The Sound of Silence

-Simon and Garfunkel


Hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone,
'Neath the halo of a street lamp,
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence.

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening,
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence.

"Fools" said I, "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows.
Hear my words that I might teach you,
Take my arms that I might reach you."
But my words like silent raindrops fell,
And echoed
In the wells of silence.

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made.
And the sign flashed out its warning,
In the words that it was forming.
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls.
And whisper'd in the sounds of silence."

Surviving the Ameripocalypse

Predator Press

[LOBO]

Despite me warning you people a whole week ago, America’s credit rating has been dropped for the first time in history. And as a consequence it lost, like, ten jillion points on the Dow Jones.

I’ve never played the Dow Jones, but I can tell from tedious “research” that Dow Jones is no Halo: all I saw was bottomless Excel spreadsheets and pie charts. It's worse than FarmVille! Whoever lost 10 jillion points playing that stale piece of crap deserves swift and lethal payback. Did they at least get us to a new savepoint?

Worse, America doesn’t handle bad news like this well.

Sometimes I wish we were more classy, smooth and polished.

-You know, like the British.

Quack Attack

Predator Press

[LOBO]

Staring at the doc staring at my bare foot, it occurred to me how seldom it is I'm not wearing shoes, socks -something- on my feet in public.

-The last time I remember trying that was two months ago, hobbling around on crutches in a splint for a short walk: all that came of it was learning my Early Warning System's calculation of how much broken glass lay about was a woefully underinflated quantity.

Maybe I contracted hepatitis.

The doc twists my aching ankle at impossible angles, and I try not to squirm. C’mon LOBO, I’m thinking. This is minor. Be a man. It’s not like you’re Joe Theismann-

The doctor, momentarily satisfied with the knot tying on my lower leg, sits back on his heel and adopts a thoughtful expression.

“Nyarlathotep?” he asks.

I scowl. “What team does he play for?”

“No,” he corrects. “I mean Doctor Nyarlathotep gave you the referral to see me?”

“Oh,” I says. “Yes. Sorry. I was thinking about sports medicine, football-”

He smiles as he stands, and peers deeply into backlit x-rays of my Adonis-like ankle. “You’re a football fan too, eh?”

“Yeah,” I says blandly, experimentally wiggling my toes. “I used to live around the corner from the Chicago Bears’ training camp.”

“Well you have a lot of ligament damage,” he says. Clicking his pen, he grabs my chart and scrawls some notes. “But I can correct that with a very simple outpatient surgery.”

“Huh,” I says. “So doc, who is your team?”

Don’t say Packers. Don’t say Packers …

“The Rams.”

I don’t remember anything after that.

-But I’m pretty sure I screamed.

Eating dis Order

Predator Press

[LOBO]

“I think you should add some rice,” I say, staring into the bubbling red soup boiling in the monstrous crock pot. “It looks kinda watery for chili.”

Mother still towered over me, and I was about eye-level with her apron tie. “Your father doesn’t like rice,” she replied, stirring. Blowing on a dripping wooden spoon, she brought me down a taste. “What do you think?”

Pinto beans in hot water.

“How about jalapenos?” I suggest.

She pours a bowl. “Your brothers and sisters hate jalapenos.”

“Salt?”

“Nobody eats salt,” she says, bringing the bowl to the table. “Sodium is bad for your health. Now stop complaining and eat. I want this all gone when we get back.”

“Where are you guys going?”

She folds her apron and grabs her car keys.

“We’re going to McDonald’s.”

Mexican Blues

Predator Press

[LOBO]

It turns out a large part of this beloved nation’s crippling debt is due to Social Security.

Social Security, it turns out, is money we have to pay people once they get old. You know, like 30 or so.

So all we need to do is get rid of the old people.

There. We're all thinking it, and I finally said it: we need to get rid of old people, and the sooner the better.

You know how all those Mexicans are sneaking into Arizona? We should just funnel the old people out the same way, and at the same rate -you know, like a señor citizen exchange program. Those truck trailers goin back empty is a total waste of precious fuel anyway.

And what if we raised a few bucks via Pay-Per-View by capitalizing on old people’s apparently universal inability to drive?

-Just enter gramma in a demolition derby, and tell her it’s a Walmart parking lot.

Whereas LOBO Must Once Again Rescue America

-Hello Washington? Are you listening? Hello?

Predator Press

[LOBO]

People are always asking me, “LOBO, as one of the most widely-respected thinkers of the Twentieth Centurion, can you please weigh in on what America must do to salvage itself in these dark economic times?”

Well I’m glad you asked me that. See while not yet heralded for my accomplishments in the field of economics, I’m cool with that because those guys are a bunch of dumbass morons anyways.

As a staunch fan of space exploration and scientifical development, I think the gradual fade of our NASA funding may have been a clarion call things have been in economic decline for some time.

We have no one to blame but yourselves. And decades of unspectacular clarion players.

Am I bitter you people waited so long to consult me? Hell yes. Still it is incumbent upon all endowed with the radiant brainiosity such as mine -however uncommon- to protect all of Humankind under my iron fists of galvanized wisdom:

Warfare: We can’t pay Pakistan two billion dollars a year to fight terrorism. I’ll be kind and suggest Pakistan is merely incapable of reciprocating the intended value of that money, as demonstrated by the recently-found hideout of Osama bin Laden [ObL].

We look at the situation like cancer: if we don’t encourage or enable governments to resist the infiltration of extremists, in ten years the respective “host” will be so addled they will be impossible to diplomatically relate to.

-But the problem is our cancer patient doesn’t want to get the necessary chemotherapy.

I think this is self-correcting. Like cancer, the host dies and takes the disease with it. Remember ObL was once our ally, and to some degree 9/11 is the result of the United States “playing ball” with him: the landscape of that war abruptly changed, and the sudden withdrawal of US support left ObL feeling betrayed ... Jihad was declared, and the rest is history.

Groups such as these are not necessarily under a social contract. Nor have they unified methods -in fact they often operate completely independently of each other, thus even attempts to appease them will draw unpredictable results. But if Pakistan -much more accessible to middle-eastern “payback” both geographically and fiscally- wishes to handle this on their own, I feel we cannot and should not attempt to force it upon them.

They’ll figure it out eventually. Probably too late … But hey, we tried, right?

Eugenics: Sterilize everybody. The temporary antidote is $1,000 cash, which you get back in the form of paying the emergency room bill and/or baby formula and diapers. Does this mean only people with money can have babies? Yes it does.

Firstly, $1,000 is not exactly a princely sum. But it is enough for you to need a job (and presumably a car and a home) to have it.

I don’t really care if the money comes from relatives either. Grandparents desperate for grandkids? If they are that enamored with the concept they will fork out a grand, I’m fine with that. This money shows a level of commitment where it’s unlikely the child will end up a tool for a welfare dole, in an orphanage, or roving the streets in gangs to supplement the emotional void of apathetic and broken families.

Can’t raise $1,000? Can’t raise a baby. Period. I have it on good authority raising babies can be $1,500 -and sometimes even more.

Consider: This game would be a lot easier
if we got it down to one fucking button.

Economic Diversity: I have always felt a service-based economy is lunacy. If you buy an American product or service from an American, you have added nothing to the cash pool -you have merely changed where the money is locally. When -inevitably- you buy a foreign product or service, you have removed that money from the pool. Thus if we sell nothing, our pool slowly shrinks. Like it or not, we are dependent on commerce from other countries to make our pool larger. In terms of labor we can’t compete with a lot of the world: if it costs half as much to create or service outside of the United States, guess what? That industry -and money- is going elsewhere.

But wasn’t this always true? From the 50s through the 70s -arguably an American ’heyday’ of sorts- we would compete on a global scale in terms of quality. Everything we made was simply better.

I was watching a classic sitcom the other day, and two men were bonding while repairing a toaster. I thought repair? How quaint! Now it’s almost more practical to simply buy a new toaster … one that is just as likely to break down in a year as well. But wouldn’t you pay a little more for a toaster knowing it was likely to be the last toaster you ever need buy? Screw male bonding. Let’s get back to monosyllabic grunts between football plays.

I’ll go a little further on this and suggest it’s a good idea for this to be a migration-friendly country, especially with regard to foreign businesses and real estate. Both bring in more cash, making our pool bigger. Further, as an ancillary benefit, it gives other countries a vested interest in our overall well-being.

Marijuana: I would have done tedious “research” to bring out some specific dollar amounts, but every figure I came up with varied wildly from source to source. And all seemed shamelessly modified by the motives of the respective organization.

But when you imagine the cost of the misplaced law enforcement (and tools like helicopters, cars, et cetera), violator incarceration, attorneys, trials, facilitation of probation, ad nauseam, doesn’t it seem like a hefty pile of cash to spend busting a guy who only wants to watch cartoons and order Dominos’ Pizza?

And what the hell do these people have against Domino’s Pizza?

Defense Spending: I’m not going to make sweeping reformation suggestions here, because nobody knows better than me that our safety relies on having the best state-of-the-art board with the highest-tech nail in it.

But shrewdness is the watchword here. Would it kill us to occasionally buy scratch ‘n dent Apache helicopters? We all know an Apache helicopter decreases in value the second it leaves the showroom -so why aren’t we buying up the ones the Saudis only put a few thousand miles on before they became bored with it?

Boeing: Isn’t she a beauty? Formerly flown only ever-so-gently by a little old lady from Ethiopia.

America: What is the odometer reading?

Boeing: Fifty-six Bulgarians. Then she washed, waxed, and mothballed it. I doubt it has even needed an oil change yet.

America: [whistles] We’ll take it.

And while we’re on the subject, doesn’t Lockheed Martin issue coupons and customer loyalty discounts? We would get a lot more bang for our buck [literally] if we shopped for warheads and submarines on Double Coupon Day …

A Fairy Tale

Predator Press

[LOBO]

Once upon a time, in the sprawling wooded hills called Sprawling Wooded Hills, there was a quaint little hamlet called Towndaleburgville.

This lovely little village was singular in that the people -peasant, pauper, knight, and baron alike- were all living very happily and contented in peaceful harmony. This was due largely in part to the glorious reign of the great King Artemis King. King King, while ruling his cheerful subjects in a fair and just manor, found much leisure time -as not much ever happened in Towndaleburgville- and spent most of his time solving puzzles and playing games with the brighter of his regents.

One day his lovely daughter, the fair princess Phoebe King, was riding her horse to the outskirts of the land. She loved the beautiful countryside of Sprawling Wooded Hills, the smells of nature and the friendly animals … but most of all, to view the sunset from a tall precipice at the southern part of the wood. She rode her beautiful white stallion she named “Beautiful White Stallion” to this place almost every evening when there were no royal affairs, balls, or cute knights hanging around.

But today from her secret perch with the dazzling view of the sunset, she saw something very odd: there was a tall, thick plume of smoke coming up from the wood below.

“Look there, Beautiful White Stallion!” she pointed, despite that most animals usually just look at your finger rather than whatever you are pointing at. “Why, we simply must go see what is going on down there!”

Beautiful White Stallion balked; the animal had just hauled them all the way up this damned precipice as he did faithfully almost every evening. And it’s not easy to remain a “beautiful white stallion” when some rich brat makes you go mountain climbing every day. And now the little tart wanted to go strolling into God-knows-what. It was probably just some urban renewal or another iPod factory anyway. Completely forgetting himself in momentary exasperation, he dropped his head to the lush green grass and muttered in perfect English, “You bitch!”

Princess Phoebe was stunned. “Beautiful White Stallion!” she exclaimed with glee and surprise. “You can speak?”

Beautiful White Stallion looked about in a feigned confused innocence, as if to say What? Who? Me? I’m just a dumb-assed horse with a stupid name, remember? He knew that if she knew he could speak, suddenly he would have to conduct endless conversations about shopping, fashion and gossip. And it wouldn't stop there, either. Soon he's got a cellphone and she's calling him in the middle of the night; her hair in curlers and tissues between her toes as she polishes her nails, ruthlessly and with great prejudice destroying some fantastic sporting event on T.V. with endless drivel about some Duke's great ass. Beautiful White Stallion shuddered as he realized he had no fingers with which to hang up a cellphone with ... and he never did find a calling plan for minutes that he could comprehend anyway.

But ultimately, if she knew he could speak, he would feel compelled to tell the oblivious little strumpet what a profoundly boneheaded and stupid idea these reckless sojourns were. A young, beautiful, rich, airheaded princess wandering around unarmed and alone in strange lands was bound to become assailed by Scientologists or something equally horrifying. And Beautiful White Stallion was an optimist: he hoped they would one day accidentally stumble across a bunch of axe-wielding savage cannibals or maybe a GREENPEACE member (just about any homicidal antisocial malcontented neurotic sociopath maniac would do really) who would finally "off" this harlot, forever ending his days of climbing that damned precipice.

“Oh,” Princess Phoebe replied disappointedly. “Oh well. Sorry. Off we go then.”

"Tramp!"


***

The closer they got to the pillar of smoke, the more it became apparent that this was no mere normal campfire. It was huge for one. And rather than normal smoke, the place reeked of sulfur, brimstone, and cheddar cheese. Princess Phoebe dismounted, hoping that by stroking Beautiful White Stallion’s nose and walking with him, it might have a certain calming effect -for indeed, the whole place gave her the heebie-jeebies. Soon the found a clearing, and right in the center, surrounded by blasted and scorched earth was a huge cavern mouth from which acrid smoke rolled and billowed into the sky.

“Stay here, my loyal Beautiful White Stallion” soothed the Princess. “I’ll get to the bottom of this!”

She came into the clearing cautiously, stopped about halfway, and called out in a friendly voice, “Halloo! Is anyone there?”

Beautiful White Stallion rolled his eyes and muttered aloud, “I don’t believe this s---!” but was cut off by the sharp stare from the Princess. Damn, he thought. I gotta be more careful! Beautiful White Stallion turned away, looked to the sky, and whinnied the most horse-like whinny he could muster as he pawed the ground absently with a front hoof.

Suddenly, the idea of a talking horse leapt from both of their minds: they heard what seemed to be a gigantic, thundering footsteps. Hauling itself from the cave with speed and grace that belied its enormous size, a huge dragon at least three hundred yards from tip to tail slithered from the cave’s mouth.

“Okay, that’s it,” stated Beautiful White Stallion flatly as he turned. Then bolting for the woods the princess heard him say, “I’m out of here!”

“Beautiful White Stallion!” the princess cried in terror.

“Screw this sister!” She heard his unfamiliar voice fading in the distance. “I quit!”


***

The princess turned slowly, shaking in sheer terror; she could feel the beast’s hot breath on her now. Inches from her, the dragon stopped, eyeing her carefully. The dragon closed its eyes, and putting his massive muzzle against her, inhaled deeply.

He was smelling her.

This seemed to go on forever, and Princess Phoebe closed her own eyes, unable to bear waiting for the behemoth to snatch her up in his huge jaws and devour her.

The dragon stopped suddenly and reared up on its hindquarters.

"This is it" she thought, prepared for the end. She would miss the final season of Melrose Place. And she hoped her daddy would remember to cancel her subscription to Cosmopolitan …

“YOU DROPPED SOMETHING,” the dragon boomed in a voice that shook the ground.

Princess Phoebe opened one eye, and peeked at the monster. “ What?” she stammered. She frantically looked around on the ground. Nothing. Bewildered, she craned her neck to give the beast a nasty look. “Hey, are you going to eat me or not?”

“YOU DROPPED SOMETHING,” repeated the dragon.

“What!?” she demanded.

“MY JAW!”

The dragon chuckled merrily. “SORRY. I SAW THAT ON A T.V. SHOW LAST NIGHT AND THOUGHT IT WAS PRETTY FUNNY.”

Princess Phoebe scowled. Men, all alike. Even the ones that are reptiles on the outside.

“WHEW!” the dragon's massive head gracefully circled her for a closer inspection. “YOU’RE QUITE A DISH, PARDON THE PUN. NICE GAMS. AND I THINK I SMELL,” he sniffed her again, “ROYAL BLOOD TOO.”

Princess Phoebe poked him hard in the nose. The dragon flinched. “All right. Back off there buster!”

The dragon … smiled? “SERIOUSLY. IF I WAS A FEW HUNDRED YEARS YOUNGER,” he paused, “AND ANATOMICALLY EQUIPT SO AS TO NOT BLOW YOU INTO A MILLION PIECES- ”

This princess tilted her head, put one hand on her hip, and pointing scoldingly with her other exclaimed, “This is harassment you know!”

“SORRY.”

She looked around, feeling a little more comfortable having asserted herself and not having been ripped to shreds. “What are you doing here?”

“FEDERAL RELOCATION PROGRAM. I TESTIFIED AGAINST A WICKED QUEEN THAT BOOTLEGGED A LOT OF NAPSTER STUFF."

She wasn’t sure if he was joking or not. “Well you had better get those fires under control. I’m sure this is some kind of zoning violation.”

“THERE IS NO FIRE,” the said reassuringly. “I WAS MAKING A QUICHE, AND THINGS GOT A LITTLE CRAZY IN THE KITCHEN.” He paused thoughtfully. “WOULD YOU LIKE TO CHECK IT OUT?”

Walk right into a dragon’s den? she thought for a second.

“Sure!” she replied excitedly.

***

The dragon’s place was, although really warm inside, very posh. He was very proud of his lavish pad and gave her a grand tour, pulling out all the stops.

And he turned out to be very educated as far as dragons go. They talked about philosophy and world events. In the billiards room, they drank wine, shot pool and played darts. They played “Twister” and “Scrabble”- the dragon was amazing at Scrabble-- and Princess Phoebe even considered inviting him to the Annual National Scrabble Tournament that was taking place in Towndaleburgville the next day. They discussed baseball -he was a Sox fan, she was a Cubs- and they compared Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa’s RBI records.

They laughed, they cried.

The got hammered.

Suddenly Princess Phoebe glanced at her watch. “It’s three-thirty in the morning!” she panicked. “My daddy’s going to kill me! I have to get home.”

The dragon spread his mighty wings. “WANT A RIDE?” he slurred.

“Really?”

“YES. THREE MINUTE FLIGHT, EIGHT HOUR WALK. YOU DECIDE. BESIDES, I COULDN’T LET YOU WALK HOME IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT ALONE. YOU HEARD THE NARRATOR: YOU’RE HAMMERED.”

“Yes, but he said you’re hammered too,” she managed between violent hiccups.

“WHO’S GOING TO PULL ME OVER?”


***

It was a rather good thing that Princess Phoebe had passed out early in the trip. The dragon was so intoxicated he went the wrong way, and had to take her all the way around the world to get her to Towndaleburgville. When he arrived, he was so exhausted and drunk he slammed right into the castle, completely demolishing the South Wall. He set her down gently, staggered three steps to the left, crashed through the drawbridge helplessly, and passed out right there in the castle moat.

He woke the next morning to an angry Towndaleburgville mob branding all sorts of weapons. He tried to stand and flee, but he had been chained down. Dimly, he became aware of a rather bleary and haggard-looking Princess Phoebe arguing and pleading with the crowd.

“He’s a good dragon I tell you,” she cried, climbing on his muzzle. “Wake up!” Tell them you’re not going to be a bad dragon!”

He opened one eye all he could manage under the painful sun. “DOES ANYBODY HAVE A FEW THOUSAND ASPRIN?” he managed. His giant, bloodshot eye moved over the angry crowd as they silently pondered the question for a moment.

Another figure climbed onto his muzzle. The king. “My daughter tells me you play a great game of Scrabble.”

“UH HUH,” the poor dragon moaned.

“Good then,” the good King King nodded. “Today you will play in the tourney. If you win you are free, but have to donate the prize to Towndaleburgville for castle repairs.”

The dragon painfully creaked the eye open again. “AND IF I DON’T?”

“Then you’ll stay right there long enough for us to build the biggest guillotine ever.”

While the dragon slept it off a few more hours, the people arriving for the tourney just marveled at the magnificent specimen sleeping in the Towndaleburgville castle moat. But the real marveling came in when the dragon woke and began tourney play.

He kicked ass. It finally came down to the dragon and King King in the final round, and the dragon creamed him with a final score of seven hundred and twelve to one hundred and two. The good King King lived up to his bargain and set the dragon free -but only after the dragon signed a bunch of documents leaving all the prize money to Towndaleburgville.


***

While his rule was usually good and just, there was just one little problem: King King was secretly a raging alcoholic, and a REAL bad loser. When he received word that Sir Blaine the Dragon Slayer had arrived (panting and frantic for having missed the Scrabble tourney), King King, surly from his humiliating defeat in front of all his subjects (and about a fifth of Jack Daniels), was hatching a plot. He ordered Princess Phoebe secretly locked in the dungeon, guarded with the explicit instructions that no Disney characters -animal or otherwise- were allowed any access.

“Sir Blaine,” the king slurred as the famous knight entered his chambers. King King was totally bomblast by this point.

“Your Highness,” Sir Blaine replied. As he knelt before the king, his Magical, Lifetime-Warranted Dragon-Proof armor clanked noisily, making the King wince.

The King proceeded to tell the knight a fanciful tale of how the evil dragon destroyed the castle, cheated at the games, stole the prize money, and as a final act of evil had kidnapped his beautiful and marryable-aged daughter Princess Phoebe ...

Sir Blaine left King King’s chambers that night in a fit of fury. The vile beast! To rampage around town like that. To kidnap Princess Phoebe, a wonderful girl that could make any knight’s codpiece suddenly uncomfortable! And, perhaps most despicable of all, to cheat at Scrabble! The mere thought of this twisted vermin roaming the country and committing such crimes against humanity sent Sir Blaine into such a fury, he grabbed a pencil off of the King's vast desk and snapped it cleanly in twain. Eventually. Using his boot. "That abomination must pay with it's life!", he roared. He drew his magical sword, the mighty Sword of EXCLAIMER, (EXCLAIMER wasn’t particularly useful at slaying dragons per se, but wow could it chew one out… even as Sir Blaine drew the mighty weapon, it loosed a stream of dragon obscenities so vehement and odious, I dare not repeat them in this story!) and solemnly vowed revenge.

King King had commissioned Sir Blaine the princesses’ own noble steed Beautiful White Stallion to conduct the grizzly business of slaying the beast, and Sir Blaine stormed off to the stables.

But tonight was Beautiful White Stallion's "Euchre" game.

It was going to be a long night.


***

When King King awoke the next afternoon, he was immediately informed by one of his advisors what he had done. He ran down to the dungeon in tears, wading through the dead Disney characters [this can't be called a 'fairy tale' without an actual fairy, so there she is on the dungeon floor, riddled with silver arrows or something] and immediately freed Princess Phoebe ... all the while begging her forgiveness. When the princess found out about Sir Blaine and the plot to kill the dragon, she immediately remembered that Sir Blaine had a hot car and an extensive, lucrative portfolio of diversified stock options in Microsoft. Immediately, the two hastened to the site of the ill-fated battle.


***

“Dragon!” Sir Blaine bellowed at the mouth of the cave. Standing around him in a huge semi-circle was the whole village of Towndaleburgville, as well as every other neighboring town within a hundred miles, and they all tittered with nervous excitedness.

“Dragon!” he repeated. He had to yell now; EXCLAIMER was in full-blown Tourette’s mode now, screaming things about the dragon’s mother and so forth. It was somewhat irritating.

It wasn’t long before the dragon sauntered out, a weary, confused look upon his leathery reptilian face. “HOW DO YOU DO?” he asked with groggy politeness.

“Surrender the princess, and prepare to be slain!” cried Sir Blaine defiantly.

The dragon as well as the surrounding crowd, began looking at each other in complete confusion.

“WHAT?” the dragon finally asked.

“The good King King told me all about your exploits yesterday. About you destroying the castle, kidnapping the princess, and worst of all cheating at Scrabble you vile beast!”

The crowd erupted into a disappointed din, a rush of understanding leapt around them like lightning bolts.

“That drunken bastard told you what?” exclaimed one peasant.

“Ah jeez … there he goes again. King King getting all smashed and making trouble again,” replied a carpenter.

Sir Blaine looked around. “You mean it’s not true?”

“Ah, not a word, good knight,” said the village barkeep. "My kids are going to Stanford."

“He does this all the time,” yelled and exasperated smithy. “Blast!”

Sir Blaine glanced down at EXCLAIMER, still screaming obscenities at the bewildered dragon. “Oh do shut up!” growled the knight as he sheathed the weapon. He then craned his neck to look up at the towering dragon. He pulled the face shield back over his forehead so the beast could see his face and shrugged pathetically.

“Sorry,” he said sincerely.

“THAT’S QUITE ALL RIGHT SIR,” boomed the dragon, extending a single claw. Sir Blaine too the huge digit in both hands and shook it effusively.

“You mean there isn’t going to be a battle now?” shouted the village leatherworker.

Disappointed murmurs rippled through the crowd … then suddenly they started booing, throwing things at the knight and dragon.

“Fight! Fight! Fight!” started a chant.

Suddenly the king and the princess pulled into the clearing. The king raised his arms in the air to silence the crowd. “There will be no slaying today!” he commanded with authority (and really bad breath). The crowd quieted. “I actually have a better idea!”


***

The whole crowd, horses, wagons, everything, was lead by the dragon inside the cave. Everyone marveled at the steamy-hot yet palatial abode, and everyone was dazzled by the dragon’s splendid taste.

“Is that a Pioneer stereo?” someone piped.

“And Blaupunkt speakers, too!” wondered another aloud.

“A widescreen plasma T.V. and a satellite dish!”

Beautiful White Stallion, spared the "battle", still grumbled about the heat. “All this…but why couldn’t he get central air?”

The “oohs” and “ahhhs” continued all the way into the magnificent billiard room, so large everyone fit inside. The dragon moved to one side. Sir Blaine, sweating profusely in his armor, moved to the other. Princess Phoebe grabbed a box from the shelf, and proceeded to unfold the Scrabble board on the table between them.

Sir Blaine picked out seven tiles and set them up on the board, clumsily dropping several through his metal gloves. “Dragon,” he finally stated, “would you mind too terribly if I removed this stuff? It’s very clumsy for this … and it’s like wearing an oven in here.”

“NOT AT ALL,” the dragon shrugged, daintily picking his own seven tiles.

Sir Blaine began the enormous task of removing all the metal gear. Princess Phoebe aided when she could. The onlookers were all now more or less seated across the vast billiards room floor, straining to get a view of the coming competition. Few noticed as Princess Phoebe removed Sir Blaine’s last metal legging, their eyes met a lingering moment. Fewer still noticed the shy smile she gave the noble knight when his codpiece creaked, or the faint tint of pink that crossed his face as she beamed back at him knowingly.

All noticed that, just as Sir Blaine leaned forward to whisper something in the princess’s ear, the dragon spread his mighty wings, reared up and struck out at Sir Blaine with the speed of lightning. Sir Blaine, with the exception of his two feet severed at the smoldering ankles, was gone. His chair was gone too.

Everyone froze, completely stunned … except the dragon. He broke the silence with a sickening crunching sound that made everyone’s hair stand on end. Princess Phoebe, splattered in blood, screamed.

“DRAGON SLAYER,” the dragon chuckled, chewing noisily. “THE MIGHTY BLAINE!” (He swallowed, with some effort.) “-KILLER OF MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS!” Laughing loudly now, with a macabre grin that showed almost all of his first three rows of bloodied teeth. “TWO DAYS WAS ALL IT TOOK,” he paused to belch, and one of Sir Blaine’s Scrabble tiles tumbled out. “WELL, BESIDES ALL THOSE YEARS OF PRACTICE AT THIS SILLY GAME!”

The stun was wearing off, giving way to sheer animal panic. The dragon tilted his head, and licked his lips, clearly relishing the sights and sounds of human terror.


***

From the point where the dragon ate the Princess and King, to the point when the dragon crushed the last three remaining human survivors against the cave wall with a single sweeping blow from his mighty tail was mere seconds.

Only Beautiful White Stallion remained. He was covered in blood, and badly in shock. They stared at each other for what seemed like an eternity.

Finally after six or seven choked attempts, Beautiful White Stallion managed a single word.

“Why?” he stammered.

The dragon gave an ominous pause. Then, saying nothing, he pointed a huge leathery wing at the table.

At his Scrabble tiles.

Shakily, Beautiful White Stallion walked over to them. “I… I can understand Sir Blaine… I mean your family and all … but why everyone?”

He looked at the dragon's tiles for a long moment, a confused and furrowed look on his face. They read “ACXCACA”. Looking up at the dragon, he fearfully shook his head to say I don’t understand. The dragon shook his head disgustedly. “STUPID HORSE!” he leaned in with that bloodied, horrible smile. “THE LETTERS.”

Beautiful White Stallion looked again. “ACXCACA”. It made no sense …

Suddenly, the dragon smacked himself in the forehead with a blood-soaked claw. “STUPID DRAGON. HORSES CAN’T READ!” He laughed a sickeningly good-natured laugh as he gingerly picked up his tiles. “I HAD THREE ‘A’S, THREE ‘C’S, AND ONE ‘X’. WHAT THE HELL WAS I SUPPOSED TO SPELL WITH THAT?”