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| Trumpetian Countryside |
Somewhere in Europe there was a country called Trumpetia. Every year, the King of Trumpetia held a noisy
argument on the floor of the Parliament with members of each of the two
opposing parties: the Richies and the Rest. The Richies always agreed with the King and
the Rest always disagreed with both the monarch and the Richies. It made for a lively time, especially when
the Rest held a filibuster, which they did every couple of years. Local hospitals had ambulances ready to whisk
the wounded to the nearest emergency rooms.
It had been years since any members of Parliament had been mortally
wounded, which made everyone happy, because nobody liked to call the police.
Queen Bambi of Trumpetia was a former porn star who caught
the eye of the King ten years earlier when he was playing adult videos on his
flat screen TV. He thought that her body
parts would be up for grabs and that she could be kept in line. He was right.
It never bothered the King when the Queen declined to attend state
events, because he figured she was more useful back in the bedroom, anyway.
The King’s sister Roxane White was supposed to inherit the
throne. Roxane had plans for reforming
all kinds of things that a lot of people thought needed reforming. This made the Richies nervous. They staged a coup and installed the younger
brother as King. Roxane escaped to some
backwater town in Lower Moravia, where she changed her name and opened a Banana
Republic store. Her young daughter, Snow
White, was left behind because she couldn’t fit into her mother’s suitcase. The King kept Snow around, figuring he could
always use her to seal an alliance or other lucrative deal by forcing her to
marry some dictator’s son.
That’s enough backstory.
You get the idea.
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| Queen Bambi trying to go incognito |
The Queen had a robot mirror that could talk. Every day the mirror assured her that she was
the most beautiful woman around. The
facelift, the workouts, and all those spa treatments, in addition to the
fortune she spent on anti-aging creams, facials and makeup, were still paying
off. The royal treasury was paying for
all of it, so nothing was lost, except some poverty-stricken taxpayers’ money,
and everyone knew poverty-stricken taxpayers didn’t count because they didn’t
have any money.
One day, Queen Bambi got a shock when the mirror told her
Snow was better looking than she was.
“What?” she screamed
at the mirror. “That’s impossible!”
“I am not programmed to lie,” said the mirror, “and that
girl is hotter than a Manhattan sidewalk in 92-degree weather. You’re beautiful, but, on a scale of 1 to 10,
she’s a 15.”
“How did she become so beautiful overnight?” asked the Queen. “Just last month, you told me I was the most
beautiful woman in the kingdom.”
“She got a makeover,” said the mirror.
The Queen was livid.
Didn’t that flat chested little upstart know anything about respecting the
prerogatives of royal usurpers? She called
her friend Andrew the Assassin on his disposable cell phone and gave him an
order.
“Kidnap Snow White, take her into the woods and whack her.”
“Any particular method you want I should use?”
“Just shoot the bitch, and don’t ask questions!”
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| Andrew the Assassin |
Andrew the Assassin abducted Snow, bound her with duct tape,
shoved her into the back seat of his SUV and took off for the woods. Along the way, Andy fell in love with Snow. He could kill anybody except people he was in
love with. He unbound the duct tape from
Snow’s hands and mouth and let her go, after making her promise to meet him at
his place whenever it was safe again. He
took a gold chain that she was wearing, to provide proof to the Queen that Snow
was pushing up daisies. He wanted to
make sure he’d get his fee. Then he took
off in his SUV and left her there wondering where she was and if there were any
wild animals nearby. She had heard what
happened to Red Riding Hood’s grandmother.
Snow started walking, and she soon came to a quaint rustic log
house in a clearing. She knocked on the
door, but nobody answered. The door was
unlocked, so she went inside. She found
a light switch, and when she turned on the light she was surprised to find a
neat little room with a Persian rug, a wooden table with seven places set, a
La-Z-Boy recliner, a leather couch and a wooden rocker. She wandered into the kitchen, where she
found a refrigerator stocked with bottles of beer, three slices of pizza in a
box and two gallons of Rocky Road ice cream.
The bathroom had a jacuzzi and a shelf with various expensive brands of
shaving cream and men’s cologne on it. The
toilet seat was up. In the bedrooms, she
found three neatly made bunk beds and one twin-sized bed. She was so exhausted that she lay down on top
of the twin-sized bed and immediately fell asleep.
Meanwhile, back in the capital, the top executives of Dwarf Brothers
Computers were preparing to go home to that little house in the woods. There were seven of them, and they were,
indeed, brothers. They were even richer
than the King, which was illegal, so they kept most of their money in the
Cayman Islands. Despite their surname,
they were all more than six feet tall.
Their names were Dwayne, Darryl, Dan, Doug, David, Dorian and Ernie. They were all in their 20s, which explains
why none of them were married yet, although five of them were engaged. The other two were gay.
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| Snow White at a costume ball |
They took three helicopters home. When they got to the house, Dwayne discovered
that the door was unlocked but nothing was missing, and made a mental note to
yell at the cleaning woman. Dwayne was
the first to go into the bedroom where Snow was sleeping on his twin bed.
“Whoa!” said Dwayne.
“What?” said the
others, one by one.
“You gotta see this!”
said Dwayne
All of them came into the room and stared down at Snow.
“Holy cannoli!” said
Ernie.
The racket woke Snow, who slowly opened her eyes and
screamed when she saw seven tall men staring at her. It took them a minute to calm her down and
assure her they weren’t degenerates, serial killers or gangsters. They asked her how she got there, and Snow
told them the whole story about how her aunt had hired Andrew the Assassin to
bring her into the woods and rub her out, but he was in love with her, although
she didn’t love him back, but she didn’t tell him that because he had a gun,
and he had left her alive and driven off and she didn’t want to get eaten by a
wolf so she started walking and ended up here.
The brothers felt sorry for Snow. They arranged for her to stay hidden in their
house in return for light housekeeping and cooking the meals. Fortunately, there was a copy of “Cooking for
People Who Can’t Boil Water” in the house, so Snow had a reference. Dan, who was the compulsive neat freak of the
group, taught Snow how to use a broom, a mop, a dishcloth and a feather
duster. Being a deposed princess, she
had never had to do any work, but she enjoyed being useful for a change. She discovered that work was easier if she
did it while singing at the top of her lungs.
It was a good thing that there were no neighbors and the seven brothers
were always at work when she was puttering around the house, because she couldn’t
carry a tune.
This happy situation went on until the next time Queen Bambi
consulted her robot mirror. The mirror
again told her that Snow White was more beautiful than she was.
“You lying pile of scrap!” she shouted. “Snow White is dead!”
“If she’s dead, I’m George Clooney!” said the mirror. It then explained to the Queen everything
that had gone down.
After she was finished pounding the floor, Queen Bambi sat
up and made a quick decision. If you
want anything done right, do it yourself.
Forget Andrew the Assassin. She
was Queen Bambi of Trumpetia, formerly Bambi Lovebox, originally Daisy Knodelbecker,
of the Bronxtown Knodelbeckers. Nobody
messed with a Knodelbecker and got away with it. Just ask any of their neighbors who still had
a house to live in.
She had some designer drugs in her underwear drawer, left
over from her days as a porn star. The
following afternoon, she took a load of stuff and injected it into one side of
a big, juicy Red Delicious apple. She
marked the poisoned side of the fruit with a Magic Marker and put it into a
basket, along with three normal apples, two tangerines and a kumquat. She changed into a purple floral muumuu and
put a blue cloak with a big hood over it.
The mirror had told Bambi exactly where Snow was staying,
and she got clear directions on the GPS in the black Mercedes the King had
given her last Valentine’s Day, after a particularly memorable session of
uninhibited passion. She parked the car
a short distance from the house, put the hood up over her head and half her
face and picked up the basket of fruit.
She walked to the house and knocked on the door.
When Snow answered the door, Bambi pretended to be a
door-to-door fruit seller. She offered
Snow a taste of the spiked apple, just, she said, to show her how delicious it
was. To show that everything was
alright, Bambi took a bite out of what she knew was the good side of the
apple. Snow took a bite out of the other
side, made a comment about the apple not being ripe enough, declined to buy
anything and started to go back into the house.
She suddenly stopped and began to wheeze very loudly, after which she
passed out and lay in the doorway as if dead.
Bambi laughed long, hard and high. She ran back to the Mercedes, turned on the
ignition, gunned the gas pedal and sped away.
They found her later, glassy-eyed and incoherent, after she ran the car
into the rear end of a truck full of live lobsters. There were lobsters all over the street, and
several of them were hanging from Bambi’s cloak. She was taken to the emergency room of the
Trumpetia Memorial Medical Center. From
there she was admitted to the hospital, where it took her two weeks to come out
of a coma.
She had bitten the wrong side of the apple, and had taken
her own overdose.
Meanwhile, the seven brothers returned home to find Snow on
the floor by the front door, looking like she wasn’t breathing. They had brought a potential client and his
lawyer with them, to have a late meeting and finalize a deal. The client, whose name was George Prince, was
trained in CPR and First Aid, and he determined that Snow had a piece of apple
stuck in her throat. He gave her the
Heimlich Maneuver and she began to breathe again.
Snow White and George Prince fell in love and got
married. She became Snow Prince. They had a nice, big McMansion in the
suburbs, had three children who only went to the best schools and lived in
luxury.
The Dwarf Brothers retired from the computer business and
moved to the Cayman Islands where their money was. They all got married, including the two who
were gay, and opened a beachcombing and gift shop business that made them twice
as rich as they were before.
Queen Bambi went back to the palace, where the King took the
robot mirror away from her once and for all, ordered her not to make any more
trouble and made her wear a tracking device on her ankle. Then he went over to the Parliament Building
and had his yearly fight.
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