Mr. and Mrs. Ickison were in their car, driving, which was not unusual. They had just left an underground dogfight. It was, in fact, underground. The place had been built by bootleggers from the prohibition, anticipating that there would always be a need for their particular talents. They had built a subbasement under the normal basement with a secret entrance for anyone interested in a little recreation. It had been a good night. Mr. and Mrs. Ickison were very happy, they had gotten lucky. They had been unwise and bet against the champion, the underdog having looked promising. Another man had been unwise with his winnings and Mr. Ickison walked away with four hundred dollars profit on a losing dog. As he drove away, Mr. Ickison congratulated himself on his sheer brilliance. He had just done so for the third time since getting into the car, and was about to do so again, when he became annoyed by an oddly audible noise that rose above the sound of the truck. It took him a minute to identify the sound, and when he did, it was with disgust. It was the sound of an ice cream truck playing “we three kings of orient are” several blocks down the street. He hated ice cream trucks and their awful songs, but this was just inappropriate.
At that same moment, Mrs. Ickison gave a scowl of death, and almost literally shot daggers from her eyes at a woman who was hanging underwear on a clothesline in front of her house, but was distracted when she too seemed to register the singularly out of place song.
At the same time several blocks down the street, a one eyed blathering hobo prepared to have his dinner. He lived under the porch of an abandoned burned down church, the porch being all that was left. He had discovered a nest earlier in the day with several eggs in it that he was determined to have.
At the same instance, many miles away, Samuel had just tackled a giant Thistle, fallen backwards over it and finally sat up to admire the large hole it had left, when multiple things happened simultaneously. As Samuel sat staring in shock and wonder at the hand in the hole in the garden of their house in the very center of the United States, several flies “popped” into existence again, for the second time in less than a few minutes. It was as if by setting his eyes on the severed hand, a dam had opened in his mind allowing flies to pour from it without his control. Several of those flies came into being inside the cab of his not-stepparent’s truck.
Anyone watching from the street at that moment, for instance, the woman carefully masquerading her family’s unmentionables on the front lawn, would have thought that Mrs. Ickison had stuck a finger in an electrical outlet. She began to scream, and flail and convulse and writhe throughout the cabin of the truck. Mr. Ickison was nearly knocked unconscious, and very nearly blinded by his wife’s incontrollable seizure. That same anyone that might have seen Mrs. Ickison’s unfortunate breakdown, would have also seen what Mr. Ickison did not: a very strange man in a black paperboy’s cap and red blazer with obscenely large glasses, running knee-highs across the street.
At the same moment down the street, the unfortunate hobo also decided to run across the street flailing as if he was being attacked by a flock of ravens. He was, although it was just the one, the one whose eggs he had tried to steal. Sadly, another small swarm of flies had appeared in the cab of the ice cream truck, and the driver did not see the man, or the raven. Orphan raven babies, that would be an awesome band name!
Several blocks further up the street a self conscious and awkward teenage boy driving his embarrassing old family car discovered that the girl he had had a crush on for grades was crossing the same intersection he was, but in the opposite direction, and in his embarrassed terror he humiliatingly ran into her. Coincidentally this accident had nothing to do with the odd occurrences at the other end of the street, but it is strange that three crashes occurred on the same street at the exact same time. The poor young man wished that they had both died in the crash, but since they were only going about fifteen miles per hour, he had no such luck. This young man’s name was Scotch, which was the only thing his father would drink. The girl’s name was Miranda.
SammyK sat staring in stunned sepulchral silence at the skeletal severed hand. He was completely unaware of the terrible events that had occurred many miles away from the recently vacated dead-thistle hole. Finally, after what seemed like at least thirty-seven seconds, he blinked. That was a bad choice though for his first move after regaining full consciousness, because he was all covered in dirt, mud and thistle down, which all fell into his eyes as he blinked. With both eyes clamped firmly shut, with his nose crinkled to provide every possible ounce of pressure, he was effectively blind. He was about to rub his eyes with his hands in an attempt to clear them, but had the sense of mind not to, since his hand were also filthy, feathery, and sappy. Then, sitting there with his eyes closed and face contorted, he wondered why his hands were sappy, because, well, the thistle had been dead and shouldn’t have had any sap. Then, with that thought, the more practical side of his brain slapped him and shouted “excuse me!?!?!? That really isn’t that important right now!!” So he promptly put it out of his mind. He needed to think of what to do. He had to get to the house in order to clean his eyes, or maybe a hospital, but it wasn’t going to be easy stumbling around in the labyrinth of the not-garden with his eyes full of thistle. He got to his feet and slowly took a step forward with his arms outstretched like Frankenstein, or a mummy, or someone pretending to be one of those things, or pretending to be blind, or like someone that was trying to find his way without being able to see. He should have moved his hands around though while he walked, because the trunk of another mammoth thistle just happened to pass right in between his outstretched arms and collided solidly with his face. He bounced off of it backwards, reeling from the pain and the irony. Whereas he had kind of known where he was and in what direction he was going before, he was now completely disoriented. He tried desperately to regain his bearings, but was very unsuccessful. He started to move forward again, a little more carefully, towards the house; he promptly fell into the hole. He screamed as he fell.
Miles away from the unfortunately uninviting faux-lighthouse Kinkaid residence, someone else screamed too.
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