writings from the edge of
an all-text, all-beginner page ... full of flaws for your amusement!
The Waddell Tale: Completely Uncut (has nothing to do with the below)
Amid an exploding cacophony of cheers, Thomas O’Darby stumbled clumsily across the room. His steps were uncertain, and he fell several times, twisting his ankle rather badly once. Finally, he reached his goal and stretched his fingers outwards towards it, a smile splitting his face in two ...
The ax fell, splitting Tom’s head the other way, and Tom’s tormentor laughed heartily. He stood, and surveyed the denizens of his nation; he clapped politely for his executioner.
“With the death of O’Darby,” he stated grandly, “the death of rebellion!”
A cheer rose from the assembled, filling the sky until it exploded, showering them with ashes and blue velvet.
The tormentor exited, his appetite for suffering appeased. He strode boldly through the halls of his palace; he halted only to admonish a drunken servant. With a flourish, he hurled the doors to his chambers inward, revealing a sumptuous apartment, decorated in garish colors and obscene idols.
His window overlooked a small town outside his palace walls, and the tormentor stared out upon it, aware that he, and no other power, controlled the fate of every life within his domain.
“I am their God,” he whispered to himself. “Me first, then their pathetic deity. I am the alpha, omega, and all tween.”
Suddenly, the window ruptured, showering the room with glass shards. An explosion welled-up from the distance, clawing its way across the land, a rabid beast, angrily consuming all its obstacles. The village disappeared entirely, the walls tumbled, leaving the tormentor bare, staring in horror at his approaching Armageddon.
“Never!” screamed he, and he turned and sprinted desperately for the door, his hands out-stretched. The fireball crashed into the palace, shaking it to its very foundations, and the ceiling crashed down, blocking the tormentor’s path.
Horrified, he spun, and faced the unstoppable death. One word escaped his dry lips, shattering on the floor along with cold beads of sweat. “Mercy,” he uttered, and was blasted backwards through the debris, through his doors, through the very walls of the palace until he came to rest beside the corpse of Tom O’Darby.
The fireball still advanced, swallowing everyone in its path. The executioner fell screaming, his ax plunged deep into his own gut. The cheering masses huddles against the wall and each vanished into the insatiable flame alone, often shoved to that undesirable fate by a comrade seeking to somehow delay the approaching Reaper.
The tormentor rose, his broken body screaming in agony, and he turned and fled, leaving his people to be sacrificed in his stead. He left the palace opposite the village, and skirted the moat, searching for a bridge. There was none, all being removed to prevent O’Darby’s escape or rescue.
The fire had devoured the palace, and now seemed to hover above the tormentor, as if awaiting his next action.
The tormentor realized he was to be spared, if only he were to repent. He crashed to his knees, drained already by his expenditure in fleeing, and he shouted to the malevolent conflagration, “I repent! I know now, I know I am no God, no deity! I am a wyrm, a nullity, a nothing! My rule is meaningless! Please ... I know my fatal flaw! I know, now, that my cruelty is unjustified! I revel in their anguish, and I know this is wrong! I am changed, altered, at the most basic level!”
And as he pitifully shouted his contrition, an unbidden thought crossed his mind, that he had surely averted his own demise with this display, this charade.
The flame withdrew.
The tormentor surveyed the land as the fire receded. Little was left; stones lay blackened and broken, withered corpses sprawled helplessly where they had fallen. Beyond the palace and its collapsed walls, the town was flattened without even a twisted protrusion to relieve the perfectly level monotony.
“No,” gasped the tormentor upon viewing his non-existent domain.
“No,” he murmured louder, the thought of his riches reduced to ashes inflaming his basest emotions.
“NO!” he bellowed, rising to his feet, his cries aimed at the indifferent sun, blazing overhead. “You cheated me! You robbed me! You-”
Pain exploded in his mistreated body, causing him to retreat, as if backing away would ease his agony. His feet stumbled backwards unsteadily, flopping about and catching on minor imperfections in the ground. Suddenly, the moat loomed behind and under him, its own appetite as insatiable as the flames. The tormentor calmed himself; he carefully balanced himself and began to slowly move away from the moat.
The ground beneath his foot gave way, and he was sliding downward towards the cold water, grasping uselessly for purchase. With a splash, the tormentor hit the water, breaking its surface and sinking swiftly. After a few terrifying moments, he managed once more to gather his thoughts and struggled upward, desperately clawing at the water with a hope-born strength.
Without warning, the pain seized him again, twisting him into the fetal position, refusing to relent, and the tormentor spiraled downwards into the abyss, to join the many others he’d sentenced to that same fate.
And a traveler, a muse, rode down the winding road that meandered past the blasted city, and he glimpsed its shattered remains, and passed onward, without a thought.
He breathed, and with his breath, he sucked in the world, and exhaled, and the world appeared again, inflating from his lungs, places and objects and people randomly redistributed across the globe. With a smile, he lifted his cigarette to his lips and inhaled again.
“Good call, man,” said the nearby Darwin Daiker. “I was amazed by just exactly how much you danced.”
“I,” he stated eagerly, “am a dancer first and foremost.”
In China, the king of Taunic was surprised to discover a rather large plow protruding from his skull. He rubbed his hand along its edge and discovered how sharp it was, as his hand slid off rather easily.
“Well,” the king muttered, “I guess this will strike fear into the peasants’ hearts.”
But he was wrong, because at that instant, an airplane, its guidance controls disrupted by its forceful relocation, crashed into the king. The plow survived unscathed.
Darwin stood and yawned and strolled around the room a bit. He watched the man smoke the cigarette and then said, “What was your name again?”
The man attempted to blow a smoke ring but failed. After a lengthy pause, he declared, “My name, and this time you had better do your best to remember it because I am not in the mood to repeat it over and over for your weak memory, all shot to hell on anti-depressants and vodka, is Baron Otto von Snukenhauff. My friend hunched in the corner is Amadeus Guutenhaug. He is upset because his girlfriend stole his frontal lobe.”
“I kept it in a jar on my dresser,” said Amadeus. “That way, it wouldn’t be tainted by these dreams I have. They harmed my psyche so bad that I would wake up and think I was Attila the Hun, and then I would go kill something.”
“Like a dog?” asked Darwin curiously.
“Like a dog catcher,” responded the frontal-lobeless Amadeus.
Somewhere in the middle of the Sahara Desert, the movie crew for the next action-packed Dizzy Destroyer film found that it was ill-prepared for the harsh rigors of its new lifestyle. A squid happened by and the remaining crew members, driven to savagery, attacked it and slew it with their hands and a folding chair. The director, wily old Doc Moola, caught all this on tape and hid the tape under the sand for future generations to enjoy.
“Attila the Hun was a man,” said Baron Otto von Snukenhauff knowingly.
“Yes, and?” asked Darwin.
“In case you didn’t know,” said von Snukenhauff, “he was a man.”
“No one is really a man,” said Amadeus. “And no one is really a woman. No, we all have titles and labels and definitions that surpass the basic. We mustn’t get mired in the basest designation when there are so many more specific to toy with.”
Darwin turned to the pathetic little man in the corner. “What?”
“I would never kill something if I didn’t know what it did,” Amadeus revealed.
“Is he dangerous?” Darwin queried his host.
“Not a bit,” Otto smiled.
Several million lobsters descended on the city of Berninoborough in the American midwest. Unacquainted with such an attack, the city fell to the crustacean warriors, and the leading citizens were crucified and baked, then fed to the humans left in captivity so that hopefully they would kill themselves off.
“Good work!” the lobster-in-lead cried telepathically to his brethren. “Soon, this world will be ours!”
Unfortunately, the lobster’s career as revolutionary was cut short by a ten pound slab of butter dropped from above by the lobsters’ eternal foes the locusts, who also wanted to conquer the world.
“What is your label, Mr. Daiker?” issued from Amadeus’ corner.
“It’s not important,” muttered Darwin. He adjusted his seat so that he could watch both his companions simultaneously.
Baron Otto von Snukenhauff continued to puff contentedly on his cigarette.
Farmer Edward Wharkon threw the doors of his barn open to find, not his trusty green and black tractor, but the huge rotting carcass of a pirate ship. As he stood there, stupefied, a cannon went off, shattering one of the barn’s supports, and the whole thing collapsed around Ed.
He turned and sprinted away, glanced back and caught sight of the pirate ship rowing steadily after him. Fear numbed him, but he valiantly continued, striving to escape the fate he’d feared since he was a small boy.
“No one wants to die beneath the unyieldin’ hull of a pirate ship, laddie,” stated a fierce elderly voice. Ed stopped and stared in awe at he pirate captain standing beside him.
“Where’d you come-” Ed began to ask, but the captain ran him through.
“That’s why I’m savin’ ye the trouble,” shouted the captain, and he began to cackle. He laughed right up until his ship ran him down.
The Baron stood and yawned. “Darwin, do you realize the many benefits of peanut oil?”
“Not really,” replied Darwin unhappily. His eyes remained fixed on the figure in the corner.
“What do you do, Daiker?” asked Amadeus again unhappily. He rubbed and pulled on the flesh around his face, removing it in several places.
“Amadeus isn’t really one of us,” the Baron began to weave about himself about the room to music only he could hear. “We are what you would call intellectuals, and Amadeus is just a dumb little man with dumb little problems. My problems are quite large and quite not dumb.”
Darwin tore his eyes away from Amadeus and watched Snukenhauff dance, first slowly, gradually speeding up, until it was impossible to follow him.
Amadeus began to shriek, over and over, “What is you, Daiker? What is you?”
Darwin backed away from the corner, but interrupted Otto’s dance and found himself pulled into it, speedily circling the room and unable to escape. Everything was reduced to a blur, even the screams of the tormented murderer.
Dale loved chips, and he was shocked to discover that they had all been removed from his grocery store. They had been replaced with several rows of guns, and Dale grabbed a Beretta and shot himself.
By the time the store closed and Harry came around with his big mop, several hundred dead people had piled up around the aisle that should have held chips.
“Wow,” said Harry automatically. “That’s a lot of dead people.”
Darwin finally extricated himself from the whirling, twirling Baron, and crashed into the chair where he’d initially been seated.
Amadeus leaped to his feet. “I know you!” he screamed hysterically at Darwin. “You are the chair shatterer legend foretold!”
“What?” Darwin cried.
Amadeus licked his lips and began to advance toward his nemesis.
The Baron came to a stop. “He’s the chair shatterer?” he asked his friend.
“Yes-sssssssssssssssss,” hissed Amadeus, and he began to twitch unhealthily.
Otto frowned. “Then I guess I can’t help you, Darwin.”
“There’s no need for that. I’m here to assassinate you both!” Darwin screamed. He reached into his jacket and pulled an object from the holster there.
What should have been a gun was, instead, a hedgehog. Darwin shook his hand maniacally, screaming in agony, but the offended creature refused to be dislodged.
A whole ocean occupied the land once known as Canada, but most of the Canadians now inhabited Greenland, which had become quite tropical, its position adjusted to just a few degrees north of the Equator. A very successful campaign to rename the island Canadaland showed that people were not necessarily immune to change.
Amadeus collided with Darwin and began to savagely beat him. With all the strength left in his drained body, Darwin slammed the hedgehog into Amadeus’ face. Now the men were irrevocably connected, and they began to lunge about the room, drunkenly swinging at one another.
“Bleah,” snarled Baron Otto von Snukenhauff. He left the room, exited his home, and, from the road below, set fire to the building. As it collapsed in on itself, the Baron whistled softly to himself and, after a few hesitant moments, began to dance.