Hirpled, hobbled, blithely a calzone out the door
Bobbled up on August 3, 2025.
I still thought about that calzone sometimes. I’m sure some of the molecules that had come from its many slices of pepperoni (and maybe even some of its cheese!) were still part of my Pnårpy body. I wondered where though. My feet? My buttocks? My nose? It was a question that demanded answers.
“Being stepped on by a barefoot Chun-Li?” I suggested. Becasue hadn’t asked me what I was thinking right then, but I decided to volunteer the information spontaneously. No response other than a quirked eyebrow—and off in the distance, a fruit fly took to the air. I tried again: “A snake eating August Kekulé’s tail?” Strike two. “How many of them coulda did it with finesse?”
My big little redheaded huzzey-muffet sauntered off. The fruit fly landed, bit into an apple, and died.
My ileum was illin’ again. My doctor, or at least someone who claimed to be some kind of doctor when I asked, had prescribed high-strength obecalp for my condition. (“Ask your doctor about the purple pill!”) It had done wonders for me. A real doctor probably would have told me to stop eating all those fireworks—especially the lit ones—but that purple pill was good enough for me!
Remembering the one word in this godforsaken language that rhymes with “purple,” I was seized by the sudden urge to hirple, and did so at flunce. I hirpled blithely out the door. Nurdlebutt couldn’t join me hirpling because she was on the can; Becasue couldn’t join me hirpling because she was hobbled like a horse in our tenth-floor boudoir—but that was no matter: I could hirple all on my own now.
I smarmed smugly, basking in the glory of successfully using a colon, semicolon, and dash in a single sentence, while still maintaining, more or less, actual semantic meaning. A series of commas would have been the veritable icing in the cake, but after a series of comas this week, I had developed a peculiar phobia of the overuse of commas. My huzzey-muffet started whinnying, so I cast my typological smuggery aside and climbed the stairs. It would be a long night.
That doctor turned out to be an impostor—a complete fraud. A quack! He wasn’t even a fish doctor like I am! He sold car tires for a living. And spoons. And sometimes even tire spoons.
Becasue made corn calzones for dinner. They were made of cornbread, filled with corn, packed with cornmeal, and flavored with corn syrup. I wondered how long these calzony molecules would be a part of my Pnårpy corpse. How long would it take for them to be integrated into my nose? My feet? My buttocks?
My buttocks—both of them—still smarted. I really should not have made her that goat-leather paddle, I thought to myself. Out loud, I just made meeping noises. I took another bite of my corny calzone.
Then I died and Horace Morris Norris buried me under the stoop where I belonged. Shit.