The purple hirple
Limped along on July 20, 2025.
I lay under my stoop quietly decomposing for a while. But that got boring right quick, so I went back upstairs to my nineteenth-floor bedroom to doze off for a while (after noshing heartily on some raccoons, of course).
And doze I did.
I slept and I dreamed. I dreamed about four men named Gerald Herold, Harold Darrow, Darryl Darrow, and Horace Morris Norris arguing with each other about whether or not an ascot or a cravat was appropriate neckwear to go with a straw boater. I dreamed about being kicked in the face by a barefoot Chun-Li. I dreamed about someone making a RealDoll of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (Neither were wearing ascots—or cravats, mind you.) Then I woke up screaming. Screaming, flailing, and hirpling. Hirpling furiously about my bedroom in as meanderous a manner I could muster, empurpled about the countenance, and burping loudly—loud enough to wake the goats on Shoehorner Street.
Then I accidentally hirpled right out the bedroom door. And I hirpled up the stairs, ascending several storeys in my palatial abode. I wasn’t sure where I was going, until I reached the thirty-fourth floor. Then I was sure where I was going (the thirty-fourth floor).
A thought popped into my head right then: Being kicked in the face by a barefoot Nicki Minaj.
Someone was walking on my ceiling—hirpling about, that is—but I didn’t have any someones living in my house, let alone on the thirty-seventh floor. (Don’t ask how I got up another two floors—just don’t.) Becasue was in the kitchen, thirty-six floors down, quietly eating corn and cooking more corn for dinner (corn gone only slightly wrong this time). Nurdlebutt wasn’t a someone; she was a cat. All the other someones who ever lived in this house had long been turned to ghosts. Then there were the gnomes, but they lit out for Nome, Alaska, after I took a flamethrower to their under-wainscoting lairs on International Firgun Day. Tomorrow is National Hotdog Day. I listened intently to see if the walking-about on my ceiling had stopped. It had. I decided the sanest thing to do was chalk to whole thing up to my overactive imagination. (The one that came up with the idea that gnomes live in the wainscoting.) I burped, then began hirpling down thirty-six flights of stairs.
She was of course dressed like Chun-Li (again, no ascot nor cravat), which made it make more sense than it otherwise would have made.
I hirpled into the kitchen. I burped, empurpled about the countenance once more. Becasue looked at me. She was not dressed like Chun-Li at the moment. Or like anyone else for that matter.
A thought popped into my head right then: Then it was gone.
Then my big little redheaded huzzey-muffet started hirpling, then Nurdlebutt started hirpling, then we were all hirpling, up and down, all around, to and fro, until we all died of exhaustion. No one was left to bury us under the stoop. Shit.