Handout and Griddlecakes: The Paramountcy of Placement
Another dawn had broken on this rattrap city in the country’s Rust Belt. There were no jobs, but at least the smog had gone with the cars and the coal and the…. The air was clean and the sky was bright. Before another night fell on the town, though, Pop Sickle would have to do a dirty deed, ditch his kids—Handout and Griddlecakes. Stepmom said, “Chuck the little chickens. They’re costing us too much.” Pop was reluctant to use his scythe. He knew that the only humane thing to do was to take them out of town to the thick forest that still enveloped the city, one of the few remaining in the denuded landscape of that country, and leave them there to their own devices, minus their cell phones, of course.
It was not as if Pop Sickle had acquiesced immediately to his wife’s command. He protested, but in the end, he realized that their financial circumstances warranted it. They were maxed out on every piece of plastic they had ever owned and were the targets of numerous collection agents, whose abusive dunning harangues seemed interminable, whether delivered orally or visually. He could no longer suffer the pricks of those harpies, who assailed his ears with such invective as “dunce,” “dolt,” or “dimwitted shopaholic.” Recently one of those creatures appeared outside his living room window proclaiming, “Because you’re STUPID, you’re STUPID,” at some off-the-charts stentorian decibel level.
True, Pop had bought into the dream hyped by the honey-tongued hornets of hooey, living high on the hog or low on the hog or at any rate somewhere on the hog, on other people’s money (i.e., foreign creditors) but so had many of his friends and acquaintances. Pop, however, had enough intelligence to realize that the bubble was about to pop and something, something ineffable was about to occur, or, to put it in terms that would be beyond his linguistic competence, the country had entered the cul-de-sac of consumerdom, the Fin-de-Siecle Station on the Chug-a-lug Choo-Choo of Debt Peonage, and was about to receive its coup de grâce, which would lead to something, well,…something ineffable.
So it was with a certain sense of reluctance that Pop Sickle led his two charges into the forest, whence they were expected never to return.
The two kids, Handout, an affable dunce, and Griddlecakes, a savvy and somewhat testy tyke, sensed something was up that could prove very down for them. When they reached the edge of the forest, Handout, the younger of the two, quipped, “I think Pop is going to take us in and leave us there.”
“Damn right,” Griddlecakes replied. “But I’m prepared. Brought along these Krispy Krumpets.”
“How are steamy strumpets going to get us out of this mess?” the boy queried. “And what the hell are steamy strumpets doing in a children’s story, anyway?”
“I said ‘Krumpets,’ and I intend to leave a trail of crumbs.”
After a long and arduous walk, the trio found themselves deep in the forest, and Pop Sickle decided to make his move. “Let’s take a little break, shall we? Why don’t we play hide and seek for a while?”
“You never told us why you decided to take us here to begin with, Pop,” his daughter said.
Pop was perplexed. “No, I didn’t. Must have forgotten,” he answered offhandedly. “Anyway, the plot demands it.”
Not surprisingly, Pop volunteered to be the first to hide. “You kids, close your eyes and shout out the names of the most insignificant “stars” to appear on Yahoo’s website this week. You can stop when you reach the hundredth name, okay? I’m going to hide.”
Handout tried to comply, struggling to recall the names of the hordes of hoop stars, Hollywood has-beens, Hollywood should-never-have-beens, and political poseurs, whose primary function is to divert the masses from information with the potential to provide power to the powerless. Griddlecakes feigned compliance, mumbled a bunch of vowels and consonants, and kept an eye, not fully closed, on the perfidious Pop, as he made his hasty exit.
With the disappearance of Pop’s cashless carcass, Griddlecakes told her brother to stop reciting his litany of losers. “Pop’s gone. Let’s follow the trail of crumbs out of here,” which is what they did, for a few measly meters that is. Sadly, it soon became apparent that their map had become a meal for some creature fortunate enough to have avoided extinction.
“What are we to do now?” whined the boy. “We don’t know how to get out of here, and we have no money!”
“We’re going to use our wits, you fool. Keep walking,” Griddlecakes commanded.
After hours of walking, the weary waifs descried what they initially believed was a mirage. Handout was the first to react. “Look, a trail of M&Ms! Just like in the movie E.T.! It must be the hand of god.”
“More like the hand of fraud or a helping hand on the road to diabetes. Anyway, they used Reese’s Pieces in that movie,” you fool. “You should also realize that this kind of thing is usually a bad omen. At the end of the trail there’s usually a witch, or a military recruiter, or an off-key (aren’t they all?) karaoke singer.”
“But I think we should follow it,” the boy said peevishly.
“Okay,” replied his sister.
They walked about a kilometer along the candy trail when they came upon a curious character, Berserker Beaver. Berserker was ordinarily an ornery, erratic creature whose disposition on any given day was determined by what medications he had unwittingly ingested from the river whence he obtained his water. The country’s hyper-medicated populace deposits trace amounts of pharmaceuticals in her rivers and streams, the result of faulty waste treatment of millions upon millions of daily micturitions. On this particular day, however, Berserker had consumed copious amounts of water containing significant traces of some powerful sedative used to alleviate one or more of the many new diseases conjured up in recent years by overzealous marketing mavens (e.g., “Habitual Breathing Syndrome,” “Debt Dread,” “Olympic Hoopla Phobia,” “Skeptical Citizens’ Disease” [Remember: It’s always a lone gunman.], etc.) and that have proven so effective in filling the coffers of, you guessed it, the pharmaceutical companies. As a result of this fortuitous occurrence, Berserker was unusually laid back, slurring his words and barely coherent, but uncharacteristically pleasant, even ingratiating. He spoke first.
“Following the tale, are you?”
“I should hope so,” replied Handout. “We’re the main characters.”
“He means ‘trail,’ you fool,” snapped his sister.
“Well, if you go all the way, you’ll get to a ginger beer house.”
“I think that’s supposed to be ‘gingerbread house,’” replied the girl.
“Oh, yeah, ginger beard house, but it’s no good. It’s run by a twitch.”
“Whatever,” Griddlecakes said resignedly. “Look, we’re broke and on our own. We need to make some money.”
“Well, I can’t hell you with that,” said Berserker, about to fall into a trance.
“’Help,’’’ mouthed Griddlecakes so her brother would understand.
“Go see Michael Murine, the mouse, behind the second right on the rock, rock of the right, rock on the right.”
They took leave of the Beav and went in search of Murine, whom they soon found hunched over a box marked “KFC.”
Murine was an ersatz character recruited for this story so as to avoid a cease-and-desist letter from the legal department of one of the world’s biggest and most beloved corporate persons. [N.B. The reader will appreciate the fact that the writer must keep the characterization at a stick-figure level here so as to avoid the invective that would flow from the pens of the copyright police if he were more explicit.]
“Hi, we’re hoping you can help us. We ran into a beaver a little while ago who said that you might be able to,” said Griddlecakes.
“What are you eating?” asked Handout, who was beginning to salivate.
“Kenyan Fried Crickets,” Murine replied.
“We’re broke and…,” Griddlecakes started before being interrupted by the mustachioed impostor.
“I know and like Dorothy from that children’s movie that isn’t really a children’s movie, you want to go home.”
“Well, not necessarily home, but definitely out of the forest.”
“But you see, my dear, the way out of your financial dilemma has been available to you all along. I’ve been reading the story, and I think that you and your addled-headed brother should be adequately compensated by the numerous corporate persons whose progeny you have so generously and skillfully worked into the fabric of your fable. Care for some KFC?” queried the rodent, proffering the box.
“Thank you,” said the girl as she reached in to grab a handful of the premium crickets.
“And there is no need to click your slippers and mumble drivel like ‘There’s no place like home.’ All you have to do is stand in front of that big pine tree over there. The bus will be along any minute now. It’s a Strayhound.”
Jack Napes is an Irish writer based in Tokyo. His creative output is nearly all political and social satire. Jack is featured in the picture to the right and is the diminutive one, of course. He is the author of “A Visit to the Parasitological Museum” (Number Eleven Magazine), “An Immodest Proposal” (Dodging the Rain), and the poem “The Fear-Itself Litany” (The Corbett Report Subscriber Newsletter), as well as the novella Travels with the Tribe: Killing Gravity in Woke Times, which is available from Kobo Writing Life, as a digital download for about the price of a can of beer in Tokyo. Help him buy a six pack. He also runs The Luckee Chumpz’ Blog at Writing.ie. Postings are made mid-month.