Upon the Fimbriated Planet
Flabbled about on August 5, 2012.
Rheebidly I stalked the fimbriated earth, going to and fro and walking up and down in it. Upon this fimbriated mass, upon this mass of besuited and benecktied cadavers, upon the Fimbriated Planet, I had lost everything but for what I could carry on my ursine and hirsute back (which was a lot, actually, but not enough). The wind howled and high above, dozens of O-type stars blazed down upon me—blue-white and angry. They screamed. They all screamed.
At least one thing gave me a bit of comfort, enleppious though it was: My old friend and crony Traian Băsescu hadn’t been booted out on his buttocks last week as I had feared might happen. I decided to send Viktor Orbán a fruit basket for all his efforts, or maybe a bundt cake. Magyars like bundt cakes, don’t they?
As I plodded across the pinstriped plain toward lapeled hills and button-down mountains, I marveled at the fact that 0.999… was equivalent to 1. I was, to put it lithply, astounded. Amazed. Flabbergasted. Gasted flabbously, even. This just couldn’t be, I insisted—persistently, not desisting one whit nor even a whistle-blit. Soon my teranoötic, psychopompous brain was so obsessed with analyzing this factlet regarding repeating nines and their equivalency to unity that I forgot how to direct my legs to walk! I tripped over my own multiple left feet, stumbled, pimbled wildly, crortwheeled, and fell upon the squishy and cadaverous soil with a gurgeoning schtroumpf!
One of the cadavers’ neckties tried to strangle me.
Struggling mightily to free myself from the silken fiend, I freed myself from the silken fiend, and stood back up. “Must… keep… focused…” I panted gormlessly, breaking out in a cold, icilious sweat as I realized—for the first time—that I was surrounded by millions of undulating, tentacle-like neckties, bow ties, and cravats rising up from the millions of blazoned corpses comprising the ground. The stench of corruption filled the air, and I wasn’t even near any politicians. I suppressed a shudder. I reached into my rucksack and rummaged around for one of the few books that I had been able to salvage. Hopefully by giving my mind something to dwell on (and crunk about) other than all the death around me (and “0.999… = 1”), I could avoid tripping over my own 8⅛ left feet again.
I held Jason The Horse’s seminal work, What If You Are a Horse In Human Form?, in my hands. I was enormously relieved that this masterful tome hadn’t been destroyed in the fiery crash of the ÅSS Goose from the Machine. I sat down on a nearby bump on a nearby log and began reading, starting on page one—as linear-minded people are wont to do.
5.391 06×10−44 seconds later I was done reading the entire book. I neighed with satisfaction. The half-life of 7H was still about 4¼×1020 times longer than the time it took me to read the equiline book, but that didn’t matter to me right now: “Yoctosecond” was such a silly word that I was immediately seized with a massive paroxysm of guffawnery and completely forgot about Jason The Horse’s sage advice on how to come out to your friends about being a horse in human form. Lord, did my horse-shaped face guffaw!
And on the other end of the scale, 20983Bi would last 1.641 6 yottaseconds before decaying, I had also learned from Wikipedia, which was even funnier. Hahaha, “yottasecond”! I dropped the horsey book and quivered breathless with mirth and squivliness. Long after I was dead and buried under these fimbriated cadavers, that bismuth would be going strong!
One of the fimbriated neckties tried to strangle me again. I cut it down with the sharpened corners of my horsey book, stood up, and got back to work wandering framelessly along the roiling surface of this Jesus-forsaken ball of cadavery. I began to notice, after some time, that in some places, amidst all these gratuitous commas, the pinstriping along the suits adorning the bloated corpses actually lined up; in most places, the cadaverous fimbriated men were all a jumble, but here and there there were clear and obvious patterns in the directions that the bodies were facing. In some places the moldering bodies lined up for a few yards. In other places, they seemed to line up all the way to the low horizon. Did it mean something? I gorŋed that there was only one way to find out: I would follow the longest path of parallel pinstripes in sight until I arrived… somewhere. And then I would see (provided my eyebulbs weren’t plucked out by a passing tommygoff beforehand, that is).
As I plodded stodgily (and morosely, as my grandpooty would have said) in what appeared to be a north-north-buttocksly direction (for I didn’t have a compass and there were no magnetic poles around here anyway), I remembered what often lay beyond low horizons (in my nightmares at least): Eyeless potatoes eyeing me forever. Would I find them beyond the horizon of the Fimbriated Planet? I shuddered at the idea and noösed about yottaseconds again. A grin quirked up the left side of my mouth, then the right side, and then the two other sides, too. Again I was at ease, stewing in my own mirth (and alabaster). Yottaseconds… hahaha!
As I splambled along, following the pinstripes like a bordge mule follows a Galorndorn wizzle-nipf, the wind began to pick up again—and again the neckties writhed and fluttered, and squorned and spluttered. And again did the voices in my twitterpated little ceph start to chatter—to chatter and yammer, and to blather and kerplunk. “Why did the horny chicken cross the road?” asked Zippy. “To swive on the other side!” Fluffy responded. Schizophrenic laughter rang out from within my squishy meninges. I just ignored them and continued my plodding, hoping to eventually run into a miracle that would help me off this planet and back into space. I really, really wanted some bagels.
It never gets dark on the Fimbriated Planet. No matter the time of day, the entire planet is bathed in a diffuse brown light—light gently emitted from the Bagel Nebula, so close now: Light the color of scrumptious brown bread that God (or maybe Ŋod, his evil twin brother) had surely made for no other reason than to tantalize and mock me. I groaned, jonesing hard for a cinnamon raisin bagel, and kept on plodding gargishly onward.
Miles upon miles of parallel pinstripes later, I spied on the (low, low) horizon an amorphous, greenish lump sitting upon the cadaverous expanse. It was slightly pyramidal, or perhaps conical, but it appeared mostly amorphous at this distance: A splotch of green on an otherwise dark and dreary horizon. It was the only feature upon the land that I had come across in four days. (The last one was a bizarrely out-of-place statue of Catlips the Clown, but that’s a story for another week.) Deviating from the pinstrippen path, I headed toward the lump. Surely it would be something! And if not, surely it would be something else!
Onward I plodded morodically, and in size the lump grew. Detail emerged—it appeared to be a pile of small, greenish objects—objects even more out of place here on the Fimbriated Planet than that statue of dear old Catlips. Fourscore and seven meters from the conical pile, I realized what the ovoid objects comprising it were—not green eggs as I had originally surmised—but limes. Thousands upon thousands of limes piled not quite as far as the eye could see, but certainly as far as the hand could pile.
“It certainly complements that pile of lemons, mmm, doesn’t it?” a reedy voice whispered out from the thin, deoxygenated atmosphere. Dóorxmal! I whipped my head around behind me, but he wasn’t there. Or was he? Úuxmal had mastered the ability to psychedele in colors that didn’t even exist; did this gnutey little gnute possess the ability to render himself entirely in colors that couldn’t even be seen? Science demanded an answer, but fortunately I wasn’t a scientist. I wasn’t even a tist anymore.
I stood at the foot of the lime-pile and got to work surmisin’ how it might aid in my escape.
Once again abusing my right to be stupid, I started digging—digging with my bare, bear hands—hoping I would find a new rocket ship somewhere under the pile of limes. I dug and I dug, and then I dug some more. I knew that I was not quite half as smart as a full-witted individual, but it didn’t matter: I would dig until I found a spaceship. I dug with my bare hands. I dug with my bear hands. I dug with my fingers, my dogs, and my toes. I even considered digging with my prehensile earlobes, but that was pushing it even for a man named Phillip Norbert Årp who looks like an old goat with a squirrel up his nose. And so, without further florid ado… I dug.
Six hours later, I was cruising gently through the æther once again, lounging soundly aboard a shiny new starship. What one can accomplish within the confines of a simple section break, I thought to myself. Here I was on the other side of a single blank line, and look what had changed! I was no longer stranded on the Fimbriated Planet. I was no longer sans rocket ship. In fact, I had upgraded from mere gnome-built rocket ship to a true starship—and it was one that didn’t look like it had been cobbled together from thousands of plastic models of the USS Enterprise, the Battlestar Galactica, and the Oscar Mayer™ wienermobile.
This one was even spaceworthy.
It didn’t make sense—and it didn’t have to. Virtually nothing made sense anymore and, come Hell or high interest rates, I was determined to remove that “virtually” qualifier even if doing so meant burying it under a massive pile of out-of-place limes on an out-of-place planet made of besuited cadavers, while digging up an incredibly out-of-place spaceship at the same time from under the same pile.
I smarmed smoovishly. Suspension of disbelief suspended itself from the ceiling by its neck and kicked out the chair. It wasn’t just a god poppin’ outta that machine this time, it was an entire motherfrakkin’ pantheon. Somewhere off in the distance, a goose barked. I leaned back in my cushy new captain’s chair and sucked on a lime. The geese were happy, my friends—yes, very happy indeed. I named my new ship the same as my old ship, even though it was a completely different ship, and continued along my merry journey to the Bagel Nebula.