I’m sure this has been done here before, perhaps many times, but I’m bored. You know those silly Fiction 101 exercises where students write a single story by taking turns adding lines or paragraphs? Usually, the goals are to spur creativity, encourage continuity, and otherwise expose students to other writing styles. Often, it turns into a giant game of literary Telephone. I’ll start:
Hank glanced nervously at his watch. Two thirteen. It had been nearly five hours since the circus clowns had started gathering outside his window. Dozens of them. His lawn was quickly becoming slick with seltzer water and lemon merengue. The squeaky din of bicycle horns was nearly unbearable. What did they want? Where did they come from? His mind rifled through his list of enemies, but came up with nothing. “How could this all be happening again?” he thought.
Suddenly, he thought of Sylvia and what she had told him. “Of course!” he chided. “How could I have missed that?” Now he knew what he had to do. Steeling himself, he headed for the door. He had to act quickly, before the midgets arrived.
Without being seen, Hank made it out through the kitchen and into the garage. In just a couple of seconds he was around the front with his Vokswagon Beetle.
Kaahooogaaa! Kaahooogaa!
That oughta catch those tumbling painted creeps attention, Hank thought.
Sure enough, the clowns gathered around the car. Hank had enough time to dive through the open window before the painted freaks started piling in. 5 then 10 then 25 clowns climb into the tiny vehicle. . .
Hank grabbed a plunger and helped the last of the rotund circus freaks wedge his way into the back seat. Or was it a her? He could never tell.
His plan was going perfectly. He reached in and turned the ignition key. Relief washed over his face as the Beetle sputtered to life on the first turn.
He quickly set about duct taping all the windows shut. He had already removed the inside door handles and disengaged the transmission the night before. There would be no escape.
He stood in front of the car and said with a straight face “Is everybody ready for a good time?” He was greeted with an octave of bicycle horn notes. “Here we go,” he muttered under his breath.
He walked to the door leading to his kitchen and pressed the button to lower the garage door. He flipped the light switch off and headed inside, unable to stomach what was surely going to be mass clownicide. He shut the door, went inside to make himself a well deserved TV dinner and turned on the boob tube to watch the latest BtVS.
Halfway through what was so far an exciting show a loud knock came from the door leading to the garage. Hank’s heart skipped a beat. The doorknob turned slowly and . . .
In through the door poured thousands of multi-colored beings. The leader was blue, with six arms, four legs, a head that could spin around 360 degrees, and one eye in the center of a protruding forehead. He opened his mouth wide, until it seemed to take over his whole face, exposing rows and rows of savage, sharp, glistening white teeth.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhh!” screamed Hank, as he made a dive for the door. “Aliens!”
“Of course we are aliens,” responded the leader, reaching out a hand adorned with razor-sharp nails to grab Hank’s shoulder. “What did you think that clowns were? Human?” he laughed. “What an insult! And to think you tried to kill us! Now, you will have to pay.”
Shiela, you bitch!, Hank thought as hundreds of shiny, white enamel daggerettes closed around his head, I would be done for, if it wasn’t for the metal plate that you put in my head..
In those few moments, Hank tought back to the first prank Shiela pulled on him. . .
It was hard for Hank to believe that nearly ten years had passed since Sheila had set him up as a victim on Reality Now in its first season back in June of 2003. All of these years later he was still occasionally recognized in public. Of course people could hardly forget his face after it was live on TV for twenty-nine days straight, a Reality Now record that wasn’t broken for eight years. Little did anyone know that his TV appearance would set today’s events into motion. It all started with a tragic misunderstanding when Sheila thought that….
he was sleeping with one of his patients. Now, granted, this terrible thought was made all the worse because at the time, Hank was working as a tech in a clinic…a veterinary clinic. She had walked in to visit him at work that day…it just had to be livestock day, he thought. There he was, wearing rubber gloves, with a sheep racked into the harness they used for examinations…and his fly had been down. He’d apparently forgotten to zip it up when he’d been in the bathroom earlier. But she, as usual, assumed the worst. “Am I not enough for you?” she screamed, as she stormed out the door of the exam room. “And I always thought that you liked horsies better, you bastard!” she delivered as her parting shot as she left. He didn’t see her for three days, when he woke up unexpectedly in the middle of the night, to see her staring down at him…his hands were already cuffed to the bed frame, and…
…he noticed a table of sterilized surgical instruments disturbingly close by. Sheila was busily setting up several bright lights around the room, kind of like those kind you see on movie sets. A man in surgical scrubs stood in a corner of the room with his back to Hank. His hands were held up and to his sides and latex gloves already adorned them.
Sheila spoke. “So you claim that aliens are always after you, eh? Always making you go after the farm animals, is that it?” She put her hands on her hips. “Well, we’re about to a stop to that. Dr. Sawbone here lost his license a few years ago in some flap over his controversial choice of anasthetic. Rather than ether the good doctor prefers boisterous bagpipe music played at 110 decibels.”
Sheila donned a noise canceling headset and placed an identical set on the doctor. He turned. “Don’t vurry about a zing, Meester Piddlestein, I pareform zees operations many timez before. Ve vill be removink the top haff uv your skull and replacink eet weeth a metal cap that vill keep zos nasssssstee alianz fum trackink you down. Plees cloze your eyez now.” He reached down and gently placed a needle on a worn phonograph record. The crackle and hiss emanating from the record told Hank indeed this would get very loud. Hank steeled himself.
Hank’s eyes snapped open. Nothing. Or rather, the white blotchy nothing of the ceiling. ‘How does one get a ceiling dirty?’ he thought, the blotches more the color of the wall than the paint. He rolled his eyes right. Nothing. Actually, this time it was a blue nothing, splotches and all. One of the splotches, now that he looked at it, looked rather like a clown, a clown with a kilt. As he watched, the clown reached down to another splotch, which looked rather like bagpipes, and began to play, his breath puffing in and out as the drone of the music went on and on in Hank’s ears.
His heart almost stopped whena freckled face (not a scary freckled face, actually a rather attractive one, but nonetheless a sudden one) inserted itself into his line of vision. The freckled mouth was moving beneath the freckled red hair pulled back in a severe freckled bun. No sound came out, just the wheezing of the bagpipes.
Slowly sound began to come back. To accentuate the droning kilted music, he heard a sound like a whisper, then a buzz, then finally, as he began to distinguish words among the mixture, he heard her say…
“Would you like fries with that?”
“What was that?” Hank said.
The red headed cashier looked at him warily, eyeing him while continuing to maintain her perfect, plastic clown smile. The sound of the bagpipes slowly died away into a forgotten echo of memory as he remembered that he was standing in line at the McClown Happy Land fast food joint, a mere fifty paces away from his home; a place where he enjoyed eating when the laziness of his dreary existence sometimes caught up to him.
Hank shook his head and she rattled off a total. He handed out a wad of change and washed dollar bills, a spitball of metal and green George Washingtons. The redhead looked pissed as she slowly unwadded the money. A dime and two nickels fell to the floor as she tried to avoid a rather hostile ball of pocket lint. Clowns in the background, all looking disheleved and bitter, filled out his order.
Suddenly the bagpipes called Hank into the realm of fantasy and found himself…
… back in his kitchen, surrounded by the six-armed freaks. Hank was still alive, for the moment, but his hold on sanity was slipping. He was increasingly unsure what was real and what wasn’t. The memory of Sheila’s impromptu ‘treatment’ still bounced around inside that alloy-plated head of his.
“I don’t understand…he should be dead by now!” cried the red-headed one, her weapon still pointed at Hank’s skull. The look on the leader’s blue-skinned face betrayed his confusion as well. The bewilderment soon gave way to a menacing smile, and he craned his neck down, close enough for Hank to smell a putrid mix of stale circus peanuts and curdled whipped cream.
“Do you think a little piece of metal is going to save you, Piddlestein? Take him down!”
At the leader’s command, thirty cold hands grabbed Hank and slammed him onto the chipped Pergo, holding him secure. The blue one snapped two of his thirty fingers, and someone nearby handed him a bizzare instrument sporting a variety of blades, needles, and corkscrews. “We’ll just have to get that pesky plate out, that’s all.” With the press of a button, the entire device began whirring and rotating. “Tell, me, Hank, is it safe?”
“What was that?”
“Nevermind.” The blue alien grinned an evil yellow grin, bending down to administer some crude reversal of Dr. Sawbone’s surgery. The whirring grew louder. The corkscrews neared his face. Hank steeled himself.
The noxious cloud of reality confused fumed floated up to the aliens’ noses and they breathed in. Hank would’ve given up his season tickets at Buck’s Bronco Bashers just to have had a camera at that moment.
First, their noses (if you could call them noses) twitched. Their eyes rolled around as if looking for an unseen enemy. The device fell to the floor as they brought their hands (if you could call them hands) to swat ineffectually at the air. They began twirling, faster and faster, spinning like tops as they retreated back into the garage, leaving a trail of slimishness in their wake.
Hank blinked, half expecting to see them reappear with an even deadlier device and gas masks.
What did appear made him wish for the aliens and their not so subtle methods back.
She walked quickly through the dissipating fog, thin tendrils of it curling around her wrists and ankles in a weak attempt to slow her down.
She was talking aloud, but not to Hank. “I knew it! I just knew it! That bionic asshole we installed during your skull operation was going to save your life someday. The two stink glands we installed are a one time shot and are pretty painful to replace. Don’t clench your sphincter any time soon or the residual gas will be trapped in your rectum. It’ll wind its way up through your intestines and eventually up your esophagus. Believe me, you don’t want to taste that stuff. Whew! I can stiff get a whiff of it even with these nose filters in.”
Sheila grabbed Hank’s hand and started pulling him towards the front door. “C’mon!” she said, “Those things may have retreated like whirling dervishes but they’ll be back with technology even I can’t describe. We’ve got to leave this place!”
Hank pulled back. “No! Not until I get some answers! Clowns? Aliens? Do I really have a metal cap up here?” he asked, tapping the side of his head.
Sheila stopped, looking sadly at Hank. “Hank, Hank, my poor dear. You really don’t remember, do you?” She came close and put her hand on the back of his neck. “No, it’s more like right here” she said, and gently tapped higher up on Hank’s skull. He heard a distinct metallic ring when she did that. “I’ll explain everything on the way to headquarters. But for the life of Brian, we’ve got to move now.”
Hank allowed himself to be yanked out the front door and down to a waiting black car idling at the curb. It was only then that he noticed that Sheila had forgotton to remove her clown shoes.