Off Bvrenda ran into the forest of the night! What unseemly hand or eye mandated so much moisture in the air? As she marched into the frigid winter mist, her hair began to frizz. She gritted her teeth and clenched her fists, which were warmly ensconced in her favorite faux ermine fitted pleather gloves. Bracing herself against the elements, Bvrenda strengthened her resolve to stop Mandy Pandy before she committed any more telekinetic hate crimes.
Of course, she realized, because she was self actualized, that she was playing a dangerous game now. The dividing line between GOOD and EVIL had been drawn. Bvrenda never doubted in her heart that she would win, for she possessed the heart of a lioness. She believed that all return to love. “Fear is only an illusion!” She repeated to herself over and over again as she hurried into the night. Never the less, it occurred to her, in a solemn moment of introspection, that she had chosen her side in a binary game. As the heroine of her own story, Brvenda knew (she knew without a single solitary doubt!) that somebody was going to win and somebody was going to lose… but she could NEVER lose, because she was on the side of the eternal light! The battle was already won! Bvrenda heeded the lesson of the great quatrain found in the prophecies of Nostradamus. The world of goodness would rise again!
She paused to take a moment and draw in a sharp, cold, moist breath of evening air. The smell was toxic, like a bad perm. Like being trapped in a hermetically sealed room that contained a century’s worth of the farts of dying old men. She crinkled her nose, while coughing, and spat out the words, “There is something rotten in Demark!” Which was clearly an allusion to Shakespeare, further proving her sensibility and heroic qualities as an adept who was informed in the deeper meanings of cultural things.
The stench, which had offended her nose so deeply, emanated from the local swamp. It was a chemical dumping ground for all of the local industries, not to mention a runoff zone for the local sewage plant. Once it had been part of a waterway, but local engineering had turned it into an eerie, pea green soup containing just about every possible disease known to man. All of the creatures living in this habitat had mutated, so it was a petri dish full of highly adaptive genetic anomalies. The ducks and geese were gargantuan, with enormous heads that were completely out of proportion to their bodies. They were prone to territorial behavior and were known to draw blood with their tiny, razor sharp teeth, inciting deadly feeding frenzies. They were more like feathered piranhas than foul.
Then there were the bats, that had been described as pterodactyls with fur that emitted ear splitting high pitched sounds that could drive you mad with fear. They had been seen carrying away Labrador retrievers and toddlers in their hind claws as they labored in the moonlight to take sustenance home to their blind broods. And there were also stories of bullfrogs that were essentially pit bulls that could hop distances of twenty-five feet or more, and catch an ankle with a long sticky tongue from six feet away. And their skin was poisonous and deadly on contact. Oh, and then there were the blood sucking super rats that carried rabies, mad cow’s disease, and the plague! Rattlesnakes with steel jaws and flying teeth like venomous porcupine quills! It was said that mosquitoes larger than hummingbirds had exsanguinated many a visitor to this neglected hellhole. But it was winter, so Brvenda had left her flamethrower at home.
Bvrenda wasn’t afraid of anything. Not even fear. Never the less, she had strong reservations about crossing this haunted barrier, due to tails of woe that had haunted her from childhood. Tails of a moth man, flying saucers, tiny grey aliens with enormous soulless eyes, cattle mutilations, abductions, men in black, Nazi spies and organ harvesting. Not to mention all the local crack heads and opioid addicts wandering in the shadows like the living dead at any time of day or night on any given day of the week, thanks to the “war on drugs” and an opioid epidemic created by the pharmaceutical industry and intelligence agencies.
The only story that frightened Bvrenda even a tiny bit revolved around a lascivious swamp man lurking in the opaque waters she was prepared to precipitously embark upon. Apparently, this monster looked something like the Hollywood “Creature From the Black Lagoon.” Except that by comparison to the the Hollywood version, the regional variation was a puzzlingly hot looking but also clearly amphibious and not human looking creature, which happened to be in possession of an enormous private member and hypertrophic testicles. Several women had claimed to have been abducted by him, but only reported upon their return to safety that he was oddly sensitive, attentive, and only believed in consensual sex. Which was highly controversial, because people were still largely frightened of the creature, and it was suggested that the women were suffering from Stockholm syndrome and shouldn’t be trusted. Bvrenda wasn’t sure what to think.
Putting all thoughts of the creature and the monster between his legs aside, Bvrenda scanned the path through the bog. It was no more than a series of slimy stepping-stones that were only accessible when it wasn’t flooded over with raw sewage after a rainstorm. The path before her now was slick and deadly. The great divide between Bvrenda and Mandy stretched out before her like the River Styx. The smell of sulfuric gas permeated everything around her. The penetrating stench gave Bvrenda an involuntary spasm of acid reflux, leaving a horrible taste in her mouth.
A burst of fresh spearmint gum tickled her tongue and cleared her nostrils momentarily of the surrounding stench. She braced herself to embrace the worst and set off to traverse the slimy stones that led across the bog. Beyond the bog lay the woods that led the lot containing Mandy’s ramshackle house on the wrong side of town. The first two stones were so slippery Bvrenda could barely hold her balance and stop herself from toppling over and into the mire. Halfway to the other side, she began to feel as if she had the knack of navigating the algae covered rocks. When she heard something that sounded like the cross between an owl and a bull screech from the direction of Mandy’s house, her right foot slipped on something that felt like it might have been a banana slug. It was all she could do to flail her arms madly in the air and settle on the point of her left silver shoed toes, like the graceful ballerina that she was.
Bvrenda drew in another deep breath of air that smelled like it came out of Satan’s ass.
Utilizing the flashlight on her cell phone to illuminate the hazardous path ahead, she settled her right foot back down again gently on the flattest portion of the rock and regained her footing. Just as she was getting ready to tackle the next step forward, her tiny torch caught a gleam in the eye of something cold blooded and hungry looking slithering through the water toward her at a steady pace. It gained stealthily upon her like a harbinger of death come to drag her into the quivering bowels of perdition.
Or was it just imagination? Bvrenda was a highly sensitive person, and sometimes her feelings could overwhelm her mind, causing her to jump to hasty erroneous conclusions. But there wasn’t any time to stop and consider whether or not the sinister figure that appeared to be surreptitiously pursuing her at a steady pace was just a floating log or a perverted mutant stalking her to satisfy his carnal lust for her virgin flesh. A sudden burst of adrenaline propelled her across the stepping-stones like a gazelle being chased across the Serengeti by a hungry lioness procuring sustenance for her adorable bloodthirsty cubs. The binary metaphor of hunter and the hunted flashed through her mind as she virtually flew across the bog. Tragically, there was no time for her to deconstruct or analyze the essence of this truly epic moment. She simply became the situation. Before she knew it, she was almost free and clear of the mire. Soon she would be safe and secure on dry land again.
Just as she was about to make the final leap from the last stone and clear the threshold of the bayou, her foot landed on an oily patch of radioactive slime. This final misstep sent her sailing forward with her arms flailing desperately in the abominable vapors choking the night air. Spastically and in vain, she grasped at fistfuls of nothingness until her torso crashed unceremoniously onto the muddy embankment. Her nether regions were left submerged and vulnerable in the shockingly icy black waters below. Waves of horror and panic shot throughout her highly sensitive corporeal organism!
Bvrenda clawed desperately at the embankment, screaming obscenities that were swallowed into the gathering gloom of the steadily accumulating haze that was now so thick it nearly blinded her. Something tugged fiercely at her left sock, pulling her deeper into the abyss! With a savage shriek she pugnaciously yanked her leg away from whatever the hell it was and thrust her body out of the marsh and onto the muddy bank. On all fours now, she scurried to the safety of relatively dry land, panting breathlessly, covered in muck and sweating profusely.
Without a moment to lose, Bvrenda sprang to her feet, kung fu fighting! There was no time to turn back and confront whatever evil had attempted to drag her into the quagmire. Quickly she scanned the horizon before her as keenly as a night owl. The non-mutated kind. Her mud splattered eyes made out the light to Mindy’s front porch burning in the distance through a thin veil of low Tulle fog, like a hexed beacon beckoning her to her sordid fate. In spite of the agony of loud protestations from her bruised body, which was covered in muck and viscous primal ooze, she bounded forward without hesitation. The high drama of the moment was not lost upon her as she sped away into the poisoned mist.
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