Part 10: The Barbie Lunchbox

Intermission

The Queen of the Plants stepped over the naked woman in the doorway and entered her bleak house. She looked over the white couch, white curtains, white blinds, white carpeting… she walked through the white hallway, past the white living room and the white kitchen and up the white staircase. She looked into the white bathroom and the white bedroom, then descended the white staircase and laughed.

Just then Karen woke up. She lay motionless on the floor and stared up at the Queen of the Plants in terror and disbelief. Her mouth dropped open.

The Queen laughed again. "You’re the boringest yet!" she cried, and laughed some more.

Karen was silent.

Leaving off laughing, The Queen of the Plants demanded, "Get up!"
Karen obeyed.

"C’mon!" smiled the Queen (for she was nothing if not gracious), and led the way out the door.

Karen grabbed a trench coat and followed close behind.

Part 9: A Stalker

IX. A Stalker

Roger followed David back to his apartment building on North 34th Avenue. He followed him up the stairs to his apartment and continued on to the landing above. Roger didn’t know why he was following David, but he knew he had nowhere else to go.

He lay down on the landing and looked through the bars to David’s door below. David entered the apartment with his purchases and the Keebler elf, and closed the door behind him.

Inside the apartment, David set the elf back on his side table, and emptied his shopping bag onto the floor. Just then, there was a knock on the door. David stood, motionless, and stared at the Keebler elf. The elf stood motionless and stared at David.

Slowly, quietly, David crept to the door and put his eye up to the peephole. He took a step back and stared again at the elf, which only stared silently in return.

David opened the door.

Part 8: The Plan

Part VIII: The Plan

The Queen of the Plants was an exquisite planner. She made beautiful maps and long, involved lists, and she delegated the work so that, in under three days, she guaranteed the safe and joyous return of the pink, plastic Barbie lunchbox.

First, the Queen decided that she must (rather against her wishes) attend school the next day, carrying her lunch in a frightful brown paper bag. She walked to school with a serious look, but just a bit of a bounce in her step. She greeted the plants with her queenly (though subdued) greeting and carefully accepted their browning leaves into her backpack (ashamed to have them see the paper bag). She counted every step along the walk to school, careful to avoid stepping on the cracks (though the Queen’s mother hardly seemed worth the trouble).

Arriving in the classroom, she stowed her lunch and coat in her locker and strode into the 5th grade classroom with her backpack on her back. The offending bully was standing in the corner, looking enormously tall and disgustingly fat. The Queen of the Plants marched forward until she stood (all 3 feet of her) beneath the bully’s nose.

"GIVE ME BACK MY LUNCHBOX," she demanded, calmly but firmly, in her queenliest voice.

The boy stared down at her in disbelief, his mouth gaping and his eyes bulging nearly out of their sockets. He coughed, sputtered, and said, "What lunchbox?" in a low, hoarse whisper.

"MY LUNCHBOX," the Queen replied, not lowering her voice, "MY. BARBIE. LUNCHBOX." Her eyes flashed with all the fury of a woman scorned.

Looking carefully around the room, and discovering that none of his friends were present to witness a moment of weakness, he bent low and whispered, "I sold it to a warehouse thrift store on Elm Avenue." Straightening up, he bellowed, "GET OUT OF HERE YOU MISERABLE, PUNY WORM!!"

The Queen ran. She ran back to her classroom, ran up to her teacher, clutched her stomach and cried, "I think I’m going to puke!" and ran from the room. She ran to her locker, retrieved her coat (abandoned her lunch bag) and ran from the school. The Queen of the Plants ran 3 blocks down the street before she had to stop to catch her breath.

Three blocks from the school, the Queen sat down on the curb in front of a white house. There was a white house on one side of her, a white house on the other and a white house across the street. She sat down to think. "Overall," she thought, "that went quite well."

Looking around her, she wondered whereabouts Elm Avenue might be. Looking behind her she saw the white house and its white curtains and white shutters (both pulled tight) and wondered again where Elm Avenue could be. Standing up, she brushed the dirt off her royal garment and stared up at the windows, watching for a sign of life. The Queen of the Plants saw a shadow behind the blinds.

The shadow gave her courage, and she shuffled quietly up to the thick, imposing door and knocked.

*****

Karen awoke and it was daytime, but dimly shadowed inside her bedroom. Her answering machine still showed a big, red "0" which reminded her of jelly doughnuts, which reminded her that she hadn’t eaten in several days. She had no idea what day it was, nor how long she had been asleep. Her pajamas and bedclothes reeked. Stepping out of bed, she shed her white nightgown, pulled the white sheets from the white mattress, and threw the lot in the washing machine. Walking, naked, past her large oak front door, she heard a light knock.

Karen did not bother to find anything to cover herself, but opened the door unashamed, looked down at the tiny visitor, and passed out.

Part 7: Encounter

[Once again, this is part of a larger story I wrote many years ago and am just now illustrating. Tell me it's stupid, tell me it's boring, tell me I should be on medication... just tell me something in the comments, please!]

VII. Encounter

When Roger the SweetMan awoke, he began to run. He ran down the cracked and overgrown sidewalk, around the corner and down a narrow, dirty street. He ran and ran until he could run no more, and then he stopped.

Then Roger felt the cold wind, and he looked around him for somewhere to keep warm. He found himself outside the Warehouse Thrift Shop where he had begun his first reincarnation. His only suit was soiled and torn, and all his bones ached.

Entering the store, Roger wandered the rows of dumpsters full of clothes and tables strewn with broken toys, blenders caked with food and torn and soiled books. He roamed around the Warehouse for three hours, watching the customers pick through the rubbish, and wondering what he would do.

While leafing through the second half of a ripped romance novel, Roger was bumped from behind.

"'Scuze me," growled a short little man with a goatee growing to his chest and a life-sized cardboard cutout of the Keebler Elf beneath his arm. The man seemed to stumble under the weight of the decoration, nearly as large as himself, and half fell off his ridiculously tall shoes.

"Oh…Sorry…" said Roger, following the little man with his eyes as he furtively stole through the aisles, picking out odd bits of junk and adding them to a basket he carried on the same arm as the elf.

Now and then the man cocked his head towards the elf and listened, then whispered a few words back, looking around suspiciously to catch any lookers-on.

But the man did not catch Roger, who began to follow him around the store, often turning his back in order to appear to be heading the other direction, sometimes ducking down to hide behind dumpsters, sometimes crawling beneath them to get to where the elf man was going.

When David (for of course it was David) left the shop, Roger followed close behind.