(note: written for the monthly fiction reading series The F Bomb/every 2nd Wed of the month at the Mercury Cafe/Denver CO)
This Story Has Been Formatted To Fit Your Screen
and Edited To Run In the Time Allotted
“Late night watching TV, used to be you here beside me.”
–Chris Martin to Gweneth Paltrow
Love is a Chalk Outline regaining consciousness 40 minutes after the crime scene party’s over, stumbling down the hallway like a partially erased tether ball, unable to recall what he’d done with his pants.
(Commercial Interruption #1: 3 women, post-menopausal, dancing without worry because they’re wearing Gerbers brand extra-super absorbent adult diapers. Available in pink, blue, and new ‘nothing-to-see-here-because-they’re-always-this-color’ yellow. Only 28.50 plus shipping and handling. Incontinent? Gerbers’ got you covered. End Commercial)
The Chalk Outline was unable to find his pants, but that was the least of his problems. Apparently the smart ass who’d traced him had a sense of humor. Or perhaps it’d been a simple matter of incompetence or evil intent. Either way, whoever’d been in charge of tracing the Chalk Outline had neglected to trace the very reason for wearing pants in the first place. For: we live in a world in which it is illegal to expose one’s weiner in public. This law no longer applied to the Chalk Outline. He’d been traced without a dick.
(Commercial Interruption #2: Lysol does not eliminate odors. It just makes everything in the room smell like Lysol. Lysol is an odor. In order to do what its own label purports it can do it would have to eliminate itself. Avoid the madness. Stop shitting in the Employee Only restroom at work! Message brought to you by Scented Candles and Americans Organized Towards The Reelection Again Maybe Someday of Eric Cantor. End Commercial)
Having been reawakened to walk the Earth without his penis, the Chalk Outline felt betrayed and being that his 3 favorite movies were Braveheart, Rob Roy, and The Crow, he set out on the arduous journey of seeking revenge against the thing which had traced him.
“I will end you like the Internet has ended the noble history of reading spine bounded books in print!” the Outline screamed at the sky while pretending that it was raining and also the middle of the night.
The Chalk Outline’s thinly veiled metaphor for god did not answer. But that was ok. The Outline had been chalked recently. The son of a bitch who’d done the chalking couldn’t have gone far.
(Story interrupted by 20 minutes of local news emergency weather coverage. Thunderstorm Watch until 2 a.m. The weatherman, though fully aware it’s only a limited amount of water, has chosen to report upon such things as if anyone caught outside with or without a raincoat has been pre-selected to die a nasty death. Please ride out the storm whilst cowering in the proper amount of fear. If your family owns a gun, I suggest you load it. Channel 9 News Team. 9 Cares. We now return you to this story, already in progress.)
The Chalk Outline stood upon the veranda covered in blood. He’d gone into the battle well aware that taking out his own creator would not be easy. Especially without a penis. (note: the previous sentence is in no way sexist. The phrase ‘dick move’, often applied to someone who’s being an asshole, can also be defined as a real self-defense tactic invented by The Chalk Outline before he’d been murdered and brought back to life as a chalk outline. The move being invented shortly after the Outline flunked out of Karate School and when used correctly rendered one’s opponents bruised, sexually distant or confused. )
Anyway, the battle’d been harsher than the Outline’d predicted, mostly due to the fact that his opponent turned out to be plural. Opponents. Sort of. The man/men who had traced him at the original crime scene were Siamese Twins.
The Outline had no idea what he was expecting, but he hadn’t been expecting that.
(Commercial Interruption #3: A trailer for a new movie in which Hollywood remakes the story of The Three Little Pigs. In this hip, super modernized version the pigs are the ones trotting around blowing down all the houses and it’s the misunderstood wolf who stands inside, haunted by bricks and past mistakes made out of straw, waiting for the walls to fall. Directed by that guy who had the balls to bang Kristen Stewart behind Rob Pattinson’s back after having cast his own real life wife as Kristen Stewart’s mom. End Commercial)
The Chalk Outline thought about outlining the body of the Siamese Twins he’d just defeated but then thought better of it. The Twin’s outline might pop back to life like his own outline had done, and then they’d probably just start fighting again, and the Chalk Outline was done with that.
He went to the dead Siamese Twin’s refrigerator and ate some leftover shrimp instead.
(Story interrupted by the 9 News Weather Team again. Thunderstorm Watch has been escalated to a Warning in the following counties: Broomfield. Please prepare for the apocalypse accordingly. We now return to…wait shit. No. That story’s over. We now return you to the Channel 9 movie of the week, The Poseidon Adventure starring Steve Guttenberg, C. Thomas Howell, The original Robocop, Doug ‘Coughlin’s Law’ Coughlin from Cocktails, Jane (aka The Hero of Canton) and Rutger Hauer, already in progress….)
Multiverse Johnson 