There once was an ogre named Grumpf
Who had a daughter he wanted to humpf
Said he was the man
The man with the plan
But he was dumber than dumbest of stumpfs.
Naturally, Almighty Grumpf the Great Again didn’t quite like this tune and what had happened was thus. While my wife and I were cuddling, I leaning against her soft downy breast, being lulled to sleep by her humming, the window behind us was hurled open and before we even knew what happened, Almighty Grumpf had grabbed us.
Part II
Standing before the golden cage not more than twice the size of King Grumpf’s newest pet, the gremlin-hobgoblin hybrid cocked his light green, bump-riddled head and grinned his queer grin. He looked about both shoulders, giggled his sharp cranky giggle, and readied, gnarled hands shaking, to open the cage door when he quickly turned about his heels and stood as straight as a humpback can, hands behind his waist, at the sound of the flush from Grumpf’s mini-throne room where he admittedly did his best thinking.
Out trundled the king and Shawn Spicy-Hot, the king’s media relations specialist, coughed into his hand and nodded in the direction of Grumpf’s lumpy backside.
Grumpf felt for and pulled the stream of toilet paper spilling out from under his pants. He let it fall on the gold-tiled floor and told Spicy-Hot to take care of it. As always, the hybrid who grew up hearing he’d never amount to anything in his life, wadded up the paper, scurried to the mini-throne room, and flushed the linen-scented paper down the golden toilet.
“What is it you’re doing here?” Grumpf demanded as Spicy-Hot had, in taking advantage of the moment, quickly flipped through a copy of Nude Celebrities King Grumpf kept in a basket alongside the toilet.
“She’s lovely,” Spicy-Hot squeaked upon finding Grumpf nearing his bird in her little swing. “But, my Lord, why keep her in such a small cage?”
“Simple. That way she can’t get away.” He uncurled his single long finger through the cage bars and grabbed the bird by the cloaca. “See?”
The bird flapped her wings in violent protest, but at Grumpf said, she, having nowhere to go, had to take it.
“So what is it you’re doing here exactly?”
Gravelly voice pebbled with nerves, Spicy-Hot said, “The press, my Lord, the press really gave it to me this morning. You can’t imagine how many questions I have to answer. They’re wondering when you’re going to make good on all your promises.”
“Promises?”
The bird in her cage trembled at the roar and cooed with relief when Grumpf ceased touching her.
“What did you tell them?”
“I told them you were working on them.”
“What do they care? I am king! I can do whatever I want. If I want to sit on my little throne looking my magazines I can sit on my throne and look at my magazines! If I want to play a few rounds I’ll play a few rounds!”
“Yes, my Lord, I…I…I am n-n-not questioning you. Th-th-they just want to know. The trolls are ge-ge-getting up-upset.”
“The trolls!?”
“What do I care for the trolls?” Grumpf lumbered over to and, having added more than a good twenty pounds since his coronation, squeezed into his ornate golden throne bedecked in diamonds and rubies and sapphires.
At that, the double doors to his throne room slammed open and in came Rumplewhiteskin, his long pale face covered in sweat and soot, waving a handful of crinkled papers.
“I found it my Lord, I found it!”
Noticing Grumpf, despite his concerted efforts, could not push himself out of his throne, Spicy-Hot ran toward him and, with both hands, yanked him free.
“I didn’t ask for your help,” Grumpf hollered.
“But, my Lord, I…I w-was—”
“Go stand in the corner!”
“But my Lord—”
“The corner Spicy-Hot! Now! And put the hat on!”
Shoulders slumped, the humpbacked hybrid slinked to the far corner and set the cone-shaped hat in bands of yellow and blue atop his round green head.
Rolling eyes turning to Rumplewhiteskin, Grumpf first apologized on Spicy-Hot’s behalf then asked his Director of the All-Things Science Department what it was he’d found.
“I’d been scouring through the old records,” he said holding the papers in both hands, his thin pink lips pulled back in a most satisfied grin. “It’s an ancient incantation.”
“In-can-what?”
“In-can-ta-tion.”
Grumpf nodded along with each and every syllable.
“A magical formula my Lord.”
Grumpf lowered his sinewy brows at the insinuation. “I know what an in-in-in-can—I know what it means!”
Hands trembling, Rumplewhiteskin deferred. “Of course you do my Lord, I’m sorry.”
“Do I need to put you next to Spicy?”
“No my Lord.”
“Well? What it is man?”
“An incan—a magical ritual to help you drain the swamp as you promised.”
“Really!?” Grumpf snatched the papers from Rumplewhiteskin’s nimble fingers and looked over the strange inscriptions. “I can’t read this! What does it say?”
“It’s a double whammy really my Lord. You’re going to love it. This is what we’ve been waiting for.”
“Damn it! Just tell me already!”
“Well, like you said, you wanted to plant mushrooms across the world, right?”
Grumpf straightened and turned to look at his reflection in the gold wall. “Big mushrooms. Really, really big mushrooms.” He extended his hands outward. “The best mushrooms. They’re gonna be huuuuuge.”
“And this incantation will allow us to plant the hugest mushrooms the world has ever seen. Tens of thousands of them just like you wanted—all at the push of a single button!”
“A single button?” Grumpf turned, intrigued. “Really?” So accustomed was he to saying “huge” (which he pronounced “yuge’) after he said “really,” he caught himself from saying as much lest he sound like a moron. “So what does it say?”
“Well, my Lord, we have to begin collecting a number of objects. Seventy-eight in all. And here’s the thing—you yourself already found two of them!”
“I did?”
“Yes my Lord. The turtledoves. Didn’t you grab two?”
“I did.”
“And where’s the other one?”
“Oh, he’s down in the dungeon.”
Rumplewhiteskin eased over to Grumpf’s side and pointed to the passage indicating the need for two turtledoves.
“Quite serendipitous wouldn’t you say my Lord?” He knew in using the long word he’d misspoken and at once headed for the corner.
“Where are you going? I didn’t give you leave.”
“Sorry my Lord.”
“What else, what else does it say?”
Rumplewhiteskin explained everything the list required, informed him that once they’d gathered all the necessary materials, they’d offer a great sacrifice to be accompanied by a recitation of the secret, single-word incantation.
Grumpf, nodding along with the instructions, repeated, for practice, the magical word by which he would make good on all his promises:
“Covfefe.”
Thus did it begin and I, huddled about myself in my rusty iron cage stored away in the dark dusty dungeon, alone and without my love, found myself in the weeks and months to come in the company of a great many others.
The first to arrive was a most magnificently plumed bird with all the grace and beauty of a high-born lady.
It was the sound of metal grating on the cold cobble-stone floor that awoke me that day. My sleep-heavy eyes adjusting to the light spilling in through the open door, I saw two heavy-set hobgoblins in tattered overalls, their stomachs distended, wheel into the room a large, potted fruit-bearing tree.
After the hobgoblins exited, a most lamentable cry I heard from within the tree’s wilting leaves.
�
��Hello?” I asked.
“They called me a temptress,” said what sounded like what could have been—under different conditions—a most lovely and mellifluous voice. “Said I was an incarnation of the devil.”
She poked out her head and, when seeing only me, hopped down from the branches and fell flat on the floor.
“What happened?”
“I don’t really know,” she admitted. “There I was, roosting among the pears, when these two men dressed in black suits came upon me out of nowhere. The last thing I remember was a big burlap sack and hearing them calling me such vicious names. Then, the sound of a shovel as they dug up my tree.” She hadn’t lifted her head from the floor. “Now here I am.”
When you are in a dungeon the likes of which I had been relegated, you aren’t really aware of the passage of time. Sure, you know time passes, but you can’t define it in any terms of length. No cutting time down to size when you’re in a dungeon such as I.
The partridge and I became friends. She told me of her life, and I of hers. Told her of my lovely wife and how I—not knowing what became of her—worried about her.
The same I could say of the three hens whom the fat hobgoblins deposited into our cell next and after some time, the three hens, the partridge in her pear tree, and I in my cage finally had enough of the four calling birds who were soon to join us.
They just didn’t seem to get it.
They were trapped here just as we and we just wanted them to shut up. But they wouldn’t and as a result, I, having felt myself beginning to go mad, began to bang my head against my iron bars. In retrospect, the only thing that kept me from falling over the edge like a bunch of lemmings was the thought of my wife—that I might someday see her again.
Little did I know, of course, what had become of her.
“Well? What’s the hang up?” whined Grumpf, his throne cutting into his sides.
“Hephaestwé says there is no more gold. We’ve scoured the earth my Lord,” said Grumpf’s apprentice número uno Maik Not-Give-Twopence. “But there’s nowhere any can be found.”
“How can that possibly be? Where did it all go?”
More than comfortable with wagging his fingers at others, the silver-haired fairy extended his hands outward. “You have it all my Lord.”
Grumpf steepled his two long index fingers and curled his lips into a sly grin. “I do, don’t I?” Waiting for a response he didn’t receive, he added, “And?”
“Well, my Lord, I mean, if you want your plan to proceed, you’re going to have to be willing to let go of some of it.”
“What!” Grumpf slammed his wanna-be fist on his throne’s golden and bejeweled armrest. He folded his arms over his belly with a triumphal harrumph. “You can’t make me.”
“But my Lord, do you really need gold-flecked toilet paper?”
“You bet your sweet-ass I do!”
Not-Give-Twopence about to query into the king’s need for golden hair-plugs, Grumpf said, “Fame has more than enough golden rings. We just need five right? She has millions. Go ask her.”
“But my Lord, Hephaestwé requires gold to melt down. He has to fashion new gold rings.”
“So what? Take Fame’s rings, give them to the blacksmith and voila! he’ll have what he needs.”
Not-Give-Twopence ceded to his Lord’s request, left him stuck in his throne, and, in hurrying to her high-ceilinged room, demanded from Fame her gold rings.
“I will do no such thing!”
Not-Give-Twopence pleaded with her; then, thinking on his twinkle-toes, issued her a threat. “If you do not heed your husband’s request, he is more than willing to divorce you and find wife number ten.”
Aghast at the prospect of losing her position and what others would think of her, Fame plunged both hands into one of her hundreds of piles of gold rings and tossed the fairy handful upon handful.
Depositing the rings into his fairy-dust pouch, Not-Two-Pence sashayed his way down forty flights of gold stairs to Hephaestwé’s smithy where the shirtless man, his muscles rippling with glistening sweat, washed his face and thick manly beard in a water-basin.
Breath heavy not from the long descent, but the vision of masculinity before him rather, Not-Two-Pence slowed his breath and held his pouch below his waist to hide his embarrassment before clearing his deep throat and fanning his face with a limp-wristed hand.
“Hey there,” said Not-Give-Twopence. “I got what you need.” (“And then some,” he thought to himself.)
“Finally.” He possessed the gruff voice a blacksmith should. “Hand it over.”
“Oooh, so tough,” Not-Give-Twopence bellowed with a tilt to his shoulders. “So manly.”
“Uh-huh. Whatever. You got the gold or not?”
“Ooh, I’ve got the goods don’t you worry honey.” He dangled his pouch before the smith. “Uh-uh-uh,” he added with a wag of the finger. “What do you say to daddy?”
In the blink of an eye Hephaestwé snatched the bag from Not-Two-Pence’s feeble hands, turned his back, and set the gold rings in a cast-iron pan for smelting.
Hours later, he fashioned the five gold rings and gave them to two goblins who absentmindedly tossed to them into the dungeon where the ten famished birds, for a moment thinking them food, cracked their beaks with their incessant pecking.
Rare in demonstrations of patience and statesmanship, Almighty Grumpf the Great Again wanted what he wanted and he wanted it all now. His staff he sent out across the world to find the remaining 64 objects o’ desire and with his two stubby thumbs sent out across his media channels a call to his minions to assist in the task.
Now King Grumpf had two dolts for sons—World Chief and Eternal Ruler. With great aspirations for their future he’d named them, but in realizing in them he’d fathered two eggs for sons, he commissioned them with the simplest of tasks: to find, not without his own twisted sense of irony, six geese-a-laying.
Seeing something swan-like in her own long neck and in her (self-perceived) graceful-manner, the haggard witch Kellyscam Con-Her-Way (Into Significance) cast upon herself a spell to transform her skeletal-like appearance into something young and beautiful and pure.
Descended from a man with ties to the criminal underground, Con-Her-Way employed a means most nefarious to secure her catch. Knowing well a bank of swans frequented the large park not far from Grumpf Tower, she glued feathers to old wooden barrels and long branches. Tied together with lengths of rope she set her seven makeshift swans in the water and cast upon them spells of attraction.
Swans, you see, mate for life and Kellyscam with her witchy ways knew that were the seven swans-a-swimming to lay their eyes on the hexed objects, she could draw them near and ensnare them. She herself living proof the spell worked, the faux-swans set in the water, she, skulking behind a nearby tree net in hand, made swan-sounds.
Mid-pond, the seven swans-a-swimming flapped their wings in delight, and, caught so in the spell, half-flew half-swam their way toward the shore when out from behind the tree Kellyscam leapt and tossed about the seven her enchanted net.
’Twas good the order in which the objects were found mattered not for by the time Kellyscam Con-Her-Way (Into Significance) tossed her catch into the dungeon, World Chief and Eternal Ruler had not yet located their six geese, a task as simple—one might think—as one could get.
But no, the bumbling brothers, in spying one of said geese in its nest, fought over who saw it first and, in running straight for the bird, bumped into each other, knocked heads, and began once again their infantile name-calling.
Protective of its egg, the big mama goose chased after the two blundering idiots and, spreading her big long wings, nipped at their heels.
Seventeen birds and five golden rings stowed away in the deep dark dungeon, its stale air pungent with droppings, we, ever so hungry, struggled to breathe. The swans huddled with the swans, the hens with the hens, the calling birds—long since having lost their voices—with the calling birds. The partridge by her
lonesome and I alone in my cage, the memory of my wife slowly fading along with my hope.
We squawked, rather than talked. We complained and blamed with resentment as bitter as the taste in our mouths.
Then a most curious thing happened. The door opened again and shielding our eyes behind our wings, we marveled at the sight before us. Wondering as to the next avian captives, I cannot even begin to describe our collective bewilderment when we watched eight living breathing human beings march, heads bowed, into our cavern.
Eight heavily-breasted women to be exact.
They had all been at the mall, one named Mary would later explain, sitting about the central fountain breast-feeding their babies when up came at least a dozen men in dark suits and sun-glasses.
“A terrorist attack is imminent!” one of the men had claimed.
The women—there had been nine of them then—were to follow one of the men out the door and into a van while the others cleared the premises.
“Hurry hurry hurry!” the men spat.
The windowless van peeled off only to come to a halt some fifteen minutes later when, the back door opening, there stood twenty soldiers in army fatigues holding automatic weapons. They ushered the nine young women into a back alley and demanded of them their children. None, of course dream of doing anything of the sort when all of a sudden, as if sending a warning to each and every one of them, a soldier fired a single shot through Nancy Shelton’s forehead.
The women screamed, the babies wailed.
And the men with guns ripped from the mothers their flesh and blood.
Their tears had long subsided by the time they found themselves in the dungeon and instead they donned nothing short of absolute shock.
Finally, the bumbling Grumpf brothers, hullaballooing their way down the hall, their quarry in hand, fought over who would throw their geese into the dungeon first. The ensuing fight giving the geese space to take off in flight down the hall, the dungeon guards chased the birds down as World Chief and Eternal Ruler scuffled atop the ground like little children fighting over candy from a piñata.
12 Days of Christmas: A Christmas Collection Page 6