From An Admirer

The small brown parcel arrived in the mail on Thursday afternoon. As I untied the string holding it closed, I thought to myself, "who ties parcels with string anymore? We have a little thing called tape, people!" After struggling with knots that were clearly tied with a heavy-duty industrial knot-tying machine and resorting to my pocket knife, I ripped the paper off and threw off the cardboard lid.

Inside, on a bed of tissue paper, lay a singular flower. It was tiny and delicate, five blue petals with a yellow eye. There was no note, no card, not even a return address. The message, I deduced, must be the flower itself.

I retrieved the wildflower guide I received for Christmas some years ago from an aunt too cheap to get me a proper gift, and flipped through its pages. After about twenty minutes of searching, I found it; a True Forget-me-not, Myosotis scorpioides.

"Forget-me-not?" I thought, baffled and a little bit weirded out, "who wants me to remember them? It seems I've already forgotten the fool!" I chuckled at my own irreverent insouciance. I got up to put the book back on its shelf, and as I closed the cover, a slip of paper fell out from between the pages and landed at my feet. Could this be what the flower's sender meant for me to find?

I bent down to examine it.

TO BE CONTINUED!

Let's trade mix CDs.

"We should trade mix CDs."

Where do you live?

"Outside your postal code / state / country. Why? Is that a problem?"

Well... not necessarily. But the last person I promised to mail a mix CD to has been waiting for three or four years. And there was this other chick whom I dropped 20 dollars on at Sanrio while she was overseas. That was... five years ago? And I haven't so much as bought stamps yet. Yeah.

"I've got time."

So you think. But if you get hit by a low-flying passenger bus, you better not haunt me.

"Tch. If I die, I'm gonna haunt someone sexy."

You mean someone... less... sexy?

"Lead pipe to the thorax! Aw yeah!"

Wh-? Are you playing a video game while we're talking?

"Hold on dude. Sadie wants to talk to you."

"hay nate! whattup duders"

I'm pretty sure I don't know anyone named Sadie.

"omgooses you silly dweeb- this is saders from the new jersey health convention"

I've never in my life been to New Jersey. And a health convention sounds either completely salutary or entirely hazardous.

"these are satyrs from the convex heliotrope gardens"

No such thing. Ever.

"are u listening to bloodstone by amon tobin???"

Well, I was. Wait. What is this? Put the other guy back on. Put, uh- Who was I talking to before?

"jaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaake!! jaaaaake!"

"Okay. I'm back."

I'm really confused right now.

"Oh, I'm filling an envelope with glitter and matches. Gimme your address."

No. You give me your address and I'll send you a link to a Google Maps page showing local psychiatric help.

"Is it sexy psychiatric help?"

I'm going with yes...

Behind the Door

A gentle humming sound and a sickly glow emanated from behind it. It was covered with large warning signs, like wrapping paper smothering the shiny packaging of a brand new Nintendo on Christmas morning.

'DO NOT ENTER'
'ENTRANCE PROHIBITED'
'IT IS AGAINST THE RULES TO OPEN THIS DOOR'
'DIESEN TÜRKNAUF NICHT BERÜHREN'

It was painted red, and seemed almost to be pulsating. How could anyone not be compelled by their inner-child, demon, or doorman to open this stately portal?

There were no sturdy deadbolts, no keypads with secret codes, no high-tech fingerprint or retina scanners. Nothing between the forbidden lair within and myself besides a four-inch slab of steel and an ice cold knob of titanium.

My right hand trembled as I hesitantly inched it closer and closer to the beckoning orb. In a split second, my hand shot out, almost of its own accord. I grabbed the knob, turned it, and pulled.

In this wafer-thin slice of time, my life -- nay, the world -- as I knew it was irrevocably changed. With the door, opportunity swung open before me, as I gaped at the chasm now left exposed by my action.

And you wouldn't believe what I saw. So I won't tell you.

The Grim Sentence of the Dire Viscount Maxwell Anticli and the Uncompromising Doom of the Black Night Waiting in the Nefarious Shadows

It was a dark and stormy night and the nefarious Viscount Maxwell Anticli was trimming his helical goatee with a pair of bonsai sheers stolen from the nightstand of one of the Priestess of Manta Ray's vestigial virgins, the kind that weren't quite as austere these days and who didn't really take their virginal duties all that seriously anymore; a state of affairs brought on by the Priestess's advanced stage of ennuisia, the symptoms of which manisfested in an unusual way: the Priestess was completely weighted down by an inexplicable boredom with life which she then forgot whenever someone brought round the cake tray for tea or whenever it was time for badminton, a pastime best enjoyed with other severe and dreaded female role models from the surrounding hills and dells, such as the Mistress of Butterchurn Court, Dame Harshly, and the Werewolf Oracle of Brennet whose nightly howls unsettled the stones and turned deers into statues and inspired crows to fly complex backward full-formation loop-de-lupes, which were exactly the sort of unnatural phenomena that kept the local Dracula Adventure Tours company in a steady flow of tourist cash, a great deal of which was paid for in filthy lucre passed through the grasping claws of lizardmen and the rusty hooks of pirates: precisely the sort of people who would think their nephews and nieces might appreciate a gift certificate for a suicidal bus ride guided by a deranged exsanguinator with a penchant for silk-trimmed capes, the type of capes which were expertly made in a den-like shop owned by the deadly three-armed Man Beast of Sans Well, a fifteen-fingered artisan/hired hitman who was just now brandishing a hatchet with one hand, grasping someone's untrimmed muttonchop with another, and holding a glass of Parisian lemonade in yet another large sausage-fingered hand, a hand which had earlier held a phone book while yet another hand (belonging to a glassblower with a lisp) wrote down a number listed under "Anticli, Max - 832 Grim Castle Ave," an entry which described a man who, at this point, had been scheming and trimming his goatee and was, at this slightly later point, being held by his muttonchop and confronted with a small handaxe which, he now realized, had been crafted from a badminton racquet by an artisan with an odd sense of humor and a set of racquet pliers, the artisan in question now clutching at the baleful Viscount and finishing a tirade about the pitfalls of taking advantage of the unsuspecting but completely willing women under the questionable care of a dreaded and severe Priestess who was, even now, in such an extreme fugue that she couldn't even remember how much she hated all the fun things she was doing in the company of her friends, and then, the fearsome lecturing Man Beast cleared his throat and sipped at his glass of Parisian lemonade (which he had liberated from the feisty Viscount's nightstand) which then prompted the Viscount to plainly announce "you know that's not really lemonade, right?"

The Chick Is Cooked

Whoosh!

That is all.


For now.

The Dude Is Raw

I just rubbed razors across my face. I am raw. Don't mess with me. I use italics.

The Virtually-Identical-In-Size Announcement

There were polar bears everywhere. Everywhere, I tells ya.

Not a single one of them had a nice refreshing beverage to offer me, just "simple" home-decorating tips involving half-consumed salmon and pine cones. These bears were not graduates of FIT, I can say that for certain.

I tried to build a raft out of snow, but that didn't work. That is why I am slowly melting the polar ice caps; this way I will eventually get home.

Sorry about all the flooding.

Back to our regularly scheduled noise.