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The Incredible Juice Trapeze

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Doop, I wrote another story

The Incredible Juice Trapeze

“Forensic science has only come so far,” said the detective, examining the chainsaws and gore which lay before him. A chicken was on fire. “Usually, I would run some sort of blood spatter analysis. But there’s no blood.” And, indeed, there was no blood. Only organs. Organs and cocaine and suicide notes written in several different handwritings, each containing traces of even more cocaine. “I just wish we could read the notes.” They were all in French.

“Why can’t you just hire a translator, or anyone else who happens to know French?” asked the man on whose lawn this heinous and clearly plausible crime had been committed.

“In this economy? You are daft. I’ve already run a complete cost-benefit analysis, and it would be about fourteen dollars cheaper to enroll in a beginners’ French course at a local community college than it would be to contract a skilled, trustworthy, full-time translator. I will learn the nuances of the language and find out firsthand what these forsaken notes could possibly say.”

“There’s also the Internet.”

“There are also beginners’ French courses.”

And so what could very well be considered the most ingenious and well-constructed plot in history began, in a sea of tears and heartbreak.

Detective Olivia was a high-strung, inventive man who was often ridiculed for having a woman’s name. In high school, there was a club conceived entirely for the purpose of frequently writing the word “woman” in nondescript black pen on randomly chosen pages in his notebooks, or on his tongue while he slept. When he became older, Olivia neglected to have his name legally changed because he did not know what that was.

He graduated from university with a degree in astronomy, bought a boat, and decided to become a detective after he was rejected by the police department for having just bit too much methamphetamine on his person during the interview.

He now arrived on campus with high spirits, a beret, and a scroll stating his intentions. There were college kids throwing a Frisbee. Every time it crashed into the ground, its fragments littered the beautiful grass and began slowly killing the animals that lived there. The low fire of a nearby barbecue ignited the music building, and Olivia could hear the pained cries of trumpets and violas as they perished in flame.

“Such a sight,” he heard from behind him.

He turned. “Identify yourself, if you value your life.”

“I am Professor David Brochenheit. I teach French.”

“The beginners’ course?”

“The very same.”

“You lack a beret. What is this sorcery?”

The professor clicked his heels. “My beret is one of boundless knowledge. Its fabric is time.”

“You crafty bastard,” Olivia responded. He could tell that this man would be trouble. David Brochenheit was a sickly fellow with a conspicuous combover. He had one plainly visible liver spot on his upper cheek, shaped like a face; and on that face’s upper cheek, there was a darker spot shaped like another face, and on that yet another with a spot on its upper cheek which was darker still. Olivia became deeply troubled upon close inspection of this, so he summoned rain in defense. Brochenheit, put off by such a display of might, rotated one hundred eighty degrees and walked away in long, graceful strides.

Olivia’s scroll, rendered useless by the cruelty of the falling water, turned its twisted face to the sun and fell apart in his hands. But he had no time to grieve: he had a class to attend. Letting his majestic hair down that it may flow free, he checked the time, to find that he had forty-five seconds before his first class would begin. And so he called upon the ancient powers of the giant locust Alh-an’Byeu, earth spirit of travelers; the locust arrived upon a gust of wind and immediately sought Olivia’s whim.

“Giant locust Alh-an’Byeu,” prayed Olivia, “you of all the creatures on this earth know of my hardship, having weathered millennia of ill fate and neglect. I know that your days now are numbered, but I entreat you to aid my humble body in reaching a faraway place so that I may continue my quest for greater knowledge.”

The old locust blinked its giant eye in compassion and narrated to Olivia the story of its ancestors using the various clicks and buzzes out of which it had formed its language. Shaking the earth with its fervent stomps of emotion, the great insect sustained a hypnotic, high-frequency hum before lowering itself to a mountable height.

Olivia bowed. “Thank you, great Alh-an’Byeu,” he said as he brought himself up onto the locust’s thorax; it spread its air-stirring wings and manipulated them rapidly until the two were speeding through the thin air above the campus and were, shortly thereafter, landing in front of the appropriate building.

The locust Alh-an’Byeu, ancient and weary, let Olivia off of its back. He thanked the great arthropod, which acknowledged the gratefulness with a slow, trembling nod. Olivia laid a hand on the legendary creature’s shaking carapace and sung it a sweet lullaby as it steadily lowered itself to the grassy floor; with one final screech, Alh-an’Byeu put its old, withered face to the ground, and its noble spirit drifted off into the next realm as the body slowly faded into nothingness.

“You’re late, Olivia,” said the professor as Olivia entered from the stormy darkness outside.

“You know nothing of my pain,” he responded, a tear still in his eye.

That day, Olivia learned nothing about the French language that he didn’t already know; for example, that all French words are actually ancient voodoo hexes and that all but four letters in its alphabet are silent. He cursed Professor Brochenheit as he exited the classroom for being an ineffectual teacher and having an extremely unnatural lentigo.

When he returned to his apartment with a dozen minor cuts and bruises after having been mugged violently on an empty street, he found that he had left the microwave on and that a very specific part of his room was on fire. It was the microwave. He gathered up as much saliva as possible into his hands and urgently poured it over the tongues of flame, which reacted violently to the attack and proceeded to tell dirty jokes about Olivia’s mother.

“She is so hideous that she could never be loved,” one stated.

“I hear she is a harlot,” said another.

“The woman is a saint!” shouted Olivia as he continued to salivate all over the fire, a scene which would certainly have been humorous if he weren’t trying to murder several conscious entities. He eventually succeeded and would be haunted for the rest of his life by images of screaming flame.

The phone began to ring. “Hello?” Olivia answered it. All he heard back was breath – one low, constant inhalation. “Hello?” he repeated, angrily this time.

“Oh, hello, Olivia. I think I was momentarily possessed.” He could tell it was David Brochenheit by the dark-rimmed glasses.

“How did you get this number?”

“It’s very simple, really.”

“Then tell me.”

“I will soon.”

“No, now.”

“Never.”

“Idiot.”

“Whore.”

“Tell me.”

“Eventually.”

“I command it.”

“I refute you openly.”

“You are a horrible man.”

They were both ashamed at what had just happened, so lightning suddenly struck the line, and they were disconnected. “Damn it,” Olivia exclaimed.

These events left Olivia so discouraged that, the next day, he elected to feed ham to the neighborhood children, to whom he owed a monthly tribute of fresh meat, rather than attend class. He ventured out onto his farm, a lengthy estate filled with turnips and slowly inflating fish heads. Of the pigs he had in stock, there were only a few which were presentable – namely, those which were alive and chattering endlessly about their families and escape plans. The rest lay on their sides and sunk into the dirt.

Olivia, knowing that children like their ham most when it is frozen, led the verbose creatures into a large and metal-lined facility known as a freezer. After they had been locked into the dark where they would spend the rest of their pitiful lives, being the loquacious pigs that they were, they spoke of food and of Christmas as their blood slowly cooled until it was the temperature of a soup which had been in a freezer until it was about as cold as very cold blood.

Olivia laughed a maniacal laugh and dragged them out one by one, their mouths frozen shut and their eyes glazed over as though they were high on a potent drug. The drug is called death, and the high is everlasting sleep. Regardless, they were tasty, and would no doubt appease the ham-craving children about the neighborhood, affording Olivia another short month under their valuable protection.

Later, he attended a beauty salon and harassed the young women working there.

Olivia’s eyes shot open the next morning when he awoke to the sound of an obese child complaining about his sunburn, only to find that it was simply his alarm clock. By pure coincidence, though, there was an obese, sunburned child standing at the foot of his bed, staring at him with tomato-like eyes through a pair of glasses made out of someone else’s puppy. This, Olivia could tell, was one of Brochenheit’s spies. He reached for the boy, who leapt solemnly through the window and slowed his three-story descent by means of the massive pouches hidden deep within his cheeks.

“Curses,” muttered Olivia. “The demon has found my dwelling place. I am lucky that I awoke before he was able to fully drain me of my power. I must devise a defense against such attacks in the future.” So he picked up the phone to alert his Filipino security guard.

“Good morning, Olivia,” said the phone. It looked at him, smiling, with water-filled eyes.

“Witch!” he said in response. “What are you?!”

“I am here for you, Olivia. All that matters now is that we are together. Hold me close.”

“You have clearly been misled. I possess no such feelings for you.”

“But,” it sniffled, tears running down its yellowed casing, “we have been together for so long.”

“No.”

In a torrent of rage and despair, the sickened telephone brought a firearm to its temple and stared at Olivia. “Love me when I’m gone,” it said, and tears rolled down its face in a silent farewell as it pulled the trigger and was no more.

It began raining as he approached campus. Happy that he had arrived early enough to avoid the rain, Olivia took a minute to reward himself by having a dance in it.

He looked to his side. There was Professor David Brochenheit, doing an unnatural-looking jig, making full eye contact.

“What are you doing here?” asked a confused Olivia. He did not respond, but they shared ice cream on the way to class.

Once they had arrived, the professor advanced to the front of the room as Olivia took a seat. “Today we are going to learn science,” he said.

“Science?” mockingly projected the voice of one of Olivia’s classmates. “I am made of science, fool!” There was silence as Brochenheit approached the disrespectful voice’s source and placidly delivered a powerful backhand to his face.

Olivia cleared his throat and managed to produce a faint whistle. No one knew why. “Is this not a course in French?” he asked.

“Very observant, knave,” replied Brochenheit, smiling grimly. “And I’m going to make you wish it never was.”

“What?”

Just then, the professor brought his two hands high above his combover-laden head and recited a strange incantation. A gash opened in the floor of the room, and Olivia wondered whether he had left the water running.

The gash was accompanied by the rejoicing sounds of crumbling floor tiles, happy that their miserable journey through this life was at last complete. Olivia, however, was quite distressed as he succumbed to gravity and fell through the resultant pit for many months, surviving on just hope and the small, fluorescent plants sprouting from its rocky walls. Several years later, he would learn the grave results of his actions, as he would feel the vibrations of child-like singing from deep within in his viscera, go clinically insane, and die in frustration from cardiac arrest and a nasty ulcer while bathed in the majesty of a sub-par lunar eclipse. But for the moment, he lived, eventually hitting sandy ground and finding himself in a large, cavernous cavity whose ground was made up mostly of sand.

He took a cursory look around and sniffed the air, expecting something to overpower him and put ants in his hair. Such worries aside, Olivia felt fine. “Ohohohohohoho,” he heard from above his head – the voice of David Brochenheit. “It seems you have been tossed to a most despicable fate; wouldn’t you say? Did you have a nice fall? Ha! Take a look around your bare and unforgiving prison, Sandra.”

Always one step ahead, Olivia had already taken a look around his bare and unforgiving prison. “Sandra is not my name, and what do you expect to accomplish by doing this?”

Brochenheit fondled one of his hundreds of bald spots in thought. “You really do not know, my cookie? I shall lay it out in its brutal simplicity: the Tok-re’en jewel collection is mine.”

Olivia was startled, and his brain suddenly shook old memories out from its multiple folds. He remembered this.

Fourteen years and five months previous, Olivia had been brushing his teeth with pure baking soda – to see what it would have been like – when he had noticed a crack in the mirror shaped like a face, and within that crack had been another crack shaped like a face, and, within that, another. He had looked closer and closer at his mirror, disregarding his own immediate safety and making himself vulnerable to what had turned out to be a powerful backhand to his left temple. Looking up at his victor shortly before losing consciousness, he had seen Professor David Brochenheit in all his liver-spotted genius.

“What have you done to my mind?” Olivia now asked. “That never took place.”

“No, it never did,” Brochenheit responded, rubbing his bare stomach amusingly.

“I have never heard of such a collection of jewels. Its title is ridiculous, also. Are you certain that you are sober?”

“I have never been more sober in my life, Cheryl,” proclaimed the professor, picking at the single fingernail he had kept after the war.

“You need to see a doctor.”

But the Professor’s voice slowly faded off; Olivia looked both ways and called a taxi, which arrived clad in the garb of a medieval knight. He hopped into the passenger seat and addressed the driver. “Your cab is clad in the garb of a medieval knight,” he said. The driver, a short woman with four lengthy fingers on each hand, stared him in the eyes and told him that she had just come back from a frog racing competition and that she hoped that this would explain the bounty of turnips she kept strewn about her feet, dangerously close to such things as the “gas” and “brake” pedals. He saw very few turnips, but because he was attracted to her smile and was very frightened that the remaining could be of the species that makes itself visible only to the wise – not wanting to tip her off to his ignorance – he kept silent and whistled a tune consisting entirely of white noise.

She drove and drove, complaining about the sores on her feet caused by years of searching all over the earth for her lost children. Olivia cared very little for her problems, for she was a mere taxi driver, while he was an ornamented detective who owned a bookshelf and regularly visited the theater. Quietly noting the suspiciously lifelike poodles she had fitted to her ears, he convinced himself that she was a very hostile woman and jumped from the vehicle with a yelp as well as a demeanor which illustrated his surprise as he landed painfully on a leather-bound book about reptiles and the etymology of all English words rhyming with synonyms of “dysfunctional.”

“I am for the most part lucky that this book has broken my fall,” he admitted, “but there is something very wrong here.” And indeed there was, for that aged volume had been cursed long ago by an evil spirit of mangroves to afflict those who would touch it with a burning desire to visit a wine cellar.

“It seems that you have come upon a horrible fate in your leap from an armor-clad conveyance,” Olivia heard from behind him as he righted himself and checked his beautiful face for scratches in the reflection of a nearby puddle of hot tea.

“Yes, it would seem so,” he answered. “However, I take pride in the fact that I am immune to this very curse. Such a trait is hereditary in my noble line, and I would appreciate it if you would not demean me by confessing your ignorance to this.”

“What heinous lies have your ancestors vomited upon you? You are immune to bullets, nothing more.” And it was true, for Olivia was soon overcome with the unquenchable need to be close to large quantities of fermented fruit.

“Who are you, that you know this?” he inquired, in pain.

There was no response, and he concluded that this was simply a hallucination brought on by old age and the fast food he had been eating recently. A sad old man approached from a nearby yacht carrying a pipe organ.

“Serenade me,” Olivia commanded with a fleshy grin.

“Serenade yourself,” retorted the man.

Olivia was taken aback. “Apologize with sincerity to the moon and stars that you would behave in such a manner under the purity of their unwithheld light.”

“Very well.” He thusly apologized. “I shall perform your menial task, albeit below me.”

Olivia sat and crossed his legs for the performance, which consisted mainly of a bass pedal solo played at three-fourths of a beat per minute over the course of eleven days. During this time, Olivia became emotionally tied to the instrument, which communicated with him aurally through arranged complements and an overtly flirtatious attitude. It was obvious that they were meant to be together.

When the sad old man had finished his song, Olivia immediately told him that he wished to marry the organ, offering a dowry of tomato broth and an organized itinerary of a potentially enjoyable vacation to Massachusetts. The old man harshly declined the offer and coughed with incessancy; this caused Olivia to feel extremely dejected before he remembered that he already had many organs of his own and accepted the denial with little resistance.

Still in pain and not wanting to interrupt someone else’s evening with a request to tour their wine cellar, he went about constructing his own, digging deep into the soft earth and sculpting the fantastic gargoyles that would serve as its foundation. He thrust his shovel and struck something hard which rebounded it; bending down and uncovering the object with his hands, he found it to be a skull and immediately regretted planning to dig a wine cellar in a cemetery, for he had planned to dig the wine cellar in a cemetery.

About to throw the dirty thing aside, he noticed a small beetle crawling from one of the eyeholes. It was adorable, so he watched it a while longer. He stared into its eyes. It looked back at him, clueless and bewildered, sniffing at its filthy paws for leftover cocaine. Minutes passed: the sniffing ceased, and the bug now shivered from the cold. Olivia made efforts to lift it into his cloak, but it obstinately resisted and obviously wished not to continue living.

“Come, small bug, that you may not perish in the cold,” he pleaded, overtaken with compassion.

It hissed weakly at him and made an attempt to escape; alas, though, its strength was not adequate, and it fainted. The tiny thing’s open circulatory system was still twitching with inefficiency, so Olivia sadly drew it into his pocket and made a rush down the road shouting, “Beetle doctor! Beetle doctor!” The cellar would have to wait.

And so Olivia ran from building to building, periodically expelling his weighted breath as the distances between doors expanded. He stumbled and fell into a puddle of well-placed urine, righted himself, and continued; looking at the fading bug fit snugly betwixt his fingers, he realized that this was his purpose in life – the very reason for his existence. The creature’s breathing dulled. “I will get you to a hospital, miniscule insect,” Olivia told him. A glimmering tear exited his eye. “You are the soundtrack to my life.”

As they sped along the road in the light of a passed restaurant, it began to snow furiously. “Give me your money,” said the snow, which had been having some trouble at home. Olivia uncharitably ignored it, so it began pelting him and the freezing arthropod with as much force as it could muster. The skies thickened, and Olivia remembered that he had, in fact, left the water running. Sensing a strange source of power, he glanced over his shoulder: there, indefatigably trekking through the fog and snow, was the combed-over scalp of one Professor David Brochenheit.

Olivia gasped and slid several expensive diamond rings from his fingers to shed some weight; the professor sniffled, and a motorized buggy found its way beneath him. Speeding along, Brochenheit groomed the abnormal host of hairs sprouting from his blemish, drew a crimson pistol, and discharged a number of shots. “It cannot end this way,” whispered Olivia to himself and the reader.

The pursuit rushed along the thinly-populated streets with the voracity of a father penguin, the professor firing further insults with his handheld death-machine and Olivia distributing horribly racially prejudiced remarks to each store owner they passed. They quickly neared a cliff, and Brochenheit’s buggy retracted its wheels in favor of the wonders of rocket propulsion.

“What the hell?” Olivia remarked.

Brochenheit merely smiled and performed an impressive back flip.

They both approached the cliff at speeds that made Olivia wonder why he had never run a marathon, for he was keeping consistently in front of a rocket-powered vehicle.

“I will get you,” sung the professor. “You have nowhere to go, except for down to the rocky earth or into such a position that you become the site of one of my bullets’ penetration; in either of which cases, today will prove to be quite a justly difficult one for you to have lived through in such a manner that you will be able to in full confidence admit that you have not experienced a severe degree of pain at some point throughout it!”

Olivia had no time to read this needlessly complex sentence; he looked back at his oppressor, down at the helpless beetle in his hands, and forward to the approaching edge. Without much more thought, he jumped from the cliff, and he flew. By God, he flew. “I am a master of the elements,” he confidently proclaimed. “Behold me as I scale the very skies and twist the structures of this world to fit my indomitable whim!”

They both landed mere miles from the cliff and faced each other; Professor Brochenheit’s buggy had been stolen from him at gunpoint in midair, and he was still shaking. That did not stop him from raising his own gun to point at Olivia’s focused countenance. “I am going to shoot you in the face,” he said. He pulled the trigger and shot Olivia in the face.

There was silence. Everyone used the restroom and bought a snack during the intermission. The smoke cleared.

And there was Olivia, standing with his face intact. “You seem to have forgotten, mortal,” he said. “I am immune to bullets.”

The scene was noticed by a small colony of passing palm trees, which surrounded Brochenheit and beat him within inches of his life with their broad, shade-providing leaves.

Olivia and the beetle finally found a hospital that would accept the insect’s insurance, as evidently most hospitals will not accept an insect’s insurance. Such is social injustice. The beetle, who will remain nameless for absence of a name, lay in a white bed for the next week as attractive nurses crowded around him and somehow convinced him that he was loved, and Olivia slept outside because the lucky goldfish he kept in his pocket told him that was safest.

Then, while he woke up from underneath filthy newspapers one morning, a man on whose lawn a murder had once been committed approached him. “I remember you,” he said. “I paid you to investigate a slaughter that had taken place on my lawn.”

“Yes,” said Olivia as he stood and brushed the midnight rats from his midsection. “I have been waiting for you. Come with me.”

He led the man into the hospital and the two entered an elevator. “I have done much investigating,” said Olivia, “and I believe you will be impressed that I was able to find out who had written those suicide notes.” They reached their floor.

“Then who, may I ask, wrote those notes?”

Olivia cleared his throat, kicked in a door, and pointed sternly. “It was this very beetle,” he declared, “as evidenced by its thirst for cocaine and death.”

Olivia went on to finish his degree and purchase a vast French vineyard, complete with a multitude of wine cellars, should the need arise.

Professor Brochenheit made a full recovery and won the lottery, and the community college erected a new science building in his name. That is completely false. Brochenheit is dead, pronounced so after having fallen off a bridge.

The beetle? The beetle is safely undergoing intensive rehabilitation therapy with the support of his friends and family.

“But wait,” you may say, “if the beetle had written those notes, then who had committed the murder?”

The answer to this, inquisitive soul, is quite simple: it was a coincidence.

THE END

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Posted

“How did you get this number?”

“It’s very simple, really.”

“Then tell me.”

“I will soon.”

“No, now.”

“Never.”

“Idiot.”

“Whore.”

“Tell me.”

“Eventually.”

“I command it.”

“I refute you openly.”

“You are a horrible man."

“How did you get this number?”

“It’s very simple, really.”

“Then tell me.”

“I will soon.”

“No, now.”

“Never.”

“Idiot.”

“Whore.”

“Tell me.”

“Eventually.”

“I command it.”

“I refute you openly.”

“You are a horrible man.”

“How did you get this number?”

“It’s very simple, really.”

“Then tell me.”

“I will soon.”

“No, now.”

“Never.”

“Idiot.”

“Whore.”

“Tell me.”

“Eventually.”

“I command it.”

“I refute you openly.”

“You are a horrible man.”

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Posted

Quite an amazing and humorous story, Ganny. As always, great work. (You are the best)

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Posted

o muffin :>

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Posted

We ground read it in Skype lol.

Go Ganny. ;>

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I bet I'm the only one who has been following this on tumblr as it was written, and can now safely call you all poseurs.

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We had to have dramatic skype reading for this

oh ganny

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I was first to read it all, though, Ben. ;o

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Posted

this is so beautiful

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We ground read it in Skype lol.

Go Ganny. ;>

We had to have dramatic skype reading for this

oh ganny

I wishhhh

I could have been theerrree

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too bad you SUCK and we were just MOCKING YOU

actually jk lol luv u gannz ;>

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:<

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I'm considering getting everyone together for a Dramatic reading of Little boy almost dies of whatever it was, once my throat stops hurting.

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yes lets do more of these read-togethers they are awesome

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