A Typical Anti-Day
A Thursday Prompt thistle epistle
© XX Ventôse CCXXX, with pie, $5.99 extra, by armlet rewire


Laggard: chaos


“Sir! Sir!” The terrier yelped as he burst into the Controller’s office.

“How dare you burst in here?” the opossum demanded. “Now get a paper towel and clean that up, and sing to me why you’re interrupting my masturbation.”

“Sir, I’m sorry,” crooned the terrier in a creditable Brenda Lee impersonation, “oh so sorry, for disturbing your Thingle puzzle. Things are in a brilliant tussle, one might almost say a bustle.”

“Is – do you mean – there’s a bustle in the hedgerow?!”

“Don’t be alarmed,” the terroir poured a glass of wine to soothe the opossum’s savage breast. Once the nipple went down, she said, “There have been reports of hoopla among the topiaries, and no one showed up to trim their unicorns.”

“We wondered why our feet were hurting,” the three-headed three-toed sloth said in out-of-synch triplicate. Two heads started sharing salacious secrets, scaring their sister with their abusive alliterations after the third head said, “Fred, go away quickly,” and after eyeing the clock, which clearly resented being looked at, “and come in ten minutes ago. Are you still here?”

“I might be,” Schrödinger said.

“Coarse, come in twenty minutes ago, I’ll be on my fix,” the monkey grunted, and the farrier left, coming fore in while the Controller was on its toffee break. “What then?”

The amoebas coalesced into a gestalt and communicated via secreted polypeptides, farting and tap dancing, and when the collective was done the Controller stroked its leg hairs, contemplating as the clock’s feet wound slowly sideways. “Sew,” and he began knitting his leg hairs into leggings, “if things are as you saw, we must stop planking and get on board.” He paused to brush sawdust from his toes, who thanked him.

“The forecast is for fornication in the forenoon, four P.M.,” the writhing shoggoth flooped sadly (501-jeans).*

“We must do something ten years from now, when the conditions say it’s all right.”

“It’s all right?”

“All right.” She moved in a mysterious way, and the shoggoth deliquesced into a flock of seagulls that ran, they ran so far away. “Come front there,” the mass of cockroaches said, and the tortoise ambled in. “JACK!” And in the twinkling of a jump cut a rabbit crouched on the roaches’ desk, twitching his nose. “You can’t fool me with a cheap cinematic trick,” the ball of centipedes hissed.

“You wanted to hear me?” the rabbit said.

“K.O.,” and the rabbit vanished into a flock of scintillating jewel-like Lorenz butterflies, only a few of which died horribly at the claws of the centipede before they flew away.

There was a soundless bellow that sounded almost but not quite unlike a huge, juicy raspberry.

“There was a small randomicity inversion in the labs,” the terrier said to the opossum. Jack, the tabby that had been called in, twitched his ears while he scrolled through data on his tablet. “We’ve managed to lock it down before things got too far out of paw.”

“Good job,” the Controller said before taking another sip of his coffee and turning to face the audience. “All in another day’s work, here at Nosuch Lab.”


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*(you'd be sad, too, if you had no shape and were faced with wearing pants)