Deaf-mute Terry Houston, sock-puppet Zearlop Zebra, and fool Murray Dawes
I have begun work on novel #10 in my Hometown Series about the imaginary little Iowa town where I grew up. This novel is called Fools and Their Toys. It is basically a novel about how human beans communicate, mind to mind, heart to heart, and mouth to ear.
Fool Harker Dawes, Murray’s uncle
Now, I should tell you, calling them “human beans” in the previous paragraph was not a spelling mistake. It was the kind of pun that fools like Mickey often employ. And I don’t consider the word “fool” to be an insult. After all, the fool in a Shakespeare play often says the thing that sounds the wisest in the play. And all the world is a stage, and all the people merely players. But I do acknowledge that fools can actually be stupid, too. Their whole purpose is to make you laugh.
Probably the most foolish thing about this novel about fools and foolishness is that the narrator is a zebra sock puppet that the ventriloquist protagonist uses to be able to talk and communicate. Murray Dawes has a condition that makes people think he is slow of mind because he is unable to create speech in his own mouth. He is actually quite brilliant. But that doesn’t come out until he finally has the puppet to do the talking for him. Zearlop, then, is the narrator who puts the entire book in his own words even though he has brains made of wadded newspaper and cotton stuffing.
I have long worried that this particular book would be hard to write. But just like the last three novels it is now flowing out of my word processor as if it is writing itself. I do hope I can hang on to life long enough to make it real.
When I am trying to organize some book magic, I tend to light the scented candles in my bedroom and get out the old sketchbook, as well as some fairly recently purchased pens and ink. Yes, I mean, I do storybook magic by drawing. This explanation comes from a teacher who no longer has any class, a nudist who never goes naked anymore, an atheist who believes in God, and a wiseguy who knows he’s really a fool. Magic is 99% hard work and 1% drawing pictures.
So, if you have drawn the proper conclusion from that first paragraph that Mickey is being a stupid old idiot again and he doesn’t really know anything about magic. I beg to differ. I started experiencing symptoms of prostate cancer and indications of another serious lung infection brewing up a couple of years ago. I decided then not to take my complaints to the doctor because I have no money left to spend on health care for myself. Either diagnosis, if it is accurate, is a death sentence for me under Trumpcare. I would rather simply drop dead unawares than have to live with an actual looming deadline that, once passed, I would truly be dead from. So, I have gone about my daily duties and flights of fancy without worry. And, miraculously, I woke up this morning still being alive and able to write. That is magic, isn’t it? I think it is.
Both books are free if you buy them through Kindle Unlimited.
My inevitable conclusion to this experimenting was that I can create a book from black and white drawings and mix in paragraphs that tell all about Tellosia, the fairy kingdom that exists within my boyhood hometown in Iowa. A sort of field guide, if you get what I’m getting at. And I could mix in the black and white graphic novel I have been working on for more than a quarter of a century, The Hidden Kingdom. It might actually attract some readers based on my artwork and its reputed popularity with people who don’t have to actually pay for it. It might be a way to actually sell some books. So, I am going to try it, and you can’t stop me.
Valerie was on her skateboard on Main Street. She was thrashing. It didn’t matter how dangerous Daddy said it
could be. She was a thrasher, and she
knew how to ride. If he thought he could
forbid her from doing it, well, that was just so boofoo! No.
She couldn’t use that
word. Not after Danny Murphy told her
what it actually meant. Yeesh! Okay, un-cool, then.
She was ten. She was wearing her latex biker shorts. You know, the ones Mom forbid her to wear because they were skin tight. But why did it matter so much? It was not like she actually had a butt to show off. She could ride her skateboard naked and no one would really notice. She did an ollie off the edge of the sidewalk and onto the hot pavement. Summer was ending, but the last day of the Labor Day weekend was still hot. Iowa hot. Eighty degrees in the sun with warm, humid air that boiled you right out of your biker shorts sort of hot. But Valerie wasn’t ready to find out if it was true that no one would notice. She needed to keep them on. They were black with a purple slash of color on the sides. Her favorite thing to wear.
Across the asphalt street her wheels and trucks buzzed as
she rode to the south side of Main Street.
It was a small Iowa farm town.
Only maybe four cars were parked there at any one time, and no one was
on the street but her. Still, she wished
she could burn her way across right in front of someone’s moving pickup truck
and scare them into dropping a bale of hay or two. No one marked her passing by in one of the
most boring places in the whole Mr. Boofoo Universe. No.
The Mr. Un-Cool Universe. She had to remember not to say that other
thing anymore. Especially in front of
Mom, even if Mom didn’t have a clue what it really meant.
She was headed for the Ghost House on the south eastern edge
of town. The Ghost House was the only
remaining haunted house in Norwall, Iowa, and it had collapsed in on itself.
It was more a pile of broken boards and garbage than a house, but it was
the place where she was headed because, unknown to most of the adults in town,
the Ghost House still had a functioning cellar, shored up with railroad ties by
her cousin Brent Clarke and the rest of the original Norwall Pirates. The Pirates had been a secret club in the
1970’s, a secret that nearly everyone knew at least one thing about. They had been a liars’ club of young boys who
supposedly caught a werewolf once and chased an undead Chinese wizard around
town. Liars’ club was more than just a
local nickname for it. It was more of a
literal definition. But she had been
called to attend a secret Pirate meeting.
A meeting that shouldn’t exist because there had been no Norwall Pirates
since they had graduated high school in 1978.
Mom would have a fit if she knew Valerie was headed to the
Ghost House. It was the kind of run-down
rattle-trap that all mothers worried about.
No decent mother worthy of her official Mom-card would stand for a child
of theirs going to such a place, especially not Val’s Mom, the Queen of
Worrywarts.
She thrashed her way down Whitten Avenue and then around the
corner, zigzagging for two blocks, and then passing Ugly Bill’s Junkyard to the
huge pile of broken crap that had been described to her as being the actual
place.
She came to a stop, kicked up her board and grabbed it, and
looked around, not quite as certain now as she pondered a wilderness of junk,
thistles, and burdock leaves. Ugly Bill
Pixeley had tons of used car parts and wrecked truck parts from which he
salvaged the pieces that he, his brother, and his two idiot sons put together
as trucks and other vehicles which he then sold at a huge profit. Pixeley was a talented mechanic and a very
crafty self-taught engineer.
“You here for the Pirate meeting?” asked Danny Murphy,
pulling up on his bicycle.
“Yeah,” she answered, popping her Bazooka Joe bubble
gum. “Mary Philips says it ain’t just
gonna be for boys anymore.”
“Yeah. I heard that
too. And I’m glad you’re gonna be a Pirate,”
Danny said with a sly grin. He was a
sophisticated man of twelve… well, not really… but he was a boy older than
Valerie by an entire school year, though only about five months in age. Older boys being in the club was one of the
main attractions for her. “It will be
cool to have the most beautiful little girl ever born in Norwall in our club.”
Valerie blushed and dropped her eyes a little bit at
that. Her Uncle Dash had always said
that about her since she could remember.
But it was one thing to hear it from family, and something else to hear
it from somebody she rode the school bus with.
Some things get around by word of mouth a lot faster and farther than
you ever wish they would.
“Do you know how to get inside?” Valerie asked.
“I can show you a secret entrance … for a kiss?” Danny blushed intensely as he proposed the
bargain, a truly dark red that can only be achieved by somebody as
boney-skinny, white-skinned Irish, and shy of girls as Danny Murphy was.
“Boys who think like that all grow up to be rapists,” Val
shot back at him. “That’s what my Aunt
Jennifer says, anyway.”
Danny turned an even darker shade of red-violet. Valerie was suddenly feeling guilty, as if
she might possibly have caused his head to explode from embarrassment by her
cutting remark about his personal urges.
She didn’t dislike him. She just
didn’t want to kiss him.
“Aw, I didn’t mean anything by that. I’ll show you the Tunnel of Doom.”
Danny pointed to a large concrete drainage tile that had been rolled up against the side of the Ghost House’s foundation. She could see that if you crawled through the tile, you could enter through a large crack in the brick foundation. Spiders and potentially snakes to crawl through. Ughh! But Valerie was no Shrinking Violet. She pushed Danny out of the way and went in.
My life as a school teacher is definitely over. That part of my story is complete. I thought, as I found that driving for Uber to earn extra money was becoming too difficult to do, that maybe I could get healthy enough to be a substitute teacher again. Money-wise it makes sense. Three days of substituting in a single week would easily surpass my best days as an Uber driver. And they correctly figure withholding for tax purposes, something that neither my teacher pension nor my Uber account seem capable of doing. I face tax penalties again for 2018.
But my health never seems to stabilize since the car accident in August. Of course, that figures too since my diabetes has gotten worse, insulin has gotten more expensive, and my personal economy tanks monthly. So I have to let go of teacher daydreams. Those chapters are now closed. I must read on more slowly and carefully in the Book of Life.
The Wings of Imagination
The way forward is now through being a story-teller. Writing and drawing are things that I can do without leaving the house, sometimes without even getting out of bed. I know that becoming even more sedentary is basically a slow death sentence. But my arthritis, COPD, and diabetes have all worked hand-in-hand to reduce my mobility. They also make driving more dangerous. So, slowing down probably reduces the chances of sudden and destructive death. And I have never been more prolific in my writing.
Davalon the Telleron alien, Anneliese the gingerbread girl, and Francois Martin the Sad Clown Singer
I have published eight novels. They are, in order of publication, Catch a Falling Star, Magical Miss Morgan, Stardusters and Space Lizards, Snow Babies, Superchicken, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, Recipes for Gingerbread Children,and The Baby Werewolf. Number nine, Sing Sad Songs, is in the revision and editing stage and will be completed early in 2019. I have When the Captain Came Calling well under way, though the end is not yet in sight. And I recently began work on the rough draft of Fools and Their Toys. I am also working to finish my graphic novel, Hidden Kingdom.
These novels of mine will probably never generate meaningful money in my lifetime, but the creation of them feels like the fulfillment of my life’s arc. I spent four decades in education, and now I am investing my remaining life force in story-telling, using many of the students and fellow teachers in novels of surrealistic fantasy and humor, giving meaning to the memories of a life spent in service to higher ideals.
Player #3, the powerful Miss Perez
So, there you have it, the Story So Far. I will continue to work on it, polish it, perfect it, and continue not to worry if no one reads it or even cares. It is my story, the story I live to create, and that is all the meaning that matters.
I have been using the Tuesday post for this blog for a very novel thing. Yes, that’s an ironic pun made with 55% pure iron. This once-a-week exercise in fictional weirdness is basically a forge for failing novel ideas.
I began with the Stardusters manuscript for a stalled sequel to Catch a Falling Star. I worked it out with a rewritten Canto per Tuesday. And I turned the weird little climate-crisis science-fiction comedy into a passable piece of novel noodling. I was also able to use it as a test novel for the Amazon Kindle Publishing method of turning it into a book that I could hold a copy of in my two hands.
Aeroquest as a novel is now out of print.
Then I tried to rehabilitate my first and worst published novel, Aeroquest. I found I had a lot of very good individual Cantos (which I was using as a faux-poetical and somewhat snooty substitute for the word chapter). But the overall story was fractured and incoherent. What I eventually decided to do with this book is to break it up into at least three separate stories. I don’t know if I will ever republish this book, it is there to be worked on for as long as I’m still kicking.
So, what will I do with Tuesdays now?
This is now the longest stalled manuscript I have going. It has some definite problems and plot holes. I might choose to revise and edit it in this space on my blog. If I do, it will be even more of a real rewrite in front of your eyes than the first two. I initially thought these Novel Tuesdays might yield input and criticism that might prove useful. But of the few people who are actually interested enough to read this word-wrenching and rearranging, I don’t seem to get any thoughts beyond likes and hope-you-succeeds.
Anyway, I am pretty well addicted to this odd writing behavior by now, and next Tuesday yields the start of a new novel, whether you are ready or not.
Yes, I published another one within a month of its companion book. The Baby Werewolf is the other part of the story from Recipes for Gingerbread Children. I hold the first copy in my hands today. It is my 8th published novel that I am actually proud of having written.
After three days of Ged’s attempts at teaching, Shu Kwai was still kneeling stark naked in the practice grounds. He refused to accept any clothing he felt he had not earned. Ged quietly shook his head in despair. Junior Aero and Sarah Smith each had a linen robe with the White Spider symbol stitched into it. They also had tabai boots for their feet, cloth footwear with the big toe tied off for climbing and sure footholds. The two of them worked together with their telepathy to absorb the thoughts of their sensei. Shu Kwai would only stubbornly continue to struggle.
“What is it about the inner eye that you can’t get, Shu-sama?” Ged asked.
“I apologize,
Aero-sensei, I do not see the pictures in my mind that you suggest. What do they look like to you?”
“I suppose the
problem is that all Psions do not use the same inner eye to focus their power.”
“How do you mean, honored one?”
“I mean, I see molecules. I can read DNA strings with my inner eye. If I have eaten the meat, I can call up the proper shapes and spirals to make the creature. I can focus my power and shift my own DNA molecules in every cell of my body. I don’t know how I know this, or can do this, but the power wells up in me like a cup that fills itself.”
Shu Kwai’s face showed stern concentration. As the boy knelt there, quivering in the cool breeze, he continued trying with all his youthful might.
“Please, Master Ged, let me help,” said Sara, large eyes pooling with liquid sympathy for Shu’s dilemma.
“All right,please, Sara-san.”
“Shu-bozu, it is true that we all see the inner eye in different ways. Mine is like Ged-sensei’s vision. I can see molecules and DNA. I can rearrange the flow of power in the minds of others to effect healing. I have seen into Junior’s mind as well. His is different. He sees circuits and electrical links. He can trace the patterns in a human mind as I can, or in a computer mind, as I cannot.”
“So, what does my mind, my eye, look like?” asked Shu Kwai, looking with puzzled eyes into Sara’s face.
“Can I take a look?”
Sara reached over to Shu with a tender hand and touched his temple. Shu cracked a smile as her beautiful essence flooded into his head.
“Your inner eye sees motion. Flickering motions. Energy paths of movement.”
Shu nodded with his eyes closed. “I see it. It is just like chi.”
“Spirit force, yes,” said Ged, finally realizing where he had gone wrong. “Girl! Come here!” He motioned to a girl attendant who waited beside the practice field for just such an order. “Girl, we need a loose-jointed doll or a puppet. Can you fetch one for me?”
“Yes, Ged Aero-dono!” she said in breathless awe.
In minutes the girl had returned with a small wooden marionette from the Akito House, smiling and well-pleased that she had been honored to do this service for the White Spider’s special school. Ged took the doll and gratefully patted her powdered cheek.
“Picture this doll in your mind’s eye, Shu Kwai.” Ged sat the doll on the grass. “Picture it rising to its feet. Make it do something.”
As Shu Kwai concentrated, the doll stood up and bowed to Master Ged. Then it slowly began an undulating dance. The dance got wilder and happier as Shu Kwai began to feel his success. Finally, it ended with a flourish and a bow.
“Clever boy!” said
Ged, feeling warm inside for the first time all day. “Let me give you a robe!”
“No, Sensei. I made only a first step. Give me a loin cover only. I must work harder still.”
“As your teacher, I say you accomplished at least two steps today. You learned to focus the inner eye, and you learned not only from me but from your classmate Sara. That is worth a robe, surely.”
“You are anxious to cover me in cloth, Sensei. If I may choose, I would rather have the tabai boots like Sara and Junior.”
“Very well,” said Ged with a smile. “You are determined to remain a naked barbarian. But I respect you very much as a student, Shu Kwai. Your victories make me proud.”
Candle-lit nightmares become stories and keep me awake late at night.
I am now closing in on the publication of The Baby Werewolf, a novel whose story began with a nightmare in 1978. It was a dream I had about being a monster. I woke up in a cold sweat and realized, to my complete horror, that I had been repressing the memory of being sexually assaulted for twelve years, the thing that almost brought me to suicide in 1973 and that I couldn’t put into words when I talked to counselors and ministers and friends who tried to keep me alive without even knowing that that was what the dark black words were about.
I don’t normally write horror stories. Yes, it is true, a character of some sort dies at the end of practically every novel I have ever written, but those are comedies. I am sort of the anti-Shakespeare in that sense. The Bard wrote comedies that ended with weddings and tragedies that end in death. So, since my comedies all seem to end in death, I guess if I ever write a tragedy, it will have to end with a wedding.
Torrie Brownfield
But writing this horror story is no joke for me, though I admit to using humor in it liberally. It is a necessary act of confession and redemption for me to put all those dark and terrible feelings into words.
The main theme of the story is coming to grips with feeling like you are a monster when it is actually someone else’s fault that you feel that way. Torrie, the main character, is not the real werewolf of the story. He is merely a boy with hypertrichosis, the werewolf-hair disorder. He has been made to feel like a monster because of the psychological and physical abuse heaped upon him by the real werewolf of the story, an unhappy child pornographer and abuser who is enabled by other adults who should know better and who should not be so easily fooled. The basis of the tale is the suffering I myself experienced as a child victim.
It is not easy to write a story like this, draining pain from scars on my own soul to paint a portrait of something that still terrifies me to this day, even though I am more than sixty years old and my abuser is now dead. But as I continue to reread and edit this book, I can’t help but feel like it has been worth the pain and the striving. No one else in the entire world may ever want to read this book, but I am proud of it. It allowed me to put a silver bullet in the heart of a werewolf who has been chasing me for fifty-two years. And that’s how the monster movie in my head is supposed to end, with the monster dead, even though I know the possibility of more monsters in the darkness still exists.
I can give you rather accurate and unique insights into the planet called Dancer. I was a resident there for nearly twenty years, working first for the Pirate King, Cat Five, then for the maniacal Mechanoid, Khoolbas DiQuiri, and finally for his usurper, the Pirate King Razor Conn.
When the great explorer Martin Faulkner first surveyed the Beta-Regulan Star System, the system where Dancer was the only livable planet, he wrote it off as a place useful solely for refuel and resupply stops. The planet had a breathable atmosphere, but no land masses at all. Everything was salt water. It rarely ever rained there or had clouds in the sky. It was a lonely little water-ball.
It was part of the genius of Cat Five that he chose Dancer as the planet for his throne world. No other pirate king ever chose an Imperial Rimworld without any land surfaces as his home base. It proved to be a wonderful spot for ambushes as the system increasingly became a necessary stop for the Rimworld Merchant Fleet, Orchides’ Delivery, and GTS(Grand Transport Systems). Cat Five got obscenely wealthy off a mere five percent of the space trade. He designed the underwater city of Castle Orpheum and supervised its construction himself. Soon the master smuggler known as the Thin White Duke, Sir Carleton Keyser, moved in and made the world a key link in the “package industry”, what you and I, being less criminal in nature, would call smuggling.
As with any profitable venture, there would be those who would lust for control of it. The obese Mechanoid known as Khoolbas DiQuiri was Cat Five’s second in command. That motorized fat-thing was my boss during the worst years of my life. He was crafty, conniving, and he smelled terrible. He had been a blobby man in life, but as a Mechanoid, he was a transistorized stack of cyborg Jell-O. When Cat Five met an untimely end at the hands of the Monopoly Brigade, Khoolbas took over as regent. Cat Five’s son, Cat Six was only seven years old at the time. Khoolbas secretly connected himself into the city’s power and environmental systems, as well as the main computer. He secretly administered youth drugs to Cat Six, effectively trapping him in childhood forever. He even tried to take over the package industry from the White Duke. The fat one built an indestructible power base for himself.
I was serving as a computer technician and research physicist to Duke Keyser, the White Duke, when Razor Conn first showed up. He was a swaggering swashbuckler with a cowboy hat and a knack for winning the fights he picked. He was the one who revealed all of the plots Khoolbas was running on Dancer. With the Blackstone brothers as his allies, he made the people, especially the pirates, see that Khoolbas was cheating and using them. He found enough gifted malcontents among the spacers to form his own strike team which he named the Blackhawk Corsairs after his favorite interstellar hockey team. The Blackhawks overran Castle Orpheum and took Khoolbas prisoner all in one swift battle action. He ended up ruling the place, though he showed mercy to Khoolbas DiQuiri and a great deal of administrative wisdom in setting up his democratic government of the world.
The Thirties Gangster Culture that predominates the world of Dancer is mostly a matter of tough-guy posturing and the obsessive-compulsive design tastes of some of the powerful residents, but, corny as it all is, it works. It is a stimulating and imaginative place to live. A water-world pirate kingdom where space pirates could happily live with the fishes.
Arkin Cloudstalker
had stepped out for a bit of a look around.
Castle Orpheum was too dark and mysterious for his taste. He preferred a cockpit in space, or even the
open air to this dim and dreary underwater place. He missed his family, wife and kids who lived
parsecs away on a moon of the wealthy residential planet called Bird
World. Being a corsair had driven him
further and further away from his original vision of being a Galactic
Hero. He wanted to make the universe a
better place to live, but more and more it seemed that all he could manage was
to become a better killer and criminal.
The lamp-lit streets of Castle Orpheum were deserted at this time of the
artificial day-night cycle. Most
intelligent residents were in bed asleep.
Someone was walking towards him on this particular street. This someone had an orange Kevlar jumpsuit and a very big gun. This someone clanked as he walked, metal striking the pavement to the beat of a slightly off-kilter step. Arkin slowed to a stop.
“Don’t stop on account of me, Cloudstalker,” said the figure. He pulled up short under a streetlamp so that Arkin could finally see his face. It was an undead Mechanoidface, skull-like and one-quarter metal. The enlarged right eye was a glowing red computerized visual sensor. “I came to see you face-to-face about a little matter of a bounty. I am an ace bounty-hunter, Argo “Ace” Campfield.”
“I didn’t call for any bounty hunter,” said Arkin, measuring the distance between them at about forty paces, easily within the range of the big gun the Mechanoid carried.
“No, Count Nefaria hired me with money he got from a Galtorrian Knight he called Sir Saurol. With Nefaria dead, I’ll probably get even more money for your severed head.”
Arkin leaped for a
nearby alley opening, rolling and coming up with his emergency blaster pistol,
a one-shot plasma gun that he kept in his vest for occasions like this
one. Campfield’s deadly green beam
burned leather, hair, and the top layer of skin off of Arkin’s left shoulder.
“Gazzool!” groaned
Arkin, using the only Bird World cuss word he still remembered, mild though it
was. He aimed unsteadily and fired his
blaster. The air sizzled with a beam of
pure star fire and Campfield’s robotic right leg melted into two pieces.
“Hah! I laugh at losses like that!” growled Ace
Campfield. He hopped on one metal leg in
Arkin’s direction. “You may have slowed
me down, but my sensors tell me you have no more shots left to take.”
Arkin knew the
undead death-machine was basically right.
He was slightly wounded and weaponless against an enemy who was tireless
and had nothing left to fear from him.
He was as good as dead unless he did some very quick thinking. The alley he had dodged into ended in a
ladder that went all the way up into the subsea dome’s catwalks. From there he could make his way to the
submarine pens if only he could get out of range up that ladder before
Campfield hopped into position for a good shot.
That would be a darn good trick, since the robotically enhanced senses
of a Mechanoid were bound to make Campfield’s marksmanship superb.
As swiftly as
Cloudstalker could run, he bounded towards the ladder. It was only a matter of moments before
Campfield would lock on him as a target and burn a hole through his chest or
back with that energy beam. His heart
pounded as he looked up the ladder into the distant grill-work of the catwalks
above. His heart almost stopped for a
moment as he saw another face peering down at him over the edge of a catwalk
platform. Did Campfield have a
partner? Was he trapped as well as
doomed? The face was almost as unusual
as Campfield’s skeletoid visage. This
new face had crossed eyes and a white fright-wig of frizzy hair crammed up underneath
a black top hat. The silly pink tongue,
longer than the normal humanoid tongue, lolled out of the slack mouth. Before Arkin could yell, the strange face
dropped a coil of rope down on top of his head and motioned for Arkin to grab hold
with one hand while he waved a skinny rubber chicken with the other hand.
Having little
other choice, Cloudstalker firmly took hold of the rope. Instantly he was dragged upward by some
high-speed winder that thumped him several times against the ladder, but pulled
him up to the platform in a matter of seconds.
Campfield spotted him, but even robotic reflexes didn’t allow him to get
a shot off before Arkin was safe.
Face to face with
his weird rescuer Arkin tried to thank the man.
“You saved me from certain death just now,” he said, gasping for air.
“May I know your name?”
The man, his tongue
still flopping out of his mouth, shook his head yes and handed the rubber
chicken to Arkin.
“What does this
mean?” Arkin asked.
The man pantomimed
turning something over.
“What?”
Looking stupidly
impatient, the smiling fool took the rubber chicken back and now slapped it
forcefully down in Arkin’s hand.
“I don’t have time
for this. What are you trying to tell
me?”
The man pantomimed
turning something over again, then slapped the feet of the naked rubber bird. Finally realizing something of the nature of
the message, Arkin turned the rubber chicken over in his hand. There was a name written there in purple
crayon. It said, “White Dook”.
“The White Duke
sent you?” Arkin was incredulous, yet at
the same time amused. The fool grinned
and handed him a second rubber chicken.
He turned it over to see the word “YES” in purple crayon.
Below them,
Campfield was at the base of the ladder.
His robotic muscles pulled the one-legged bounty hunter up
hand-over-hand at a frightening speed.
“We’d better get
going!” said Cloudstalker.
He received a
third rubber chicken. When he turned it
over, it said, “You said it, sister dear!”
Catch a Falling Star 