Unidentified Funny Objects

by Resnick, Mike

  “Now, please,” he begged. “The plan?”

  I chuckled knowingly to show I was in control. It seemed like something a good conman would do. I got carried away and soon I was howling with tears in my eyes.

  “Merri has invited me to march with her today to stop your lumberjacks,” I said, wiping my eyes.

  “How is that good news? My lumberjacks will still be stopped.”

  I realized that I hadn’t thought the next part out. Getting to know Merri was the crucial first step. On the third step I stopped her from ruining Pinion’s business. The second step was still nebulous. Since Pinion eagerly awaited an answer, I distracted him with another knowing, knee-slapping chuckle.

  He seemed irritated at first. His hat quivered and gave away his mood. Then something dawned on him. His hat settled and a smile crossed his face.

  “I understand,” he said. “You will acquaint yourself with Merri, find a weakness, and exploit it!”

  I felt instantly relaxed. Now I had a second part.

  “Yes, exactly,” I said. “That is my great plan! Thank the gods I’m here.”

  TREANTS ARE WONDROUS CREATURES, but they, too, have to eat. People have witnessed treants devour sheep like peanuts. In Buklivia, a forest of treants ate so many sheep everyone had to wear clothes made out of wheat for a decade. Nowadays, shepherds put up scarecrows with axes in their hands.

  “They sleep during the day, right?” I asked as we entered the forest.

  “Most of them,” Merri replied.

  Pinion’s lumberjacks were just arriving for a day’s work. Although, thanks to Merri and her team, they hadn’t swung an axe in two months.

  The plan was a simple man-to-man affair. I was told to find a lumberjack and stand in front of him until the sun went down. I found the least threatening lumberjack I could and ran between him and a treant. The lumberjack was instantly displeased.

  “Don’t stand there,” the lumberjack ordered.

  “That’s the point,” I stated. “I’m purposefully in your way.”

  “I know.” The lumberjack rolled his eyes. “But you’re not doing it right.”

  “What?”

  “I can still sneak an axe past.” He nudged his axe past my leg. “I could chop a few inches out of the trunk with you standing there. Move a little to the left and I couldn’t scrape bark.”

  I moved where instructed.

  “Good,” the lumberjack said, satisfied.

  “Don’t you like working?”

  “I love working.” He leaned on his axe. “I just hate to see people doing a bad job.”

  AFTER A WHILE THE LUMBERJACK got bored and fell asleep, so I went looking for Merri.

  I got lost instantly. I selected a few Treants as landmarks, but some of them were sleepwalking and my mental map fluttered away. Merri found me trying to build a compass out of two pinecones and a dead squirrel.

  “Isn’t that the lumberjack you were stopping?” Merri asked as she ran to me.

  Sure enough, the lumberjack had woken up and was now mid-swing. We ran up to him just as his axe sunk into the treant’s side.

  The treant let loose a scream that sounded like wood being struck by lightning. It reached down with a branch, grabbed the lumberjack, and bit off his top half. It stuck the rest of him in its sap to save for later.

  Then it charged towards Merri and I.

  Instinctively, I stepped in front and told her to run. The treant bit down on my arm and it was, I quickly decided, one of the most unpleasant things I ever experienced. The other activists chased the treant away as I rolled around and screamed. I didn’t stop until they pointed out that the treant had, in fact, only eaten a chunk of my sleeve.

  THAT NIGHT THE ACTIVISTS celebrated a successful protest. I joined them, but was not amused by their mockery of my near-death experience. Every minute or so an activist would bend down and bite the sleeve of another, who would then cry like an infant. I pretended to be too high-browed for their sense of humor.

  I saw an activist came up to Merri and bite her sleeve, but she pulled her arm away. She turned to me and caught me staring, so I glanced at random objects around the room with feigned interest.

  A moment later Merri sat down at my table and passed me a drink.

  “I wanted to thank you for saving me,” she said. “It was very brave.”

  Her smile made my language skills drop. She talked while I mumbled incoherently and agreed with everything she said. Naturally, her main topic was treants, but she soon turned to Pinion. She listed each of his flaws as if she was sentencing him to death, a tone I was unfortunately familiar with.

  “You’re not too fond of Pinion, are you?”

  “I haven’t been since I was a kid,” she said.

  “You defended treants back then?”

  “No.” She blinked. “He’s my father.”

  My jaw dropped.

  Merri laughed, guided my mouth closed, and kissed me lightly on the lips.

  “You’re cute. Maybe tomorrow night we can spend some proper time together,” she suggested.

  I managed a nod.

  WHEN I RETURNED TO PINION’S tower, I found him enchanting a wooden pipe. It was going poorly. The pipe kept floating around, sticking itself in his ear, and lighting stray hairs on fire.

  “How’s the plan going?” he asked while patting out the flames.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that Merri was your daughter?”

  “I thought it was obvious. How did you think I knew so much about her?”

  “Magic,” I shrugged. “Divination.”

  He laughed. “By the Gods! If I could use magic to understand women do you think I’d be working for a living? I’d be up to my eyebrows in gold!”

  I thought about it, and conceded he had a point. “You should’ve told me. A confidence scheme is a delicate creature and secrets can be poison.”

  I smiled. That was a particularly good bit of conman wisdom. I was about to ask for a piece of paper to write it down when I realized Pinion was staring at me with very intense, fatherly eyes.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Are you planning on sleeping with my daughter?”

  “I’m afraid it’s crucial to the plan.”

  THE NEXT NIGHT MERRI and I met for dinner.

  Gigantic, domesticated fireflies illuminated the restaurant. A musician played a thousand-string harp and her huffs and puffs only mildly interrupted her music as she ran from one end to the other. The meal was lovely, and we stayed past when the fireflies rebelled and dropped glowing excrement on some of the guests.

  We talked and laughed and poured drinks into one another until we ended up in her bedroom. She gave me a wink and a smile and disappeared into her dressing room. I immediately kicked off my pants in anticipation. I decided that being a conman was a suitable next step in my career.

  As I waited, I admired the paintings and sculptures she kept in her room. I made a mental note to pretend that I knew everything about art. I noticed a glass box that had something strange locked inside of it.

  “Why do you have a giant walnut?” I asked.

  “That’s a seedpod,” she called out. “The treants plant them to start a new forest. I rescued it last year.”

  I stared at the seedpod for a moment and a plan formed in my head. I hated the plan, because it required me leaving a seductive Merri behind. Sure, I could wait until after Merri and I had our sensual rendezvous, but would I have a second chance? The mental image of Pinion’s endless parade of cruel guillotines convinced me to act now. I was particularly attached to my head, and I knew I would dearly miss it. Also, Merri gave little indication that she was into shorter men.

  With a heavy sigh, I smashed the glass, stole the seedpod, and ran.

  WEEDS AND THORNS TORE at my shins as I ran through a field and I sorely regretted not putting my pants back on. I consoled myself by imagining the vault of pants I would be able to buy when I delivered the seedpod to Pinion.

  Enchanted
brooms assaulted me the moment I entered the tower. They swept me from the foyer to the library, down the stairs, up the stairs, into the dumbwaiter, and around the bedrooms until I slid into the study with the seedpod gripped in my arms like a child. Pinion had fallen asleep while working and awoke with a start when I slammed against his desk.

  With red, wide eyes he looked at me, then at the seedpod, and then back at me.

  He screamed. It was a long, feminine scream that yellowed his open books and left him winded.

  “Do you know,” he panted. “What that is?”

  I stood up, smiled, and presented it like a trophy. “It’s a seedpod. The treants plant them to start a new forest. What did you think it was?”

  “I thought it was a seedpod,” he said flatly. “The treants plant them to start a new forest.”

  We stared at each other in silence. It continued until the silence itself felt awkward and flew out the window.

  “One of us is missing something,” I admitted.

  “Why did you bring that here?” Pinion asked. His face was growing whiter by the minute and was moments away from becoming transparent.

  “We can use it to plant a hidden forest that you can harvest in secret. It’s the perfect plan!”

  Then I felt the tower quake.

  Later, I would learn that treants are fiercely protective of their young. Once a seedpod had fallen in the Mercian river and an entire forest followed it downstream with a vengeance. The region never recovered.

  “They’re going to tear this place down!” Pinion screamed. “What have you done?” Books toppled off the shelves. Brooms stampeded into the room to clean up the mess.

  “I’ll admit that this is an unexpected turn of events.”

  “And how is Dunri, the genius conman, going to make this right?”

  “Who?”

  “You, you imbecile!”

  One of the walls fell off and I could see the moving forest surrounding the tower.

  “I’m not entirely who you think I am,” I admitted.

  “What do you mean ‘not entirely’?”

  “I’m a small-time thief named Francis.”

  Flames appeared behind his eyes. “What did you steal?”

  “A lime,” I said sheepishly.

  “The Ystarians were going to execute you for stealing a lime?”

  “The Ystarians are very particular about their limes.”

  I thought about explaining the complex social and religious history between limes and the Ystarian people, detailing the great scurvy epidemic, the barbaric Feud of the Lemons, and the annual Festival of the Martyred Cistruses, but since the floor was falling out from underneath us I decided to leave it at that.

  The tower shook and shed another wall. A naked servant fell from the floor above and his bath followed him a moment later. The bathtub smashed Pinion’s enchanted guillotine to pieces, saving me from a second beheading. A mop glided from a closet and attempted to clean up the soapy water.

  Pinion grabbed the mop and swung it at me.

  “This is exactly why I asked for an advance! If you’re a little dissatisfied with my service…” I was interrupted when the mop caught me in the stomach.

  I curled up into a ball. The tower rocked again and I rolled towards the stairwell. Pinion charged at me, so I just kept rolling. I ran as soon as I hit the ground floor. The treants lashed out at me with branches and roots and I was plenty bruised by the time I made it to the safety of a nearby hill.

  Exhausted, I sat down and watched the chaos.

  “HE’LL MAKE HIMSELF DISAPPEAR before the towers come down,” Merri said, appearing beside me. She handed me something. “You forgot your pants.”

  I took them but didn’t bother to put them back on.

  “You knew about Pinion’s plan, didn’t you?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I helped the real Dunri escape in exchange for somebody else to be sent in his place.”

  “How did he guarantee that?”

  “He played the executioner.”

  “He was very talented,” I said, rubbing my neck. “You knew I would take that seedpod.”

  “You were a little predictable. But…I didn’t expect you to step in front of that treant.”

  “I didn’t expect a tree to be so mean.”

  “You are, in all respects, a terrible conman.”

  “Thanks?”

  “However, I could be convinced to let you buy me a drink.”

  “Really?”

  “The treants are safe at the moment. A drink will help me find a new way to irritate my father.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well,” she smiled. “I’m certain he won’t approve of you.”

  THE ALIEN INVASION AS SEEN IN THE TWITTER STREAM OF @DWEEBLESS

  Jake Kerr

  Tim Becker @dweebless

  I’m getting those tweets, too. It must be a viral ad campaign for a movie called Alien Overlords or something. It’s everywhere.

  The Aliens @alienoverlords

  People of Earth: There is no reason for panic. Simply relocate to Canada and everything will be fine.

  Tim Becker @dweebless

  @alienoverlords Dude, how are you in my timeline? I most definitely did NOT follow you. Reporting you for spam.

  Tim Becker @dweebless

  Just reported the idiot @alienoverlords for spamming me. How much you wanna bet they reappear? Money talks. :/

  Henry Bloch @imissthenorthstars

  @dweebless I did the same thing. Do they really think people will see the movie after this kind of crap?

  Jo Guinee @minnyjotg

  @imissthenorthstars @dweebless I can’t get away from it! It’s all over Youtube + they’re doing some BS thing on TV where they cut into shows

  The Aliens @alienoverlords

  People of Earth: Honestly, we don’t think our instructions are that complicated. Move to Canada.

  Tim Becker @dweebless

  @alienoverlords This would be funny if it were real. Like, dude, I’d rather be dead than move to Canada. LOL.

  The Aliens @alienoverlords

  @dweebless That can be arranged.

  Tim Becker @dweebless

  Hahahaha. A viral campaign is trolling me! RT @alienoverlords @dweebless That can be arranged.

  Tim Becker @dweebless

  Just saw the Youtube video. WTF. It’s freakin’ static and a voice telling us to relocate to Canada.

  Jo Guinee @minnyjotg

  @dweebless I think it’s brilliant. The @alienoverlords movie is totally the next @oldspice. The aliens are on a horse!

  Tim Becker @dweebless

  @minnyjot LOL!

  The Aliens @alienoverlords

  There seems to be a misunderstanding. This is a warning, not a joke. We really don’t want to kill anyone.

  Tim Becker @dweebless

  Do the aliens realize Nickelback and Rush are from Canada? #deathbymusic! RT @alienoverlords We really don’t want to kill anyone.

  The Aliens @alienoverlords

  @dweebless Hey, if you’re going to retweet our messages, can you at least not edit the meaning? Not cool.

  Henry Bloch @imissthenorthstars

  @dweebless The @alienoverlords account is totally trolling you. And notice they didn’t defend Rush or Nickelback ;)

  The Aliens @alienoverlords

  People of Earth: We have nothing against Nickelback or Rush or anyone else. We just need lots of space. So hightail it to Canada. NOW.

  John Scalzi @scalzi

  “Hightail it to Canada” is the name of my next band.

  Monica Becker @skifanatic89

  @alienoverlords Hey, I’m going to school in France, do I have to move to Canada, too? ;)

  Tim Becker @dweebless

  @skifanatic89 Watch it, sis. These guys like Nickelback. I wouldn’t taunt them. WHO KNOWS THE DEPTHS OF THEIR EVIL!

  The Aliens @alienoverlords

  @skifanatic89 Yes, you need to move to Canada, too.

&
nbsp; The Aliens @alienoverlords

  @dweebless For crying out loud. We’re not EVIL! Just misunderstood. Anyway, we just destroyed Tulsa.

  The Aliens @alienoverlords

  We destroyed Tulsa since you all were not moving fast enough and not taking us seriously. Video coming to our YouTube channel shortly.

  Tim Becker @dweebless

  This Alien Overlord viral campaign is like watching a car wreck. You don’t want to watch, but it’s so compellingly awful you can’t stop.

  The Aliens @alienoverlords

  We’re having some transcoding problems with YouTube, so be patient. But trust us, Tulsa isn’t there anymore.

  Tim Becker @dweebless

  Noobs. RT @alienoverlords We’re having some transcoding problems with YouTube, so be patient. But trust us, Tulsa isn’t there anymore.

  Monica Becker @skifanatic89

  .@alienoverlords Couldn’t you have destroyed Montreal instead? I can’t stand the Canadiens fans.

  The Aliens @alienoverlords

  @skifanatic89 No, Montreal is in Canada. Haven’t you been paying attention?

  The Aliens @alienoverlords

  Video is online now. If you have the bandwidth, you should really check it out in HD. Totally awesome explosions.

  The Aliens @alienoverlords

  We apologize. The previous tweet was in poor taste. We’re sorry for all those that died but we can’t wait forever for you to move to Canada.

  Jo Guinee @minnyjotg

  @dweebless Just saw the video. The CGI in the movie is amazing I have to admit. Maybe Michael Bay is directing! LOL.

  Tim Becker @dweebless

  @alienoverlords I don’t think anyone is really missing Tulsa. You guys need to up your game.

  The Aliens @alienoverlords

  @dweebless Sadly, we think you’re right. We have decided to destroy France.

  Tim Becker @dweebless

  @alienoverlords Ha. I don’t think anyone will miss France either! But my sister is there so how about destroying someplace else--North Korea?

  The Aliens @alienoverlords

  @dweebless Sorry, dude, it’s too late--we destroyed France already. We actually destroyed North Korea first, but no one seemed to notice.

  Tim Becker @dweebless

  Look out @skifanatic89! RT @alienoverlords Sorry, dude, it’s too late--we destroyed France already.