…wafted into the street, where a big rig driven by Big Stan Brown ran over it. It stuck to a wheel; a few blocks later Stan and his petite wife Louise got out. Louise noticed it and peeled it off the truck-tire tread; she’d been nursing a grudge with the paperboy, who was due to be paid the next day and had a nasty habit of throwing the Browns’ newspaper in the rose planter, on top of the rabbit hutch, or through the bathroom window. She kept 26F, soiled appearance and all, and paid him with it plus other currency the next day. The paperboy, not a quick study, used the well-traveled fiver at…
… a game of three card monty being played by some unscrupulous 8th graders. He followed the “hand is quicker than the eye” routine, and felt confident that the red queen was on the left, but alas, the card on the left was revealed to be a club. The unscrupulous 8th graders then took their booty to the parking lot of the nearest liquor store and began asking random customers…
…if they wanted to try their luck at the game. A security guard chased them off the lot; the kid with 26F lost interest in TCM and wandered a few blocks away to a fish & chips stand; he used the bill to buy a small serving plus a Coke. The proprietor put a $10 bill into the till in place of 26F and another fiver; he picked up some milk at the nearby supermarket on the way home. A thieving check out clerk saw the soiled fiver and…
…its mysterious phone number. He pocketed the bill and went home gleefully, visions of creamy telephone orgasms in his head. When he called the number using his default long-distance carrier, however, the system merely gave a error message. He tried a number of other long-distance carriers, for each one dialing a different “101” code in front of the number. Still no luck. But then… something connected.
There was a click. A voice with an odd accent said, “Ha lo? Kiu vi estas?”
The clerk did not respond.
“Ha lo! Kiu vi estas!!” The voice was upset. “Respondu!”
Silence.
“Respondu al mi! Nune! Se ne, mi sciigos la policistojn! Vi ne rajtas uzi tiu cxi linion!!”
Silence from the clerk, who was secretly amused. “What a goof,” he thought. “Can’t even speaka da Inglish.” He said nothing and continued listening.
The voice, now quite angry, said, “Do. Via kulpo. Mi informigis la Centralon. La nigraj helikopteroj nun iras vien. Andiaux.” There was a disquieting chuckle from the phone. The the call was broken.
The clerk looked at the telephone. “Well. That was weird,” he thought. He hung up the handset. “Oh well. Maybe I’ll order pizza…”
“…now, what kind of pizza should I have? I like sausage and pepperoni, but I’m kind of in the mood for onions and green peppers. Or maybe should I go wild and try extra cheese this time, and maybe even some anchovies?” A paragon of decisiveness, the clerk pondered the question for another 15 minutes, then picked up the phone, and dialed the pizza place.
“Hello, this is Papa John’s. Will this be delivery or carryout?” said the voice at the other end.
The clerk did not respond.
And then…
The silence was deafening.
Distracted, he looked down at the bill and studied it carefully.
There was something alluring, almost arousing about Honest Abe’s portrait. The close he looked, the more his eyes were drawn to the beard, on the left side of the chin.
Much to his surprise he saw the word SEX embedded right there for all the world to see.
“I’ve gotta do something about this,” he thought. “I mean it’s one thing for Disney animators, corporate CEO’s and Madison Ave types to pull this kind of stunt, but not the engravers at the US Dept. of Treasury”
Having realized Papa John’s makes really shitty pizza and not even feeling hungry anymore, he hung up the phone and dialed his the number of his old friend Paul O’Neill…
…In came the clerk’s live-in girlfriend, carrying a large pizza with all the topppings he liked. “Surprise!” she said.
Then she asked, “Jimbo, I’ve got to do some laundry. Can you give me five for the laundromat?”
“Sure,” he said, and handed her the 26F bill. She trundled her laundry basket across the street. But just as she approached, she saw someone inside tampering with a change machine in the laundromat, and a plainclothes cop with a sliding gait wtacthing him. She nervously clutched the bill and…
…looked back towards Jim’s apartment. As she looked, however, three silent black helicopters came down out of the night sky. Ropes fell from their open side doors. Commandos slid down them. The first smashed bodily through the apartment window. Two more followed. Others landed on neighbouring rooftops and took up guard positions.
A few seconds later, the first two commandos reappeared at the apartment window, bearing a struggling man-size burden. The ropes hauled them back into one of the helicopters, which turned, rose, and began to accelerate away. A moment later, the other commandos started back up their ropes, and, as they were climbing, their helicopters followed the first.
Suddenly the scene was motionless. Joan–Jim’s girlfriend, though he’d never called her by name, and indeed she wasn’t even sure whether he knew her name–just stood there and looked. Yes, that was her apartment.
Yes. Her apartment. Her name was on the lease; she paid all the bills, and that freeloader Jim just sat around and loafed, or hung out with his no-good poolhall “friends”. Where did he get his money, anyways? She didn’t really want to know. She would have turfed him out weeks ago, but… but… he was so good in bed. He knew all the right spots. It was like he could look at anything, even the freaking phone, and see just the right way to arouse it. He joked that he gave phonre-sex workers orgasms.
She clutched the five-dollar bill. Her breast heaved. Would she ever find as good a lover again?
She sighed. Maybe it was just as well…
… because although the sex was great, he had a tendency to beat her when he got angry.
As Joan bent to the task of loading up two washing machines, she thought of Jim and what he may be going through now. She also wondered, honestly, whether she should even go home after she was done with the laundry…
She put 26F in the change machine and got back 20 quarters for her laundry.
The following morning, Paul Overfield, the cash collection clerk for Squeek-E-Kleen Laundries emptied 26F into a locked deposit bag and headed back out of the laundromat to the armored car just outside. He was but three feet from the truck when …
… he slipped on a banana peel and landed face first, shattering the cartilage in his nose. And as he spurted blood onto the ground, the deposit bag flew through the air and landed on the ground roughly, spilling open, quarters spilling out onto the asphalt with a clicking sound and bills stirred up by the wind. As 26F was caught and carried by a quick gust…
…A buxom woman named Jane Bradley, accompanied by her husband Joe and their five kids, walked that way. A pert gust of wind caused the fiver to slip between Jane’s ample boobs.
Joe dared to snicker; the kids did not. There was a laugh from the commandos, still on the rooftop, as they trundled Jimbo away, to the delight of the weary Joan. Most likely the commandos would drop Jim off at the county line and tell him never to come back.
Meanwhile the cop arrested the burglar in the laundromat and Jane pulled the 26F bill out of her cleavage, with only Big Joe daring to watch. She stuffed it in her handbag. Jimmy, her youngest, wanted some bubble gum, so Jane and Joe went to an AM-PM mart, where they…
…bought a shiny new T-Square with it. The nerdy store clerk promptly…
…put it in the till and went on to the next sale.
26F languished in the till for almost a minute. The store was busy, and the next few customers after Mrs. Bradley only required one-dollar notes or coins for their change. Soon the clerk needed more ones. He pressed the intercom. “Ellie! It’s Per at the front! I need twenty in ones and ten in quarters!”
A bulky lady appeared from the back of the store. At the front, she took a twenty-dollar note from Per’s till, and–there being no tens–two fives, including 26F. She replaced them with a stack of ones and a pile of quarters. “Thanks, Percival. You’re always such a dear.” She patted the clerk on the head.
“You’re welcome,” said Per through gritted teeth. “Please don’t call me that.”
“But dear! It’s your name! You used to love hearing it! Why, when I was your babysitter…”
“Mrs Bonham! Please!” The clerk blushed. Several girls in the lineup giggled. Oblivious, Mrs Bonham moved away.
His cheeks red with humiliation and embarassment, Percival Howley served the next customer. And banknote 26F rested in a cashbox in a dingy office at the back of a conveniece store on a street of broken dreams…
…until it was deposited in the night deposit box of the local bank by the asst. manager.
The next day, while counting the deposits, bank teller Shelly accidently cut her finger on a crisp new five dollar bill. Drops of blood spiled on the counter top, one just catching the corner of 26F.
The DNA of bank teller Shelly activated a microscopic transmitter unknowingly placed in 26F by the unscrupulous 8th graders who had lifted it from a CIA operative with a gambling addiction and surprisingly low IQ.
The transmitter sent a coded message to…
… me, but I deleted it because I thought it was spam having forgotton that I’d encoded my hotmail address onto the transmitters chip.
26F in the mean-time spent 6 days in the bank’s vault before THE BANK WAS ROBBED and 26F went with the millions upon millions of other dollar bills to…
…land in one of a series of canvas bags jammed into the back of a van screaming along the interstate, police in hot pursuit. The…
…criminals not stopping until they finally hit a red light in New York City where they stopped for nachos and a cold drink. 26F being used to pay the prostitute/cashier. A short time later a regular customer stopped in for a “quick one” and while the cashier was busy and had her eyes closed he rifled the till and glommed onto 26F. He had planned to stay for a second round but one of the Secret Service men assigned to him reminded him that Hillary expected him home for dinner. In gratitude he gave 26F to the agent who…
…died. Unfortunately for all around him, he had been wired to a “dead man switch” which unleashed a deadly biotoxin into the taco salad.
At the autopsy, 26F fell onto the cold tile floor and lay unnoticed for weeks, until…
…it was picked up by assistant medical examiner Art Farhken. A curious deja vu came over him…he knew the phone was about to ring.
The phone rang. Art picked up the phone and spoke. “Hello, this is Papa John’s. Will this be delivery or carryout?”
Art stared at 26F, the confusion growing in his mind. No one responded at the other end. Art swooned, and as the bill fell from his clammy hand…
…the janitor awoke from his coma and went back to work. When he went to sweep 26F into the dustpan, he noticed a bit of green and splotch of dark red. Thinking it was too early for Christmas, he picked it up for a better look. Lunch!
He was in a time crunch so he stopped at a nearby convenience store and bought a bag of doritos and a prized nehi soda. The prosititute/clerk then…