Harris Burdick Would Be Proud... (Maybe)

(go here: http://www.fifeschools.com/hedden/staff/rwilliams/HarrisBurdickMysteries.htm to see the illustrations this is based on)

Mark flung the chair high above his head and began whacking the floor, trying to hit the ever-wiggling lump, until one of the legs broke off. It scrambled under his whackings, dodging each one. He had seen it crawl in through the small, carved opening in the door he had made for the dog, but he did not know what it was.

"That was my favorite chair, you motherfucker!" he screamed, picking up the broken leg in fury.

The thing poked its head out from one end of the carpet, and Mark stood stationary, examining it. Its head was yellow and its body was a short, plump thing that changed hues from purple to orange. It had a long antenna that began to rise out of its head toward the ceiling. Mark shifted his eyes upward to see a hole forming.
He dropped the wooden beam. The ceiling sucked him up like a vacuum cleaner sucking up dust. Suddenly he was floating, no floor or ceiling or walls to contain him. Millions of colors and spectrums of light he could not describe twinkled past his wondering, confused pupils.

Just as suddenly as he was raised, he felt himself being lowered. The spectrums faded as darkness took over, like the moon changes shifts with the sun. He carefully stumbled around until he collided with a desk and discovered a lamp.
The new sphere of light revealed file cabinets. Across the room, a door was placed, but after having floated through a portal, Mark decided to look around before he opened that door to what could possibly be another dimension or maybe even some sort of alien lair where they'd take him and experiment on him.

He opened numerous file cabinets and took out all the papers. He set them on the desk with the lamp and stared in waiting astonishment as the papers did nothing -- no alien tricks or transformations. They just sat there. He decided to try the door.

Now, Mark was not the smartest person. He believed in everything that anyone told him, regardless of how blatantly obvious the lie was. He also made up excuses for himself when he would commit some minor wrongdoing, so when he opened the door and knocked over a backpack, he took it, because, he later justified, "there was a good chance it wasn't real anyway."

He walked down a plain, wallpapered hall and made a mental note that he had been in room one-eleven, DNH, whatever that meant. The hall let to the inside of a parking garage, and then to another door that led outside. It was quite chilly that night, so he stepped back inside to look inside the stolen backpack for help. Inside, he found some duct tape, so he taped the door shut. "That way, I can get back inside, in case I get too cold," he told himself.

He strolled down the boulevard, crushing cigarette stubs and glass shards under his boots. He was in the middle of some sort of residential area, with peace signs painted in the window and American flags hanging from the porch. He smiled at the comfort they brought.

Down the street, he saw a bar, called The Red Man's Tavern. He did not know who the Red Man was, nor why he had a tavern. He pondered this as he walked inside to a whispering crowd plastered to the television. Richard Nixon's wrinkled face greedily stole the entire screen.

"Richard Nixon?" Mark said aloud. "Are you watching some kind of history program?"

A roar of laughter filled the small bar. "Where have you been? We're watching a presidential debate. Well, some people are." Mark agreed that a bar atmosphere was not the best place to choose a candidate.

Mark was stunned. "What year is this?"

This remark brought even more laughter and stares. The same man answered, "Nineteen-seventy-two."

Mark's heart beat faster as he stepped outside of the bar. Wow, he thought. 1972! I must have traveled back in time! His shaking, excited fingers scourged through the "unreal" backpack, uncovering a camera and tiny little plastic things Mark could not identify. He decided that he would take pictures of that room that he was in so everyone would believe him when he got home.

He raced back to the room where the door was cracked open, the way he'd left it. He set the backpack next to the desk. It fell over, and all of the little things fell out onto the floor. Click, snap, click, snap, went the camera as Mark captured proof inside the glass lense.

Mark did not notice the hole forming above him again until it was already sucking him up. Gravity pulled the camera out of his hands and it landed on the pile of papers.

Two men were arrested that night for breaking into the Democratic National Headquarters. They allegedly kept the back door open with duct tape, the tricky fiends, and began to take pictures of documents and were planning to plant listening devices when they were caught in the hallway after they had taken a break to go to the snack machine. The men pleaded innocent; they claimed they were just renting a room in the Watergate upstairs, but the evidence was too overwhelming.

* * * *

The red sun beat down against the red earth, scorching whatever and whoever was inbetween. Children and their parents ventured to the beach, which was actually a lake, to splash in the water and lay in the sun.

Nixon was whining and droning on the radio behind the sand about "this whole Watergate business," which he swore was not his fault, Mommy and Daddy pretending to be political. Neither of them was interested or paying attention or had even voted in that election. Mommy was reading a romance novel to fill the void and Daddy was watching the kiddies behind his newspaper.

The kiddies were playing pirates, stopped suddenly by the still, blue lake with no boat or ship to cross foreign waters to the treasure. Captain William refused to let this interfere with his plans. "Arggh! I'll just have to steal a boat!" he warbled in his best pirate voice attempt, eyeing an inflated raft across the beach.

"Argh! Let's go find one!" his younger sister, Emilie, imitated. William stopped, shedding himself of his pirate identity and allowing himself to seep back in and take over.

"No, Emilie, you can't be a pirate, you're a girl! You have to be my captive!"
Water emerged from her body; salty water that stained her young face. "But I don't WANT to be the captive, I want to be a pirate!"

She cried toward Nixon's dreary voice. Then, there was a rustling in the sand. Emilie stopped her bitching and watched bug-eyed as a creature, made of the yellow sand, rose from the red earth, castles and their mighty ant empires crumbling around it.

In one swoop, he ate Emilie. "Ha, ha, ha," he said. "Children."

* * * *

Bill was a very nervous man. He took pills for his shaking hands, pills for his shaking sleep, and therapy for his shaking mind. His therapist had labeled the culprit of his paranoia and worriedness as "stress at work," although the traumatizing image of his little sister being eaten by a sand monster probably had something to do with it. A suggestion was made to take a cruise to Venice, the most beautiful city in the world.

"It's perfect, you see," explained the doctor, "because the ship can't fall out of the sky like a plane, or run into a tree and explode like a car"(so much for his trips across town). "The only thing it can do is sink, but they hardly ever sink, and there's tons of lifeboats." So Bill agreed.

He took the blue pills, the ones for his sleep.

He boarded the giant boat, sucking down tablets to calm his nerves. The voyage began with the ringing of a large bell. Bill watched in horror as the ship moved away from the dock. His nerves paralyzed him; he fainted on the deck.

He opened his eyes inside his cabin. No one was around to console him or ask him if he was okay. It was as if the other passengers simply got tired of seeing a body laying on the deck, so they found out which room it belonged in, and took it there, throwing it meaninglessly on the rock-hard bed. There was a large lump protruding out of his balding head.

He bravely journeyed back out onto the deck, expecting to see annoyed faces of the people who threw him in his room, but all he encountered was a few smiles and many busy, ignoring neighbors. He looked ahead and saw the beautiful architecture of Italy. He thought maybe the bump on his head had given him some amnesia and that the ship had actually not gone from the United States to Italy in a few short hours.

But when the ship began to approach the deck, it did not slow down. Bill's heart beat out of his chest a thousand miles as the boat traveled into Venice, trying to fit itself into the tiny river, crushing Italian rowboats as well as buildings along the way. Bill fainted again, sweat pounding through his pores, soaking his face and hair.

When Bill came to, he was in his bed. The alarm clock was buzzing in his ear, urging him to get up and face the day with any weapons he deemed necessary. A heavy hand smacked the screaming wake-up call into silence while another hand knocked a receiver off its hook and dialed the boat's seven digits. He decided not to travel to Italy on a giant, destructive ship.

That morning, he sat in his safe, unchanging kitchen reading the newspaper, a safe way to experience the violence of the world. A headline caught his eye; Woman Missing After Halloween Festivities. Apparently, this woman, Joanie Sheen, had been walking down to the local pumpkin patch when she found one alongside of the road. Her husband recalled her telling him about it in one of her how-was-your-day-that's-nice-here's-mine conversations.

* * * *

She had been walking to the local pumpkin patch that would be filled with little children running wild, wanting all the deformed pumpkins, while their parents told them no, that's not the right kind of pumpkin. She dreaded the experience, but could not resist the yearly lobotomy. While casually searching for four-leaf clovers in the field alongside the road, Joanie saw a bright, round, orange pumpkin. She grabbed it up and ran home with it.

She brought the knife down closer to its smooth surface as it began to glow, electrified with an unknown light. Joanie was puzzled by this. The pumpkin split in half and tiny, cat-like creatures emerged. Joanie purred under her breath for the cute little things as they spoke to her in foreign tongues and zapped her away with their tails.

She arrived in a quiet place. Anything she said echoed off the high ceiling and carved walls. Two black and white citizens scurried past her, switching out beads between their fingers. Suddenly, she was knocked unconscious by a heavy, wooden object.

"Sorry!" exclaimed the nun, riding on a floating chair. She belonged to a secret monastery of nuns in the middle of the Himalayas. There was a leader of the nuns. They called her "Mother." She decided who stayed and who went. All nuns were expected to be perfect, or they were sent away.

The smelly one went to France. The one with the weird teeth went to England. The hairy one went to Arabia. The one with the beard went to the circus. The fat one went to Italy. The one who spat went to Germany. The annoying one was dropped in the middle of the ocean. More nuns are landing from the sky at this very mome--


Julia closed her eyes slowly, nodding off behind the text. The vine curled and twisted around the bedpost. She rolled over in her sleep, breaking some of the branches of the life-sucking plant. Its green leaves tickled her nose as she snored.
She had found the book in the dumpster outside of the library when she went dumpster-diving, which she thought was a pretty awesome, punk thing to do.

It was very old and had a Post-It note glued on the front that said:

Please don't read this book. It's very boring, and you wouldn't like it anyway.
- Mr. Linden

"Pee-shaw," she said, taking the book. She got home and found that it was a very boring book, about nuns, and she fell asleep very quickly. She awoke to her father's bellowing, male voice, announcing that her favorite television show was on, and it was a brand-spanking-new episode. She noticed the vines around her, and discovered the origin within the pages of the book. It seemed that some seeds had gotten stuck inside the moist pages from the dumpster.

Julia trailed downstairs, rubbing sand from her eyes. The glow of the box placed like an altar in the living room illuminated the family's faces. The title spun across the screen: "Another Place, Another Time." Her father had told her that it was similar to "The Twilight Zone," but she supposed it was beyond her generation.

Ricky's body swayed up and down in a continuous, heated movement. Sweat dripped all around him. He could hear the frightened inhaling of his friends around him. Four pairs of shaking hands pummeled the lever up and down, up and down, up and down, but it seemed hopeless. An eight foot green, scaly monster ran behind them.

Ricky and his gang decided that their only hope was to jump into the waters surrounding the track. Rob, the tall, green, scaly monster, was deathly afraid of water since a swimming pool murdered his mother. So it goes.

But the boys had to make a decision: Right or left? The thrilling climax had eyes around the world glued to illuminated boxes. Which would they choose?

They chose right, which was a mistake, because they found themselves face to face with ravenous sharks and piranhas. They were immediately eaten alive, as these sea creatures had not eaten in seven months.

Names and positions flew up into the top of the television as the children became uninterested. With his eyes still turned toward the screen, her father said, "John. Come here."

Her little brother shuffled his feet across the newly vacuumed carpet, creating sparks as he moved toward his father. His tiny, beaten shoes stopped parallel to his father's large, clean loafers. "Son, when we go to the park, I've noticed that you like the doves particularly. Is that right?"

"Yes," he responded, staring down at the floor, wondering about what he did not know as static electricity.

"Well, tomorrow we'll go down there and then we'll spruce up your new room."

His eyes beamed larger as he stopped caring about the floor. "I'm getting a new room?" He stepped closer, smudging the clean loafers in his excitement.

"Yes. We've just fixed the roof, and you can have the third floor bedroom, that one that you've always liked."

That night the son tossed and turned in his sleep, dreaming of the high ceiling and the perfect view of the backyard. Aliens disturbed his dreams.

The crunching of blankets masked all other sounds, yet a strange buzzing surrounded his ears.

Is this the one? Wonders lay in dreamland, atop fantasies and imagination. All time ceases behind locked eyelids.

He pulled the covers over his head in a pained anguish, wanting only for tomorrow to come, but light invaded his sleep.

Could this be him? They asked. They called him Archie Smith, Boy Wonder. As his imaginary aliens were capturing him, his eyelids opened in
survival. The clock told him that it was nine, but he knew that years had passed since he closed his eyes. A quick jump into new clothes and a quick drive in a vehicle brought them to the park.

* * * *

The doves spiraled around overhead, like the hands of a clock, keeping time with their wings.

I watched him. He stood under them with a black thing to his eyes and his head toward the sky, trying to shoot them with light. He carried the victims home, protectively captured in his little black box.

The next day, he taped the victims to my walls, happy little bird faces trapped in my room.

But I set them free. I opened the window and watched as the wind liberated them. I had no idea doves were so skinny, almost invisible, like paper.

* * * *

The little boy, happy with his successful liberation, dashed down the flights of stairs and into the kitchen. His feet stopped moving him so suddenly that they almost screeched across the linoleum. His aunt Linda was there.

He knew his aunt Linda by the giant, stained lips that engulfed her face, and the long, plastic nails that would scratch up his arms. He saw her as a clown, with overdone makeup and bright, mismatched clothing.

He disappeared before she could notice him. "How have you been?" she asked his mother.

"We've been doing fine. Julia was just accepted into that high school she's been wanting to go to." His mother was rolling out a thin piecrust.

"That art school?"

"Yes." Her hand searched the counter without her eyes to guide it, instantly needing assistance when the desire object was not found. "Well, shoot. I thought I brought those peaches up. Can you go downstairs and get them for me? They should be just to the right, in a jar."

She was walking down the stairs to get the peaches when she saw a little door in the wall. She hadn't ever noticed it, but then again, she'd never been in the basement before, either. The door knob looked like it was turning. It opened.
A mouse came out, ignored Linda, and scurried up to a package of canned strawberries.

"Don't you want some cheese?" She asked. She had seen enough cartoons Saturday morning to know that mice loved cheese.

He looked at her strangely. "I'm lactose intolerant." Then he went inside the hole and shut the door behind him.

She picked up the jar of peaches and dropped it just as quickly in shock. "How rude." Then she took a nap.

The annoying humming and beeping of her cell phone woke her up. Her eyelids parted and her nephew's face was centimeters from her own. A mix of chocolate and ketchup was smeared around his mouth and the repulsive odor filled her nostrils and disturbed her taste buds.

Her phone grew impatient, so she lifted opened its mouth and pressed one of its teeth. "Hello?" she said, while the cell phone prepared to eat her.

"Where are you, babe? The poetry reading started two seconds ago," her beatnik boyfriend Dave questioned.

"I'll be right there, I just have to change." She dashed up the stairs and flooded the bathroom, stripping off her neat layer of skin and replacing it with a messy, pot-smelling one. She put her fingers in her hair and made them do the hokey-pokey so as to appear that she hadn't washed her hair in forever and three years.

* * * *

Her boyfriend took the microphone just as she took a seat in the smoke-filled room. "Now I'm going to read a poem I wrote called 'The Harp,'" he said, monotonely. He said everything on the same pitch, regardless of the emotion he felt. He would be a very bad actor, but could star in lots of movies. "It's dedicated to my girlfriend, Linda."

His poem went like this:

I've eaten your crimson apple and I am a pillar of salt
My fingers pull the strings
Gently, tenderly, perfectly under your spell
They move automatically and people praise me
But now I've fallen into your black puddle
My eyes are failing me,
I see only darkness
I am floating, suffocating
Your hands are around my neck, and I feel your fingers closing
in
I'm falling deeper, plunging into unknown depths
My arms are stopping
My legs are immobile as I slip further into your pit
And suddenly my heart has failed me
The last thing I see is the ripples swimming to shore
Ignoring and fleeing from my peril


No one clapped for his poem. They had all made a silent, synonymous decision a long time ago that they were forbidden to clap. Snapping was where it was at. The poet then began a detailed, seemingly drug-induced story about one incident in his life, his voice again staying at a constant decibel. It went like this:

Oscar and Alphonse were my best friends. I took them everywhere with me in my shirt pocket. My shirt was white. Sometimes it was blue, but usually it was white. It was made out of cotton. Through the cotton, I could feel them writhe and wiggle, wrestling against my chest. Each night I fed them organic oak leaves that I got from the tree in the back yard, building their tiny bodies into healthy machines.

One night, I poked a leaf down into my cotton shirt pocket, but it did not disappear. I was in my bedroom and the phone was ringing. My heart skipped five beats when I opened the shirt pocket on my white cotton shirt and Oscar and Alphonse were gone!

Suddenly the phone stopped ringing and there were screeches from the kitchen. I ran down the wallpapered hallway and went down the steps, through the dining room and into the kitchen where my mother was standing on a chair, trying to push Oscar and Alphonse away from her with a broom.

"NO," I shouted. I grabbed the green and brown beings up off the gleaming, reflective tile.

"Get those things OUT of my house," my mother said. She got down off the chair and handed me a spoon. I've never been clear as to why she handed me the spoon.

I knew it was time to let them go, so I put them down in the grass next to the oak tree in the backyard with the spoon. They crawled into the curve of the spoon and formed a circle. Suddenly they transformed into pirates!

The two were wearing red jackets, eye patches, big hats, and peg legs. Not really, but I like to tell it that way. Really they looked like perverted Disney characters.

"Arrrrrrgh," said Captain Troy. "You broke the spell with the spoon! Thank you oh so much."

He grabbed my arm, his grown fingers tightly twisted around it. I made a small wincing sound, but he did not loosen his monster hold.

His assistant, Robert, put the spoon in his pocket and spread a map out on the ground. He did a weird jig on top of it, crinkling Antarctica and ripping Belgium right down the middle under his heavy boots. A breeze spun through the backyard and Captain Troy pushed me towards the map.

Robert dropped down into a bright yellow country on the map. Captain Troy pushed me on the map and I, too, fell into its colors.

We stood next to a churning, green river. Captain Troy stuck two fingers in his dirty mouth, blowing hard to create a sharp whistle. Robert threw the spoon into the water and it transformed into a giant ship. We started to board the ship when--


He was interrupted by Hitler, who had grabbed his girlfriend and was making his way toward the stage. Dave started to run away when Hitler shot him with a tranquilizer dart. Dave fell face forward with a thud onto the stage, knocking the microphone into the audience, who was amazed and stunned by the presence of Hitler, who then erased their memory of the three's presence and teleported to the house on Main Street.

Hitler had faithfully taken his career test, and the three answers it came up with for him were: art student, savior of the world, crazy dictator. He was rejected by art school, Jesus had already taken the savior of the world thing, so there was only one option left. But he decided that he had to rid the world of other crazy people so he'd be the only one left and no one would get in his way.

So he put them all in a house and planned to send it to the moon. There were piles of newspapers with pictures of pumpkins and headlines of "MISSING!" strewn throughout the house. Bill was in the corner breathing into a bag and mumbling under his breath, while the sand monster that ate his sister was in the kitchen drinking martinis and flirting with a teenaged girl whose father was pulling her away, telling her it was TV time. They left the room as he ate her little brother.

There was a woman searching a bookshelf for a romance novel and her husband had one of the newspapers in his fingers while his other hand twisted the radio knob. A man and a woman across the room were discussing time travel and teleporting; one claimed he went to 1972 and the other claimed kittens had sent her to a monastery, trying to use the pumpkin newspapers as proof. Captain Troy and Robert were sword-fighting all around the house, knocking over china plates and dancing on the dining room table. A mouse, sitting at the table eating strawberry shortcake, yelled at them to "stop their horseplay" and scared them so bad that they turned into Oscar and Alphonse, where they proceeded to crawl across the table, looking for a spoon.

Hitler shoved Dave and Linda into the crazy situation, locked the door, and blew the house to mars. Everything went back to normal and Hitler took over the earth.

THE END

Remember, this is satirical and humourous, and, most importantly, reviews are greatly appreciated!