C has just realized:
a. that at long last the new Arby’s has opened.
b. that if you play all the songs from Into The Woods at the same time in your memory bank, your interior will resemble a painful glacier.
c. that skateboarding represents the pinnacle of human achievement.
d. that mountain over there is a snorgath and not a mountain at all.
A bot focuses intently on its mission to deliver cupcakes. No taunting or hurled insult can divert it from its task. Believe me, I tried.
In the Valley of Soot the bleak town of Scraps sprawled in the mud next to the sludge stream. In the worst of the huts Little Scratch crawled under the splintered beam to breakfast.
‘Here now finally, are ye?’ said Little Scratch’s mother. ‘ Eat your scrape of tar and hurry up about it before I throw it on the rancid heap.’
Little Scratch barely managed to swallow the scrape of tar and hurried to the pit to visit her grandfather, the only grown person in the whole wide world she loved who loved her back.
When she squeezed under the barbed wire and crawled down into the pit and saw her grandfather sitting there, she said, ‘Grump, won’t ye please tell me again about the Fountain of Wonder and Glory?’
‘Ah yes, my little heart, ye know, I do believe ye have enough length on ye now to seek for yourself the Fountain of Wonder and Glory,’ said the grandfather.
Little Scratch shivered in thrill and crouched low to her grandfather’s side to listen. Not fifteen minutes later, carrying a pouch of gravel seeds tucked in her least ripped shirt, she swam the sludge stream and trudged over the hill of thistle prickles and broken boulders. In the distance she saw Left Mountain and Right Mountain. Following her grandfather’s instructions, she headed for Left Mountain, which was the mountain on the right.
A month later, standing atop the cliff marking the summit of Left Mountain, she turned her pouch inside out and pincered out the last of the gravel seeds with thumb and forefinger.
There, that’s done it for that, she thought. Now I follow Grump’s final instruction.
Without hesitation, she flung herself off the cliff. A sound of wind. A rush of cool. She fell. And awoke on silver sands at the edge of a lake. She gazed at the miracle. The Fountain of Wonder and Glory lifted its many-colored arms in spray as if to celebrate Little Scrape’s arrival. Little Scrape shuddered in bliss. Her shirt was soft and had nary a rip.
‘Thank ye, Grump,’ she whispered.
oh, butch cavendish, where hast thou gone?
heartless villain of yesteryear
do you yearn once more
to confront the pair
masked man
on silver steed
and faithful companion urging
his mount to ‘get ’em up, scout’?
The sandwiches were indeed most disappointing.
While on lunch break between scenes, Fay and Robert can’t help but notice:
a. the giant tarantula.
b. the matron approaching rapidly while carrying a pair of very large hypodermic syringes filled with a dirty brown fluid of some sort.
c. that the sandwiches are one thin slice of cheese between two slices of stale bread.
d. their respective agents slashing each other to death in a knife fight.
‘I am so lovely,’ said the Magnificent Witch of Oin.
She smiled at her image in the pearl encircled mirror. She shook her head softly side to side to watch her lustrous tresses sway. She sighed at the glorious sheen of her draped red satin gown. Could her hands be any lovelier? While gazing at their shapely perfection, she thought not.
###
A pair of travelers moving along the stream flowing through the canyon of Oin paused.
‘What’s that there?’ said one, a stranger from a distant land. He pointed up to the mouth of a cave in the canyon wall.
‘Oh, nothing of any concern,’ said the other, a farmer from the verdant plain spreading out from the mouth of the canyon. ‘It’s only Mad Mag, the Ragged Hag of Oin. She wanders about in rags like that, grinning and posing. She eats bats and insects. Around here she’s considered to be a lucky charm of sorts.’
###
She couldn’t help but notice the pair of knights regarding her with subservient awe. She nodded regally in their direction, then raised her perfect chin to a noble expression of supremacy.
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Doc's Lunacy
5 of 5 stars to The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton goodreads.com/review/show/55…
