Wise Acres

by Dale E. Basye

  “Principal Bubb!” Milton yelled. “I have a proposition for you.”

  The De-Press Corpse began to converge. The Orb-Servers waddled toward the principal, their red unblinking eyes streaming the event, live, to an incredulous afterlife.

  Principal Bubb assessed her situation, sipping it a little at a time, as if she were taking strong medicine. Vice Principal Carroll had been consumed by a creature from his own imagination. The Tower of Babble was now strictly past tense. And now she, the Principal of Darkness—after finally digging herself out of a well of low opinion—was in a deadlock with a little squirt that had already caused her an eternity of trouble.

  “Fine, Mr. Fauster,” the principal sighed as she stomped forward. “Let us strike a bargain, and quickly.”

  Milton stepped urgently from the mound and marched to meet her. The teachers willed their books to circle overhead, ready to strike at the slightest provocation. The fallen angels gripped their weapons tightly as they glared up at the sky.

  Principal Bubb seethed. “What do you want, you insolent little—”

  “I want you to let go of my sister,” Milton replied with grim determination.

  “Not going to happen. I can’t have that grasping guttersnipe gallivanting across the underworld.”

  “But she doesn’t deserve to be sent … down there,” Milton said, staring the principal square in her yolky, snot-green goat eyes. “And you know that.…”

  Principal Bubb noted the prying eyes of the media surrounding them.

  “Fine,” she replied after a brief internal struggle. “But with conditions. For starters, your sister will be locked away … somewhere. Just not down there.”

  Milton looked back at Marlo, leaning limply against the Rod of Irony.

  “She’ll be safe?”

  “As curdled milk.” Principal Bubb scratched at her scabby chin. “Now what do I get?” she said, smiling blackly. “You certainly don’t expect me to let you go off to Heaven now, do you?”

  Milton shook his head. “I couldn’t do that even if you allowed it,” he said. “I wouldn’t feel right about that. About leaving Marlo behind.”

  “Then what do you propose? What’s to prevent me from merely seizing you and your conspirators?”

  Milton noticed a nearby Orb-Server staring at him with wide-eyed expectancy. Milton walked toward it, kneeling down beneath its penetrating, broadcast-throughout-eternity gaze.

  “Principal Bubb has just saved the afterlife,” Milton said, speaking clearly into the creature’s eye-body. “She saved us all. From a plot devised by Vice Principal Carroll that would have had us all slaves to his troubled imagination. Principal Bubb, um … deputized me as one of her operatives and sent me—in secret—to uncover how he was going to do it. All of the children and teachers were in on it. We had to undo the Tower of Babble so Vice Principal Carroll couldn’t use it to brainwash the hereafter. Principal Bubb is a …”

  Milton chose his next word carefully, leaping over dozens of more apt descriptions of the principal, before settling on …

  “Hero,” he said, swallowing the bile rising in his throat and forcing a grateful smile.

  The De-Press Corpse collected around Principal Bubb.

  “Is this true?” they gasped as one.

  The principal locked eyes with Milton, much more at ease locking horns, before leaning into the row of microphones shoved into her disaster-area-of-a-face.

  “Yes,” Principal Bubb replied. She turned to her team of fallen angels. “Heck’s Angels! Drop your weapons!”

  Azkeel glared at the principal with his dark, cruel eyes.

  “Never! We won’t rest until this whole place is strewn with the torn pages of our enemy!”

  “If you don’t drop your weapons, you won’t get paid.”

  Nine swords fell instantly to the ground.

  “Principal Bubb!” Mary Claire Divine with Gabriel’s Horn called out, thrusting her white microphone in the principal’s face. “So you’re saying that Milton Fauster, the boy who once escaped from Limbo and now has just won the War of the Words, is in your employ?”

  Principal Bubb eyed Milton dubiously before wrapping her anaconda arm around him, squeezing him close.

  “Why, yes, he is,” she said, exposing her fangs in an unconvincing grin. “My special assistant, in fact.”

  Milton went queasy all over. Behind him, he saw two of the principal’s demon guards dragging Marlo to Principal Bubb’s personal coach. He was now the strangest thing he had ever imagined: the principal’s unlikely ally. Yet however far-fetched it might seem that he and his arch-nemesis would find themselves walking together, along the same improbable path, Milton had made the very most of the terrible cards dealt to him. But at what cost? As Marlo’s unconscious body was heaved into the principal’s coach, two words shone brightly in Milton’s mind: I’m sorry. He had prevented Marlo’s transfer to Hades at the price of eternal rest. And that was enough for now … until he could plan his next move. His story was still his to tell.

  Meanwhile, Principal Bubb lapped up the attention with the disgusting gusto of a dog lapping up its own sick. Milton Fauster had willfully surrendered himself and, in turn, made her a media darling.

  She gripped the boy tightly by the shoulder. The principal, finally, had Milton right where she wanted him. Too close for his comfort. Under her thumb-talon. And, as her personal assistant, he could handle a host of dirty jobs for her. In fact—Principal Bubb thought as she exposed her yellow, gnarled teeth for the cameras—she already had in mind a particularly dirty job that would suit Milton to a terrible T indeed.…

  Michael’s face was utterly smooth and uniform in its alabaster color. Framed against majestic pillars splashed with the bloodred glow from the Lake of Fire, Michael was almost indistinguishable from the polished stone around him.

  He switched off his radio and gazed out from his steep, amoral acropolis, perched on the side of a mountain of bone, at the center of h-e-double-hockey-sticks.

  A black-and-gray tabby cat hopped onto Michael’s lap. The archangel unbuckled the animal’s leather messenger bag, set it to the side of his throne, and stroked the creature’s fur.

  “Ahh … Sergeant Snugglelump … my little fleat-footed Meow-cury … your efforts have not-eth been in vain,” Michael said in his cold marble voice. “I knew ‘fool’ well Vice Principal Carroll would set-eth his amazing mind to the task, coming up with connections that no sane man ever could, cracking the code for a language-virus, just in time for the War of the Words, if given certain clues and artifacts.”

  Michael shifted upon his cruel yet surprisingly comfortable throne of imported Corinthian leather stretched across a frame of Corinthian bone.

  “So sad … his unseemly end at-eth the claws of his own imagination.”

  The lower half of Michael’s above-and-beyond-pristine face laughed. The top, however, did not. He stroked the black-and-gray cat as it purred on his lap.

  “Our poor, deluded Vice Principal Carroll wanted merely to simulate dominion over-eth all of Creation. I, however, want more. Much more.”

  BACKWORD

  Understanding often comes at the expense of fascinatioN

  To comprehend means that one must sometimes undO

  The knot of mystery binding the outside world with ourselveS

  Every word is a label that shapes meaning into something tangiblE

  Risking a reliance on words over meaning, a tomb of definitioN

  No other species depends on verbal language like ourS

  Oddity as odd as the Venus flytrap: a vegetable carnivorE

  Not to mention the electric eel, or nightmarishly agloW

  Such as those fish with the lanterns growing just above their teetH

  Eloquence is humanity’s defense, offense, and consequencE

  Nature’s unnatural advantage over everything, bestowed upon maN

  So often tripping over his clever cleaver of a tongue, causing a snafU

  Embarrassin
g himself when high-voltage elocution becomes argumenT

  Making words, in a word, complicated when we ourselves we outwiT

  All that separates sarcasm from sincerity is a word, stressed or at easE

  Klutzes are we, cooking up language on the fly, when we must masteR

  Every word, an ingredient blended just so, with each sentence a recipE

  Shrewdly choosing our words to avoid becoming the crudely cheweD

  So the real issue isn’t how fancy we can make our thoughts (and it is a writer’s rule of thumb to never use a complicated word when an unambiguously perspicuous one will surely suffice) but who (or whom) is the master: you or your words?

  Here in the hereafter, there are many who—mark their words—intend to be master. Those who seek to follow their distorted destinies to the letter: not for the better. And there is precious little one can say to someone who can only hear the sound of their own voice—bellowing across the vast, unfillable canyon of their ambition—drunk on the reverberated reflection of their echoing ego (echoing ego … echoing ego … echoing ego …).

  Just because someone or something is perfect, doesn’t make that someone or something infallible, not in a wantonly imperfect Creation such as ours. Sometimes a righteous creature comes from left field to dominate the center stage. But if someone’s pristine, power-hungry head is nothing more than an echo chamber, then who gets the last word in humanity’s story?*

  * * *

  * The author!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I WOULD LIKE to formally acknowledge—meaning to acknowledge while wearing a tuxedo and cummerbund—young readers and the writers who write for them. It’s interesting when people ask me why I choose to write for children, and I have to say, I really don’t. I happen to be an arrested individual (no convictions, other than to be the best I can be), so I simply write for myself. I may tone down the off-color nature or innuendo-rich witticisms that often spring up naturally, but other than that, I write to amuse or engage myself and don’t think too much about the reader. That may sound terrible, but I mean it in a good way: I don’t pander or assume I know what’s in the head of that wonderful young person on the other side of the page. I just naively hope that they enjoy the ride as much as I. (And no, we’re not there yet … don’t make me pull this book over!)

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DALE E. BASYE lives in Portland, Oregon, where, on a good day, he is an imaginative, playful, and hopeful person. Unfortunately, on all the other days, he is an insufferable pain in the butt.

  Here’s what Dale E. Basye has to say about his seventh book:

  “A story can live both within us and outside of us. It’s like a big, living creature, as big as our lives, as big as our dreams. And if ink is the blood of the story—the story that tells the world—then language itself is the skin that holds it all together. But is the beauty of language only skin-deep? Can pretty words only take us so far before things get ugly? Words have the potential to hurt far more than sticks and stones, especially if those words are printed on sandpaper and wrapped around a stone with sharp sticks tied to it. Heck is like that. And, no matter what anyone tells you, Heck is real. This story is real. Or as real as anything like this can be.”

  When not writing, Dale enjoys taxidermy—the fine art of driving a taxi while helping to improve people’s complexions—playing with his son, making his wife laugh, being at the beach, hiking, and selling blood plasma to pay off gambling debts. Actually, he’s just kidding: he doesn’t really like hiking all that much.