Sunday Comix (Little Black Book 5)
2001-07-17 - 11:58 p.m.
This story was originally going to touch on the invention of the wheel, but after reading so much about piskies and banshees, I decided that leprechauns were a better fit. Thanks to JenB for the marshmallows, and for Sarah for the...umm, moral support.
LBB5
I got a little black book for Christmas. This is what I wrote in it...
Once, when the world was new, oranges were cube-shaped. In fact, oranges were so cuboidal that they weren�t called �oranges� at all, they were called �cubes�. Apples were called �pyramids�, and pancakes were called...well, pancakes have always been called pancakes. And in this world that was so new lived two pre-Mesopotamian children, Heindall and his sister Gastri (her real name was Pastri, but no one knew how to pronounce �p� sounds back then, so they substituted with a �g�). Heindall was an apprentice baker, and Gastri was a lawyer�s assistant. Because Lawyers had not yet been invented, Gastri spent most of her time playing in the forests, where cubes and pyramids grew wild and all the animals spoke in one language. The fact that the animals all spoke one language, however, was not very useful to Gastri, because she only spoke her native language, known as Grunt. On any particular day of the week (even though the week had not yet been invented) Gastri and Heindall could be found frolicking and exploring in the vast expanses of cube- and pyramid-producing trees. It was on one of these days (it was later predicted to have been a Tuesday) that the two pre-Mesopotamian children came upon a house. This, of course, was very bizarre, because housing had not previously been discovered. And the house itself was constructed of gelatin-free marshmallows, which were also previously undiscovered by mankind. Upon reaching the clearing that housed the house, Heindall said to Gastri, �Hans! (for everyone refereed to everyone as �Hans!� in those days) Who do you think lives here?� Of course, Gastri had no more of an idea than Heindall. So the two did what any sensible children would do, when placed in front of a pile of gelatin-free marshmallows...they began to gnaw on the edges. They played in the taffy good between their fingers and threw their bodies against the larger marshmallows, which would bounce them back into the grass. After a great long while, when their stomachs were quite full of sugar substitutes, and their hands quite sticky from taffy pies, the pre-Mesopotamian children lay in the sun and drifted off to sleep...
And so it was not until Gastri woke up that she considered going inside the marshmallow construct to see whom/what was inside. �Hans! Do you think we ought to�� But it seemed that Gastri was talking to herself, because Heindall was no where to be seen. So, being the modern type of pre-Mesopotamian girl that she was, Gastri took the initiative to find him by herself. First, she walked up to a rather large-looking marshmallow and poked it (not being aware of the purpose of doors, doorbells, or doormats [even today, some scholars are perplexed as to the purpose of doormats] ). Then she poked another marshmallow, and another, until all the marshmallows had been poked several times over...but she was determined not give up her quest to find her brother. She knocked and pounded on the wall of the house, not realizing that gelatin-free marshmallows are a poor conductor of sound. And then she gave up. But just as Gastri was about to invent crying, one of the marshmallows squished aside, and light from the inside of the house sprinkled out into the clearing. In the doorway (for it was a doorway, but Gastri never really considered giving a name to such a thing as a hole in the side of a house) stood a witch.
Now, it must be stated that up until the pre-Mesopotamian era, there were only two types of witches known to exist: �nice� witches that ate only vegetables and spent their time transporting lost children back to their respective homes; and �evil� witches, who ate small children and lived in gelatin-free marshmallow houses. Not knowing which one of the aforementioned groups this particular witch belonged to, Gastri gave the stranger the benefit-of-the-doubt that she was a nice witch. So, when the witch invited Gastri inside, she thought nothing of it, and went to look for Heindall. And soon enough, she found him. Her brother was sprawled out on the livingroom floor, playing checkers by himself. Or rather, he would have been playing checkers, if he knew how, but as it was, he was just making up the rules as he played. The witch then explained to the two pre-Mesopotamian children (during a series of checkers games, of course) that she was not really an evil witch, but an ex-nice witch, who was kicked out of her coven because she did not like to crochet.
As it was getting dark shortly, the witch offered to help them get back home; but neither of the children had such a thing, homes not being invented yet. So instead, she packed them each a morsel of food and sent them on their way. But like all children, they complained that weren�t yet done playing until it really had become dark outside...so the witch agreed to let them keep the checkers game.
Gastri and Heindall had not walked far into the night when they stopped to play another game. But Heindall wanted to play his own variation, and Gastri wanted to play it normally (she had won most of the games so farr). And screaming, aggravation, whining, and general pissiness were invented within the course of five minutes, follwed quickly by the invention of discus throwing, as the two children threw the checkers pieces at one another.
A spider, sitting nearby was captivated by the circular shape of the checkers piece. After many not-so-accurate measurements and documentation of multiple pages, he took his idea to a squirrel. The squirrel confirmed the results of his research, and they soon set about convincing the trees to bear spherical fruit rather than cubodial and pyramidal shapes. The trees all agreed, when they saw the obvious benefits of a higher volume-to-surface-area ratio. (That is, all but the star-fruit bearing tree, who sported a high surface-area-to-volume ratio instead.) But this created a catastrophe in the taxonomy department, because some of the fruits were of reasonably the same size and shape. To amend the situation, the more intelligent animals were given the task of renaming the fruits...but these �intellectual� animals just came up with bizarre names that sounded good (and some that sounded worse). For example, a snake suggested that one of the groups of fruits be called �apple� because it was similar to the pineapple, but did not grow on pine trees. And the wise-and-trusted owl said that what we now know as kiwi fruits tasted very much like kiwi birds. And the arguments went long into the night, at which point some rabbits made the point that the tasks of eating and sleeping took priority over silly arguments, and everyone retired to their respective homes.
It was a short time later, in the horse-and-buggie era, that a union of leprechauns from the Balkans known as the Leprechauns Underground Construction Crew plus Yodelers (LUCCY) (inspired partly by the cards who painted the Queen of Heart�s roses red) decided to take it upon themselves to paint some fruits of the world bright orange. The orange balls made perfect road markers, for detouring road traffic while the leprechauns maintained the conditions of their woodland paths. Even to this day, crack espionage teams of leprechauns have been seen infiltrating fruit-bearing countries to spraypaint all the oranges orange. And the yodelers, they shout yodel-ay-hee-hoo! And that, my friend, is why oranges are called oranges.
