Tagged: mime

By the Time Isaac was Done with Me

  • by jenwonder if you even miss me
  • people thought they had a far more sinister meaning
  • dressed in a Hazmat suit
  • mixture of ferocity and jocularity
  • nonetheless churning with anxiety

Tune in next time part 223                           Click Here for Earlier Installments

By the time Isaac was done with me I had learned that her real name was Cleopatra, and I was exhausted from my efforts both conversational and carnal. My mind was nonetheless churning with anxiety over the sinister Tibetan chocolate bar, which manifested in my actions as an odd mixture of ferocity and jocularity. The last time I felt that way I dressed in a Hazmat suit and went to the White House to talk things out with Thor. The thing about Hazmat suits is that most people thought they had a far more sinister meaning than I intended. I was just trying to be funny, but you try telling that to the Secret Service.

I digress.

There were no Hazmat suits in Cleopatra’s apartment so it was easy enough to avoid that misstep this time, despite my compromised mental state. As I was getting dressed in the clothes I’d gotten from Jim’s closet what felt like ages ago, Cleopatra turned on the TV.

“We need to make sure your father’s return hasn’t hit the news yet,” she said, flipping through the channels until she landed on the Contrarian News Network showing footage of my heavily pregnant wife Fleur and her retinue, all laughing at the antics of a troop of mimes.

I wonder if you even miss me, I thought, as she threw her arms around the neck of Viscount Arlo of Svenborgia. The damn Svenborgians were all over this mess.

“That Arlo guy is such a dick,” Cleopatra said.

How did she even know who he was?

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At the Academy I’d Been a Member of the Ninja Defense League

  • by jenno self-respecting parrot
  • thousands of dollars of helicopter lessons
  • did not seem to match any of the furniture
  • sees nothing but fish-belly white skin
  • the possibility of saliva

Tune in next time part 179                             Click Here for Earlier Installments

At the Academy I’d been a member of the Ninja Defense League. Our name might make it sound like we defended ninjas, but I can assure you they need no help with that. No, we practiced techniques to defend ourselves from ninjas. One of the secrets that I learned was that, due to their near-total silence, ninjas have incredibly sensitive ears.

Before these alleyway foes could bundle us off to our dooms, I filled my lungs and let loose a deafening squawk. No self-respecting parrot would make half the noise I did over the next minute. I chirped and shrieked and hooted and whooped until every last ninja had fled the scene. Or at least until I no longer felt any hands on me.

I bent forward and shimmied my shoulders until the pillowcase fell off my head and fluttered to the ground.

Setsuko, tangled in a sheet, sat across from me, leaning against a pink brick wall. The ninjas were gone. Or so it seemed. Ninja camouflage is the best camouflage.

I used the rough corner of a bright pink brick to chew through the ziptie around my wrists, and then I was free. I wanted to rub my back across the bricks, like a bear scratching itself on a tree, to rid myself of my constrictive, itchy jumpsuit, but resisted.

I pulled the sheet off Setsuko’s green-haired head and found her smiling at me in a way that made my heart purr. She bounded to her feet and threw her bound wrists around my neck, pulling me into a kiss. It felt amazing, like finally getting to use thousands of dollars of helicopter lessons all at once in a daring escape.

She pulled me behind a heart-shaped dumpster and shed her clothes, a feat which she somehow managed without unbinding her wrists. I was surprised that the carpet, being green, matched the drapes. But I was more surprised that they did not seem to match any of the furniture.

Imagine a man who, upon undressing his lover, sees nothing but fish-belly white skin. That man was me, except that Setsuko’s skin was more of a mime-belly white. And her body parts weren’t strictly the ones I’d been led to expect.

Still, her face was lovely, and I was sorely tempted to take her up on her offer. The only things that stopped me were the likelihood of the ninjas returning, and the possibility of saliva from my tongue activating some psychotropic or narcotic properties in her heavy mime body makeup.

“Sorry,” I said. “I really have to find Tessa.”

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As Setsuko Approached

  • by jenshow her how to spin it
  • odor unfaded since the autumn
  • it was a weather balloon
  • sound all fancy-pants cyberpunk
  • that’s my butt

Tune in next time part 177                             Click Here for Earlier Installments

As Setsuko approached, I backed up a step. When the rogue mime got a look at the Tessa-bot’s mangled remains she gasped.

“Hey, that’s my butt tattoo!” she barked. “What’s it doing on Tessa?”

I know that rainbow-spewing unicorns don’t sound all fancy-pants cyberpunk, but the way this one was rendered, with the unicorn’s chrome sheen and a circuitry pattern worked into the rainbow, it had a distinct William Gibson vibe. I had a hard time imagining it on Setsuko’s hindquarters. Not an unpleasant time, mind you, but difficult.

I shook my head, trying to clear it of the thought of Setsuko naked, but that thought refused to stay submerged. It was a weather balloon of impropriety that kept rising up through the strata of my mind, bouncing around through my personal stratosphere, making it impossible for me to think of anything else. It invaded all of my senses, burning behind my eyelids, ringing in my ears, filling my nose like petrichor, an odor unfaded since the autumn rains quenched my lonely, parched summer.

It didn’t matter that Setsuko was dangerous. I’d had a crush on her as long as I could remember.

While I stood there, gobsmacked, imagining the day I could give her a hula hoop and show her how to spin it (hopscotch wasn’t the only thing I learned at the Academy, after all), she snatched the capacitor from my hand and aimed it at me.

It was drained, or so I thought.

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I Almost Sprained My Tongue

  • by jenI’m not who you think I am
  • English and Swiss boarding schools
  • it wasn’t coming just straight down
  • step out of the queue
  • A rather unexpected smile

Tune in next time part 173                             Click Here for Earlier Installments

I almost sprained my tongue, but in the end I managed to deliver the message. “I’m not who you think I am. I’m his twin brother.”

The woman’s own tongue action was very crisp and meticulous, suggesting she’d been educated in the best English and Swiss boarding schools before attending the Academy.

Our passing of information to each other through vigorous tongue movements must have looked a lot like a passionate kiss. Valentine Village’s many cherub-costumed employees went out of their way to celebrate and encourage such signs of love. When they spotted us they fired their confetti cannons. We were suddenly engulfed in tiny bits of colorful paper, and it wasn’t coming just straight down, but swirling madly on gusts of wind. I decided to take advantage of the unexpected camouflage and “step out of the queue,” as it were, to escape from my donut-loving captor and find Tessa on my own.

I pulled away from the green-haired woman mid-sentence. A rather unexpected smile rested on her lips. It was a very nasty smile, even though it was soon speckled with confetti.

And suddenly my mind put the pieces together. The wild hair, the posh education, the quick thinking with the raffle ticket. This woman could only be the rogue mime Setsuko, and that meant I was in deep shit.

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I Wandered

  • by Kenta little cumbersome for you
  • drunk and incoherent
  • into the battery on his belt
  • “I was somewhat stunned.”
  • like busted birthday balloons

Tune in next time part 136                             Click Here for Earlier Installments

I wandered the avenues and byways of Pittsburghistan as darkness gathered, too many things on my mind. Soon I was talking to myself. “Gonna be a little cumbersome for you to sort all this out, when you don’t even have a roof over your head. Better off drunk and incoherent in some back alley, not trying to solve so many mysteries at once.”

“There’s a nice alley right over there,” said a voice beside me. I jumped, literally bounded up into the air in surprise, and the dapper gentleman laughed. He inserted a wire into the battery on his belt and said, “What’s nice about the alley is it has a liquor store right at the end of it. Are you okay?”

“I was somewhat stunned.” More than that I was embarrassed to have had an audience for my solo conversation, but the stranger didn’t seem to be holding it against me.

“I’m a good listener,” he offered. “If you’ll buy me a bottle of rum you can tell me anything you like, and I won’t tell a soul.” He smiled ruefully. “Won’t remember any of it, so I couldn’t tell anybody if I wanted to.”

I self-consciously scratched my chest, the tattoo’s message squirming beneath the dense layer of curly hair under my shirt. Had this friendly man been sent by the White Faces? Their agents didn’t usually talk, but special assignments sometimes required them to. They called it “walking against the wind.”

The man smoothed the battery wire, which went up along his shirt and entered the side of his neck. Perhaps the mime cartel had built androids to bear the burden of speech.

Hoping I was just being paranoid, I said, “Not tonight. You’ll have to get someone else to supply you.” The man no longer wore a warm smile. It was replaced by a disappointedly vexed expression, like busted birthday balloons.

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I Haven’t Gone By That Codename In Years

  • by jenI don’t deserve her
  • has her gargle with salt water
  • “He tips well, but…”
  • Marrying from a sense of duty!
  • freeing the painter

Tune in next time part 135                             Click Here for Earlier Installments

“I haven’t gone by that codename in years,” I told the wig and its hidden microphone. “And I no longer take orders from you.”

“You wouldn’t want us to show this tape to your wife, would you?”

“My wife and I have an understanding. She knows I don’t deserve her anger for something like this.” While it was true that Fleur and I had at one time had such an arrangement, I wasn’t sure it still stood. I worked to keep that uncertainty out of my voice. “She has her flings, too, you know. There’s this one guy she likes a lot. He has her gargle with salt water, and then–”

“Enough!”

“He tips well, but…”

“Listen up Winifred, we need you to come in for a major debriefing. It’s been years! You’ve gone so far off script, we don’t know what’s gotten into you. Marrying from a sense of duty!”

“That wasn’t my choice,” I complained. “And I am not Winifred any longer.”

I finished splashing off at the sink and slicked my hair down, thinking about my last official mission for these clowns. It had involved freeing the painter who was being held captive by the infamous mime cartel the White Faces. I’d been successful, but the things I saw in their headquarters, and the things they did to me, still haunt my dreams.

As I buttoned my shirt I thought of the tattoo hidden under my prodigious chest hair. The tattoo given to me against my will by that captive painter before she would let me rescue her from her greasepaint-coated prison. That was how I first met Tessa, and I always remembered her with an improvised tattoo gun in her hand.

Was it time to shave my chest and read that tattoo’s message once more?

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Jorgensen Threw A Net Over Me

  • k-avataruses it for a cellphone ad
  • this is not about my ambition
  • it’s a whole lotta whole lot
  • fell into the cotton candy pit
  • company they helped politically

Tune In Next Time Part 29                             Click Here for Earlier Installments

Jorgensen threw a net over me and ordered his crew to drag me below and throw me in the brig. Sliding over the planks on my back, I had to wonder if the alliance was in financial trouble. What other explanation for a buccaneer who takes the skull and bones off his mainsail and instead uses it for a cellphone ad?

Another hint of monetary woes was the crewmen themselves. Their soundless approach was no surprise, but the white face paint was. Ninjas and pirates had powerful unions, but mimes would scab for practically nothing, and, obviously, you never hear them complain about their work conditions. I thought I saw an angle that might lead to my escape.

But the next moment I was flung down an open hatch into the hold. My startled scream turned to a puzzled grunt as I fell into the cotton candy pit. Ever wondered how much cotton candy a frigate can carry? Well, it’s a lot. In fact it’s a whole lotta whole lot. The salt water saturating my clothes and hair dissolved the fuzzy cargo like acid, and I sank through a shaft shaped like a cutout of a man who should have cut his losses long ago.

Aphrodite Hunter peered down on me with her one good eye and the remarkably lifelike glass one. She cackled, then said, “You won’t starve, but your dentist might have some stern words for you at your next checkup! Just wanted you to know, this is not about my ambition to rule the pirate ninja alliance. Your friend John is up to something with Heinrich, something shady with a company they helped politically, which makes you my insurance policy.”

I wanted to tell her she had it all wrong, that holding me wouldn’t give her any leverage over John. But the lid slammed down over the hatch and I was left in sticky darkness.

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Trudy Looked at the Pamphlet

  • by jenIs your skin too loose?
  • as double-jointed as a trained mime
  • biting her lip furiously
  • the lewd cartoon
  • he blushed like a boy
  • toxic sludge in the neighborhood

Trudy looked at the pamphlet in her hand, biting her lip furiously to keep from smiling. Ever since the EPA found toxic sludge in the neighborhood, they’d been getting stuff like this in the mail – offers for all kinds of services that would solve all of their alleged problems.

“Is your skin too loose?” was the headline on this one. Trudy handed it to her father who opened it to read the details. As he scanned he blushed like a boy.

Trudy looked over his shoulder to see what the problem was. Presumably it was the illustration that embarrassed him so. The lewd cartoon depicted a woman as double-jointed as a trained mime who was demonstrating just how loose her skin was.

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Matilda Always Laughed

  1. Character – Nudist lesbian mime with wooden shoes and an attitude
  2. Setting – Peepshow
  3. Object – Bouquet of flowers, all yellow
  4. Situation – Sniper

Matilda always laughed when she thought back on it, even though it was sort of tragic.

The funny thing about it was that she could get paid for just hanging around. Naked, but that didn’t bother her, being a nudist. And the slobbering apes who dropped their quarters in the slots didn’t care about her art, the elegance of being “trapped in a box” when she was literally inside a box already, or the skill it took to be silent in wooden shoes. But why should she expect them to?

On that steamy August night a bank robber paused in his getaway to check out her act. The police sniper blew the shot, shattering the one-way glass and revealing a lovely nymph with a cluster of yellow flowers.

The robber escaped, but Chloe captured Matilda.

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