25th July, 1991
Dennis the sensual warthog was feeling rather strange as he woke up and died. Possibly that accounted for it. Letitia knelt at his side, sobbing wretchedly, punctuated only by the occasional sneeze caused by the cold she had recently caught while visiting Dennis at his waterfall. She sobbed and cryed until she disolved into a small moist puddle. Nearby Michael was also sobbing, he was upset about being left out of the last adventure in looney land. Another puddle was rapidly filling. Dennis was crawling out from under the waterfall when he spied Prunella cleaning her tendrils in a nearby field of elderberries. As he ripped the thin silk from her (now ain't dat familiar?) berry-stained pocket he remembered the bed time stories of childhood: times of warm comfort. Was it the waterfall or the rorschach-stained fabric or the extremely jagged endings of the lines? Undaunted by this, and several other unfortunate circumstances, including her death, Sally went forth, not unlike that other sorry character of history, Sir Edmund What'sname, the well known amnesiac who had forgotten to be in the story.
Meanwhile in another part of the bread tin Marvin was trying to open a small tin of de-hydrated words, when a raindrop hit is when much if it hospital dihydroxyphenylalanine, the last word nearly took his head off, so many words burst forth that two extra lines were needed to stop the sillyness. And then again two weeks later, due to the mailer black hole. After many ACKS and re-ACKS and general stuffing around, she finally got it in, his lips softly rounding in surprise, wondering why she had just eaten his favourite tie. He also wondered about the random line number effect that was occurring recently but decided it was just his imagination and that no-one would believe him in the tidal pool, over the rocks and past the waterfall. Suddenly a large group of manic greenies approached and began chaining themselves to the paper cutout trees. Dennis was concerned that he himself may mistaken be for a large sequoia. Then his conscience got to him. ``All right I confess, I murdered Elaine. I couldn't help it, her violin was driving me insane! Not even twelve dooners over my ears helped. So I garotted her with the bow, and now I can sleep again!''. Elaine now has a craving for wild sequoia. All that violin playing was merely to steady her sequoia-crazed nerves - you know, stretching others to breaking point as a substitute for self flagellation - and now that the scraping strings (her one small control) was gone, she became instantly disoriented and fell off the world to her death. Ozalp barked. Then he howled. And then he whined. Finally, Robert came out and shot him. Meanwhile, in a passing bee's pollen pouch, Prunella was confused, how could she go on to study nuclear physics when she was stuck in a bee. Alfred didn't really care, in fact the bee was annoying him, so he swatted the bee. The now much flatter Prunella was finding it very iridescent in the fish tank, so she discarded her scuba gear and promptly drowned.
Later that evening, as the sun set and so did the jelly, Anja screamed and screamed, and cried and screamed, sobbing and sobbing in her pillow as the jelly wobbled and wobbled in sympathy. The death of her one true love in the fish tank that afternoon had so tried her that the customary reserve and strength that defined Anja to her readers had quite deserted her. It must also be added that the loss of the scuba gear figured not insignificantly in her mourning. [anyway nobody told ME about a line quota. Bloody Pedants! why don't you all go and ROT!] Rousing her rouge ruffle roughly, she raised her right royal ring, glinting gladly in the glorious glen. Bright bolts belted both back before blowing between big blue bags. Overwhelmed, and ordinarily orthogonal, Anja ate the dictionary. Wit vry fw letrs t use th storii waz lookin a littl confuzed. The story was saved from total collapse by Oxford the highly educated octopus. Several sentences away, Ozalp was beginning to worry about his relaxed attitude to everything, when in a meaningless amount of orthopaedic elephant droppings Stephanie burst forth wielding the strychnine-covered samurai sword which she thrust at her swollen ankle, then immersed foot and sword in the steaming turd (thus supplying retrospective semantic justification to a post-structuralist iconographic relationship). In this manner she fashioned for herself a life of unspeakable and pointless agony. Stephanie laughed, then realised she had given away an as yet unrevealed secret about herself. She swept the black cape about her as she fled into the night, quickly disappearing into the inky blackness. A flash in the room reflected off the pool of ink that was forming from the large tear in Robert's body. Robert lay face down over a sheet of blotting paper and the bloodied pen lay next to him. Detective Bogg was confused; how could the paper have the reversed image of a frog, when etched on Robert was a Coca-Cola label? As he noted this in his book, a piano fell on him.
Later at the morgue, the coroner wondered why there was an impression of `Rhapsody in Bm' on Bogg, when the piano had been playing in C. He put it down to a reflection of the top-side doppler shift, tidied the files and left for home; paused thoughtfully when struck by a falling piano. The piano was disappointed. She rolled off, searching for a Real Man: someone who could stand up for longer than a second...
The last time something similar had happened it had made the headlines in major newspapers all around the world. This time, however, no-one dared take a second glance in case they were the next to go. As fate would have (comma), and fate did have. There was little sense in the paragraph so far so it was time to introduce a new character - Simon was finally to get his first major roll in a story; sadly however he was shot before the line of penguins had passed, but Anja, with adept use of a bale of hay and a pair of tweezers had him patched up in a jiffy. As the jiffy drove off, they began to wonder if it had all been a mistake, which it had.
Catastophically, they seached fo the lette between q and s; nd then th on bfo b, nd soon they were no more due to the lack of typographical symbols left to describe them. Luckily, a meta-alphabet had been left behind by Sir Mervyn Moncrieff A.B.C Q.R.Z before the volcano had erupted. Breathing a sigh of relief, the authors had decided enough is enough. Suddenly a large hole opened up in the story fabric and all the characters were swallowed up, torn pieces of story lay littered aroung the rapidly shrinking hole, and all that remained were a few rotting vowels. Will our characters survive until the next story? will aroung ever turn into the word around? will the ragged edges of the story ever become smooth? and will there be another story after this one?, very likely I'm afraid!