Chapter 9
| The Story | The Authors |
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An Albino alligator a waterlogged copy of Gone With The Wind three pencils a baby's arm holding an apple The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra with Leonard Slatkin conducting Carl Orff's Carmina Burana several rubber squeak toys a flashlight a slightly less than mint copy of Action Comics #1 a rather tarnished Grammy the secret diaries of Adolf Hitler (forged) and finally one dwarf and two old pirates who sat in the sand sheepishly and squinting in the afternoon sun. | |
| "Yuck!" said Mr. Tickles. "That was horrible!" And so saying he ran off. Where was Cupcake Island? What did everyone want with him? His last question was answered by Meredith. Grasping his arm with unusual strength, she proclaimed, "You have to come with us to the radio station and tell us what Donovan's intestines are like!!!" | |
| "'Tis no use! I have already consumed Donovan's intestines! Shortly after consuming his testicles!!! Next is Mr. Tickles' testicles!!!!! For I dearly love Rocky Mountain Oysters!!!!!!!!!!" | |
| Surely he was delirious and babbling incoherently having been immersed in an atmosphere of methane. His brain was infused with such gases as Donovan had been socially trained to retain, and they were taking their toll on Mr. Tickles' demeanor. Meredith grabbed his paw and led him through a field of poppies running and skipping to get him winded, breathing heavily in and out, clearing his head for the impending radio interview. | |
| Mr Tickles loved the blue and white patches which made up the cloth of Meredith's dress. They reminded him of the kitchen table cloths he used to lay on on hot summer days, the smell of tuna sandwiches being made, and his good fortune to be able to lick the tuna can afterwards. He thought of tuna as he was running with Meredith. As they reached the edge of the poppy field he began to feel nervous. The radio station was not far off. It's big 50,000 watt antennae protruding up into the sky. Meredith looked at him and smiled. | |
| "Everything is really going to be all right, you know," she said. Mr. Tickles smiled weakly and gave an uncertain nod. Meredith tilted her head and narrowed her eyes slightly. "You haven't changed your mind, have you?" she asked. He reached out and lightly touched her sleeve. "No, I haven't." He said decisively. "Let's do this." | |
| 'ok' said meredith, "the first thing you have to do is take off all your clothes and paint your body pink." mr tickles looked at her in stunned silence. finally he managed to splutter out "ALL MY CLOTHES??!" meredith sighed and rolled her eyes. these tax inspectors were all the same. | |
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And with these last pronouncements — for the umpteenth having absolutely nada to do with the story at hand — "told by an idiot/full of sound and fury/signifying nothing" — the dwarf knew that once and for all he really was gone. Crazy. Bull goose loony. Stuffed fuller than Sibyl with voices that just weren't going to go away. Plagued by hallucinatory sex-kittens. "I'm cuckoo for Coco-Puffs," was all he could manage to stammer, weakly, grasping the trunk of a coconut palm for support, which rained six successive coconuts down onto his head before dissolving into the old, ill-cared-for Plaster of Paris it had been formed from, many years back, for episode #13 of Gilligan's Island. Mr. Tickles knew none of this from his vantage point upon the ground — his head throbbed with six new goose-eggs and his overworked libido was, as usual, "all dressed up with no place to go," and he had gone crazy. Crazy. This was a beginning them, he allowed himself as a final sentient thought, a last cigarette before quitting, so to speak — the world was not as he had imagined it! Everything was a lie. Perhaps he wasn't even required to be a dwarf any longer, eh, think of that? And with that, the remaining substance of the dream broke apart, the sky shredded and shrivelled away into a million million tiny pieces, revealing a new sky behind itself, the sun behind the sun of the ancient Maya, the whorling of the constellations in brand new configurement, the Dog Star licking its butt, all former horoscopic promises bedamned, even the trees no longer strictly tress the way we have come to assume them. He stood up then. He stood up, and he kicked sand over the deflated skin of what had once masqueraded as a Meredith, he hitched up his pants and he headed off into the next great adventure of his life. Someone, Raven or some other Trickster God, had pinned the May 3rd page from an old Page-A-Day Ziggy calendar on his back. It bore the quotation "Today is the First Day of the Worst [sic] of Your Life."
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