CONTEST! CHAPTER TWO *Make sure you read chapter one first. It has been copied to a file in our files section! ____________________________________________________________ About four blocks away from Icky Gnome, TPE’s resident racanteur and man about town, Rolando Armentero, had forded the chilled gusty winds and ever piling snowdrifts and was pulling into his white snow-blanketed driveway. His cart was laden down with boxes of Christmas lights he’d had on layaway at Gnome Depot, odd pieces of blown glass lawn ornaments and 200 pairs of Christmas socks. Not stockings. Socks. Those too had been on layaway at the store where he worked as assistant manager. SOCKS ‘R US is one of the largest stores in TPE Village. They stock socks of all sizes and persuasions, all sizes and religions. Rolando, although schooled in all things horticulture, had by happenstance become a sock expert. So on this evening, after paying the last zero buck installment on his Christmas sock stash, he had loaded them into his cart after work and was now unloading them into his toasty warm, Miami style house. His horse, Chachi, was happily munching hay in his own festively decorated barn. There are three things of paramount importance in Rolando’s life: maintaining his golden Miami tan, propagating his manly man goatee, and putting up his annual Christmas light display each year. Since childhood, he had collected strings of lights, blinking Santas, wireform deers with mechanical heads that bobbed by virtue of tiny motors implanted in their stomachs, penguins with illuminated innards and top hats that popped off and on, musical trains that chugged along lighted tracks, life size human doll children in fleecy sleeper suits that slept in a bed that jiggled and wiggled and woke them up when a tiny Santa peeped over the footboard, a hand carved wooden depiction of Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol” figurines that marched around a wooden Christmas tree whenever the clock in it’s center struck the hour, a huge illuminated sleigh laden to overflowing that slid on rails across his roof and back as Santa tumbled out, then back in, then backwards. It was the motherlode of electric Yuletide merriment, and it created a mob scene of touring gnome carts past his house every year. The Channel TPE77 news team did a five minute spot there every year, and Rolando had a full wall of trophies, awards and ribbons for his effort. Tonight, he was going to finish winding lights around his artificial palm trees before he went to bed. The finishing touch! Icky Gnome’s prospects were not so good. His sisters gnomelette, Stinky, was being pawned off on him while they Christmas vacationed in Bermuda. Stinky was the result of a mad night of beer and tequila shots after his sister Zelda and brother in law Mel Gnome went on a bender at the Stop & Slurp strip club across town. The two of them were hopelessly irresponsible. Two months after they plied their wigglers that night at a cheap motel, Zelda had her own wiggler which lead them to plying a quick troth at the TPE town hall. They named the progeny of their union Albert. Albert was a droll and lackluster gnomelette right from the start. He remained unpotty trained until he was seven and was relegated to junior-elder Depends which he hated having changed. When Albert became particularly fragrant, he delighted in running away from Zelda until the mission was abandoned. Of course, the relatives and townspeople who were assaulted by the stench had no choice but to nickname him Stinky. Like the diapers, the name stuck. Fortunately, his compass kicked in when he was eight. He had become fascinated with swirling water and self-directed squirting. The rest, thank god, is history. So, Stinky was arriving in the morning. To Icky, the experience was akin to the storming of the Normandy beaches or army ants on the march through the Amazon basin, or the barbarian hoards…you get the picture.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 04:08:43 +0000
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