Happy Anniversary, You Big Dumb Chain Story!
Our illustrious chain story, Tune In Next Time, has reached another milestone! 400 installments, if you can believe it. Soon it will be as long as one of our actual novels. We can’t imagine trying to edit it into coherence, though.
This time, we’ve pulled our inspiration phrases from one of the baby name books in Jen’s vast collection. Some of these “definitions” are rather dire, as it turns out.
As these shared prompts usually go, Jen will take the first phrase and write until she manages to work it in. Then Kent will take over the keyboard, and so on.
- personification of madness
- now little used except in the Highlands
- youthful delight in fine necklaces
- wreaked havoc on
- unsuccessful attempts to pronounce
- the tinkling sound of pieces of jade
- “Red flag”
- the murder of her father
- merely a Cornish curiosity
- in origin a local
Tune in next time parts 399 & 400 Click Here for Earlier Installments
We sped onward across the waves, the fisherman in his hip-waders and lipstick, me dressed as the personification of madness. The fisherman told me about the garment he’d foisted upon my torso. “The peacock-feather vest is an old symbol of wisdom, now little used except in the Highlands.”
“The Inimical Archipelago has no Highlands,” I said.
“The Archipelago is all Highlands. Just thirty years ago the Lowlands were still above sea level. They’re gone now, of course, lost due to the folly of the Warlord and his dalliance with the American president. Back in those days William Penn XI took a youthful delight in fine necklaces, and that lady president had the finest.”
I knew he was talking about Mother. And I knew that it was she, not the warlord, who really bore the blame for the catastrophe that wreaked havoc on the Great Lakes and, evidently, also partially sank the Archipelago. But it didn’t seem worth arguing that point.
What would this lowly fisherman say if he knew that I was the son of the president he so reviled? Or that Jim, the man we were chasing, was the result of the Warlord’s affair with her? Through the years since the cataclysm there had been several unsuccessful attempts to pronounce Mother dead. Would this man take out his ire on her sons instead?
The catamaran swooped over the waves. The rushing wind and crashing surf were complemented by the tinkling sound of pieces of jade on a strand of silk that whipped in the breeze and curled around the mast.
“The Warlord should have known better than to trust that woman,” the fisherman said. “He even made a speech on the radio where he said, ‘Everyone around me says that she has “Red flag” written all over her, but I can resist neither her charms nor the opportunity to view a calligraphic tattoo of that nature first hand.'” He turned his head and spat into the waves. “Perhaps it’s wrong to judge her so harshly, though. It’s little wonder that the murder of her father left her mind unhinged.”
I had never met my grandfather. He’d been assassinated in Cornwall decades before my birth, in a very mysterious incident known to the world as the Curiosity. But to Mother, her father’s death was not merely a Cornish Curiosity — it was part of an elaborate conspiracy theory she sought to this day to untangle.
“You’re quite well informed on global political history,” I remarked, “for an Inimical fisherman.”
He grinned. “The fishing life here in the Archipelago suits me, but I would not say that I am in origin a local.”
(bonus points! whew!)