So, Highwayman is riding a nuke right towards the Winking Moon aka the narrator of this jaunty little blog fiction. Dang.
But…but when he busted through the clouds he opened up the tiniest of gaps allowing the briefest of glimpses into the happenings of the factory floor.
[Camera 3 slow zoom through the clouds] Focus in on the pile of hummus smothering John Barleycorn. It starts to wiggle and then jiggle. It would seem that the scarecrow has some life left in him yet. He reaches a fist out through the hummus; the laser blast didn’t kill him, though he is a little frazzled. He shakes himself free from the tyrannical grip of the pasty dip and emerges to a very dramatic score. [Camera one tight focus and twirl around him, like a Michael Bay movie].
“Barelycorn! You’re alive!” Agent Rainmaker cheered triumphantly.
“It’s Barleycorn,” he said badassedly, wiping the dip from his brow. “Look at what I found.”
What he found was this [camera 2 steady focus on “this”]: an odd contraption with gears and levers and a toaster on the side and an antenna and an attached instruction manual.
Barleycorn scanned the manual for the “Plot Device,” it seemed pretty straightforward to use. He pointed the device and turned the crank, but nothing happened. Stupid plot device!
Highwayman was so close to ‘nooking’ the moon that he was just an udder length away from the cow that was always jumping over the moon.
“Crapola!” Barleycorn exclaimed. “It’s not working.”
“Is it plugged in?” Agent Rainmaker offered.
“Is it plugged in? What? No. You don’t plug in a plot device, it’s just supposed to work, so long as the reader keeps reading. That’s what plot devices do, they move the plot forward.”
“What do we do?”
“We need to move the plot forward.”
“Barleycorn, I’m preggers,” Agent Rainmaker offered up. “And you’re the scare-father.”
“Oh, crap, really?” he said. “But we didn’t even get to get down.”
He tried the plot device again. It still wasn’t working.
“I’m really my twin sister with a brain implant of my brain,” she ventured.
“You’re a man. What?” He said, confused as heck. “That’s not plot, those are just ridiculous soap opera tropes.”
“Oh, sorry. I guess I don’t know what plot is.” She admitted. (That makes two of us.) “What’s the manual say?”
Barleycorn flipped to the troubleshooting section and in big bold letters he read: For the plot device to work properly, John Barleycorn Must Die.
He grimaced and tossed the book down. It should also be mentioned that while the plot device wasn’t saving any days (or moons) at the moment, it did provide a nice force field for Barleycorn. The lasers, Pio! Pio! Pio!, just bounced right off of it.
John Barleycorn didn’t know what to do. He did know that he wanted to live.
“What’d it say?” Agent Rainmaker asked.
He thought for a moment and considered sacrificial herodom. “Nothing. It’s didn’t say nothing.”
Aw, Barleycorn what the heck man? You coulda been the big hero in this piece. I guess I just have to find another way to stop the dastardly Highwayman.
BAM! John Barleycorn is dead! How did it happen? I’ll never tell, but just know that it did happen when you were looking at that diabolical diversion I created.
Ha! Ha! Ha!
Oh me oh my
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