigned myself to the sad fact that Sefernday was canceled.
Even the competitive wafflestomping games had to be called off due to a particularly stubborn sewer clog beneath Bouillabaisse Boulevard. Not even the Himalayan varnishing gnomes could polish that one shiny enough to get it moving again.
Sefernday was canceled. This was even worse than that year we canceled Christmas because Santa Claus had kidnapped all the children.
I blundered aimlessly around the downtown area, forlornly gurning and murping at anyone whom I passed by. Most ignored me. Some looked askance at me—even more askance than is their usual wont. Others turned into glabrous machine elves and sublimated away into the æther. What was I to do? My Sefernday was ruined.
No pepperoni. No sausage. No ducks. Perhaps ducks were extinct. It had been known to happen to other animals we all know and love, like the dodo in 1662, the green-haired moonbat in 1994, and even the domestic moose in 2018. Perhaps all the jimsonweed I ate while snuffling about the Whatanagawatchee Swamp caused me to hallucinate those ducks… and that curious duck bar called the Quacking Bush.
Had pepperoni and sausage gone extinct, too? Was the story about a “shortage” in pig guts just another conspiratorial ruse to protect us from the knowledge that the last crop of pepperoni trees and sausage bushes had died off… due to drought and desertification and all the other shrieking horrors of climate change? Would my spaghetti trees be next!?
Panic gripped me like Gargamel squeezing a smurf to death in his bony hands. I yipped, Chihuahua-like, and fled in a blind fright. As is so often the case, I attempted to hide in a hole in the ground, but the hole I chose spat me back out. So I dove into another, and that one spat me out too—and purloined my bolo tie in the process! I ran and I ran (and then I ran some more). I wore my shoes out, then I wore my feet out, and then I wore my nose down to a nub. I stopped. I poked my eyestalks in every direction. I wasn’t sure where I was. Was I truly anywhere? I mean: How many places are there to be? I sat down dejectedly and the machine elves chewed my skin off.
Well, that does it, I said to myself inside my little pea brain. I shall simply celebrate Sefernday myself! With grim determination I skinlessly plodded home and grabbed Becasue. Come Hell or high water—even high interest rates—we would celebrate the heck out of this Sefernday ourselves.
As a man with an Å in his name, it was my obligation—nay, my duty!—to throw coherent communication out the proverbial window on Sefernday, and instead spend the day making the most inhuman shrieking and babbling noises. As a 5½-foot-tall girl–chipmunk, it was Becasue’s obligation to clobber me over the noggin for being such a big, dumb doodie-fess: An obligation she readily accepted on most days, including today.
My brain still smarted. I was dumb—deaf and dumb; deaf, drooling, and dumb—but my brain was still smart. And it smarted. It smarted to think, which made me dumber. It smarted to not think, which made me smarter. Did I eat something to make my brain sore? Maybe it was the football bat that struck me in the forehead a few minutes ago. Pepperoni and a football bat. There was no way to know.
I tried standing but my legs were still worn down to little nubs from all that running. My feet had yet to regrow. Becasue’s feet weren’t detachable like mine, so no help there. What to do? Keep babbling to myself? Matriculate myself into the sublime plenum once more? Run in strict geometric patterns about my chandeliers and ceiling clocks until I invert gravity and bring forth the End Times?
Sefernday had been a bust. Becasue melted into the floor—and the floor wasn’t even made out of butter anymore, as it had been until 2018 when I replaced it with wood. I looked up at my ceiling. My ceiling clock hung there, ticking out the hours, minutes, seconds, and thirds. What to do? Indecision and vacillation surrounded and suffocated me—
My brain still smarted. I also knew that Brian Brain was dead. Someone would pay dearly for that. Perhaps I’d take it out on those dogwinkles again. Or perhaps I would go on a tater-totting spree to sooth my smarting mind. My brain did need a rest from all this Seferndaisical worrying and paternostering. And my receding jawline left no doubt: My slow slide into dundering senescence continued unabated.
Once upon a time Sefernday had been a day to ſurely remember. But this one I wanted to ſurely forget. ◊