Stinky and the Magic Pencil

Ezekiel Woods


Nov 14th, 2006:
they were all around me, these dogs. and i'm not talking about big vicious pitbulls or the fangs-and-hair monsters-of-hell of the comic books. these were shih-tzoodles. punt-dogs. the yappy little things on the end of some old lady's chain that haunts your afternoon stroll. but there were hundreds of them, and somehow, they'd banded together - formed a sort of a... a lap-dog militia.
they had berets and little shih-tzoodle salutes and secret code yaps and everything.

before i knew what was happening, they had me wrapped in duct-tape and were shoving me into the back of one of those little garden wagon things drawn by a harnessed team of uniformed shih-tzoodles. i mean, granted, the tape wasn't really all that sticky with all those hairballs in it, but i guess they'd done their math, and the yardage was sufficient to paralyze me in spite of the stray critter-coif.

they must've drugged me - that or all those dilaudid i took finally kicked in - either way, i guess i lost consciousness.
when i woke up, they were shoving me through what i can only guess was a doggy door for, like, a tea-cup poodle or something. i felt like play-doh, i really did. at one point i thought "okay, this is just all that acid i did in high school. they warned me this might happen, but i never thought...", but several authoritative nips at my ankles told me this was real.

very, very real.


they put me in a small room and left a can of alpo with a bowl of stale water
...and locked the door.

after several hours, i managed to wriggle out of the duct tape - "hey you shih-tzoodles! you can't hold me hostage like this! i'm an american citizen, dammit! george bush will hear about this and he'll send helicopters and tanks after your asses and then you'll be sorry! hey! HEY! where's the fucking CAN OPENER?! christ...!"

Dec 23rd, 2006:
today i was paid a visit by the queen of the shih-tzoodles. she wore a raspberry beret. she informed me that in the spirit of holiday kindness, i would be allowed to send one christmas card to whomever I chose. i carefully addressed it:

"dear george bush.
merry christmas.
you suck.
i hope you choke on some ham.

love and kisses,

that guy who's being held prisoner by the shih-tzoodle army in some dumpy little hole, who you don't care about because you suck.

p.s. i did your daughters ...both of them ...at the same time ...one night at the lincoln memorial ...right up there in the lanky president's big bronze lap. woohoo.

April 2nd, 2007:
with spring coming on, the shih-tzoodle captain told me i would be allowed to open my little window on warm days. while heavily barred, this meant that i'd be able to get some fresh air - a welcome respite from the pervasive stench of dog-wet newspaper.

i opened my window and was glad.

April 11th, 2007:
this morning, a small bird came to my open window. it was a young robin - too young to be on it's own. i left it for a while to see if it's mother would come for it, but she never did, so i fashioned a crude nest for it with straw and a few hairballs, and brought it inside. i named her stinky. wild animals don't generally live long in the care of humans, and i really didn't expect stinky to live through the night. but she did live through the night, and the next night after that... by the end of the week, we'd become great friends.

April 23rd, 2007:
as stinky's flight abilities improved, she became really quite handy to have around. for instance, after one particularly stressful day in the cell, stinky flew away with my visa card. i thought, "okay, this is it. she's gone off to god-knows-where with my credit card and i'm left alone in this pit to be buried alive under mountains of manicurist's bills and preening assistant's fees... i knew this would happen. i knew..." only to have her return a few moments later with both my credit card and a shiny new bottle of scotch. yeah, okay, so it was a blended scotch, but she's a bird. what the hell does she know about scotch anyway?

that night, as stinky and i wallowed in alcoholic blur, i mourned those i'd left behind - all the friends and family and loan officers who had no idea what had become of me. i'd just disappeared. no note, no phone call... just... gone.

it was then that we devised our plan. in the morning, stinky would fly off for her morning constitutional as usual, but this time she would return with a small pencil clutched in her beak. i would use the pencil to draft a note - my address to the world - on the remnants on the bag from the liquor store. stinky would then deliver this message to some computer geek in indiana or someplace, who would post it on some obscure blog somewhere, wedged between the crab-dip recipes and the suicide threats and someone would read it and hopefully tell my mom that i was being held hostage by shih-tzoodles and not dead at all, and oh, by the way, don't sell my records.

we both said we thought this a fine plan and did this awkward little high-five thing and passed out promptly.

April 24th, 2007:
at a painfully bright 9:57 a.m. we decided that a good single-malt really is worth the extra money, and vowed to initiate our communication-to-the-world-at-large plan tomorrow instead.

we further vowed not to regain consciousness until that time.

April 25th, 2007:
a bit green still, both stinky and i were up at dawn's early crack. as the first rays of sun crashed over the far ridge, stinky took off in search of the magic pencil that would mean communication with the outside world. after an hour i'd begun to worry, but minutes later, stinky returned to the window with pencil in beak, and i began to draft my epistle to the world. in the end, it proved to be not much more than a bunch of doodles and a disconnected rant about john bonham and his secret connection with MI5 ...secret that is, until it all came screaming to public attention with his solo record "I Am a Secret Agent with MI5", which ranked respectably on the UK charts, but did poorly in the states.

but the content was not important. just the mere existence of the note proved i was alive, and some of the doodles may have implied something about shih-tzoodles, i don't know.

but as i scratched my last few lines, it occurred to me that we faced something of a hurdle in just how stinky was going to carry such a large piece of paper?

she couldn't carry it in her beak if she was to see where she was going, and she needed to keep her little feet free as her only defense against the vicious flying wallabies that guarded the perimeter of the shih-tzoodle compound.

not to be deterred, stinky flew away a second time and returned several minutes later with a small piece of string - the idea being that i would tie the note around her neck in such a way as to allow unrestricted movement for stinky in flight and situations of wallaby warfare. but the little string proved too short, and stinky flew away a third time - this time returning with a crusty but serviceable rubber band. i carefully positioned the note to allow free movement and slipped the rubber band over her head. for the briefest of moments, stinky's eyes bugged out and her little tongue flopped out the side of her beak, then she promptly died.

i'd killed her. she didn't know... she couldn't know... only I could've known that the rubberband might be too tight for her delicate neck.

i had blood on my hands.

i fell into a despair deeper than i ever thought possible. my wailing shook the very walls of the dark, terrible place that imprisoned me. i wept bitter tears as I prepared the crude béarnaise that would accompany my now-roasting friend to the dinner table.

it was the best meal i'd had in months.

later that day, one of the more friendly of my guards said to me [in yap-ish - a singularly annoying language to the human ear, yet not without it's subtle beauties], "you know, under the geneva convention, you get 20 minutes of online time a month - why not just e-mail someone?" of course! the geneva convention! internet rights! i can't believe i didn't think of it sooner!

then, throwing off my blanket, i rushed through the open door of my cell, down the hall, and into the well-lit, ultra-modern computer facility in the next room.


[announcer: this concludes our allotted internet time for this month. join us again next month when our hero discovers the joy of ferrets!]

EzekielWoods@gmail.com

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