Brian Lillie

 

1ST DEGREE

Jefferson Davis purchased a sock boiler from Stanislav Gamoria, the crazed Prussian inventor who was holed up in Philadelphia for several years in the mid-nineteenth century, waiting for that whole “Gamoria Poisoned Our Water Supply” thing to blow over.

One of the socks that were boiled was a green woolen number that Davis purchased during an absinthe-fueled debauch in New Orleans a few years before the War Between the States started to screw with his nightlife. This sock later fell out of a steamer trunk as it was being transported to Charleston, along with Davis’ entire collection of big-eyed silver duckling statuettes. The sock lay in a ditch for several weeks before being eaten by a particularly hungry badger.

 

2ND DEGREE

The badger’s named was “Lil’ Bumpy”, on account of the fact that he was smaller than the other badgers and had a fairly advanced case of eczema. (This didn’t prevent him from being a favorite among the toddler badgers, who would gather around him at the holidays and listen to him tell stories about rutting, looking for food, avoiding raccoons, etc.)

Now, after Bumpy ate the boiled green sock, a strange thing happened: You see, when that sock was originally dyed, a single snapweed seed got lodged in between some of its fibers. The act of boiling that sock several times cooked the seed, eventually releasing a tiny amount of Protease 15, which has been known to decrease the severity of skin ailments in small mammals. Unfortunately for Bumpy, he would have needed to be soaked in eighty-five gallons of Protease 15 for five weeks to fully cure his eczema. As it was, the tiny amount he ingested was just enough to kill one of his million or so eczema bumps.

That bump was named Gary.

 

3RD DEGREE

Gary’s death sent a shockwave throughout the Lil’ Bumpy Eczema community, as he was the Ombudsman for the right front paw, as well as secretary of the local Lodge. You can probably imagine that his funeral and wake were quite large and well-attended affairs, not to mention rather raucous. Over the course of the evening, all of the eczema bumps in attendance drank WAY too much and ate all sorts of fatty finger foods, which Gary’s lodge brethren had brought in abundance. The smell of all these microscopic cocktail wieners and bacon-stuffed cheese modules gathered together in one small area of Lil’ Bumpy’s right front paw was enough to attract an elderly mosquito named Ms. Eliza Portmanteau.

Because Ms. Portmanteau’s vision had deteriorated with the onset of old age (she was, after all, over thirty-five days old at this point!) she could not make out the tiny drunken mourners in their tiny little blobbish black suits, eating their tiny little snacks. All she saw was a vaguely ovoid patch of undulation that smelled like bacon. Thus, it is completely understandable that she thought she was beholding the ancient Mosquitoan god called Skreeeeeeeeeeeeee, the Bacon-Scented Oracle of Punkratonia.

As she prostrated before the “Oracle”, the drunken eczema bumps all looked up and were horrified to see the gigantic, matronly insect crouching above them. All except Pepito, Gary’s brother-in-law. He was so drunk that he thought the monstrous creature was really funny, and so he shouted at the top of his lungs, “Hey big mama, why don’t you come over to my place for a drink!”

Through her aged ears, Ms. Portmanteau heard Pepito’s jape as “From now on, you must subsist only on flower juice!” Ms. Portmanteau went on to form a Mosquito religion called “The Juicers,” who strove to give up their bloodsucking ways and live only on the nectar of fragrant woodland flowers. This religion lasted roughly three days, by the end of which all of its converts had died from malnutrition.

 

4TH DEGREE

Twenty-nine years later, in the library of Ohio State University in Columbus, a studious thespian by the name of Kroll Vandenbeen was researching obscure Mosquito lore for his role as the eldest larvae, Flip, in Arturo Sandregar’s “Death of 215,000 Mosquito Larvae,” when he stumbled across a terse passage in Wooton’s History of Really Stupid Insect Religions which mentioned Eliza Portmanteau and her ill-starred Juicers. Included was an artist’s rendering of Ms. Portmanteau prostrating to an oddly shaped god, which glowed godishly from the paw of a badger. “Skreeeeeeeeeeeeee, the Bacon-Scented Oracle of Punkratonia,” read the caption. Aha! This was just the stage moniker Vandenbeen had been searching in vain for. He had already picked out “Kevin” as the new first name that would catapult him to stardom, but now he had an equally impressive surname!

Behold! Kevin Skreeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!

Anyone who knows even a little about Hollywood would be able to tell you that Vandenbeen nee Kevin Skreeeeeeeeeeeeee went on to become one of the world’s biggest stars, winning three Best Actor Oscars, and starring in over forty well-regarded hit films, including “Wax Them Horsies,” “From This One Place To This Other Place With Bigger Trees,” and “Akimbo!”

 

5TH DEGREE

On His deathbed, Skreeeeeeeeeeeeee managed to write an autobiography before succumbing to elbow cancer. The book, One Cool Guy, became an instant bestseller, translated into twenty-five languages, including Chizembop, Eskimo, and Flozberish.

One dark and stormy night, a heavily loaded cargo plane sped above the mountains of Flozber towards the capitol city, Mulzmoondt. Its hold was filled with copies of Skreeeeeeeeeeeeee’s autobiography, freshly translated and printed using burnished spinach squeezins, in the traditional Flozberian way. All of a sudden, a finger of treacherous lightning jabbed downwards from the darkened clouds like a second-grade teacher accusing a seven-year-old of stealing her Hello Kitty “Best Teacher in the World” nose hair clippers, striking the plane and effectively busting it in two. Books and molten fuselage screamed away in great billowing wads to crash into the lonely mountains below.

One book, though, remained aloft in a particularly playful current of air, which blew the lucky tome all the way to Greenland before depositing it, unharmed, in the laundry basket of Kjerklt Ntttkrrsko’trsk, a local sportswriter, who was busy working on an article about that afternoon’s National Sodball Championship match between the Grrkkt’l Sassownsk’tts and the Ornjsk Bierntt’llqt’s.

 

6TH DEGREE

That afternoon, Ntttkrrsko’trsk slipped on a rogue Mento and broke his leg, while rushing to turn in his story. At the hospital, his niece Tjyerka’ssk visited, and he asked if she would go to his apartment and hang his laundry out to dry, which he had planned to do himself but would now be unable.

Tjyerka’ssk agreed, and when she went to her uncle’s apartment, she discovered Skreeeeeeeeeeeeee’s autobiography sitting atop the mildly damp laundry. The combination of the colors of the book jacket, the smell of the laundry, and the cavorting late afternoon sunbeams which filled the apartment caused Tjyerka’ssk’s head to expand to seventeen times its normal size.

Kevin Bacon stepped through her enlarged left nostril, wiped himself off with a bedspread, and offered to take her out for scones.

 

A week later, he starred in Footloose . . .

 

 

BRIAN LILLIE is a writer from Ann Arbor Michigan.