Chapter Thirteen

wherein a beautifully expressed reader suggestion is answered with the ugliest prose in this chronicle

You lie down, you like down because, well, you just feel compelled to lie down, right there on the floor of the garage, even though you have a perfectly serviceable bed and some perfectly serviceable couches elsewhere in the house, but you don’t want to know what that commotion was, so you just lie, lie all the way down, down here on the garage floor, something you know doesn’t make any sense, but you know, it came from a different place in your heart, a place that rendered ideas with much prettier prose, as they say in Alliteratown, than the ideas you’ve been having since this adventure began, because it’s almost as though you’d shut off the part of your mind that cares about sentence construction and clever turns of phrase in order to achieve your daily word count, but here was an idea rendered so beautifully, you couldn’t ignore it, no matter what it was telling you to do, not that the content of the idea was any less beautiful than its form—oh heavens no—you deserve a little lie down after everything you’ve been through, and before everything else you’re no doubt going to go through from this point, including the very next thing you’re likely to go through, which is the thing no doubt causing the commotion behind the door to the rest of the house, but you’re not likely to go through that yet, not until you finish going through the thing you’re in the midst of now, the dislocated shoulder, which you don’t know how lying down is meant to help, but you do it anyway in the hopes it pops itself back in, and you know, it just did pop itself back in, popped itself right back in, all the way back in, not most of the way back in the way it did last time you dislocated it, though it could be that you’ve been operating on a mostly back-in-popped shoulder this entire time, and that this was the first time in years it had been properly all the way back in, or maybe you’re just misremembering because of all the pain you’re experiencing right this instant, unremitting pain—you know the kind—well, it’s the kind you’re experiencing right this instant, that shoulder-having-just-popped-back-in kind of pain that you don’t recall from before, the previous time you thought you popped your shoulder back in, which is why you think that this time might be the real deal, the time your shoulder popped back in for real, because surely it wouldn’t hurt like this if it hadn’t been popped so far back in as to be all the way, but who knows at the end of the day, maybe it’s hurting because it popped in too far, of which you’re not even sure the likelihood, never having studied anatomy like you promised yourself you would so that every time you got constipated you understood it was just because you ate too much cheese and not because you were having a brain aneurysm, which you can fully admit is a bit hypochondriacal, but again that’s why you wanted to study anatomy, at least the page that talks about eating too much cheese not causing brain aneurysms, though who knows, really, if there’s a scenario in which that may have happened, not cheese alone, mind, but cheese interacting with another substance, say, some sort of brain poison or some bleach or something, you know, one of those aneurysm poisons, or mostly poisons, a poison really close to causing a brain aneurysm that only needs a single bite of cheese to push it over the edge, as outlined here on page one of this anatomy textbook you never studied, not even the first page, to say nothing of the chapter on relocated shoulders, which is way deep into the book, somewhere after knees, you know, that knee chapter they’re always going on about, the one that rattles on for pages and pages about how great knees are, passages like, ‘oh yeah, knees are the best, especially when you need to propel yourself forward while standing or to kick or to stop kicking or to stop standing, now that we think about it,’ and so on and so forth, ad infinitum, which the author thinks is Latin for knees, but don’t quote him on that, especially not to the doctors who joined together like Voltron to create that textbook, especially not them, nor to any other doctors for that matter, because we don’t want to lose our medical license after all, and by we the author means the royal we, something that all these self-important doctors like to refer to themselves as when they’re flinging all these Latin phrases this way and that, phrases the rest of us can’t be bothered to understand because the rest of us, the great non-doctor unwashed, all learned Spanish instead, and sure, there are plenty of Spanish words with Latin roots, like the word Latino itself, which is just the word Latin that a spaghetti-O rolled up next to, and one day the guy inventing Spanish saw it and said hell yeah and a lot of other stuff to the effect that he was going to call a whole bunch of people after a spaghetti-O rolling up to the end of the old language off of which he was vaguely basing his new one, and then some letters from a can of alphabet soup rolled up to this new language he was inventing, the letters a-r-d, which rolled so hard that they rolled over the s and the h at the end, and right there he said, ‘I’ll call the people from this place where I’m inventing this language that new word that this alphabet soup just created after it rolled up to it, but the other letters can’t roll like the o that rolled up to Latin, so maybe there was a skateboard involved,’ and between you and the author, maybe there wasn’t a skateboard, because why would a skateboard be around back in the days he was inventing Spanish, when spaghetti-Os and alphabet soup had barely made their debut, a debut I should remind you they made to great applause in the society pages, back in the days when the society pages contained nothing but headlines and the words clap, clap, clap, clap over and over and over, not that the word ‘over’ was part of what they said, just to be clear, because ink was expensive back then, and the typesetter pawned all his copies of the letters contained in the word in order to afford more Cs, Ls, As and Ps for further instances of the word ‘clap’, you know, for the society pages’ applause-ridden features exposing all the sordid details of these canned, mass-produced pastas’ coming-out parties, parties it should be noted you were never invited to, but this was ages ago, long before the apocalypse, and you couldn’t expect these canned pastas’ parents even to have foreseen your birth, let alone bothered to invite you to a party that would have been centuries-over by the time you were old enough to attend it, even before you were old enough and trying to sneak in, maybe one fewer century plus 98 years and a few days, though to give credit where it’s due, it really was a convincing fake ID, the very genesis, in fact, of your experience with spirit gum and fake mustaches, not that you wore one in your picture, but you rather applied it to the ID itself, a tiny one right where your own mustache would have gone, because if there’s anything that makes you look more mature than having a mustache in your ID picture, it’s your ID picture itself having a mustache, real hair that the bouncer at the cotillion you’re trying to sneak into can be mesmerized by, allowing you to sneak past and chat up some of the more attractive young canned pastas in attendance, not that they’d ever give someone of your station or your means the time of day since you don’t belong to the right fraternity and your parents couldn’t even afford to work at this country club, let alone be members, but then your parents were always quick to remind you never to belong to a club that would have you for a member anyway, and oops the mustache just fell off while the bouncer was petting it, and now you’ve been made and he had you bodily removed, which you’ll recall was the last time you had your shoulder dislocated, and it was since then you feel you’d been operating on a partially relocated shoulder, until today of course, as you sit lying here on the floor of the garage, remembering thanks to the fake ID story that you have cases of spirit gum that will make you the richest man ever to walk the non-Muto Mall if you can ever find your way back to it, and oh would you look at this: Billy Mitchell VII is here standing over you with a saw sticking out of his arm, asking if you’re okay, to which you just shrug before returning to your dreams of becoming a spirit gum magnate, dreams which are instantly shattered when you realize that you don’t even know what a magnate is, and you refuse to let Billy tell you it’s a wealthy, influential person, especially in business, but too late, he’s telling you now, and you can’t forget it no matter how much you try, and the commotion in the other room is getting louder and Billy’s saw wounds are beginning to bleed and your shoulder is hurting again because maybe it was popped too far back in after all and a few sprinkles of acid have managed to find their way in through the hole in the garage door and who even knows if the mechano-farthing survived the crash and the assassin knows where you live and there’s a blighter and a git at Making Plans for Rigel who are completely indifferent to you and you don’t know what to do about any of it, but you have one idea, and you realize this has gone on far enough, so you put to yourself the question,

Do you:

A. finally take a breath after all that?

B. stand up and do what the part of your brain you named Lisvender suggested at the end of chapter twelve?

The voting period for this chapter has ended.