Clash of the Figments - Chapter 22

If there was a fan running somewhere in the world, I’m confident that over the next few days the owner was no doubt utterly confounded by the amount of shit hitting it. 

We stayed up into the wee hours following the newscasts, which had pre-empted all other programming, including Nightline.  Early the next morning, the coverage continued, as it did in fact for days to come as more and more information and details were made available to the public.  We followed it all from my living room.  

We watched the first daytime footage, in which we were able to see just how much damage the moose had taken.  In addition to the thousands of bullet holes, huge tears and gashes in its hide were evident from flying shrapnel, and the left hindquarter had been blown completely off by an anti-personnel mine. 

We watched as the country formally known as the USSR issued an apology to the world while the artist formally known as Prince sang When Moose Cry to frenzied thousands in Central Park. 

We watched as the talking news heads debated what was done, what wasn’t done, what should have been done, and whose fault it all was, now that they had the advantage of perfect 20/20 hindsight. 

We watched as it was discovered that the spy moose was not in fact a real animal at all, but a machine.  A highly specialized robot built specifically for diabolical means. 

At this point we ran out of that good cheese dip with the jalapenos in it, and since we were running a little low on beer as well, we decided to make a quick run down to the store, which wound up taking a little longer than we meant it to since Jimmy saw a putt-putt course on the way and threw a fit until we agreed to play a round.  We were having a great time and might have just said to hell with the whole story and not come back at all but of course Simon had to get in an argument with Jimmy over whether or not having your ball hit the windmill did or did not count as a one stroke penalty which escalated into a great clashing of putters and the eventual ejection of all three of us from the course. 

So, with nothing better to do, we went back to the house. 

We watched as soldiers loaded the mechanized carcass of the moose onto a flatbed truck and drove it to a large airplane hangar in Cartagena where it was lost forever from public sight. 

We watched as beer prices dropped to all-time lows now that the threat to crops was over, and how a group of five housewives in Indiana had become millionaires when they’d invested all of their retirement savings into depressed General Mills stock which had now skyrocketed to astronomical heights. 

We watched it all.  But I didn’t believe a word of it.  Because I knew something that the rest of the world didn’t know.  I knew something that just wasn’t explained by everything we had seen on the news.  Something that told me that the world had been deceived.  Something that was on the front of my car. 

Antler fuzz. 

That, and the fact that all of the commercials I had seen for the Magic Kingdom in the past few days were wrong. 

 

Next Week:  Chapter 23