this is why it happened: i was talking with a friend over skype. i said i'd be back in about ten minutes. when i got back in ten minutes, the friend did not respond, and so i indulged myself in the mildest form of skype-trolling: leaving a long string of dense, obscure messages. i decided to write a story.
it took longer than i expected, but i'll be honest with you: i love it. it's not good, really-- it's not well written, or well thought-out, but i like it.
full disclosure? it makes me feel like gaiman, in the same way finding a big stick in the woods, thumping it on the ground, and informing to the squirrel in front of you that it "SHAALLLLL NOT PAAAAAAAASSSSSSS!!!" makes you feel like gandalf. you don't have magic powers of a mouse-nest of a beard or an elven ring or hobbits, for that matter, but that doesn't matter at all. i don't know what super-power gaiman has, but i like feeling like i have it too. even though i don't. clearly.
this, then is the story-- enjoy:
(a few notes:
- i kept the IM formatting by making indents because it was written over IM, and that makes a difference in how you pace your words and stuff. also, it would have been work to make it make sense without it.
- sinister means, literally, left-handed. from latin. the latin for right-handed is dexter. the friend i was writing to is left-handed.
- i made this story up as i went. i started with nothing but two randomly chosen nouns.)
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there once was a penguin who lived in a watermelon.
it was not a very big watermelon, and it was not a very cold watermelon, and it was not a very antarctic watermelon, and as watermelons went, it was not even particularly pretty.
and the penguin said to himself, "i do not want to live in a watermelon. i want to live in the sea."
and so he climbed out of his watermelon and flew the few inches to the great table on which the watermelon houses of his penguin community all sat,
and he went to the watermelon of his neighbor-penguin, and he said to him, "Sinister, i don't like my watermelon anymore."
Sinister was not a very bright penguin. he was the kind of penguin who believed all of and only what he was told. his understanding of the world was as black and white as he was.
Sinister was only black and white.
this, anyway, was what the penguins would tell you about him.
but what they didn't know is that Sinister had a secret-- Sinister was an evil genius.
"what do you mean you don't like your watermelon, Dixie?" said Sinister.
"it's large and green and it keeps you cold at night. what more could you ask for?"
and Dixie said to Sinister, "i don't rightly know. but i just have this feeling . . . i don't know. i keep thinking about the sea. dreaming about it, really. salivating over it, and fantasizing about it, and doing whatever the verb form of nostalgia is when you do it to the future, and--" and Sinister cut him off, and said, "shut the fuck up, dixie, and go home. you're drunk."
this had not been the truth until Sinister proclaimed it so.
but drunk or otherwise, dixie suspected he was onto something-- he really did want to live in the sea, and furthermore, he figured to himself, all penguins were supposed to live in the sea. they must all want it too, but they just didn't know it.
dixie went home and read 1984 by george orwell, which was published in england by penguin books in 1950.
he promptly forgot every word of it, for he was a penguin, and furthermore an idiot.
but among sinister's secrets were that he, too, wanted to live in the sea. he always had.
the difference between sinister and dixie was this: sinister was crazy enough and smart enough and evil enough and genius enough to pull the whole thing off.
i'll skip to the end: sinister cut his foot off, and then made himself a new one.
he mixed the blood with the red fruit of the inside of his watermelon, and he chanted away four penguin days.
much like the days of the christian creation myth, nobody has any idea how long a penguin day is, and it doesn't matter in the slightest.
i, personally, believe they are 4.23689 billion years E-4 a piece.
but that's just my opinion, and anyway, i digress.
the blood ritual was not to a penguin god.
or it was, in a sense, though sinister did not quite know it.
the ceremony was to creat within himself a sense of utter solidarity, or insanity, and devil-may-care, or rather god-may-care--- diety-may-care--- what have you--- the point is that it worked.
sinister, as you might expect, had spent his life in doubt and mild insecurty and careful, witty, aloof observation. now, his focus was fully on himself, and his idea, and on nothing more.
what sinister did not know was that the ritual was, in fact, a ritual to the penguin god, and a ritual to himself, for sinister was the penguin god.
he was their jesus, if you will, though he himself did not know it.
sinister, freshly emerged from his fourty days in the watermelon-blood cocktail that made a fruity pool at the bottom of his watermelon, took his rotten fleshy foot and shot it with a freeze ray.
this had the convieniant effect of making it not unlike a saw.
he climbed out of his watermelon, armed with his frozen fruity bloody foot-saw, and looked at his watermelon.
it was all he had known.
it was his home.
it was his life.
and then, he took his foot to it, and he used it as a lever, and because he had a place to stand, he moved his world.
he rolled it off the table.
he rolled it down the hallway of the universe,
and to the great black door, finally free of the contstraints of time and penguin-space, and there on the threshhold, he used his foot to cut the top of his watermelon off.
then, he flew into it, cut his other foot off, told it to quit its whining and shut the bloody fuck up if it knew what was good for it, shot it with a freeze ray, sprayed it with that chemical that makes hiking boots waterproof, attached a new foot where the old one was supposed to be, and connected his organic, disembodied feet with a long pole.
and he kyaked away into the expanse of the blackness until, after many long penguin-eternities in the nothingness, he washed up on a beach.
he surveyed the beach, and the ice, and the penguins there, and while he knew they were penguins, he knew they were not like him.
they were nothing like his penguins.
they did not look the same, or talk the same, and they did not live in watermelon.
and he looked at the sea, and he remembered his dreams, and he thought to himself, "this is everything you ever wanted."
and he told himself, "you like the sea."
but he did not like the sea.
he told himself, "you want to stay here in the sea."
but he did not want to stay here in the sea.
he told himself, "man up, you goddamn coward, and live your sorry remainder of your pathetic useless life here in this icy hell you've made your way to."
but he did not man up, nor was he a goddamn coward, for he was not god-damned, because he was, in fact, something like god, and he did not damn, and he certainly did not damn himself, and he was not sorry, and there was no remainder to his life, and he infinitely more eth-etic and log-etic than path-etic, and he was far from useless, and the thing he had was not quite a life, really, when you thought about it, though it was when you didn't, which was all a part of the problem, really,
and while his mind was thinking and churning over the truths and the falsehoods and all of the things in between, his hands had been moving of their own accord, as though possessed by an evil spirit (who was highly intelligent and inventive), and they picked up the pole that connected the two feet, and they tossed the feet into the ocean, and they held the pole, and, in doing so, made it into a shotgun, and they aimed, and they fired, and sinister's heart stopped.
sinister had not been alive, though he'd been something like it.
he hadn't been god, though he'd been a god, or anyway, he'd been more than a prophet, for certain, and he hadn't been possessed, quite-- all this to say, he could no more fully, absolutely, unabashedly die than he could fully be any of the other things he'd never fully been.
siniter did what sinister always did-- he played silly, lefthanded tricks, and he was a little bit everything, and never fully anything, and always indefinable.
he vanished, in a sense, though became ubiquitous and evident in others.
he expired, in one sense, and inspired, in another.
his life fully ended at one point in time, in one sense, but in the same stroke he bacame immortal.
sinister became the spirit of the left-handed.
this is why all left handed people are known to have feet like penguins, and to be black, white, or something in between.
this is also why they tend to like watermelon.
THE END!
(but this is the story of sinister, isn't it? and so it does not end.)
((and yet there is nothing more.))
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