But when he left to investigate the remnants of Rex's food bowl, there were definitely the makings of a broad smirk spreading itself across his for once serenely angelic face.
Chapter 8
Shakespeare
There was a certain amount of tension and distrust in the air after the dog-poo incident.
Rex reveled in his newfound peace and quiet.
His peace was shattered, though, when a textbook fell out of Laura's bag one morning as she left for school.
It was a tattered old book, and it looked 'important'.
'It looks violent," said Puck, looking at the cover.
Warren and Spanglebean looked at him.
"How can you tell?" they asked quizzically.
"It says 'Shakes Spear', Puck retorted, as if it was obvious." Those words alone are a call to arms!"
They spent the day poring over the pages, and when Laura arrived home that night in tears because of her missing textbook, the Pixies were of the opinion that they were well placed to help.
To help her understanding of the text, they decided to put on a series of plays.
Unfortunately, their efforts were a confused conglomeration of mixed works and understandings.
They commenced with Hamlet, and quickly progressed to the skull scene.
Warren, who cast himself as Hamlet because of his regal deportment, held aloft one of Rex's old bones, because it was the closest he could get to a skull.
"Alas, poor Yorrick, I knew him well." he announced with confidence.
"Horatio." interjected Spanglebean.
"What?"
"Horatio!"
"Well? Well? Is it ‘Well’ or is it ‘What’ or is it Horatio?" demanded Puck, which threw the entire conversation into chaos.
By the time they had consulted the Bard and discovered that it was in fact “Alas poor Yorrick I knew him Horatio”, they had bored with Hamlet and moved on to Romeo and Juliet.
Warren had cast himself as Romeo because of his regal deportment.
He gazed skyward with solemnity and projected his voice quavering sweet and tender as though to an angel.
"But soft, what light through yonder window breaks"
He stopped.
"What the hell does that mean?" he demanded.
Spanglebean's eyes glazed over, and eventually he issued forth with a soliloquy of his own devising.
"I think it is a metaphor, a play on the fact that light is both a waveform and a particle and that even an absolutist construct such as 'love' that is invisible to the eye can be shattered by a proverbially thrown half brick that you can also not see, but can leverage by non-conformist thinking as to tool of moralistic deconstruction.
Here what he is saying is that true love that is always personally affirming can be smashed by blindly applied utilitarian social norms strictly though tragically applied."
He sat down.
Puck looked at him, and then he turned to Warren.
"Are we reading the same book?" he asked. "I just thought it was about some guy looking at some sheila through a window."
Laura looked from pixie to pixie, her mind searching for something that would help link what she had heard with what she understood she had read.
Suddenly she brightened, and rising, muttered a quick "Thanks, you guys." before disappearing into the house to do her homework.
The Pixies looked at one another.
"I think we did quite well, don't you?" beamed Warren.
A few days later, Mr. and Mrs. Scotland received a couple of letters from the school.
One was from Laura's teacher, expressing concern over Laura's overly vivid imagination, and one was from the Principal, wanting to consider Laura's future at the school.
In a nutshell, the Principal had not been able to understand a word of Laura's assignment on Shakespeare, but had concluded that it either exhibited signs of genius or gross insubordination, and she wanted to find out which.
Chapter 9
The Bag
Laura escaped any form of sanction over her Shakespeare project, and she was careful to exclude references to conversations with pixies in her school assignments for a while thereafter.
To say that all had settled down to a blissful domestic routine in the Scotland Yard, however, was to be overly liberal with the meanings of the words 'settled', 'blissful', 'domestic' and 'routine'.
Scotland Yard retained a relatively benign chaos that slipped under the radar of normality for a little while, until the day that something so startling happened that it changed the Pixie world forever.
It was a blustery day, overcast and with the occasional squall of rain dashing swiftly across the entire world as Spanglebean knew it.
The sun was taking the day off, and so the rain seemed a bit chillier than it probably was.
It was in the midst of a break in the squalls that Spanglebean was taking a leak on the rosebush, when all of a sudden a shock ran through his terrified body, slamming closed his urethral sphincter and sending his legs running straight into Rex's kennel with such pace that he hadn't managed to slow before hitting the back wall with a crash.
He sat in the kennel, huddled and shaking, whilst Warren attempted his best counseling skills.
"What the fuck's wrong with you??!!" he demanded to know.
Spanglebean began his unintelligible monotone relating matters of such concern that he could not help but whimper and stammer uncontrollably.
Eventually, the story unfolded, and when the two remaining pixies poked their heads out of the kennel, they spied the cause of Spanglebean’s distress, snagged and flapping menacingly near the newly watered rose.
It was a plastic Bunnings shopping bag.
It had blown over the fence in the wind, and it evoked such a dreadful existential crisis in the poor pixie who until that point had believed that the entire back yard was all that existed, and that Bunnings was a myth.
Rex witnessed an entire pixie conversation for the first time, trapped as he was at the rear of his kennel.
In their distress, the pixies had forgotten to kick him out, and as the three of them crowded in, he had not had the opportunity to leave voluntarily.
It seemed that they had completely forgotten that he was there.
It was as though, not expecting to see him, they didn't see him.
Chapter 10
A New Dawning
Rex enjoyed the conversation immensely. It had all the qualities of a good drama.
Even better was the brainstorming session that occurred after Warren and Puck confirmed the continued existence of the Bunnings plastic shopping bag.
The solution they settled upon was that Warren would climb onto Puck's shoulders, and that Spanglebean would then scramble up the lofty tower of two.
The theory was that from that elevated vantage point, Spanglebean would be able to see over the fence and out into the void beyond.
Rex stared at the pixies.
Sure, their logic was sound.
In fact, their logic was supremely logical.
But he had a nagging feeling that it didn’t quite make sense, though he could not quite put a paw on what made it so.
Puck was strategically placed at the bottom because he was the shortest, and so if they fell, they would have less distance to fall.
Warren was in the middle because he was the biggest and strongest, and Spanglebean needed a good, strong secure footing.
And Spanglebean was on top because he was the one that really and truly wanted to know.
They worried that if he didn't see if for himself, he was unlikely to believe the results of the experiment anyway.
Rex was entertained.
For the first time since they arrived, the pixies were being 'fun'.
"And," he sniggered, "what could possibly go wrong?"
'What could possible go wrong' was not so much a matter of fate.
It was a matter of pixies being involved.
Rex retired to a quiet part of the garden to watch, well out of the way, because there was no telling how far the destruction would spread.
In fact, he needn't have worried.
Everything went exceedingly well.
First Puck got into position leaning with his hands outstretched against the paling fence.
After a few goes, and finally with a leg up from Spanglebean, Warren achieved the mammoth task of standing on Puck's narrow shoulders.
Then, with considerable trouble, Spanglebean arrived at the top of the pixie tower, at just the right height that if each and every pixie was able to stand on their tippy-toes, he would just be able to see.
That was when things got interesting.
Puck struggled to Pointe for the briefest second before his legs began to wobble.
From above came a cry:
"I can see! I can see!"
And the pixie tower started to topple.
The weight of three pixies was more than the paling could stand, and it came away in Spanglebean's hands as they fell in a graceful arc towards the greater known universe's floor.
As a gap opened in the fence line, Puck clenched his fingers around the bottom of the wooden paling, grasping tight.
Spanglebean hit the ground, steadfastly clinging to his only support.
The quite rotund Warren formed the lever, and Puck found himself being catapulted skyward so dizzyingly fast and high that he felt that he could touch the sky.
The paling left his grasp so eloquently that it would have left an Olympic pole vaulter's coach weeping in the bleachers.
The world turned end over end, and with the grace of an Olympic gymnast, Puck landed his somersault feet first on the Scotland house roof.
Below, Spanglebean was on his back in raptures.
Warren was leaning over him yelling.
"Did you see? Did you see?"
Spanglebean was shouting with glee
"There's another one! There's another one!! "
Puck looked down from his strange new lofty environment.
"There’s not just one of them."
His voice floated down from the roof. "Rex, I know how you feel.": Banjo the dog.
"There's fucking hundreds of them!!"
End of Book One
Disclaimer:
All characters appearing in this amazingly superfluous magniescent though inconsequential novella are completely of my florid rabid morbid imagination and any similarity to persons, animals, plants, virus, bacteria, or neo-biologica preforma beings which don't yet exist but may, some time in the future, achieve sapience, be they living, passed, or in any way in a vegetative, ambivalent or multifarious state is completely utterly and consumptively coincidental and outside the construct of the performative narrative that makes up the para logical sequencing and chronological sequestering that brought forth the impossible calculus that melded the concrete confabulation of this abstract literary creation.
Sincerely,
The Author.
Scotland Yard Page 2