This one is similar:
YELLOW FINGERS
==============
Explanatory pause; you're wrong: this investigative document has nothing
to do with the sensuous golden yellow decorating the two fingers you hold
your smoke with. Heck no. The subject matter mainly consists of kings,
pages, a slick thief...also Ma Bell.
Cautionary pause: this is meant to be read by the strong-willed. If you
feel ready to proceed, I suggest you take a deep breath. You'll sure need
it to get through the first paragraph: some 130 words with no periods...
all one sentence. For your benefit, I broke a couple of grammatical rules
and used little minus signs to make it less wieldy...but then I never said
I had high marks in English Literature. Here we go...
I hate stories that start off with "once upon a time", so: at one point during
an era, many-many-many years ago,
-back then when Vincent Price and Bela Lugosi frenchteethed long white necks
while church bells played the funeral waltz and screaming bats swooped in
and out,
-back then when light sprites took delight creating fright in the night...
sneaking up behind you (if you were walking back home after midnight) and
shouting "BOO-BAH-BOO-BAH-BOOOOOO!",
-back then when thick yellowish smoke curled up from the graveyard grounds
while coffins surfaced, lids creaked open and corpses sprang up while
gravediggers shivered,
-yes, way back then lived a rich ugly mean-mean-mean king (with a face like
a wanted poster and wearing huge diamond rings worth enough to pay off
Canada's national debt) in some huge castle on top of some hill some quarter
mile off some foggy sea shore. Phew...
Hats off to you if you're still with me: you're sure tenacious. Time to take
a breather: do a Super Bowl half-time. I'll wait for you.
Welcome back. Well, just how mean was this king? Very, very mean. Meaner than
Jake the Snake and The Undertaker combined. Today's top meanologists, after
studying parchments at The Mean Hall of Fame in Transylvania, all agree that
if this king lived today, he would be a shoe-in as a Blue Line taxi driver.
This king employed a few pages: you know, them servants dressed in black tights,
leafy boots and candy-striped half-jackets with high fuzzy collars up to the ears.
He had them poor pages living in cheap huts, all along the edge of that foggy
sea shore.
In order to hide them cheap huts from the castle, this mean king arranged for
tall pine trees to be planted in a straight line, some hundred yards from them
cheap huts. Them pine trees made for a beautiful sight when viewed at sunset:
the fog off the sea would envelop them trees, then turn kinda yellowish due to
the sunset. This made them pine trees look like "yellow fingers" waving in the
sea breeze: like, WOW!
This king was a real meany. His rules were that the poor pages had to stay behind
them pine trees all day until midnight, at which time they had to cross over to
the castle, perform their duties, and return to their huts by 4 am, scared out
of their wits, midnight to 4 am being the busiest ghostly goings-on...easily as
scary as taking the Queensway off the Pinecrest ramp around 5 pm.
This story would end here (and you'd all wonder why I wrote it) were it not for
a slick thief (you know, one of them with shifty eyes, sneaking around furtively
on tip-toes, a bit like a car salesman) who all along had been casing the castle.
One evening, he made his move: armed with a double-barrel-sling-shot (his own
invention using his wife's bra), he surprised the king around 9 pm with a loud
"gimme all your gold".
The king (who probably was a western movie nut) answered "you'll never get away
with this", then began yelling to his pages for help. To no avail, as he had
forbidden them to cross before midnight...as our slick thief well knew. Well,
our slick thief got the gold, after sling-shooting the king with two size 42D
sling-shot stones. The king was killed instantly.
The next king was a nice, kind king. He had the pages' huts all fixed up: windows
with shutters, aluminum siding, individual mail boxes. Plus he got them all
Designer tights from Eatonius' department store. Also removed all restrictions,
allowing them to run around all over the grounds. He told them "you guys be
ready when called upon, hear", and for this purpose equipped them all with
Westpagius beepers and increased their salaries with special "on call" pay.
Well, in order to get to the punch line of this story, I have to bring in our
slick thief once more.
He had way too much dandelion wine last night, plus lost all his gold in a heavy
poker game of kings-and-little-ones. He woke up to his wife's mouth: she'd gone
through his pockets and was yelling at him for losing all their money. His head
felt as if Mike Tyson was using it as a punching bag, and his stomach as if an
olympic diving team was inside it doing two and a half forward somersaults with
a full twist.
His wife kept nagging him, with wifely specials like "you promised to take me
shopping today" and "I should have listened to my mother and never married you",
all the while banging pots and pans on the iron stove (OUTCH!). Well, what else
could our suffering slick thief do. Assuming all kings were alike, he did no
further casing of the castle and that night pulls the same stunt on our new king,
who was sitting outside in his swing-chair enjoying the "yellow fingers" scenery.
Well, our new king simply pressed the Westpagius alarm button: pages swarmed in
from behind pine trees. Our slick thief was quickly disarmed, our new king saved.
I hate stories that end up with "and lived happily forever after", so our new
king lived a contended life until he died of old age.
Stories-of-old usually end up with a lesson or a moral; and this one is no
different:
LET YOUR PAGES DO THE WALKING THROUGH THE YELLOW FINGERS !
