The Trouble With Bricks 1

Chapter One – The Phipps Triplets Trip Out

         This story doesn’t happen a very long time ago but it does take place a very long ways away. Not that it starts in a place a long ways away. It started at a garage sale down the street. Actually, it started a very long time before that, but we don’t have to get into that now because it would just complicate matters and matters are quite complicated enough on their own. Just ask Frank’s colon.
         It was a typical garage sale. Not a lot of old lady knick knacks though because the man running the garage sale wasn’t an old lady. He was more of a mad scientist type. He had the crazy hair and he wore suspenders for some reason. He probably didn’t even know why he wore suspenders. He was too busy thinking of new inventions to make, like butter slices. But don’t get him started on that or you’ll be bored for about two hours straight. Believe me.
         Now why was this mad scientist guy having a garage sale? That’s a fair question. I mean, you don’t see too many mad scientists having garage sales. They’re usually busy inventing crazy things, like a machine that dresser gophers in tuxedos. Again, though, don’t ask him about that one either.
           Okay, so we’ve got this mad scientist garage sale. The name of the mad scientist isn’t really important at this moment, but it could be later. If we come to that point, I’ll let you know. Let’s just call him Phil cause that’s his name.
         Where was I? Oh yeah. Garage sale. So, as fate would have it, down that very street on the very day of the garage sale, came the Phipps Triplets, with pockets bursting with new allowance money. Now, the crazy thing about the Phipps Triplets is that they weren’t really triplets. In fact, there was really only two of them: Cleotus and Suzie Phipps. And they weren’t twins either. It was one of those idiotic nicknames that people get called, like calling a big guy “Tiny” or a bald guy “Harry” or a one-armed podiatrist “Stinky”.
         So up the street came Cleotus and Suzie with around five bucks apiece in their pockets. Originally, they weren’t planning on stopping at the garage sale. Cleotus wanted to go to the nearest gas station and buy five dollars worth of cream cheese and Suzie was going to spend hers on the newest issue of Large Duck Hunters Monthly. But fate had other plans: big, scary, excessively-annoying plans.
         As they strolled innocently past the garage sale, Cleotus happened to spy on the sheet-covered ping pong table, amidst all the junk and glass, what looked suspiciously like a blender covered in shiny jewels. This was exactly what it was and more.
         As soon as his eye caught sight of that exotic and gaudy artifice, Cleotus knew he wanted it, maybe even more than he wanted that cream cheese. Maybe just a little bit more.
         “Hey Suz,” cried Cleotus. “Look at that thing.”
         Suzie stopped suddenly and peered at the table. “What thing?”
         “That big shiny doo-dad in them middle. I wonder what it does.”
         “Who cares,” answered Suzie as she began to walk away. She was stopped abruptly by the meaty left arm of Cleotus.
         “I wanna take a look. It might be something.”
         “Yeah,” answered Suzie. “Something like trash.”
         But Cleotus ignored her, which he often did, and approached the table. There it lay, smack dab between a ceramic poodle and a toilet brush, looking like the award for best actor in a situational comedy. Gently, he lifted his hands toward it, almost afraid to touch it.
         Suddenly, a shadow darkened the table. Cleotus turned to find a middle-aged man with crazy hair and suspenders standing beside him.
         “So,” let out Phil, the mad scientist, like a tea kettle expelling its unwholesome juices, “I see ya got an eye on my rift transducer. That’s quite a keen eye ya got there, young fella.”
         Cleotus could only nod like a moron as Phil continued.
         “Why, back in my day, I’d be a lucky fella if I found one of these babies in a garage sale. Of course, it doesn’t work. If it did, I wouldn’t be selling it.” Phil laughed and slapped Cleotus on the back, causing the boy to choke on his spit. “But I can see you’ve got an eye for the unknown, an eye that appreciates the maniacal in life. I could use an assistant like you. Have you ever thought about getting a hunchback? It’s really a simple operation.”
         Just then, a second shadow fell across the table, revealing the arrival of Suzie. “Cleotus, what are you doing? Are we going to the store or not?”
         Cleotus, for a moment, was torn between his desire for cream cheese and his desire for the rift transducer. He gave in to the immediate.
         “How much do you want for it?” He asked sheepishly, like a snow leopard.
         Phil pondered for a moment. “Well, young man, that’s a fine question. One I would expect from a future hunchbacked assistant such as yourself. Brand new, this Rift Transducer retails for seven hundred dollars. You could find it in the hardware section or maybe in electronics. But…seeing as how it’s broken and really not worth the rhinestones I glued onto it, I’ll let it go for, uh…How much did you say you had on you?”
         “Five bucks,” Cleotus offered.
         “Well, it’s a bargain at any price. And I mean that. I’ll let you take this beauty home today for the low, low price of twenty, no, make that five dollars.”
         Excitedly, Cleotus plucked the five dollar bill out of his pocket and waived it in front of Phil’s face. “Why, I’ve got five dollars!”
         “You’re even luckier than I thought,” answered Phil. Quickly, Phil’s hand snaked down and captured the five dollar bill like a cat eating a slow and slightly deranged gerbil.
         Greedily, Cleotus reached out and clutched the Rift Transducer to his puffy chest and began to exit the drive way. He was stopped abruptly by a hand on his shoulder.
         “Wait,” cried Phil. “I must warn you that the Rift Transducer comes with a mighty curse. It’s a terrible curse that could remain with you for as long as you live.  It’s so hideous that I am literally frightening myself right now just thinking about telling you about it.”
         “Well, what is?”  Cleotus cried out.
         Hesitantly, Phil answered.  “Unfortunately, it was printed on the instruction manual that I lost a long time ago.”
         “Then why tell us about it?”  Suzie replied.  “That’s just a waste of time.”
         “Geez,” said Phil. “I just thought I’d warn you.” As Phil turned to go, Suzie could hear him mutter to himself, “Dad gum kids. Never have any respect for their elders.”
         Suzie grabbed Cleotus’ arm and escorted him off the driveway as fast as a blind juggler in a used car lot. If you didn’t get that last analogy, don’t worry. There’s a lot more coming.
         *                    *                    *                    *                    *
         They soon arrived at the gas station without further incident, unless you count Cleotus getting hit the head with a flying cabbage and most of us don’t. Once at the store, Cleotus hid behind the dumpster, as he often did when “dark dealings went the day” as Suzie went inside to buy her magazine.
         Cleotus, being the simple-minded goof that he was, was instantly hypnotized by the shiny apparatus. Every which way he turned it, the light reflected back into his eyes, making his head hurt. It was, he explained later, like getting an ice cream headache while being trapped in a tanning booth.
         As he was entranced by the Rift Transducer, Cleotus failed to notice the approach of the scariest, ugliest, most annoying bully his neighborhood had to offer until it was too late.
         “Hey dummy head!” shouted Reginald, the aforementioned bully. “Whatcha looking at?” As he talked, spit seemed to slosh out of his mouth like a monkey head filled too full with jelly.
         Reginald, who was really younger than Cleotus, was nonetheless larger and harrier. He currently was wearing torn up jeans and a shirt, cut in half, that said “Flarg” in large blood-red lettering. What “Flarg” really meant, no one knew, and you didn’t really want to ask Reginald unless you enjoyed the sight of your own blood outside of your body.
         “Hey, big dummy,” yelled Reginald again when he had received no response. “I asked you a question. Are you gonna answer or are you too dumb?”
         “Maybe he’s too smart to answer,” replied Suzie who had just walked up.
         “Dwha?!” Said Reginald at his usual expressive best.
         For whatever reason, Suzie was the only kid in the neighborhood not scared of Reginald. But, oddly enough, Reginald was slightly afraid of her. The kids in the neighborhood reasoned that she must have some dirt on him in order to frighten him that much. And that was true as far as dirt went.
         Three summers ago, Suzie had wandered upon young Reginald, only slightly less large at that time, in a clearing in the nearby woods. What she had found him doing, she never told anyone, but she did reveal years later to Cleotus that it involved shaving cream, a rubber ducky, and three pounds of nails. When pressed for additional details, she would usually begin to shudder.
         “Why don’t you mind your own business, Suzie?” said Reginald, who usually didn’t recover this fast, but he was on vacation. “This is between me and your brother.”
         “Oh yeah,” retorted Suzie, like a constipated banshee on the morning after a big disaster.
         “Yeah.” Reginald fired back.
         It was then that Cleotus pushed the button.
         Now, Phil, the mad inventor was crazy. That’s true. But he was also absent minded and what that means is that he forgot that the Rift Transducer actually worked. It worked once before, immediately after being created and opened a rift in the space-time continuum that deposited a rather large cockroach directly into Phil’s toilet. He discovered the cockroach later during his nightly constitutional.
         As soon as Cleotus flicked the button, mysteriously labeled “On”, a loud buzzing noise, like a thousand angry bees trapped in a large nostril, erupted from the device and a large blue cloud, like the kind that show up in movies, materialized above their heads.          Lightning flashed from out of the cloud, striking the dumpster, a stray cat, and Reginald’s left shoe, in that order. And then, from out of the cloud, dropped Phlegmina, the Mint Julep Fairy.
         Now, Phlegmina was a little large for a fairy, a fact, you can be sure, was fully exploited by the other fairies in her graduating class. Her skin, hair, fingernails and toenails were completely green. She was adorned in a dress of shimmering tin foil and a crown forged entirely out of carrots and straight pins lay on her noggin. Big black boots covered her feet, which hung precisely three feet off the ground. Oh, and she had wings.
         Phlegmina, who had been watering daisies in her garden on the outskirts of Whizzles and Flipskins, was angry, bewildered and surprised to say the least. She was also slightly gassy.
         “Oh my,” she exclaimed upon first seeing Cleotus and Suzie, “You’re awful big to be a Snidehorn. Are you a blue truffle Snidehorn or a whimsical joe Snidehorn?”
         While Cleotus looked on, Suzie hazard a reply. “Are you a fairy?” She asked.
         Phlegmina replied, “Why, of course, my dear. I am Phlegmina, the Mint Julep Fairy. I was in my garden just a moment before when this awful blue cloud appeared, sucked me up and deposited me in this enchanted land.” She took a moment to glance around at the dumpster and the trash scattered around the ground. “And oh, what a dirty enchanted land you have!”
         Behind the fairy, Reginald had gone completely unnoticed. He took full advantage of this fact to try and sneak up and pull her wings off. The crunching of his tennis shoes on broken glass, however, alerted Phlegmina to her immediate peril. She turned quickly, waved her hand, said the magic words “Skippy O” and abruptly Reginald disappeared.
         “Now,” Phlegmina began, turning back to Cleotus and Suzie, “Where were we?”
         “Uh,” said Suzie, “what happened to Reginald?”
         “Well,” explained Phlegmina, “I sent him far away. He really was too large and ugly to remain in my presence for too long anyway. Plus, I think he was planning on tearing my wings off and that would never do. Oh no. We fairies definitely detest the tearing off of the wings. Why, it would have killed me.”
         “Just like a bee would die if their stinger is removed?” Cleotus asked, which was a really good question for Cleotus. Usually, he has trouble with forming complete sentences.
         “Not really,” joyfully answered Phlegmina as she turned to Suzie, who she correctly had identified as the more intelligent member of the group. “And who might you be and why have you summoned me? For you must be an extremely powerful witch to have summoned me through quite a long distance away.”
         “Oh, it wasn’t me. Cleotus summoned you.”
         Phlegmina took a moment to digest this nugget of information before proceeding. “But surely, you are mistaken. For, as we can both see, he is clearly an imbecile or what we would term in my land, a village idiot.”
         “That’s Cleotus, alright.” Suzie agreed. “But, he did push the button that brought you here. He probably didn’t realize what he was doing at the time.”
         Phlegmina waved her index around like a school teacher on an adverb bender. “No, no, no. This won’t do at all. We simply cannot permit imbeciles to push buttons and summon fairies from alternative realities. We had better take evasive action immediately.”
         Cleotus, perhaps on a sub-atomic level, sensed danger. “Now hold on there, flying shrub woman…” was all he got out before Phlegmina waved her arm, said the magic words “Hold the Mayo”, and Suzie and Cleotus disappeared completely.
         Alone, Phlegmina looked around at the desolate back of the building and sighed. “Well, this stinks.” She exclaimed to no one in particular, unless you count that stray cat who was trying to slink away at the moment.
         Suddenly, her eyes found the Rift Transducer lying by the side of the dumpster and grew two sizes larger. “Ooh, shiny,” she mumbled as she fluttered toward her prize.
                   *                    *                    *                    *                    *
         Now, while Phlegmina was busy playing with her new toy, the Phipps Triplets were also busy, falling through a time-space continuum commonly referred to in fairy terms as a shaft. There wasn’t much to see in the shaft, unless you counted darkness, which was what Cleotus was doing. More specifically, he was counting the shadows they passed to amuse himself. Suzie was busy screaming.
         Eventually, Suzie stopped screaming long enough to notice a light beginning to spread out underneath them. The light gave off enough illumination for her to be able to see that there were not falling through empty space, but down a long shaft that was laced with vines and roots. Interspersed among the roots were skeletons of various small animals, such as squirrels, pixies, and the remains of a tribe of rutabaga men.
         As they neared the source of the light, Suzie began to hear a song rise up from the light below. The song went a little like this:

Oh, I’ve got a gun and that’s enough
To show them greenies that I am tough
If you like clovers, you better curtail
Cause I’ll be coming like a shimmy shammy shale
Oh hide-e-ho, and diddle in the dark
Cause my name’s Fraaaaaaaaaank…

         And that’s as far as the voice got. For just as the singer began to warble into a crescendo fit for a king, Suzie and Cleotus broke out of the shaft, through the light, and fell straight on top of Frank Sparks.
         Of course, they didn’t realize at the time that they had fallen on top of Frank. Cleotus thought that he had fallen onto a small mound of hay or, at the very least, on top of a mound of very soft rocks. Suzie didn’t fall on Frank at all, but rather on top of Frank’s colon.
         After the initial shock, Cleotus sat up to take stock of his surroundings and to check if the egg he had been hiding in his back pocket was wounded. It was now scrambled.
         “What happened, Suz?”
         “I don’t know,” Suzie answered after rubbing the dirt from her eyes. “I think…”
Suzie stopped as her eyes caught their first glance of the countryside they had fallen into.          Now, Suzie had seen plenty of countryside in her short life. She was familiar with city streets, back yards, and maybe even clumps of trees. But the world they had just fallen into was something entirely new. They were no buildings, no cars, and everything smelled like thrown up licorice.
         The bushes seemed like ordinary shrubs on first inspection, but upon a second glance, Suzie realized that they made up entirely out of some foreign substance, like plastic or spam. There were no regular trees to speak of but there were plenty of irregular trees. There was a tree with underwear hanging from each limb like a great big leaves. There was another tree made entirely out of construction paper. And finally a tree that looked, at least from a distance, like a massive boulder. The odd thing is that this tree was a boulder. How very odd.
         Suzie could have spent at least another fifteen minutes gazing at her surroundings if it hadn’t have been for three interesting occurrences. First, Cleotus had risen from the ground and was now rooting through what appeared to be a tent.
         “Cleotus,” began Suzie, “don’t go through someone else’s things. It’s rude.”
         “But I’m hungry,” whined Cleotus as he threw a pillow out of the tent in his quest for sustenance. “I can smell something in here and I want it.”
         Cleotus, when hungry, was little more than a stomach with teeth.
         The second interesting occurrence happened not soon after when Suzie had risen from the ground and looked down to see what cushioned her fall. Apparently, she had landed on what looked like someone’s internal organ.
         It’s not a heart, she thought to herself, but it could be a liver or something else. Perhaps a duodenum. Whatever it is, I hope it’s not covered with goo.
         It was when the organ sat up and stretched that she noticed something else peculiar. The organ had arms, legs, a mouth and eyes. And the eyes were glaring at her. Slowly she backed away to consider her next move should the organ attempt anything.
         The third interesting thing that occurred was that Frank sat up.