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Chapter One:
In Which Sid Loses A Friend And
Decides to Leave Town
Once upon a time there was a golden harvest named Sid. He enjoyed bathing in the sunlight that filled his LA home on occasion, mainly during the daylight hours. One day he was up in the middle of the night. He could not sleep because people had been stealing grain from his garden shed and he found it difficult to drop off when he knew that at any moment any number of grain-thieves could be undertaking grain-theft within the confines of his very shed. He was also under the impression that he was a hermit; whenever he walked down the street his neighbours would shout at him: "You hermit! Clear off and hermit elsewhere!"
Well, this was rather upsetting for poor Sid, because not only did he not know what a hermit was, but neither did he know how to hermit. On this day, while Sid could not sleep, his only friend, Himself, came to visit.
Himself was a blonde, baby-faced gangsta rapper from Colne. With a knock at Sid's back door, he entered through the front.
"Hallo friend!" cried Himself in a tone that can only be described as analytical. He clasped his hands together and approached Sid with the sole intent of giving him a hearty handshake. Sid backed away, suddenly remembering the days of old. Ten years ago to this day, Sid was wandering aimlessly through his dead auntie’s attic, searching for something to black-mail her with, whence he stumbled upon a buckled shoe. It was her grandfather’s favourite shoe, and was now believed to be haunted by the spirit of her grandfather’s foot.
"What is wrong?" questioned Himself.
"Sorry," jolted Sid as he became aware of his surroundings once more. "It must be those pills I’m taking for my arthritis."
The 'baby-faced' gangsta rapper paused for an iota while he thought what arthritis was, then began blurting out nonsense about an eyebrow curler.
"Oh yes," he began once more, "I came here for a reason, there’s someone I’d like you to meet."
While Sid was still trying to find the energy to look confused, Himself grabbed him by the arm, and led him outside to a Porsche 911. He pointed at the window, which seemingly on-cue, wound down. "This, is my fiancé, Mary Krimple."
Sid eyed her like a wary asp, examining its meal-to-be. She gave him a glancing smile that he returned with a scowl. Holding back a flood of tears he turned to Himself. "I hope you'll be very happy together!" he blurted and ran off, upstairs.
After standing for a second, bewildered by his friend's odd behaviour, himself walked out to Mary in the car and drove off to the local Spud-u-like, where they shared a spud.
Sid sat on his bed, feeling like a pile of frayed ropes. Tears rolling down his shining golden face, he reached under his bed and pulled out a chest. He opened it and took out it's content: one buckled shoe.
"What am I to do?" he asked the shoe. And with that he cried himself to sleep.
That night Sid had a very strange dream. It was purple with lots of numbers and traditional smiley-faces smiling at him. Then, out of the neck of a headless guru came his great-grandfather's buckled shoe.
"What am I to do?" he demanded of the shoe, to which the shoe replied: "Write a song about a highway," and then turned into a jet filled with passengers and flew off into the distance over hills made of turkey.
At that Sid woke with a start. He looked at his clock. It was quarter to five. Out of his back-room window he could see Himself and Mary stealing grain from his shed, but for some reason this time it didn’t bother him, his mind was made up...
Only minutes later, he had boarded his flying squirrel, which was appropriately named Jill III, and set off for the perpendicular valleys of Prussia. With only three sets of socks for luggage, the flight took less time than a swallow has when operating a particularly tricky dance, called the jugular vein. After almost an hour of conversing with Jill III about matters of the senate, they came down to earth with an almighty squeal, because for some reason, Jill III had inadvertently broken her back. Fortunately, Sid didn’t notice (if he had, he would of almost certainly slipped into unconsciousness for reasons best unknown) and scrambled off the squirrel. He put a hand to his overly burned forehead, and looked around for several minutes, after which he stated, in a loud, blatant voice, "This isn’t Prussia at all! This is North Yorkshire!’
Oh well, he mouthed, might as well make the most of it. Sid grabbed his pack-o-three matching tartan socks, stripped himself down to a string vest he was unaware he had ever put on, and made for the nearest motel, skipping 'gaily'. He looked at the sign, it said 'The Buckled Shoe’ and thought to himself: Mmm, must be a sign (bom bom, bom bom). He walked up to the check-in desk, and banged a bell with the palm of his fist, three, bold times. The man who walked up to Sid there and then was quite odd. Quite odd indeed.
He was a gnarled old man with one eye; the other was made of solid spruce. He was bent double, eating breadcrumbs off of a tin plate.
"Hello, Joe," he said in a terrible voice that resembled a thousand seagulls smashing empty bottles on a steel floor.
"Hello, sir," said Sid, trembling; for he was quite afraid of this odd old man.
"My eye is cold," said the man, "my eye."
"I noticed the sign outside..." Sid began.
"Aye! 'Tis a sign!" yelled the horrible little man, who began to laugh loudly, then louder and louder.
"Stop! Please stop!" cried Sid, hands over ears, as the noise became too loud to be bearable. Suddenly, with a wisp of blue smoke the man and the motel disappeared and once again Sid was stood in the open air of northerly Yorkshire, and without Jill III, who had died and rolled into a stream where she was washed up on the river bank further downstream where she served as a nice crop fertilizer, he was stranded.
Then, as if to add insult to injury it began to rain.
Sid sat on a rock. He had never felt so low in his life. He dropped his socks into a muddy puddle and stamped on them.
"What's the matter?" asked an unreasonably high-pitched voice from behind him. "Maybe I can help."
Turning round, Sid saw a small glowing rabbit. "Wow!" he exclaimed, "I'm almost certain you can! Who are you?"
"I," said the rabbit, "am Ana-coinean Sgail, the rabbit of light."
“Wow-ee!” said Sid, slightly beriddled (although he would never show it).
“That’s the response I get from all my customers,” replied Ana-coinean, who started to emit a tangible green hum.
Sid looked confused and shocked at the same time. “Customers?” Said the golden harvest.
“Yes of course!” started Ana-coinean, “you didn't think I gave my services to any old busybody, willy-nilly did you?”
“Why, what are your services? ‘Tie salesthing’? Keyboard repair thing?” he said, expecting just that.
"No… silly! It is something far more extraordinary!” Ana-coinean jumped off the ledge and onto a hard patch of phlegm, where she now stood, posing in the daylight clouds. “For I,” she started once again “Bring hope to those who have none!”
“Oh,” stated Sid, sounding slightly disappointed. “For you see, I have a small portion of hope lost in my brain somewhere.” He began to weep, “and you (sniff) only br-br-bring hope to tho-those who (snuffle) who have no-none.”
Ana-coinean then to began to weep, but not in the same fashion. “That’s O.K, I could still help you,” said she, trying to cheer Sid up.
“Really?” sniffed Sid as he looked at her with ‘Puppy-dog eyes’.
“Really really! All you have to do is pay, in cash, the small fee of 11,000 Canadian dollars.”
Sid jumped up, suddenly aware of his wantingness to live. “Very well, I shall bring you these 11,000 Canadian dollars, tax-free!” He blurted as he ran off, so as to find a Canadian that he could mug.
Ana-coinean changed to a sort of purple-ish colour “Fool!” she said, and began to laugh, loudly.
Chapter 2:
In Which Sid Undertakes His Quest
Sid rushed through the moors of heather tripping every now and then but scrambling to his feet quickly, because now he had a mission. Eleven thousand Canadian dollars were all that stood between him and eternal euphoria. He had absolutely no idea how to go about obtaining this money but he had to start somewhere, and the rain-soaked North Yorkshire moors were obviously not the best place - therefore he figured that wherever he was running to, for he did not know where, had to offer some better opportunities.
Just as he was pondering how many ants it would take to tow an ancient Roman chariot he tripped over a root, hidden in the undergrowth and fell, headfirst into a muddy puddle. Although this was like a normal puddle in appearance only, because as he fell, he continued to fall into the depths of the puddle, falling and falling for fathoms and fathoms until time and space began to lose their relevance. Suddenly he stumbled blinking into the light, not knowing whether he had been falling for seconds, hours or years. He stood in the full sunlight, the heat baking the mud on his wet clothes hard. He looked round trying to work out where he was and how he got there but the bright light dazzled him and all he could think of was 'pinnacle'.
Pinnacle? What does that mean? How would you use it in a sentence? Where did I hear it? Suddenly he realized where he was; it was somewhere he had been many, many times before. He looked around, still not quite believing what he was seeing. In amazement, he exclaimed, “Cri...” suddenly he blacked out.
Before he knew what was going on anymore (for he never would do… ever again) the spirit of his great-grandfather’s shoe appeared before him, shining like the day it ’twere made. “What am I to do?” He asked the shoe, and it replied, “Do not fear Sid, for the time has almost come.” Sid began to weep. Tears of rage and confusion rolled down his face. What was wrong with this shoe? Didn’t he realize that Sid needed help not riddles, he was family after all.
“Why are you trying to confuse me with riddles?” said Sid, stuttering. He was about to ask this for a second time, when the shoe spoke once more.
“It’s not a riddle, you just don’t know what it means.” The shoe looked very angry at Sid (almost as if it was possible). Sid wanted to apologise for his ignorance, but he didn’t.
“Fool,” wittered the shoe under his breath, and with that, he disappeared, and was replaced with the surroundings that Sid found so familiar once again.
"..pes!" he finished. "I thought they'd knocked this place down!" he gasped as he realised he was in his favourite place to play when he was but a child: the roof of a multi-storey car park in California. It was just as he remembered it, there was the empty old oil canister in which he used to hide and shelter from the wind, here was the barely-conscious drunken old tramp whom he used to poke with a stick until he became enraged and would let out a roar. But most of all, there was his prized possession, his old six-shooter, capable of maiming at ten paces. Tightening his turban, Sid picked up his gun and shot the hobo in the head.
"Heh," he chuckled, "still works." Then turning to his gun he smiled and said, "Let's go and find some money."
As he was about to leave he tripped on some invisible thread and fell on his chin. "Oof," he said, "Who put that there?"
"I did," said the shrill voice of Ana-coinean Sgail.
"Oh, it's you," said Sid, turning to her. She gave him a very unsettling glare. "Why did you go and do that?" he muttered, rubbing his chin.
"Well, I'm no longer offering you my services," she said. "I don't agree with your cold-blooded murdering policy."
"Ahh," said Sid, "Well, as it happens the tramp I just killed was not an ordinary tramp!" He wandered over to the slumped corpse of the hobo and reached in his pocket and pulled out his wallet. Taking it over to Ana-coinean he took out the tramp's ID card and showed it her.
"Oh, I am sorry," apologised the rabbit of light as she examined the information held on the card. "I didn't realise... so I suppose in a way, you just saved the world."
"Indeed I did," said Sid, smiling smugly. "Anywho, is there any way which you could get me out of here? I need to find 11,000 Canadian dollars, if you remember and I ain't gonna be finding them here."
"I'll see what I can do," said Ana-coinean and reached into her little handbag.
It was a nice little handbag, (rumoured to be magical) made of black porcelain and twine. She had found it years ago in an English man’s car boot, and had treasured it ever since. Anywho, When her furry little mitten-like-hand came out of the fine leather interior of the bag, Sid saw to his amazement that Ana-coinean was not holding a beet root, which he had previously assumed she would, but a letter tied up in a bow.
“Well, erm, thanks a lot!” Said Sid, feeling rather betrayed “But how is that supposed to help me in the slightest?”
The look that Ana-coinean gave Sid then hadn’t been given to him since his grandmother was alive. Her facial expression was a mix between dubious yet angry, practical yet ingenious, and trodden down yet boosted up.
“Why don’t you open it, and see what's inside before you judge how important it is. Look at me, judge me by my size do you?”
“Well…” began Sid, but he could not finish, for Ana-coinean butted in stating:
“Quiet you!” and with that, she turned her head, and leaped into the air like some sort of robotic animal.
“Bah!” Said Sid, picking up the letter which Ana-coinean held outstretched just moments before. As he picked it up, Sid became aware that the shadow of someone or something was moving behind him, and he didn’t like it, not one little bit.
“Hey you!” said the shadow. As Sid squinted, he saw that the voice was coming from the mouth of the hobo that he had shot dead earlier on in the story. Sid had never before seen a dead man before, especially one that walked and talked (although admittedly rather crudely). Sid decided to take absolutely no notice of the man whatsoever, but unbeknownst to him, this would be his downfall. The hobo shot him. As Sid bled, he wanted to end the paragraph off in a cliffhanger, so with his last remaining ounce of strength, Sid took out a knife, and carefully opened the letter and began to read. This is what he read:
"Ay, now begins a second storm to rise;
For this is he that moves both wind and tide.
War.
From worthy Edward, King of Albion,
My lord and sovereign, and thy vowed friend,
I come, in kindness and unfeigned love,
First to do greetings to thy royal person;
And then to crave a league of amity;
And lastly to confirm that amity."
For the first time in his life, Sid felt compelled to sing, and despite his less than favourable position, sing he did: "Ay, now begins a second storm to rise," he wailed in an unearthly voice, and as he sang he saw what he thought was reality begin to distort. He continued to sing, "For this is he that moves both wind and tide."
As he sang his consciousness began to ebb and flow. Sounds, colour and taste began to merge and his vision became blurred.
"War!" he screamed at the top of his voice and as he did the car park around him twisted and turned into a searing white light.
Suddenly there was a silence. Sid felt well. But he was rather
confused by where he was.
Chapter Three:
Normality Swing (It’s like a Little Dejá Vu but a Little Bit More)
There was a knock at the door. It was Himself come to visit. The blonde, baby-faced gangsta rapper from Colne entered through the front door.
"Hallo friend!" cried Himself in a tone that can only be described as analytical. He clasped his hands together and approached Sid with the sole intent of giving him a hearty handshake. Sid backed away, suddenly remembering the days of old.
"What is wrong?" questioned Himself.
"Sorry," jolted Sid, as he became aware of his surroundings once more. "It must be those pills I’m taking for my arthritis."
Himself paused for an iota while he thought what arthritis was, then began blurting out nonsense about an eyebrow curler.
"Oh yes," he began once more, "I came here for a reason, there’s someone I’d like you to meet."
While Sid was looking very confused, Himself grabbed him by the arm, and led him outside to his car. He pointed at the window that wound down.
"This, is my fiancé, Mary Krimple."
“.” said Sid, and wet his bone-dry throat for a second try. “What the hell is going on?” he whispered to himself. Mary outstretched an arm, which Sid shook without thinking.
“Delighted to meet you,” said Mary. Had all that just then been a dream? Had Sid just imagined such characters as: Ana-coinean Sgail, Jill III and the man in the hotel? He didn’t think his jelly-like brain twer capable of concocting such ingenious people.
“Likewise,” responded Sid. He must have dreamed it, for here he was, back in his LA home. He did have the feeling that he’d done all this before however. Ah well, thought Sid, might as well put that crazy adventure all behind me. Just then, something caught the corner of Sid’s eye. As his eye bled, he managed, with the other eye, to get a glimpse of what it was that caught him. It was a claw, and not the claw of a mountain bear or lion either, oh no; it was the claw, of Ana-coinean Sgail.
“Sid, what are you doing?” she said. Sid was surprised to say the least.
“Ow……w” mouthed Sid. “You...you’re not real!”
“Oh I’m quite real, I can assure you.”
“No, no, I dreamed you up, along with all the rest of that bizarre quest-”
“No,” interrupted Ana-coinean. “You got pulled into a temporary vortex, your molecular structure was blasted into a thousand tiny pieces, and sent back in time 567 minutes.”
“Oh” Sid said, “So how come you’re here? Shouldn't you be in North Yorkshire?”
“No!” shouted the rabbit of light at Himself and Mary. Then, totally out of the blue, she whipped out a magnum 637, and shot down the newly weds. “Tee hee,” said Ana-coinean Sgail. She grabbed Sid by the arm, made a complicated sign with her ears which inadvertently created another temporary vortex, and jumped though with Sid not far behind.
"So," said Sid as he hurtled through space and time, "where am I and what is going on?"
"It is not for me to say," said Ana-coinean in a quivering voice glowing the colour of magic. "Well actually I'll tell you anyway. I'm travelling through your past, correcting all of your mistakes. It started with you killing that hobo."
"Yes, and you killing my best friend and his wife?"
"Well actually they weren't married yet, but are you sure that was you best friend?" she said in a voice and then disappeared.
"What does this mean?" cried Sid into the void. Then he hit his head on something brown yet invisible.
There was a knock at the door. It was Himself come to visit. The blonde, baby-faced gangsta rapper from Colne entered through the front door.
"Hallo friend!" cried Himself in a tone that can only be described as analytical. He clasped his hands together and approached Sid with the sole intent of giving him a hearty handshake. Sid backed away, suddenly remembering last time this happened... twice.
"What is wrong?" questioned Himself.
"Sorry," jolted Sid as he became aware of his surroundings once more. "It must be those pills I’m taking for my... never mind."
"Oh yes," Himself said, "I came here for a reason, there’s someone I’d like you to meet."
Sid scowled. "I think I know," he said as though he had a mouth full of Bitter Kas.
"I bet you don't," chuckled Himself and grabbed Sid by the arm, and led him outside to his car. He pointed at the window that wound down.
"This, is my fiancé, Mary Krimple."
This gave Sid an idea. "No," he said in the voice of an irate builder, "This, is my fiancé!” Himself turned to Mary, then to Sid, then to a strange bit of sawdust he remembered making as a child.
“Is this true?” Said Himself, finally turning back to Mary.
“I’m afraid that it is,” replied Mary, and she too, turned her head to look at Sid. Sid shook his head, like a teacher shakes his head at an incorrect schoolboy. “Oh!” Mary spoke again, “My mistake,”
Himself (beginning to get a rather nasty headache) slowly raised his left eyebrow, and turned to Sid again. “For your sake Sid, I suggest you leave now,” He did so. While Sid was still walking back to the front door of his house, Ana-coinean leaped out from behind his flowerbed. With a silly grin on her face, she said:
“Sorry Sid, I just couldn't resist it,”
“Yeah, well I've got news for you Ana-coinean Sgail, I don’t even want your services anymore. All I want, is for you to return me to the future!” Sid stood, tapping his foot repeatedly on the ground and looking very very cross.
“Fine!” said Ana-coinean, and with that word, Sid found himself situated on the roof of a multi-storey car-park in California, with a hobo standing right in front of him, pointing a shiny, golden gun right at Sid’s shiny, golden face.
“Appropriate, don’t you think?” said the hobo.
“Not in the slightest,” said Sid, talking like a spiteful child (and taking to his surroundings very well).
“I never did like you.”
“Shame, I found you to be a companion with which I could converse with without feeling the bitter sweet sensation that is feeling uncomfortable,” Sid smiled, the hobo didn’t.
“I’m going to kill you now!” said the hobo, and being rather patient for someone who was about to become a murderer. The hobo squeezed the trigger of his beautiful golden gun. Sid shut his eyes. ‘Click’. ‘Click’
“Oh dear,” said Sid, opening his eyes, staring the hobo dead in the face (who was now panicking, and checking the gun inside, then out). Sid turned, and began to walk away from the frantic hobo. Just then, Sid heard a loud noise, and fell the floor.
“Oh dear,” said the hobo.
The plot thickens eh readers! No? Ah well.
Find out what happened to Sid and freinds next week in 'The Buckled Shoe - Chapters 4, 5 and 6'
In Which Sid Loses A Friend And
Decides to Leave Town
Once upon a time there was a golden harvest named Sid. He enjoyed bathing in the sunlight that filled his LA home on occasion, mainly during the daylight hours. One day he was up in the middle of the night. He could not sleep because people had been stealing grain from his garden shed and he found it difficult to drop off when he knew that at any moment any number of grain-thieves could be undertaking grain-theft within the confines of his very shed. He was also under the impression that he was a hermit; whenever he walked down the street his neighbours would shout at him: "You hermit! Clear off and hermit elsewhere!"
Well, this was rather upsetting for poor Sid, because not only did he not know what a hermit was, but neither did he know how to hermit. On this day, while Sid could not sleep, his only friend, Himself, came to visit.
Himself was a blonde, baby-faced gangsta rapper from Colne. With a knock at Sid's back door, he entered through the front.
"Hallo friend!" cried Himself in a tone that can only be described as analytical. He clasped his hands together and approached Sid with the sole intent of giving him a hearty handshake. Sid backed away, suddenly remembering the days of old. Ten years ago to this day, Sid was wandering aimlessly through his dead auntie’s attic, searching for something to black-mail her with, whence he stumbled upon a buckled shoe. It was her grandfather’s favourite shoe, and was now believed to be haunted by the spirit of her grandfather’s foot.
"What is wrong?" questioned Himself.
"Sorry," jolted Sid as he became aware of his surroundings once more. "It must be those pills I’m taking for my arthritis."
The 'baby-faced' gangsta rapper paused for an iota while he thought what arthritis was, then began blurting out nonsense about an eyebrow curler.
"Oh yes," he began once more, "I came here for a reason, there’s someone I’d like you to meet."
While Sid was still trying to find the energy to look confused, Himself grabbed him by the arm, and led him outside to a Porsche 911. He pointed at the window, which seemingly on-cue, wound down. "This, is my fiancé, Mary Krimple."
Sid eyed her like a wary asp, examining its meal-to-be. She gave him a glancing smile that he returned with a scowl. Holding back a flood of tears he turned to Himself. "I hope you'll be very happy together!" he blurted and ran off, upstairs.
After standing for a second, bewildered by his friend's odd behaviour, himself walked out to Mary in the car and drove off to the local Spud-u-like, where they shared a spud.
Sid sat on his bed, feeling like a pile of frayed ropes. Tears rolling down his shining golden face, he reached under his bed and pulled out a chest. He opened it and took out it's content: one buckled shoe.
"What am I to do?" he asked the shoe. And with that he cried himself to sleep.
That night Sid had a very strange dream. It was purple with lots of numbers and traditional smiley-faces smiling at him. Then, out of the neck of a headless guru came his great-grandfather's buckled shoe.
"What am I to do?" he demanded of the shoe, to which the shoe replied: "Write a song about a highway," and then turned into a jet filled with passengers and flew off into the distance over hills made of turkey.
At that Sid woke with a start. He looked at his clock. It was quarter to five. Out of his back-room window he could see Himself and Mary stealing grain from his shed, but for some reason this time it didn’t bother him, his mind was made up...
Only minutes later, he had boarded his flying squirrel, which was appropriately named Jill III, and set off for the perpendicular valleys of Prussia. With only three sets of socks for luggage, the flight took less time than a swallow has when operating a particularly tricky dance, called the jugular vein. After almost an hour of conversing with Jill III about matters of the senate, they came down to earth with an almighty squeal, because for some reason, Jill III had inadvertently broken her back. Fortunately, Sid didn’t notice (if he had, he would of almost certainly slipped into unconsciousness for reasons best unknown) and scrambled off the squirrel. He put a hand to his overly burned forehead, and looked around for several minutes, after which he stated, in a loud, blatant voice, "This isn’t Prussia at all! This is North Yorkshire!’
Oh well, he mouthed, might as well make the most of it. Sid grabbed his pack-o-three matching tartan socks, stripped himself down to a string vest he was unaware he had ever put on, and made for the nearest motel, skipping 'gaily'. He looked at the sign, it said 'The Buckled Shoe’ and thought to himself: Mmm, must be a sign (bom bom, bom bom). He walked up to the check-in desk, and banged a bell with the palm of his fist, three, bold times. The man who walked up to Sid there and then was quite odd. Quite odd indeed.
He was a gnarled old man with one eye; the other was made of solid spruce. He was bent double, eating breadcrumbs off of a tin plate.
"Hello, Joe," he said in a terrible voice that resembled a thousand seagulls smashing empty bottles on a steel floor.
"Hello, sir," said Sid, trembling; for he was quite afraid of this odd old man.
"My eye is cold," said the man, "my eye."
"I noticed the sign outside..." Sid began.
"Aye! 'Tis a sign!" yelled the horrible little man, who began to laugh loudly, then louder and louder.
"Stop! Please stop!" cried Sid, hands over ears, as the noise became too loud to be bearable. Suddenly, with a wisp of blue smoke the man and the motel disappeared and once again Sid was stood in the open air of northerly Yorkshire, and without Jill III, who had died and rolled into a stream where she was washed up on the river bank further downstream where she served as a nice crop fertilizer, he was stranded.
Then, as if to add insult to injury it began to rain.
Sid sat on a rock. He had never felt so low in his life. He dropped his socks into a muddy puddle and stamped on them.
"What's the matter?" asked an unreasonably high-pitched voice from behind him. "Maybe I can help."
Turning round, Sid saw a small glowing rabbit. "Wow!" he exclaimed, "I'm almost certain you can! Who are you?"
"I," said the rabbit, "am Ana-coinean Sgail, the rabbit of light."
“Wow-ee!” said Sid, slightly beriddled (although he would never show it).
“That’s the response I get from all my customers,” replied Ana-coinean, who started to emit a tangible green hum.
Sid looked confused and shocked at the same time. “Customers?” Said the golden harvest.
“Yes of course!” started Ana-coinean, “you didn't think I gave my services to any old busybody, willy-nilly did you?”
“Why, what are your services? ‘Tie salesthing’? Keyboard repair thing?” he said, expecting just that.
"No… silly! It is something far more extraordinary!” Ana-coinean jumped off the ledge and onto a hard patch of phlegm, where she now stood, posing in the daylight clouds. “For I,” she started once again “Bring hope to those who have none!”
“Oh,” stated Sid, sounding slightly disappointed. “For you see, I have a small portion of hope lost in my brain somewhere.” He began to weep, “and you (sniff) only br-br-bring hope to tho-those who (snuffle) who have no-none.”
Ana-coinean then to began to weep, but not in the same fashion. “That’s O.K, I could still help you,” said she, trying to cheer Sid up.
“Really?” sniffed Sid as he looked at her with ‘Puppy-dog eyes’.
“Really really! All you have to do is pay, in cash, the small fee of 11,000 Canadian dollars.”
Sid jumped up, suddenly aware of his wantingness to live. “Very well, I shall bring you these 11,000 Canadian dollars, tax-free!” He blurted as he ran off, so as to find a Canadian that he could mug.
Ana-coinean changed to a sort of purple-ish colour “Fool!” she said, and began to laugh, loudly.
Chapter 2:
In Which Sid Undertakes His Quest
Sid rushed through the moors of heather tripping every now and then but scrambling to his feet quickly, because now he had a mission. Eleven thousand Canadian dollars were all that stood between him and eternal euphoria. He had absolutely no idea how to go about obtaining this money but he had to start somewhere, and the rain-soaked North Yorkshire moors were obviously not the best place - therefore he figured that wherever he was running to, for he did not know where, had to offer some better opportunities.
Just as he was pondering how many ants it would take to tow an ancient Roman chariot he tripped over a root, hidden in the undergrowth and fell, headfirst into a muddy puddle. Although this was like a normal puddle in appearance only, because as he fell, he continued to fall into the depths of the puddle, falling and falling for fathoms and fathoms until time and space began to lose their relevance. Suddenly he stumbled blinking into the light, not knowing whether he had been falling for seconds, hours or years. He stood in the full sunlight, the heat baking the mud on his wet clothes hard. He looked round trying to work out where he was and how he got there but the bright light dazzled him and all he could think of was 'pinnacle'.
Pinnacle? What does that mean? How would you use it in a sentence? Where did I hear it? Suddenly he realized where he was; it was somewhere he had been many, many times before. He looked around, still not quite believing what he was seeing. In amazement, he exclaimed, “Cri...” suddenly he blacked out.
Before he knew what was going on anymore (for he never would do… ever again) the spirit of his great-grandfather’s shoe appeared before him, shining like the day it ’twere made. “What am I to do?” He asked the shoe, and it replied, “Do not fear Sid, for the time has almost come.” Sid began to weep. Tears of rage and confusion rolled down his face. What was wrong with this shoe? Didn’t he realize that Sid needed help not riddles, he was family after all.
“Why are you trying to confuse me with riddles?” said Sid, stuttering. He was about to ask this for a second time, when the shoe spoke once more.
“It’s not a riddle, you just don’t know what it means.” The shoe looked very angry at Sid (almost as if it was possible). Sid wanted to apologise for his ignorance, but he didn’t.
“Fool,” wittered the shoe under his breath, and with that, he disappeared, and was replaced with the surroundings that Sid found so familiar once again.
"..pes!" he finished. "I thought they'd knocked this place down!" he gasped as he realised he was in his favourite place to play when he was but a child: the roof of a multi-storey car park in California. It was just as he remembered it, there was the empty old oil canister in which he used to hide and shelter from the wind, here was the barely-conscious drunken old tramp whom he used to poke with a stick until he became enraged and would let out a roar. But most of all, there was his prized possession, his old six-shooter, capable of maiming at ten paces. Tightening his turban, Sid picked up his gun and shot the hobo in the head.
"Heh," he chuckled, "still works." Then turning to his gun he smiled and said, "Let's go and find some money."
As he was about to leave he tripped on some invisible thread and fell on his chin. "Oof," he said, "Who put that there?"
"I did," said the shrill voice of Ana-coinean Sgail.
"Oh, it's you," said Sid, turning to her. She gave him a very unsettling glare. "Why did you go and do that?" he muttered, rubbing his chin.
"Well, I'm no longer offering you my services," she said. "I don't agree with your cold-blooded murdering policy."
"Ahh," said Sid, "Well, as it happens the tramp I just killed was not an ordinary tramp!" He wandered over to the slumped corpse of the hobo and reached in his pocket and pulled out his wallet. Taking it over to Ana-coinean he took out the tramp's ID card and showed it her.
"Oh, I am sorry," apologised the rabbit of light as she examined the information held on the card. "I didn't realise... so I suppose in a way, you just saved the world."
"Indeed I did," said Sid, smiling smugly. "Anywho, is there any way which you could get me out of here? I need to find 11,000 Canadian dollars, if you remember and I ain't gonna be finding them here."
"I'll see what I can do," said Ana-coinean and reached into her little handbag.
It was a nice little handbag, (rumoured to be magical) made of black porcelain and twine. She had found it years ago in an English man’s car boot, and had treasured it ever since. Anywho, When her furry little mitten-like-hand came out of the fine leather interior of the bag, Sid saw to his amazement that Ana-coinean was not holding a beet root, which he had previously assumed she would, but a letter tied up in a bow.
“Well, erm, thanks a lot!” Said Sid, feeling rather betrayed “But how is that supposed to help me in the slightest?”
The look that Ana-coinean gave Sid then hadn’t been given to him since his grandmother was alive. Her facial expression was a mix between dubious yet angry, practical yet ingenious, and trodden down yet boosted up.
“Why don’t you open it, and see what's inside before you judge how important it is. Look at me, judge me by my size do you?”
“Well…” began Sid, but he could not finish, for Ana-coinean butted in stating:
“Quiet you!” and with that, she turned her head, and leaped into the air like some sort of robotic animal.
“Bah!” Said Sid, picking up the letter which Ana-coinean held outstretched just moments before. As he picked it up, Sid became aware that the shadow of someone or something was moving behind him, and he didn’t like it, not one little bit.
“Hey you!” said the shadow. As Sid squinted, he saw that the voice was coming from the mouth of the hobo that he had shot dead earlier on in the story. Sid had never before seen a dead man before, especially one that walked and talked (although admittedly rather crudely). Sid decided to take absolutely no notice of the man whatsoever, but unbeknownst to him, this would be his downfall. The hobo shot him. As Sid bled, he wanted to end the paragraph off in a cliffhanger, so with his last remaining ounce of strength, Sid took out a knife, and carefully opened the letter and began to read. This is what he read:
"Ay, now begins a second storm to rise;
For this is he that moves both wind and tide.
War.
From worthy Edward, King of Albion,
My lord and sovereign, and thy vowed friend,
I come, in kindness and unfeigned love,
First to do greetings to thy royal person;
And then to crave a league of amity;
And lastly to confirm that amity."
For the first time in his life, Sid felt compelled to sing, and despite his less than favourable position, sing he did: "Ay, now begins a second storm to rise," he wailed in an unearthly voice, and as he sang he saw what he thought was reality begin to distort. He continued to sing, "For this is he that moves both wind and tide."
As he sang his consciousness began to ebb and flow. Sounds, colour and taste began to merge and his vision became blurred.
"War!" he screamed at the top of his voice and as he did the car park around him twisted and turned into a searing white light.
Suddenly there was a silence. Sid felt well. But he was rather
confused by where he was.
Chapter Three:
Normality Swing (It’s like a Little Dejá Vu but a Little Bit More)
There was a knock at the door. It was Himself come to visit. The blonde, baby-faced gangsta rapper from Colne entered through the front door.
"Hallo friend!" cried Himself in a tone that can only be described as analytical. He clasped his hands together and approached Sid with the sole intent of giving him a hearty handshake. Sid backed away, suddenly remembering the days of old.
"What is wrong?" questioned Himself.
"Sorry," jolted Sid, as he became aware of his surroundings once more. "It must be those pills I’m taking for my arthritis."
Himself paused for an iota while he thought what arthritis was, then began blurting out nonsense about an eyebrow curler.
"Oh yes," he began once more, "I came here for a reason, there’s someone I’d like you to meet."
While Sid was looking very confused, Himself grabbed him by the arm, and led him outside to his car. He pointed at the window that wound down.
"This, is my fiancé, Mary Krimple."
“.” said Sid, and wet his bone-dry throat for a second try. “What the hell is going on?” he whispered to himself. Mary outstretched an arm, which Sid shook without thinking.
“Delighted to meet you,” said Mary. Had all that just then been a dream? Had Sid just imagined such characters as: Ana-coinean Sgail, Jill III and the man in the hotel? He didn’t think his jelly-like brain twer capable of concocting such ingenious people.
“Likewise,” responded Sid. He must have dreamed it, for here he was, back in his LA home. He did have the feeling that he’d done all this before however. Ah well, thought Sid, might as well put that crazy adventure all behind me. Just then, something caught the corner of Sid’s eye. As his eye bled, he managed, with the other eye, to get a glimpse of what it was that caught him. It was a claw, and not the claw of a mountain bear or lion either, oh no; it was the claw, of Ana-coinean Sgail.
“Sid, what are you doing?” she said. Sid was surprised to say the least.
“Ow……w” mouthed Sid. “You...you’re not real!”
“Oh I’m quite real, I can assure you.”
“No, no, I dreamed you up, along with all the rest of that bizarre quest-”
“No,” interrupted Ana-coinean. “You got pulled into a temporary vortex, your molecular structure was blasted into a thousand tiny pieces, and sent back in time 567 minutes.”
“Oh” Sid said, “So how come you’re here? Shouldn't you be in North Yorkshire?”
“No!” shouted the rabbit of light at Himself and Mary. Then, totally out of the blue, she whipped out a magnum 637, and shot down the newly weds. “Tee hee,” said Ana-coinean Sgail. She grabbed Sid by the arm, made a complicated sign with her ears which inadvertently created another temporary vortex, and jumped though with Sid not far behind.
"So," said Sid as he hurtled through space and time, "where am I and what is going on?"
"It is not for me to say," said Ana-coinean in a quivering voice glowing the colour of magic. "Well actually I'll tell you anyway. I'm travelling through your past, correcting all of your mistakes. It started with you killing that hobo."
"Yes, and you killing my best friend and his wife?"
"Well actually they weren't married yet, but are you sure that was you best friend?" she said in a voice and then disappeared.
"What does this mean?" cried Sid into the void. Then he hit his head on something brown yet invisible.
There was a knock at the door. It was Himself come to visit. The blonde, baby-faced gangsta rapper from Colne entered through the front door.
"Hallo friend!" cried Himself in a tone that can only be described as analytical. He clasped his hands together and approached Sid with the sole intent of giving him a hearty handshake. Sid backed away, suddenly remembering last time this happened... twice.
"What is wrong?" questioned Himself.
"Sorry," jolted Sid as he became aware of his surroundings once more. "It must be those pills I’m taking for my... never mind."
"Oh yes," Himself said, "I came here for a reason, there’s someone I’d like you to meet."
Sid scowled. "I think I know," he said as though he had a mouth full of Bitter Kas.
"I bet you don't," chuckled Himself and grabbed Sid by the arm, and led him outside to his car. He pointed at the window that wound down.
"This, is my fiancé, Mary Krimple."
This gave Sid an idea. "No," he said in the voice of an irate builder, "This, is my fiancé!” Himself turned to Mary, then to Sid, then to a strange bit of sawdust he remembered making as a child.
“Is this true?” Said Himself, finally turning back to Mary.
“I’m afraid that it is,” replied Mary, and she too, turned her head to look at Sid. Sid shook his head, like a teacher shakes his head at an incorrect schoolboy. “Oh!” Mary spoke again, “My mistake,”
Himself (beginning to get a rather nasty headache) slowly raised his left eyebrow, and turned to Sid again. “For your sake Sid, I suggest you leave now,” He did so. While Sid was still walking back to the front door of his house, Ana-coinean leaped out from behind his flowerbed. With a silly grin on her face, she said:
“Sorry Sid, I just couldn't resist it,”
“Yeah, well I've got news for you Ana-coinean Sgail, I don’t even want your services anymore. All I want, is for you to return me to the future!” Sid stood, tapping his foot repeatedly on the ground and looking very very cross.
“Fine!” said Ana-coinean, and with that word, Sid found himself situated on the roof of a multi-storey car-park in California, with a hobo standing right in front of him, pointing a shiny, golden gun right at Sid’s shiny, golden face.
“Appropriate, don’t you think?” said the hobo.
“Not in the slightest,” said Sid, talking like a spiteful child (and taking to his surroundings very well).
“I never did like you.”
“Shame, I found you to be a companion with which I could converse with without feeling the bitter sweet sensation that is feeling uncomfortable,” Sid smiled, the hobo didn’t.
“I’m going to kill you now!” said the hobo, and being rather patient for someone who was about to become a murderer. The hobo squeezed the trigger of his beautiful golden gun. Sid shut his eyes. ‘Click’. ‘Click’
“Oh dear,” said Sid, opening his eyes, staring the hobo dead in the face (who was now panicking, and checking the gun inside, then out). Sid turned, and began to walk away from the frantic hobo. Just then, Sid heard a loud noise, and fell the floor.
“Oh dear,” said the hobo.
The plot thickens eh readers! No? Ah well.
Find out what happened to Sid and freinds next week in 'The Buckled Shoe - Chapters 4, 5 and 6'
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Chapter One:
In Which Sid Loses A Friend And
Decides to Leave Town
Once upon a time there was a golden harvest named Sid. He enjoyed bathing in the sunlight that filled his LA home on occasion, mainly during the daylight hours. One day he was up in the middle of the night. He could not sleep because people had been stealing grain from his garden shed and he found it difficult to drop off when he knew that at any moment any number of grain-thieves could be undertaking grain-theft within the confines of his very shed. He was also under the impression that he was a hermit; whenever he walked down the street his neighbours would shout at him: "You hermit! Clear off and hermit elsewhere!"
Well, this was rather upsetting for poor Sid, because not only did he not know what a hermit was, but neither did he know how to hermit. On this day, while Sid could not sleep, his only friend, Himself, came to visit.
Himself was a blonde, baby-faced gangsta rapper from Colne. With a knock at Sid's back door, he entered through the front.
"Hallo friend!" cried Himself in a tone that can only be described as analytical. He clasped his hands together and approached Sid with the sole intent of giving him a hearty handshake. Sid backed away, suddenly remembering the days of old. Ten years ago to this day, Sid was wandering aimlessly through his dead auntie’s attic, searching for something to black-mail her with, whence he stumbled upon a buckled shoe. It was her grandfather’s favourite shoe, and was now believed to be haunted by the spirit of her grandfather’s foot.
"What is wrong?" questioned Himself.
"Sorry," jolted Sid as he became aware of his surroundings once more. "It must be those pills I’m taking for my arthritis."
The 'baby-faced' gangsta rapper paused for an iota while he thought what arthritis was, then began blurting out nonsense about an eyebrow curler.
"Oh yes," he began once more, "I came here for a reason, there’s someone I’d like you to meet."
While Sid was still trying to find the energy to look confused, Himself grabbed him by the arm, and led him outside to a Porsche 911. He pointed at the window, which seemingly on-cue, wound down. "This, is my fiancé, Mary Krimple."
Sid eyed her like a wary asp, examining its meal-to-be. She gave him a glancing smile that he returned with a scowl. Holding back a flood of tears he turned to Himself. "I hope you'll be very happy together!" he blurted and ran off, upstairs.
After standing for a second, bewildered by his friend's odd behaviour, himself walked out to Mary in the car and drove off to the local Spud-u-like, where they shared a spud.
Sid sat on his bed, feeling like a pile of frayed ropes. Tears rolling down his shining golden face, he reached under his bed and pulled out a chest. He opened it and took out it's content: one buckled shoe.
"What am I to do?" he asked the shoe. And with that he cried himself to sleep.
That night Sid had a very strange dream. It was purple with lots of numbers and traditional smiley-faces smiling at him. Then, out of the neck of a headless guru came his great-grandfather's buckled shoe.
"What am I to do?" he demanded of the shoe, to which the shoe replied: "Write a song about a highway," and then turned into a jet filled with passengers and flew off into the distance over hills made of turkey.
At that Sid woke with a start. He looked at his clock. It was quarter to five. Out of his back-room window he could see Himself and Mary stealing grain from his shed, but for some reason this time it didn’t bother him, his mind was made up...
Only minutes later, he had boarded his flying squirrel, which was appropriately named Jill III, and set off for the perpendicular valleys of Prussia. With only three sets of socks for luggage, the flight took less time than a swallow has when operating a particularly tricky dance, called the jugular vein. After almost an hour of conversing with Jill III about matters of the senate, they came down to earth with an almighty squeal, because for some reason, Jill III had inadvertently broken her back. Fortunately, Sid didn’t notice (if he had, he would of almost certainly slipped into unconsciousness for reasons best unknown) and scrambled off the squirrel. He put a hand to his overly burned forehead, and looked around for several minutes, after which he stated, in a loud, blatant voice, "This isn’t Prussia at all! This is North Yorkshire!’
Oh well, he mouthed, might as well make the most of it. Sid grabbed his pack-o-three matching tartan socks, stripped himself down to a string vest he was unaware he had ever put on, and made for the nearest motel, skipping 'gaily'. He looked at the sign, it said 'The Buckled Shoe’ and thought to himself: Mmm, must be a sign (bom bom, bom bom). He walked up to the check-in desk, and banged a bell with the palm of his fist, three, bold times. The man who walked up to Sid there and then was quite odd. Quite odd indeed.
He was a gnarled old man with one eye; the other was made of solid spruce. He was bent double, eating breadcrumbs off of a tin plate.
"Hello, Joe," he said in a terrible voice that resembled a thousand seagulls smashing empty bottles on a steel floor.
"Hello, sir," said Sid, trembling; for he was quite afraid of this odd old man.
"My eye is cold," said the man, "my eye."
"I noticed the sign outside..." Sid began.
"Aye! 'Tis a sign!" yelled the horrible little man, who began to laugh loudly, then louder and louder.
"Stop! Please stop!" cried Sid, hands over ears, as the noise became too loud to be bearable. Suddenly, with a wisp of blue smoke the man and the motel disappeared and once again Sid was stood in the open air of northerly Yorkshire, and without Jill III, who had died and rolled into a stream where she was washed up on the river bank further downstream where she served as a nice crop fertilizer, he was stranded.
Then, as if to add insult to injury it began to rain.
Sid sat on a rock. He had never felt so low in his life. He dropped his socks into a muddy puddle and stamped on them.
"What's the matter?" asked an unreasonably high-pitched voice from behind him. "Maybe I can help."
Turning round, Sid saw a small glowing rabbit. "Wow!" he exclaimed, "I'm almost certain you can! Who are you?"
"I," said the rabbit, "am Ana-coinean Sgail, the rabbit of light."
“Wow-ee!” said Sid, slightly beriddled (although he would never show it).
“That’s the response I get from all my customers,” replied Ana-coinean, who started to emit a tangible green hum.
Sid looked confused and shocked at the same time. “Customers?” Said the golden harvest.
“Yes of course!” started Ana-coinean, “you didn't think I gave my services to any old busybody, willy-nilly did you?”
“Why, what are your services? ‘Tie salesthing’? Keyboard repair thing?” he said, expecting just that.
"No… silly! It is something far more extraordinary!” Ana-coinean jumped off the ledge and onto a hard patch of phlegm, where she now stood, posing in the daylight clouds. “For I,” she started once again “Bring hope to those who have none!”
“Oh,” stated Sid, sounding slightly disappointed. “For you see, I have a small portion of hope lost in my brain somewhere.” He began to weep, “and you (sniff) only br-br-bring hope to tho-those who (snuffle) who have no-none.”
Ana-coinean then to began to weep, but not in the same fashion. “That’s O.K, I could still help you,” said she, trying to cheer Sid up.
“Really?” sniffed Sid as he looked at her with ‘Puppy-dog eyes’.
“Really really! All you have to do is pay, in cash, the small fee of 11,000 Canadian dollars.”
Sid jumped up, suddenly aware of his wantingness to live. “Very well, I shall bring you these 11,000 Canadian dollars, tax-free!” He blurted as he ran off, so as to find a Canadian that he could mug.
Ana-coinean changed to a sort of purple-ish colour “Fool!” she said, and began to laugh, loudly.
Chapter 2:
In Which Sid Undertakes His Quest
Sid rushed through the moors of heather tripping every now and then but scrambling to his feet quickly, because now he had a mission. Eleven thousand Canadian dollars were all that stood between him and eternal euphoria. He had absolutely no idea how to go about obtaining this money but he had to start somewhere, and the rain-soaked North Yorkshire moors were obviously not the best place - therefore he figured that wherever he was running to, for he did not know where, had to offer some better opportunities.
Just as he was pondering how many ants it would take to tow an ancient Roman chariot he tripped over a root, hidden in the undergrowth and fell, headfirst into a muddy puddle. Although this was like a normal puddle in appearance only, because as he fell, he continued to fall into the depths of the puddle, falling and falling for fathoms and fathoms until time and space began to lose their relevance. Suddenly he stumbled blinking into the light, not knowing whether he had been falling for seconds, hours or years. He stood in the full sunlight, the heat baking the mud on his wet clothes hard. He looked round trying to work out where he was and how he got there but the bright light dazzled him and all he could think of was 'pinnacle'.
Pinnacle? What does that mean? How would you use it in a sentence? Where did I hear it? Suddenly he realized where he was; it was somewhere he had been many, many times before. He looked around, still not quite believing what he was seeing. In amazement, he exclaimed, “Cri...” suddenly he blacked out.
Before he knew what was going on anymore (for he never would do… ever again) the spirit of his great-grandfather’s shoe appeared before him, shining like the day it ’twere made. “What am I to do?” He asked the shoe, and it replied, “Do not fear Sid, for the time has almost come.” Sid began to weep. Tears of rage and confusion rolled down his face. What was wrong with this shoe? Didn’t he realize that Sid needed help not riddles, he was family after all.
“Why are you trying to confuse me with riddles?” said Sid, stuttering. He was about to ask this for a second time, when the shoe spoke once more.
“It’s not a riddle, you just don’t know what it means.” The shoe looked very angry at Sid (almost as if it was possible). Sid wanted to apologise for his ignorance, but he didn’t.
“Fool,” wittered the shoe under his breath, and with that, he disappeared, and was replaced with the surroundings that Sid found so familiar once again.
"..pes!" he finished. "I thought they'd knocked this place down!" he gasped as he realised he was in his favourite place to play when he was but a child: the roof of a multi-storey car park in California. It was just as he remembered it, there was the empty old oil canister in which he used to hide and shelter from the wind, here was the barely-conscious drunken old tramp whom he used to poke with a stick until he became enraged and would let out a roar. But most of all, there was his prized possession, his old six-shooter, capable of maiming at ten paces. Tightening his turban, Sid picked up his gun and shot the hobo in the head.
"Heh," he chuckled, "still works." Then turning to his gun he smiled and said, "Let's go and find some money."
As he was about to leave he tripped on some invisible thread and fell on his chin. "Oof," he said, "Who put that there?"
"I did," said the shrill voice of Ana-coinean Sgail.
"Oh, it's you," said Sid, turning to her. She gave him a very unsettling glare. "Why did you go and do that?" he muttered, rubbing his chin.
"Well, I'm no longer offering you my services," she said. "I don't agree with your cold-blooded murdering policy."
"Ahh," said Sid, "Well, as it happens the tramp I just killed was not an ordinary tramp!" He wandered over to the slumped corpse of the hobo and reached in his pocket and pulled out his wallet. Taking it over to Ana-coinean he took out the tramp's ID card and showed it her.
"Oh, I am sorry," apologised the rabbit of light as she examined the information held on the card. "I didn't realise... so I suppose in a way, you just saved the world."
"Indeed I did," said Sid, smiling smugly. "Anywho, is there any way which you could get me out of here? I need to find 11,000 Canadian dollars, if you remember and I ain't gonna be finding them here."
"I'll see what I can do," said Ana-coinean and reached into her little handbag.
It was a nice little handbag, (rumoured to be magical) made of black porcelain and twine. She had found it years ago in an English man’s car boot, and had treasured it ever since. Anywho, When her furry little mitten-like-hand came out of the fine leather interior of the bag, Sid saw to his amazement that Ana-coinean was not holding a beet root, which he had previously assumed she would, but a letter tied up in a bow.
“Well, erm, thanks a lot!” Said Sid, feeling rather betrayed “But how is that supposed to help me in the slightest?”
The look that Ana-coinean gave Sid then hadn’t been given to him since his grandmother was alive. Her facial expression was a mix between dubious yet angry, practical yet ingenious, and trodden down yet boosted up.
“Why don’t you open it, and see what's inside before you judge how important it is. Look at me, judge me by my size do you?”
“Well…” began Sid, but he could not finish, for Ana-coinean butted in stating:
“Quiet you!” and with that, she turned her head, and leaped into the air like some sort of robotic animal.
“Bah!” Said Sid, picking up the letter which Ana-coinean held outstretched just moments before. As he picked it up, Sid became aware that the shadow of someone or something was moving behind him, and he didn’t like it, not one little bit.
“Hey you!” said the shadow. As Sid squinted, he saw that the voice was coming from the mouth of the hobo that he had shot dead earlier on in the story. Sid had never before seen a dead man before, especially one that walked and talked (although admittedly rather crudely). Sid decided to take absolutely no notice of the man whatsoever, but unbeknownst to him, this would be his downfall. The hobo shot him. As Sid bled, he wanted to end the paragraph off in a cliffhanger, so with his last remaining ounce of strength, Sid took out a knife, and carefully opened the letter and began to read. This is what he read:
"Ay, now begins a second storm to rise;
For this is he that moves both wind and tide.
War.
From worthy Edward, King of Albion,
My lord and sovereign, and thy vowed friend,
I come, in kindness and unfeigned love,
First to do greetings to thy royal person;
And then to crave a league of amity;
And lastly to confirm that amity."
For the first time in his life, Sid felt compelled to sing, and despite his less than favourable position, sing he did: "Ay, now begins a second storm to rise," he wailed in an unearthly voice, and as he sang he saw what he thought was reality begin to distort. He continued to sing, "For this is he that moves both wind and tide."
As he sang his consciousness began to ebb and flow. Sounds, colour and taste began to merge and his vision became blurred.
"War!" he screamed at the top of his voice and as he did the car park around him twisted and turned into a searing white light.
Suddenly there was a silence. Sid felt well. But he was rather
confused by where he was.
Chapter Three:
Normality Swing (It’s like a Little Dejá Vu but a Little Bit More)
There was a knock at the door. It was Himself come to visit. The blonde, baby-faced gangsta rapper from Colne entered through the front door.
"Hallo friend!" cried Himself in a tone that can only be described as analytical. He clasped his hands together and approached Sid with the sole intent of giving him a hearty handshake. Sid backed away, suddenly remembering the days of old.
"What is wrong?" questioned Himself.
"Sorry," jolted Sid, as he became aware of his surroundings once more. "It must be those pills I’m taking for my arthritis."
Himself paused for an iota while he thought what arthritis was, then began blurting out nonsense about an eyebrow curler.
"Oh yes," he began once more, "I came here for a reason, there’s someone I’d like you to meet."
While Sid was looking very confused, Himself grabbed him by the arm, and led him outside to his car. He pointed at the window that wound down.
"This, is my fiancé, Mary Krimple."
“.” said Sid, and wet his bone-dry throat for a second try. “What the hell is going on?” he whispered to himself. Mary outstretched an arm, which Sid shook without thinking.
“Delighted to meet you,” said Mary. Had all that just then been a dream? Had Sid just imagined such characters as: Ana-coinean Sgail, Jill III and the man in the hotel? He didn’t think his jelly-like brain twer capable of concocting such ingenious people.
“Likewise,” responded Sid. He must have dreamed it, for here he was, back in his LA home. He did have the feeling that he’d done all this before however. Ah well, thought Sid, might as well put that crazy adventure all behind me. Just then, something caught the corner of Sid’s eye. As his eye bled, he managed, with the other eye, to get a glimpse of what it was that caught him. It was a claw, and not the claw of a mountain bear or lion either, oh no; it was the claw, of Ana-coinean Sgail.
“Sid, what are you doing?” she said. Sid was surprised to say the least.
“Ow……w” mouthed Sid. “You...you’re not real!”
“Oh I’m quite real, I can assure you.”
“No, no, I dreamed you up, along with all the rest of that bizarre quest-”
“No,” interrupted Ana-coinean. “You got pulled into a temporary vortex, your molecular structure was blasted into a thousand tiny pieces, and sent back in time 567 minutes.”
“Oh” Sid said, “So how come you’re here? Shouldn't you be in North Yorkshire?”
“No!” shouted the rabbit of light at Himself and Mary. Then, totally out of the blue, she whipped out a magnum 637, and shot down the newly weds. “Tee hee,” said Ana-coinean Sgail. She grabbed Sid by the arm, made a complicated sign with her ears which inadvertently created another temporary vortex, and jumped though with Sid not far behind.
"So," said Sid as he hurtled through space and time, "where am I and what is going on?"
"It is not for me to say," said Ana-coinean in a quivering voice glowing the colour of magic. "Well actually I'll tell you anyway. I'm travelling through your past, correcting all of your mistakes. It started with you killing that hobo."
"Yes, and you killing my best friend and his wife?"
"Well actually they weren't married yet, but are you sure that was you best friend?" she said in a voice and then disappeared.
"What does this mean?" cried Sid into the void. Then he hit his head on something brown yet invisible.
There was a knock at the door. It was Himself come to visit. The blonde, baby-faced gangsta rapper from Colne entered through the front door.
"Hallo friend!" cried Himself in a tone that can only be described as analytical. He clasped his hands together and approached Sid with the sole intent of giving him a hearty handshake. Sid backed away, suddenly remembering last time this happened... twice.
"What is wrong?" questioned Himself.
"Sorry," jolted Sid as he became aware of his surroundings once more. "It must be those pills I’m taking for my... never mind."
"Oh yes," Himself said, "I came here for a reason, there’s someone I’d like you to meet."
Sid scowled. "I think I know," he said as though he had a mouth full of Bitter Kas.
"I bet you don't," chuckled Himself and grabbed Sid by the arm, and led him outside to his car. He pointed at the window that wound down.
"This, is my fiancé, Mary Krimple."
This gave Sid an idea. "No," he said in the voice of an irate builder, "This, is my fiancé!” Himself turned to Mary, then to Sid, then to a strange bit of sawdust he remembered making as a child.
“Is this true?” Said Himself, finally turning back to Mary.
“I’m afraid that it is,” replied Mary, and she too, turned her head to look at Sid. Sid shook his head, like a teacher shakes his head at an incorrect schoolboy. “Oh!” Mary spoke again, “My mistake,”
Himself (beginning to get a rather nasty headache) slowly raised his left eyebrow, and turned to Sid again. “For your sake Sid, I suggest you leave now,” He did so. While Sid was still walking back to the front door of his house, Ana-coinean leaped out from behind his flowerbed. With a silly grin on her face, she said:
“Sorry Sid, I just couldn't resist it,”
“Yeah, well I've got news for you Ana-coinean Sgail, I don’t even want your services anymore. All I want, is for you to return me to the future!” Sid stood, tapping his foot repeatedly on the ground and looking very very cross.
“Fine!” said Ana-coinean, and with that word, Sid found himself situated on the roof of a multi-storey car-park in California, with a hobo standing right in front of him, pointing a shiny, golden gun right at Sid’s shiny, golden face.
“Appropriate, don’t you think?” said the hobo.
“Not in the slightest,” said Sid, talking like a spiteful child (and taking to his surroundings very well).
“I never did like you.”
“Shame, I found you to be a companion with which I could converse with without feeling the bitter sweet sensation that is feeling uncomfortable,” Sid smiled, the hobo didn’t.
“I’m going to kill you now!” said the hobo, and being rather patient for someone who was about to become a murderer. The hobo squeezed the trigger of his beautiful golden gun. Sid shut his eyes. ‘Click’. ‘Click’
“Oh dear,” said Sid, opening his eyes, staring the hobo dead in the face (who was now panicking, and checking the gun inside, then out). Sid turned, and began to walk away from the frantic hobo. Just then, Sid heard a loud noise, and fell the floor.
“Oh dear,” said the hobo.
The plot thickens eh readers! No? Ah well.
Find out what happened to Sid and freinds next week in 'The Buckled Shoe - Chapters 4, 5 and 6'
In Which Sid Loses A Friend And
Decides to Leave Town
Once upon a time there was a golden harvest named Sid. He enjoyed bathing in the sunlight that filled his LA home on occasion, mainly during the daylight hours. One day he was up in the middle of the night. He could not sleep because people had been stealing grain from his garden shed and he found it difficult to drop off when he knew that at any moment any number of grain-thieves could be undertaking grain-theft within the confines of his very shed. He was also under the impression that he was a hermit; whenever he walked down the street his neighbours would shout at him: "You hermit! Clear off and hermit elsewhere!"
Well, this was rather upsetting for poor Sid, because not only did he not know what a hermit was, but neither did he know how to hermit. On this day, while Sid could not sleep, his only friend, Himself, came to visit.
Himself was a blonde, baby-faced gangsta rapper from Colne. With a knock at Sid's back door, he entered through the front.
"Hallo friend!" cried Himself in a tone that can only be described as analytical. He clasped his hands together and approached Sid with the sole intent of giving him a hearty handshake. Sid backed away, suddenly remembering the days of old. Ten years ago to this day, Sid was wandering aimlessly through his dead auntie’s attic, searching for something to black-mail her with, whence he stumbled upon a buckled shoe. It was her grandfather’s favourite shoe, and was now believed to be haunted by the spirit of her grandfather’s foot.
"What is wrong?" questioned Himself.
"Sorry," jolted Sid as he became aware of his surroundings once more. "It must be those pills I’m taking for my arthritis."
The 'baby-faced' gangsta rapper paused for an iota while he thought what arthritis was, then began blurting out nonsense about an eyebrow curler.
"Oh yes," he began once more, "I came here for a reason, there’s someone I’d like you to meet."
While Sid was still trying to find the energy to look confused, Himself grabbed him by the arm, and led him outside to a Porsche 911. He pointed at the window, which seemingly on-cue, wound down. "This, is my fiancé, Mary Krimple."
Sid eyed her like a wary asp, examining its meal-to-be. She gave him a glancing smile that he returned with a scowl. Holding back a flood of tears he turned to Himself. "I hope you'll be very happy together!" he blurted and ran off, upstairs.
After standing for a second, bewildered by his friend's odd behaviour, himself walked out to Mary in the car and drove off to the local Spud-u-like, where they shared a spud.
Sid sat on his bed, feeling like a pile of frayed ropes. Tears rolling down his shining golden face, he reached under his bed and pulled out a chest. He opened it and took out it's content: one buckled shoe.
"What am I to do?" he asked the shoe. And with that he cried himself to sleep.
That night Sid had a very strange dream. It was purple with lots of numbers and traditional smiley-faces smiling at him. Then, out of the neck of a headless guru came his great-grandfather's buckled shoe.
"What am I to do?" he demanded of the shoe, to which the shoe replied: "Write a song about a highway," and then turned into a jet filled with passengers and flew off into the distance over hills made of turkey.
At that Sid woke with a start. He looked at his clock. It was quarter to five. Out of his back-room window he could see Himself and Mary stealing grain from his shed, but for some reason this time it didn’t bother him, his mind was made up...
Only minutes later, he had boarded his flying squirrel, which was appropriately named Jill III, and set off for the perpendicular valleys of Prussia. With only three sets of socks for luggage, the flight took less time than a swallow has when operating a particularly tricky dance, called the jugular vein. After almost an hour of conversing with Jill III about matters of the senate, they came down to earth with an almighty squeal, because for some reason, Jill III had inadvertently broken her back. Fortunately, Sid didn’t notice (if he had, he would of almost certainly slipped into unconsciousness for reasons best unknown) and scrambled off the squirrel. He put a hand to his overly burned forehead, and looked around for several minutes, after which he stated, in a loud, blatant voice, "This isn’t Prussia at all! This is North Yorkshire!’
Oh well, he mouthed, might as well make the most of it. Sid grabbed his pack-o-three matching tartan socks, stripped himself down to a string vest he was unaware he had ever put on, and made for the nearest motel, skipping 'gaily'. He looked at the sign, it said 'The Buckled Shoe’ and thought to himself: Mmm, must be a sign (bom bom, bom bom). He walked up to the check-in desk, and banged a bell with the palm of his fist, three, bold times. The man who walked up to Sid there and then was quite odd. Quite odd indeed.
He was a gnarled old man with one eye; the other was made of solid spruce. He was bent double, eating breadcrumbs off of a tin plate.
"Hello, Joe," he said in a terrible voice that resembled a thousand seagulls smashing empty bottles on a steel floor.
"Hello, sir," said Sid, trembling; for he was quite afraid of this odd old man.
"My eye is cold," said the man, "my eye."
"I noticed the sign outside..." Sid began.
"Aye! 'Tis a sign!" yelled the horrible little man, who began to laugh loudly, then louder and louder.
"Stop! Please stop!" cried Sid, hands over ears, as the noise became too loud to be bearable. Suddenly, with a wisp of blue smoke the man and the motel disappeared and once again Sid was stood in the open air of northerly Yorkshire, and without Jill III, who had died and rolled into a stream where she was washed up on the river bank further downstream where she served as a nice crop fertilizer, he was stranded.
Then, as if to add insult to injury it began to rain.
Sid sat on a rock. He had never felt so low in his life. He dropped his socks into a muddy puddle and stamped on them.
"What's the matter?" asked an unreasonably high-pitched voice from behind him. "Maybe I can help."
Turning round, Sid saw a small glowing rabbit. "Wow!" he exclaimed, "I'm almost certain you can! Who are you?"
"I," said the rabbit, "am Ana-coinean Sgail, the rabbit of light."
“Wow-ee!” said Sid, slightly beriddled (although he would never show it).
“That’s the response I get from all my customers,” replied Ana-coinean, who started to emit a tangible green hum.
Sid looked confused and shocked at the same time. “Customers?” Said the golden harvest.
“Yes of course!” started Ana-coinean, “you didn't think I gave my services to any old busybody, willy-nilly did you?”
“Why, what are your services? ‘Tie salesthing’? Keyboard repair thing?” he said, expecting just that.
"No… silly! It is something far more extraordinary!” Ana-coinean jumped off the ledge and onto a hard patch of phlegm, where she now stood, posing in the daylight clouds. “For I,” she started once again “Bring hope to those who have none!”
“Oh,” stated Sid, sounding slightly disappointed. “For you see, I have a small portion of hope lost in my brain somewhere.” He began to weep, “and you (sniff) only br-br-bring hope to tho-those who (snuffle) who have no-none.”
Ana-coinean then to began to weep, but not in the same fashion. “That’s O.K, I could still help you,” said she, trying to cheer Sid up.
“Really?” sniffed Sid as he looked at her with ‘Puppy-dog eyes’.
“Really really! All you have to do is pay, in cash, the small fee of 11,000 Canadian dollars.”
Sid jumped up, suddenly aware of his wantingness to live. “Very well, I shall bring you these 11,000 Canadian dollars, tax-free!” He blurted as he ran off, so as to find a Canadian that he could mug.
Ana-coinean changed to a sort of purple-ish colour “Fool!” she said, and began to laugh, loudly.
Chapter 2:
In Which Sid Undertakes His Quest
Sid rushed through the moors of heather tripping every now and then but scrambling to his feet quickly, because now he had a mission. Eleven thousand Canadian dollars were all that stood between him and eternal euphoria. He had absolutely no idea how to go about obtaining this money but he had to start somewhere, and the rain-soaked North Yorkshire moors were obviously not the best place - therefore he figured that wherever he was running to, for he did not know where, had to offer some better opportunities.
Just as he was pondering how many ants it would take to tow an ancient Roman chariot he tripped over a root, hidden in the undergrowth and fell, headfirst into a muddy puddle. Although this was like a normal puddle in appearance only, because as he fell, he continued to fall into the depths of the puddle, falling and falling for fathoms and fathoms until time and space began to lose their relevance. Suddenly he stumbled blinking into the light, not knowing whether he had been falling for seconds, hours or years. He stood in the full sunlight, the heat baking the mud on his wet clothes hard. He looked round trying to work out where he was and how he got there but the bright light dazzled him and all he could think of was 'pinnacle'.
Pinnacle? What does that mean? How would you use it in a sentence? Where did I hear it? Suddenly he realized where he was; it was somewhere he had been many, many times before. He looked around, still not quite believing what he was seeing. In amazement, he exclaimed, “Cri...” suddenly he blacked out.
Before he knew what was going on anymore (for he never would do… ever again) the spirit of his great-grandfather’s shoe appeared before him, shining like the day it ’twere made. “What am I to do?” He asked the shoe, and it replied, “Do not fear Sid, for the time has almost come.” Sid began to weep. Tears of rage and confusion rolled down his face. What was wrong with this shoe? Didn’t he realize that Sid needed help not riddles, he was family after all.
“Why are you trying to confuse me with riddles?” said Sid, stuttering. He was about to ask this for a second time, when the shoe spoke once more.
“It’s not a riddle, you just don’t know what it means.” The shoe looked very angry at Sid (almost as if it was possible). Sid wanted to apologise for his ignorance, but he didn’t.
“Fool,” wittered the shoe under his breath, and with that, he disappeared, and was replaced with the surroundings that Sid found so familiar once again.
"..pes!" he finished. "I thought they'd knocked this place down!" he gasped as he realised he was in his favourite place to play when he was but a child: the roof of a multi-storey car park in California. It was just as he remembered it, there was the empty old oil canister in which he used to hide and shelter from the wind, here was the barely-conscious drunken old tramp whom he used to poke with a stick until he became enraged and would let out a roar. But most of all, there was his prized possession, his old six-shooter, capable of maiming at ten paces. Tightening his turban, Sid picked up his gun and shot the hobo in the head.
"Heh," he chuckled, "still works." Then turning to his gun he smiled and said, "Let's go and find some money."
As he was about to leave he tripped on some invisible thread and fell on his chin. "Oof," he said, "Who put that there?"
"I did," said the shrill voice of Ana-coinean Sgail.
"Oh, it's you," said Sid, turning to her. She gave him a very unsettling glare. "Why did you go and do that?" he muttered, rubbing his chin.
"Well, I'm no longer offering you my services," she said. "I don't agree with your cold-blooded murdering policy."
"Ahh," said Sid, "Well, as it happens the tramp I just killed was not an ordinary tramp!" He wandered over to the slumped corpse of the hobo and reached in his pocket and pulled out his wallet. Taking it over to Ana-coinean he took out the tramp's ID card and showed it her.
"Oh, I am sorry," apologised the rabbit of light as she examined the information held on the card. "I didn't realise... so I suppose in a way, you just saved the world."
"Indeed I did," said Sid, smiling smugly. "Anywho, is there any way which you could get me out of here? I need to find 11,000 Canadian dollars, if you remember and I ain't gonna be finding them here."
"I'll see what I can do," said Ana-coinean and reached into her little handbag.
It was a nice little handbag, (rumoured to be magical) made of black porcelain and twine. She had found it years ago in an English man’s car boot, and had treasured it ever since. Anywho, When her furry little mitten-like-hand came out of the fine leather interior of the bag, Sid saw to his amazement that Ana-coinean was not holding a beet root, which he had previously assumed she would, but a letter tied up in a bow.
“Well, erm, thanks a lot!” Said Sid, feeling rather betrayed “But how is that supposed to help me in the slightest?”
The look that Ana-coinean gave Sid then hadn’t been given to him since his grandmother was alive. Her facial expression was a mix between dubious yet angry, practical yet ingenious, and trodden down yet boosted up.
“Why don’t you open it, and see what's inside before you judge how important it is. Look at me, judge me by my size do you?”
“Well…” began Sid, but he could not finish, for Ana-coinean butted in stating:
“Quiet you!” and with that, she turned her head, and leaped into the air like some sort of robotic animal.
“Bah!” Said Sid, picking up the letter which Ana-coinean held outstretched just moments before. As he picked it up, Sid became aware that the shadow of someone or something was moving behind him, and he didn’t like it, not one little bit.
“Hey you!” said the shadow. As Sid squinted, he saw that the voice was coming from the mouth of the hobo that he had shot dead earlier on in the story. Sid had never before seen a dead man before, especially one that walked and talked (although admittedly rather crudely). Sid decided to take absolutely no notice of the man whatsoever, but unbeknownst to him, this would be his downfall. The hobo shot him. As Sid bled, he wanted to end the paragraph off in a cliffhanger, so with his last remaining ounce of strength, Sid took out a knife, and carefully opened the letter and began to read. This is what he read:
"Ay, now begins a second storm to rise;
For this is he that moves both wind and tide.
War.
From worthy Edward, King of Albion,
My lord and sovereign, and thy vowed friend,
I come, in kindness and unfeigned love,
First to do greetings to thy royal person;
And then to crave a league of amity;
And lastly to confirm that amity."
For the first time in his life, Sid felt compelled to sing, and despite his less than favourable position, sing he did: "Ay, now begins a second storm to rise," he wailed in an unearthly voice, and as he sang he saw what he thought was reality begin to distort. He continued to sing, "For this is he that moves both wind and tide."
As he sang his consciousness began to ebb and flow. Sounds, colour and taste began to merge and his vision became blurred.
"War!" he screamed at the top of his voice and as he did the car park around him twisted and turned into a searing white light.
Suddenly there was a silence. Sid felt well. But he was rather
confused by where he was.
Chapter Three:
Normality Swing (It’s like a Little Dejá Vu but a Little Bit More)
There was a knock at the door. It was Himself come to visit. The blonde, baby-faced gangsta rapper from Colne entered through the front door.
"Hallo friend!" cried Himself in a tone that can only be described as analytical. He clasped his hands together and approached Sid with the sole intent of giving him a hearty handshake. Sid backed away, suddenly remembering the days of old.
"What is wrong?" questioned Himself.
"Sorry," jolted Sid, as he became aware of his surroundings once more. "It must be those pills I’m taking for my arthritis."
Himself paused for an iota while he thought what arthritis was, then began blurting out nonsense about an eyebrow curler.
"Oh yes," he began once more, "I came here for a reason, there’s someone I’d like you to meet."
While Sid was looking very confused, Himself grabbed him by the arm, and led him outside to his car. He pointed at the window that wound down.
"This, is my fiancé, Mary Krimple."
“.” said Sid, and wet his bone-dry throat for a second try. “What the hell is going on?” he whispered to himself. Mary outstretched an arm, which Sid shook without thinking.
“Delighted to meet you,” said Mary. Had all that just then been a dream? Had Sid just imagined such characters as: Ana-coinean Sgail, Jill III and the man in the hotel? He didn’t think his jelly-like brain twer capable of concocting such ingenious people.
“Likewise,” responded Sid. He must have dreamed it, for here he was, back in his LA home. He did have the feeling that he’d done all this before however. Ah well, thought Sid, might as well put that crazy adventure all behind me. Just then, something caught the corner of Sid’s eye. As his eye bled, he managed, with the other eye, to get a glimpse of what it was that caught him. It was a claw, and not the claw of a mountain bear or lion either, oh no; it was the claw, of Ana-coinean Sgail.
“Sid, what are you doing?” she said. Sid was surprised to say the least.
“Ow……w” mouthed Sid. “You...you’re not real!”
“Oh I’m quite real, I can assure you.”
“No, no, I dreamed you up, along with all the rest of that bizarre quest-”
“No,” interrupted Ana-coinean. “You got pulled into a temporary vortex, your molecular structure was blasted into a thousand tiny pieces, and sent back in time 567 minutes.”
“Oh” Sid said, “So how come you’re here? Shouldn't you be in North Yorkshire?”
“No!” shouted the rabbit of light at Himself and Mary. Then, totally out of the blue, she whipped out a magnum 637, and shot down the newly weds. “Tee hee,” said Ana-coinean Sgail. She grabbed Sid by the arm, made a complicated sign with her ears which inadvertently created another temporary vortex, and jumped though with Sid not far behind.
"So," said Sid as he hurtled through space and time, "where am I and what is going on?"
"It is not for me to say," said Ana-coinean in a quivering voice glowing the colour of magic. "Well actually I'll tell you anyway. I'm travelling through your past, correcting all of your mistakes. It started with you killing that hobo."
"Yes, and you killing my best friend and his wife?"
"Well actually they weren't married yet, but are you sure that was you best friend?" she said in a voice and then disappeared.
"What does this mean?" cried Sid into the void. Then he hit his head on something brown yet invisible.
There was a knock at the door. It was Himself come to visit. The blonde, baby-faced gangsta rapper from Colne entered through the front door.
"Hallo friend!" cried Himself in a tone that can only be described as analytical. He clasped his hands together and approached Sid with the sole intent of giving him a hearty handshake. Sid backed away, suddenly remembering last time this happened... twice.
"What is wrong?" questioned Himself.
"Sorry," jolted Sid as he became aware of his surroundings once more. "It must be those pills I’m taking for my... never mind."
"Oh yes," Himself said, "I came here for a reason, there’s someone I’d like you to meet."
Sid scowled. "I think I know," he said as though he had a mouth full of Bitter Kas.
"I bet you don't," chuckled Himself and grabbed Sid by the arm, and led him outside to his car. He pointed at the window that wound down.
"This, is my fiancé, Mary Krimple."
This gave Sid an idea. "No," he said in the voice of an irate builder, "This, is my fiancé!” Himself turned to Mary, then to Sid, then to a strange bit of sawdust he remembered making as a child.
“Is this true?” Said Himself, finally turning back to Mary.
“I’m afraid that it is,” replied Mary, and she too, turned her head to look at Sid. Sid shook his head, like a teacher shakes his head at an incorrect schoolboy. “Oh!” Mary spoke again, “My mistake,”
Himself (beginning to get a rather nasty headache) slowly raised his left eyebrow, and turned to Sid again. “For your sake Sid, I suggest you leave now,” He did so. While Sid was still walking back to the front door of his house, Ana-coinean leaped out from behind his flowerbed. With a silly grin on her face, she said:
“Sorry Sid, I just couldn't resist it,”
“Yeah, well I've got news for you Ana-coinean Sgail, I don’t even want your services anymore. All I want, is for you to return me to the future!” Sid stood, tapping his foot repeatedly on the ground and looking very very cross.
“Fine!” said Ana-coinean, and with that word, Sid found himself situated on the roof of a multi-storey car-park in California, with a hobo standing right in front of him, pointing a shiny, golden gun right at Sid’s shiny, golden face.
“Appropriate, don’t you think?” said the hobo.
“Not in the slightest,” said Sid, talking like a spiteful child (and taking to his surroundings very well).
“I never did like you.”
“Shame, I found you to be a companion with which I could converse with without feeling the bitter sweet sensation that is feeling uncomfortable,” Sid smiled, the hobo didn’t.
“I’m going to kill you now!” said the hobo, and being rather patient for someone who was about to become a murderer. The hobo squeezed the trigger of his beautiful golden gun. Sid shut his eyes. ‘Click’. ‘Click’
“Oh dear,” said Sid, opening his eyes, staring the hobo dead in the face (who was now panicking, and checking the gun inside, then out). Sid turned, and began to walk away from the frantic hobo. Just then, Sid heard a loud noise, and fell the floor.
“Oh dear,” said the hobo.
The plot thickens eh readers! No? Ah well.
Find out what happened to Sid and freinds next week in 'The Buckled Shoe - Chapters 4, 5 and 6'