“Tell us a story, granna.”
“No.”
“Pleeaaasee?”
“Bug off.”
“Pretty please with-”
“-no damned way. Besides, there’s no good stories left.”
“Daddy said everybody’s got good stories, you just have to ask them.”
“I didn’t smack your daddy enough when he was growing up.”
“Plllleeeeeaaasseee?”
“Get me the bottle and I’ll tell you a thing or two just to shut your yap. Right.”
glug glug and so on glug
“Right. Right. Now, listen up…”
In the beginning, there was Something. And the Something was probably like it was now and it was big and really neat.
Then later, after the beginning, there was also Nat.
And Nat looked at the Something and its bigness and neatness, and Nat said “I can do something better!”
So Nat picked up a big ball of dirt from the ground and stuffed it full of sticks and stones and shook it up and down and side to side and right-left over-and-out until it was all done. Then he stuck one big eyeball up against its surface, real close, and he took a peak at what he’d done.
Well, the place was a mess. Some bits were too cold and others were too hot and most of it was too dry. Almost all of it was water, and almost all of that water was out in the middle of nowhere and no good for anybody, or even any fish.
“Well, I can fix that,” said Nat. So he grabbed some people from the Something without saying please, thank you, or would-you-kindly, and he shook them all over his ball of dirt. They landed all dizzy and put out and none of them in the same place.
“Now you go and make sense of this mess here for me, will you?” asked Nat in that way that wasn’t a question. Then something caught his eye out there in the Something that’s somewhere, and Nat went to go check on it.
That was a long, long time ago. We’re not sure if Nat remembers us. But it’s probably for the best.
“That was lousy, granna.”
“You’re telling me. It’s all we had in the old days, and we had to share it. One story a week, too, not a hundred thousand a minute or whatever your damned internet gets you nowadays.”
“But it was so boooring. Don’t you have another one?”
“Sure, if you’ve got the stomach for it. Get me the other bottle.”
bloop swish glinginging etc
“Oookay. I think I remember this right…”
So a long time ago then, right, everyone was pretty angry and mad all the time, because Nat had dumped ‘em all off without so much as a by-your-leave. Hell, most of them didn’t even know the man’s name, and he certainly hadn’t bothered to introduce himself. So everyone was all over the place all off by themselves wandering around too grumpy to say “hello” or “pleased to meet you” or “mind if I sit here?” and that meant fights. Lots of them. Back in those days you ran out of teeth before age fifteen, had a nose bent triple by twenty, and were lucky to have an ear to call your own by middle age. The elderly didn’t exist; most folks that old got ornery enough to tick off something bigger than they were.
This was a pretty big problem, and that’s why someone decided to do something about it. And that someone was Bil.
Now, Bil was a good enough person, and that was downright weird. He didn’t hate anyone, and nobody hated him, because Nat bless his leathery ass, Bil was too thick to loath. You couldn’t look into that big dopey grin and spit back. Clouds would part over Bil’s head when thunderstorms came, and mama bears would watch him walk right up and over their cubs without more than a bit of a twitch.
Of course, his hide was still stitched up and down with more scars than anyone knew how to count back in those days. Even a kindly universe can’t stop a big enough doorknob from doing something to himself.
That day in particular, that something was a gift. See, Bil had made himself a ladyfriend, a nice enough gal who was willing to put cheerfulness over good looks or brainpower. And he liked her so much, he wanted to give her something to make her happy.
So he went out looking, Bil did, and he wandered the world for years. There’s been whole books written on the adventures Bil had in his quests. There was the time Bil found the People Made Out Of Dried Bark, and ate them. There was the battle of the World’s Angriest Hornet Nest, which Bil lost. There was the time Bil Saved the Sun, which the Sun always said was just Bil misunderstanding the concept of a solar eclipse. A lot of these stories are a bit mysterious, see, because the only one writing them down was Bil, and he wasn’t who you’d call Francis Bacon, or Shakespeare, or whoever the hell it is this decade.
Any rate, we can skip over those, because Bil finally found the fourth-tallest hill in the Near Vicinity, and from up there he could very nearly see over the edge of the bit of the world he knew. It wasn’t too warm or cold, the weather was cloudy with sunny, the landscape sat at his feet instead of sprawling, and as Bil sat there on his buns staring out into a pretty mediocre view he felt a strange and unfamiliar sensation a-creeping up on his tiny little brain.
“That’s it!” he said as he sat up, and he almost lost it in his excitement. But Bil was careful after that, and put it in a box he made out of the leftovers of the People Made Out Of Dried Bark. It was small and shoddy, but it did the job and kept the present safe and dry until he got home to his sweetie and opened it up with a big smile.
The girl, she looked at the box, and she looked at Bil, and she looked at the box, and she looked and Bil, and they sat there for five minutes. Then she screamed and jumped in the lake and ran down the river yelling and whacking her head over and over. All the folk from miles around heard her yelling and got themselves out of their funks and walked over to see what the fuss was about, because maybe it’d be something they could get angry at.
“What is it?” they asked her.
“Get it out of my head!” she screamed. “It’s stuck in there and it won’t go away! I’ll do anything to make it go away! GET IT OUT!”
Well, everyone had a bit of a puzzler at that all afternoon, but she couldn’t describe what it was she was talking about. But that night, when those folks all headed home for the evening? Hoo-wee did they get it bad. That little present of Bil’s had spread to them all – boredom stalked their steps forever now, sending them loony with it every big, empty, grumpy day from dawn to dusk. People were still grumpy, sure, but there was nothing for it but to hang together now, because the only thing worse than staring at some idiot’s face all day in a bad mood was staring at rocks.
As for Bil, he never got what all the fuss was about, but he never ran out of things to do, not until the year afterwards, when Bil Brought Fire To His Hair. That put a damper on things.
“Granna, is Bil why we feel the way we do now?”
“Yup. Hey, you asked for this.”
“Did not.”
“Get me another bottle.”
“Promise it’s over?”
“Over? Sure. Let me tell you how it’s all going to be over.”
click-psssh-gulp
“Ahhh….”
My grandmother said her grandmother told her this when she was good and pissed, so that’s good enough for me.
In the end of the end, the whole world is going to go rotten. The middle of the ground will start to go runny and smell bad and it’ll leak up through the ground and everyone will be feel just sick as dogs. That’ll last for about a hundred years, and we’ll know those hundred years are up when the smell turns sort of eggy. Before that, it’ll be more like bad meat.
Once that smell turns, the sky’ll turn green-yellow, like grandpa’s throwup, and there’ll be lots of damp stuff in the air sort of like damp underpants. Every single person in the world will throw up at the same time and it’ll all go in the water, where all the fish will die and smell even worse. All the water’ll smell gross too then, and everybody will feel so bad they’ll spend all day on the outhouse instead of punching each other. The animals will all run away and hide under all the beds, and then they’ll throw up too, and the beds will all run away and hide under the horizon, so nobody’ll be able to sleep and they’ll get really cranky and complain all the time.
And then – just when the cranking gets the loudest, just when the smells get the foulest – then Bil will come again, and he will try and wrestle the earth into not smelling so bad. But Bil is going to mistake a hornet’s nest for the earth, and his ears are going to be so full of dirt from his little rest that nobody’ll be able to tell him different, except in sign language. And Bil doesn’t know sign language.
So after that, while the whole planet’s watching Bil try and put a headlock on a set of pupating larva, the bad smell and noisy bickering’ll bring Nat over to check out what’s making all the blather, and he’ll say “ew,” then stomp on the earth three times, then scrape his foot off three times, and then run away.
That’s about it.
“Granna?
“Yeah?”
“Can you pleeeease never tell us anything again?”
“Maybe.”
“Pretty please with sugar on top?”
“Tell you what. Give me that last bottle in the back of the cupboard and I’ll never speak to you ‘till the day I die.”
“Promise not to after that, too?”
“Sure. Good girl.”