Category Archives: humor

May 23, 2023 · 2:25 am

Spinning Wheels of Thought

Picture borrowed from; https://www.townsends.us/products/colonial-spinning-wheel-sp378-p-874

I start today with nothing in my head to write about. I guess I can say that with regularity most days of the writing week. Sundays in particular are filled with no useful ideas of any kind. But I have a certain talent for spinning. As Rumpelstiltskin had a talent for spinning straw into gold, I take the simple threads of ideas leaking out of my ears and spin them into yarns that become whole stories-full of something to say. And it is not something out of mere nothing. There is magic in spinning wheels. They take something ordinary and incomplete, and turn it into substantial threads useful for further weaving.

Image borrowed from; https://www.overdrive.com/media/1423394/rumpelstiltskin-and-other-tales

Of course the spinning wheel is just a metaphor here for the craft of writing. And it is a craft, requiring definable skills that go well beyond merely knowing some words and how to spell them.

My own original illustration.

The first skill is, of course, idea generation. You have to come up with the central notion to concoct the potion. In this case today, that is, of course, the metaphor of using the writing process as a spinning wheel for turning straw into gold. But once that is wound onto the spindle, you begin to spin yarn only if you follow the correct procedure. Structuring the essay or story is the next critical skill.

Since this is a didactic essay about the writing process I opened it with a strong lead that defined the purpose of the essay and explained the central metaphor. Then I proceeded to break down the basic skills for writing an essay with orderly explanations of them, laced with distracting images to keep you from dying of boredom while reading this, a very real danger that may actually have killed a large number of the students in my writing classes over the years (although they still appeared to be alive on the outside).

My mother’s spinning wheel, used to make threads for use in porcelain doll-making, and as a prop for displaying dolls.

As I proceed through the essay, I am stopping constantly to revise and edit, makeing sure to correct errors and grammar, as well as spending fifteen minutes searching for the picture of my mother’s spinning wheel used directly above. Notice, too, I deliberately left the spelling-error typo of “making” to emphasize the idea that revising and proof-reading are two different things that often occur at the same time, though they are very different skills.

And as I reach the conclusion, it may be obvious that my spinning wheel of thought today spun out some pure gold. Or, more likely, it may have spun out useless and boring drehk. Or boring average stuff. But I used the spinning wheel correctly regardless of your opinion of the sparkle of my gold.

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May 23, 2023 · 2:22 am

The Haunted Toy Store… Canto 23

Canto 23 – Confessional

Stan stumbled into the bedroom.  He wasn’t sure how he was going to explain it all to Bonita.  Especially since the Vodka was making it difficult to walk, let alone talk.

She was sprawled out on the top of the bedspread, it was still tucked in and made up with her usual attention to tight corners.  She was still dressed.  Her head, propped up against the pillows, was wide awake, and she had definitely been crying.

“Bone, honey, um…”  He stood at the foot of the bed, swaying and shifting his weight from one leg to the other.

“Stan, you’ve been drinking.”

“It’s Maria… um, ah… it ain’t actually… um, going well…”

“But you’ve been trying harder than before… I’ve seen it.  You two are working together instead of fighting.”

“Yeah, but, I have something to tell you…”

“Yeah… but, first… I have something I gotta tell you.”

“Oh, um… the doctor’s visit?”

“Yeah.  The report came back.”

“Oh, no!  You mean…?”

“Remission is over.  The cancer is back.”

Stan pressed the palm of his hand against his forehead.  How could he…  now?  Maria was…

“You gotta promise me about Maria.  She’s gonna need you more than ever now.”

“You know I will…”  The room was swirling a bit.  He sank to catch himself on the corner of the foot of her bed.  There was suddenly no way he could tell her now.  “How long do you have?”

“Days, weeks, months… not years.”

“You know they told us that before.  Then the chemo started doing its damn job.”

“Yeah, but not this time.  It’s spreading faster than ever this time.  Promise me you will love her like she’s your own daughter.”

“Don’t be so quick to give up.  We both still need you.”

“We don’t have any more options.  It’s still there in my lungs.  We can’t afford more treatment, and Doc Jimenez says it wouldn’t help if we could.”

Stan started to cry.  The alcohol… and the bad news… both sets of bad news.   But mostly the alcohol…

“Promise me you’ll love her, and you’ll take care of her.”

 There was nothing more to say.  “You know I will.”

He gathered her limp and exhausted form up in his arms.  Drunkenly.  And they both wept together.

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May 21, 2023 · 12:45 am

Mickian Art…70’s Style

Most of my novel stories have lived in my head since the 1970’s. I began recording the ideas in a notebook that I called the libretto. I drew illustrations to solidify the characters and some of the plot elements in my mind. But the basic natures of the characters and the style of my artwork grew from these original artistical notations.

I got better at art over time. And the characters benefited from my teaching experience in that I was able to depict numerous characters with nuances and details gained from students and other people I hadn’t met yet when I drew these pictures. Dorin Dobbs, for instance, is based in large part on my eldest son, who wouldn’t be born for another 18 years when I drew these pictures (He’s the yellow-haired boy in both of the first two pictures.)

Francois, the singing sad clown from my book Sing Sad Songs, is based on a student from the 80’s who was actually Spanish speaking and of Mexican-American descent.

I drew this picture of him in 1976.

I taught the boy in 1983.

I wrote and published the book in 2018.

The inter-dimensional traveler, the Man-Cat, is an idea from a story I have not written yet, and probably never will.

Disney-Michael Stewart and his gang of Milk-Lovers is another story I haven’t written yet, and though more likely, is still probably a novel I will never get to.

Invisible Captain Dettbarn and Francois ended up in separate stories from this picture. The other three boys in the picture were babies or not yet born when their stories happen.

So, today was a chance to look at and re-evaluate the past. All of these drawings were done in the 1970’s. All I did was scan them with a good scanner and crop them a little to make them better compositions. And they allow me to keep track of where my mind has already been, that I might successfully chart the future of where it is going.

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May 20, 2023 · 1:49 am

Wally Wood

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A self-portrait by Wallace Wood.

I am a bit of a cartoonist for a reason.  I started drawing cartoons at the age of five.  I read everything in the Sunday funny pages, not just for the jokes.  I poured over the drawings and copied some.  I drew Dagwood Bumstead and Blondie.  I drew Lil’ Abner and Charlie Brown and Pogo.  Cartoonists were heroes to me.

But my parents wanted to protect me from the evils of comic books.  Superheroes were off limits most of the time.  Things that are associated with evil were out of the question.  So Daredevil was beyond reach.  And Mad Magazine was full of socialist ideas and led kids down the dark path of satire.  So the truth is, I didn’t discover Wally Wood until I was in college.  His corrupting influence didn’t take hold of me until I was older and full of hormones.  Ah, youth and the propensity for sin!  Wally taught me that cartoons could be real.

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Wally Wood was one of the original artists working for EC comics who formed Mad Magazine with it’s spoofs and irreverent humor.  Wood worked together with the Great Will Eisner on the Spirit.  He went on to work for Marvel on the comic book Daredevil where he innovated the red suit and double-D logo, as well as doing the primary story-telling that brought that comic book from the bottom of the Marvel stack to almost the very top.  His work on Daredevil resonates even until today where there is now a big controversy that the popular show on Netflix does not list Wood among the creators of Daredevil in their credits.  I must remember to complain about that later.

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But the thing that drew me to Wood more than anything was the realistic style that he brought to the unreal realm of cartoons.  The man could draw!  He did marvelous detail work and was a leader in the development of dynamic composition in an artistic industry that tolerated and even often encouraged really poor-quality drawing.  He took the comic book from the age of the glorified stick figure to an age of cinematic scope and know-how.  Here it is revealed in his classic break-down of innovative comic-book panels;

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But it is also important to realize that the more power you put into art, the more it can blow up and hurt people.  Wood had a dark side that went a bit darker as he went along.  He had an issue with the kind of false front comics had to throw up in front after the anti-comics crusade of psychologist Fredric Wertham’s book Seduction of Innocents.  He is probably the artist behind the cartoon poster The Disneyland Memorial Orgy.  He started his own cartoon studio that produced increasingly erotic and pornographic comics like Sally Forth, Cannon, and Gangbang.  He became increasingly ill, lost the sight in one eye, suffered severe headaches, and eventually committed suicide in 1981.  With great power comes great responsibility, and we are not all superheroes in the end.  But I will always admire and emulate the work of this great artist… and selfishly wish he could’ve lived to create more of the wonderful art he gave us.

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May 20, 2023 · 1:45 am

Philip K. Dick

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There is a major drawback to being so smart that you can perceive the edges of infinity.  It makes you bedbug crazy.  I love the science fiction that populated the paperback shelves in the 50’s and 60’s when I was a boy.  I love the work of Philip K. Dick.  But it leads you to contemplate what is real… what is imaginary… and what is the nature of what will be.

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the robot Philip K. Dick who appeared at Comic Con and answered questions

There are numerous ways to investigate life.  But it is in the nature of imaginary people to try to find ways to make themselves real.  When the replicants in Bladerunner try to make themselves into real people, they must try to create memories that didn’t exist.  They try to mirror human life to the extent that they can actually fool the bladerunner into letting them live.  Of course, it doesn’t work.  They are not real.  (Bladerunner is the movie name of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep).

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It is like that for me as well.  Being an imaginary person is difficult.  You have to constantly invent yourself and re-invent yourself.  By the time you finally get to know yourself, you have to change again so that the anti-android factions don’t destroy you.  Although, I think I may not actually be an android.

Does that sound a bit crazy?  Well Philip K. Dick’s life story may in fact have led him down the path to really crazy.  In 1971 he broke up with his wife, Nancy Hackett.  She moved out of his life, and an amphetamine-abuse bender moved in.  In 1972, ironically the year I began reading Dick’s work, he fell in love at the Vancouver Science Fiction Convention.  That was immediately followed by erratic behavior, a break-up, and an attempted suicide overdosing on the sedative potassium bromide.  This, of course, led directly to his 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly.

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The story is about a police detective who is corrupted by a dangerous addictive drug that takes him down the rabbit hole of paranoia, and being assaulted by the perception of multiple realities simultaneously.  His novel Ubik from 1969 is a story of psychics trying to battle groups of other psychics even after they are killed by a bomb.  The crazy seems to have been building for a while.

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In 1974 he had a transcendental experience when a lady delivering medicine to his door wore a fish-shaped pendant which he said shot a pink beam into his head.   He came to believe the beam imparted wisdom and clairvoyance, and also believed it to be intelligent.  He would later admit to believing he had been reincarnated as the prophet Elijah.

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Imagination has its dangers.  It is a powerful thing able to transform reality.  Science fiction writers often use their imagination to shape what the future will actually make come into being.  But it can also turn your mind inside out.  A great science fiction writer like Philip K. Dick can contemplate the nature of reality and turn his own reality inside out.  It is a lesson for me, a lesson for all of us.  Wait, is that a pink beam of light I see?  No, I just imagined it.

 

 

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May 19, 2023 · 1:16 am

The Joys of Editing Yourself

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I am now in the final phase of publishing The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.  I am merely waiting for Amazon to object to whatever ridiculously minute formatting error I may still have going.  And I once again had to publish without benefit of a beta reader or an editor of any kind.  You learn things about yourself that you really don’t want to know.

What I have learned;

  • I can’t depend on my wife to be a beta reader and comment on my work.  She tried once and told me, “Your writing is like dog poop.  It is full of weird stuff, smells bad, and is impossible to get off your shoe once you step in it.”  To be honest, I ironed out that metaphor just a bit.  She was actually quibbling about my proofreading style and basically ignored all the content of the story.  That’s the way English teachers are about prose.
  • I can too easily fall into the habit of introducing characters on a fashion model runway.  The first time the character enters the narrative I tend to give a head to toe rundown of how they look, what they are wearing, and how they have done their hair.  I know better than that, but I still do it.
  • I… use… ellipsis… marks… toooo… much…!
  • My creative spellings tend to drive the spellchecker insane.  In this novel I had trouble over the spellings of blogwopping, interbwap, and dillywhacking.  To be fair two of those words are from the language of the Tellerons, a space-faring race of frog people who happen to ineptly invade the earth.  (Oh, and the other is a euphemism  used by young boys for something very private.  Don’t tell anybody about that one.)
  •  Time travel plots can be laboriously difficult to follow through mobius-strip-like  contortions of time, space, and history.
  • Sometimes my jokes are not funny.  Seriously… that can be a problem.
  • And my characters often act on weird impulses and do things for no rhyme or reason… or rhythm either for that matter… see what I mean about ellipsis marks?  Of course, one can always explain that that is exactly how people really are.  I myself never do that.  There is always a rhyme to be snatched from the ether in the very nick of time… randomly.
  • And at the end of the novel, when I am tying up the loose ends of the plot in a Gordian Knot, I have strings left over.  Maybe enough to knit a shirt with.  So I end up picking them up and starting another novel with them.
  • It is basically heck to be a divergent thinker.  You try to make a list of things, and by the time you get to number 9, you have forgotten what the list was about, and you even forgot to number things, so you have to go back to the first one and count.  Now what was I talking about?

Oh, yeah.  I edited the book all by myself.  And now it’s done.  Time to start a new novel and make all the same mistakes over again.

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May 18, 2023 · 1:41 am

Flying the Magic Flying Carpet

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There are many ways to fly.  Airplanes, bird wings, hot air balloons, bubble-gum-blowing goldfish… well, maybe I am really talking about flying by imagination.  The more my six incurable diseases and old age limit my movement, my ability to get out of bed and do things, the more I rely on reading, writing, and the movie in my head to go places I want to be.

Wings of Imagination

Sometimes the wings I use to fly come from other writers.  I get the flight feathers I need not only from books, but also from YouTube videos, movies, and television shows.

This magic carpet ride in video form is by the thoughtful creative thinker Will Schoder.  In it he carefully explains how Mister Rogers used the persuasion techniques of Logos, Ethos, and Pathos to talk to elephants and convinced a congressman intent on cutting the budget to actually give Public Television more money for educational programming.  This is a video full of warmth and grace and lovingly crafted magic flight feathers that anybody can use to soar across new skies and blue skies and higher skies than before.  I hope you will watch it more than once like I did, to see how beautifully the central explanation spreads its wings and gives us ideas that can keep us aloft in the realm of ideas.

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It is important to stay in the air of fresh ideas and new thinking.  The magic carpet ride that takes you there is the product of vivid imagination, cogent thinking, and the accurate connection of idea to better idea.  So instead of falling from the sunlit sky into the darkness that so easily consumes us on the ground, keep imagining, keep dreaming, and keep flying.  You won’t regret having learned to fly.

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May 17, 2023 · 12:50 am

The Way Mickey’s Mind Works

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If you’ve read any of the crap that Mickey wrote about before in this goofy blog, you probably already suspect that Mickey’s mind does not work like a normal mind.  The road map above is just one indicator of the weirdness of the wiring that propels Mickey on the yellow brick road to Oz and back.  He just isn’t a normal thinker.

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But having a few bats in the old belfry doesn’t prevent the man from having a plan.  If you read all of Mickey’s hometown novels, you will discover he hasn’t written them in time order.  Main characters in my 2016 novel weren’t even born yet in my 2017 books.  If you look at them in chronological order rather than the order written, you will see characters growing and changing over time.  A shy kid in one novel grows into a werewolf hunter in the next.  A girl who loses her father to suicide in a novel not yet completed, learns how to love again in another novel.

Multiple Mickian stories are totally infected with fairies.  The magic little buggers are harder to get rid of than mosquitoes and are far and away more dangerous.  And there are disturbing levels of science-fiction-ness radiating through all of the stories.  How dare he think like that?  In undulating spirals instead of straight lines!  He doesn’t even use complete sentences all the time. And they used to let that odd bird teach English to middle school kids.

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But there is a method to his utter madness.  He started with the simpler stories of growing up and learning about the terrors of kissing girls when you are only twelve.  And then he moved on into the darker realms of dealing with death and loss of love, the tragedy of finding true love and losing it again almost as soon as you recognize its reality.  Simple moves on to complex.  Order is restored with imagination, only to be broken down again and then restored yet again,.

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And, of course, we always listen to Mr. Gaiman.  He is a powerful wizard after all.  The Sandman and creator of good dreams.  So Mickey will completely ignore the fact that nobody reads his books no matter what he does or says.  And he will write another story.

Francois spotlight

It is called Sing Sad Songs, and it is the most complex and difficult story that Mickey has ever written.  And it will be glorious.  It also rips Mickey’s heart out.  And I will put that ripped-out heart back in place and make Mickey keep writing it, no matter how many times I have to wash, rinse, and repeat. The continued work is called Fools and Their Toys.  It solves the murder mystery begun in Sing Sad Songs. This re-post of an updated statement of goals is the very spell that will make that magic happen.  So, weird little head-map in hand, here we go on the writer’s journey once again and further along the trail.

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May 16, 2023 · 1:49 am

How Mickey Battles the Blues

It should be noted that Mickey does not battle the St. Louis Blues.  That is his favorite hockey team.  And while they have never won the Stanley Cup, they do win a lot and are almost always in the playoffs.  So they help fight depression.  Battling them would not only be counter-productive, but might also result in losing all those big square white middle teeth in that goofy smile.

But battling depression is a constant necessity.  Not only am I subject to diabetic depression and Donald Trump overload, but my entire family is prone to deep and deadly bad blue funks.  It helps to be aware that there are a lot of ways to fight that old swamp of sadness. It doesn’t have to keep claiming the Atreyu’s horse of your soul.  (Yes, I know that Neverending Story metaphors seriously date me to the 80’s and signify that I am indeed old… another reason I have to constantly fight depression.)

Blue Dawn

I have some surefire methods for battling depression that apparently the science actually backs up.  It turns out that most of things that Mickey does actually stimulate the brain to produce more dopamine.

“Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain’s reward and pleasure centers. Dopamine also helps regulate movement and emotional response, and it enables us not only to see rewards, but to take action to move toward them.”  – Psychology Today

So, I guess I am secretly a dopamine addict.  It is a brain chemical you cannot focus or function effectively without.

  1. Being creative in some way fosters the production of dopamine in the old think-organ.  So writing this blog helps.  Doodling excessively helps.  Writing novels, painting pictures, drawing cartoons, and writing really remarkably bad poetry also help, and I do all of those things every week.
  2. Chicken Dancing helps.  Really.  Flapping your arms and wiggling your butt in such a stupidly silly way is aerobic exercise, and the very act of exercising increases not only dopamine but also serotonin and endorphin get a boost.  These are your “natural high” brain drugs.  Have you ever noticed chicken dancers are never really sad while dancing?  The ones crying excessively are either crying from happiness or extremely embarrassed teenagers forced to chicken dance by their goofy old dad.
  3. For more information about chicken dancing and its possible uses for evil, check out this link The Dancing Poultry Conspiracy Theory.  Because laughing about stuff is also a cure for depression.  It tends to even bypass dopamine and take a left turn through serotonin straight into the pleasure centers of the brain.
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  5. Winning streaks also help immensely.  Of course, I can’t always count on the St. Louis Blues to give me winning streaks.  X-Box EA Sports MVP Baseball 2004 set on the rookie difficulty level for the last decade helps with that.  I have won over 300 consecutive games including two World Series sweeps that way.  And Albert Pujols has hit over 1,000 home runs in his Mickian baseball career.
  6. Check lists also help because they are the same thing as winning streaks.  The sense of accomplishment you get from checking off boxes on your To-Do List also boosts dopamine in the same way.  So what if I am listing routine things like walking the dog, picking up socks, and taking out the trash?  A check mark is still a check mark and a check mark by any other name still smells like marker.
  7. And, of course, there is listening to music.  I am seriously addicted to classical music because every emotion from beautiful and awe-inspiring to butt-ugly brutal can be found somewhere in the works of the great composers. And don’t forget, Paul Simon, Don Henly, and Paul McCartney are in that category too.

8. And please, don’t forget food.  Depressed eating can easily make you fat, but there are certain magical chemicals in certain foods that give you certain dopamine-building effects that can turn blue skies to bright sunshine.  The primary chemical is called Tyrosine, and it can be found in a variety of foods like;

– Almonds

– Avocados

– Bananas

– Beef

– Chicken

– Chocolate

– Coffee

– Eggs

– Green Tea

– Milk

– Watermelon

– Yogurt

9.  And finally, thinking skills are critical.  While thinking too much and obsessing can get you into the tiger trap pits of depression, meditation, decompressive mantras and positive thinking can all dig you out and keep you out.

You are probably wondering what kind of nitwit authority I can actually bring to this topic, but I have spent a lot of money on therapy, not all of it for me, and I not only listen to psychiatrists and psychologists, but I remember what they explained to me.  And I have tried enough things to know what works.

So while you are busy chicken dancing to Beethoven while eating a banana, rest assured, Mickey is probably doing something just as embarrassingly ridiculous at the very same time.

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May 16, 2023 · 1:43 am

The Haunted Toy Store… Canto 22

Canto 22 – The Puppets on the Wall

The puppets in the workshop were all hung up by the strings on the workshop wall.  There was a triple row of pegs to hang them from and they were basically all there.  All hanging from strings and all in their bare wooden forms without costumes or wigs.

Shandra woke up with a start.  She shook her wooden head awake.  Sawdust flew out of her ears.

“Mark!  Mark?  Are you here too?”

“Yeah.  To your left.”

Shandra turned her wooden head to see Mark smiling at her.

“You been awake for long?”

“No, Shandra.  You woke me up by calling my name.”

She would’ve smiled back at him, but her face was made of wood and was fixed in a frown.

Below them both and to the right they heard a female voice crying.  It was weeping softly.

“Who is that down there?”  Shandra roared.

“That’s the Gingerbread Witch you burned up on stage,” said the mouse puppet directly on Shandra’s right.

Shandra glared at the mouse.  It turned its little gray head away.

“So, what you cryin’ about down there, Wicked Witch?”  Shandra growled.

“You burned me,” replied a shaky little voice.

“But it weren’t real… was it?”

“Everything that happens on that stage is real.  Mr. Mephisto controls reality.  How you think we all got to be puppets?” said the mouse angrily.

“I was just a runaway girl whose parents never looked for her.  Mr. Mephisto promised to find a foster home for me when my punishment as a puppet is done,” sobbed the witch puppet.  “Now, when he puts me back in my real body, I will probably be horribly burned all over my body.”

Shandra’s little wooden tummy immediately turned to ice… well, it felt like that anyway.

“I didn’t know…” Shandra started to say.  But then she got angry.  “Why didn’t you defend your little timid self, then?”

“I couldn’t.  You are so forceful and scary.”

“Wait a minute,” said Mark, “you are saying all the puppets here are being punished for something?”

“Yeah.  Running away from home is a sin that the Devil punishes.”

“I was a runaway too,” said the mouse.

“I ain’t no sinner,” growled Shandra.

Mr. Mephisto was suddenly there laughing.  “You burned poor little Dierdre here.  You put a hit out on Poppa Dark.  You are definitely a puppet for a reason, little girl.”

“I’m gonna run away from here,” declared Shandra.

“You can’t.  Your arms and legs only work on stage,” said Mephisto.

“You wouldn’t leave me here alone?” asked Mark meekly.

“No, of course not.  What did Mark do wrong, by the way, Devil Man?”

“He ran away from loving parents to be with you, an evil influence.”

“So, we are in Hell, then?”

“No.  More like purgatory.  But for a reason.  The angels in Hell are fallen angels, but still angels made by God.”

“Are you sending me to a home all burned?” whined the witch.

“You came here in 1925, Diedre.  You are 103 years old now.”

“But you control reality, Devil Man,” Shandra said.  “You could put her back as a child… and not all burned up, either.”

“That’s right.  I could.”  Mr. Mephisto grinned.

“So, why are we really here?” Shandra asked.

“Because God is a just god.  Some will earn redemption.  And some will get the punishment they deserve.”

“And what if we don’t believe in God?” Shandra growled.

“Well, whatever…  He definitely believes in you.  For good or ill.”

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