Stretching

I shared a quote on my facebook page the other day: "We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day." Edith Lovejoy Pierce
One of my friends posted this comment: "It was a dark and stormy banana would be a good opening line." I added a comment after his: "Bludgeoned sprinkles lay in pools of their own blood on the battlefield", in the hopes my friend would come back with the next line, but it didn't happen. Since that day, though, I've had these two sentences begging for room to grow into a wild and weird story, so here goes.


It was a dark and stormy banana. Bludgeoned sprinkles lay in pools of their own blood on the battlefield, the Moosomin Dairy King. People coming on the scene gasped in horror and covered their mouths with their shaking hands, hot tears stinging their eyes. How could this have happened in our town, in our Dairy King?! It was unthinkable that such extreme violence could be visited upon such a happy place like the Dairy King, a place where families went to buy joy, happiness, sweetness, and a few precious moments of peace and quiet while their children devoured their frozen treats, and before all hell broke loose when the sugar frenzy kicked in.


Dairy King employees and customers unfortunate enough to be at ground zero when the devastation hit, stood in mute horror, their eyes wide and staring, unaware of the sweet and fruity ice milk toppings dripping down their faces and staining their clothing, while chunks of strawberry and mashed banana mixed with pieces of chopped nuts slowly clotted in their hair. And everywhere were sprinkles; pink, white, green, yellow, and blue dashes of colour. Most bled out when they hit water or other wet surfaces. The ones that avoided any dampness and landed on a dry surface were not much luckier: In the ensuing panic, many more sprinkles were trampled to death, crushed to powder under the stampede of work boots and doc martins. 
No one person or surface in the place had escaped the sugary trajectories when the blast took out the sprinkle machine, spraying sprinkles in a circular pattern as the shock waves rippled outwards. Good thing, too, because the investigators were able to pinpoint the location of the explosive device when it detonated. All they had to do now was figure out 'who done it'. They got to work immediately when they arrived on scene; they called ambulances, took crime scene photos, interviewed witnesses, collected evidence for further analysis. There was a lot to go through: They would need the assistance of Detective Caffeine to help them get through it all. 


The next stop was Tim Horton's, the ancestral home of Detective Caffeine. Rich, dark, mysterious and exciting, Det. Caffeine has assisted law enforcement on every criminal case going back to the 1800's. The Detective's uncanny ability to speed up an investigator's thinking processes has helped law enforcement solve their cases in half the time.  


The investigators were rapidly discussing the case at the office when they saw two young boys ride by the window on bikes - bikes with dried ice milk and bits of banana and strawberry on the handlebars and caught in the spokes. The perpetrators had rolled by right under their noses. Those little Hooligans! 


The Hooligans had moved to Moosomin five years before, when Mr Hooligan retired from the military after 25 years of loyal service.  The two Hooligan boys, who so brazenly rode past the police station on their evidence-smeared bikes so soon after the Dairy King explosion, had been 5 year-olds starting kindergarten when they moved to town, and immediately began attracting attention for roughing up their classmates for lunch money, rice krispie squares and Dairy King coupons. By the time the boys hit 3rd grade, they were notorious. 


Mrs Hooligan was standing in the doorway when the investigators arrived at the house. She looked haggard. Being Mrs Hooligan will do that to a person. She smiled wanly at the agents as they approached the door and they smiled wanly back at her. There was no need for words; she knew why they were here and who they were looking for. In the past, Mrs Hooligan would have given any excuse to keep her boys from being arrested and going to lock up, but today was different. Unbeknownst to her boys, Mrs Hooligan had had enough.


The boys were sitting side by side on the couch playing their favourite nintendo or playstation or wii game, looking like freshly scrubbed little cherubs still steamy and warm from the bath. Their hair was damp and their tee shirts clung to their backs. They both looked up at their mother as she entered the living room, beatific smiles on their cherubic faces, waiting to hear the latest alibi their mother had cooked up to get them off the hook. Their smiles cracked and fell off, replaced with looks of wide-eyed shock and betrayal when they heard their mother tell the agents to cuff them and take them away. She had come to the end of her rope with the two of them, she said, and that perhaps a stint in jail would do them and the rest of the family some good. As the boys were being led across the porch and down the steps, a sprinkle came loose and fell from the patterned sole of one of the boys' runners. Their mother kindly pointed it out to the agents and suggested that perhaps they might want to bag it and use it for evidence. The agents drove away and Mrs Hooligan walked into the house, closed the door and went to bed.


At the trial, the boys looked haggard and worn from their ordeal. Being in lockup was scary and you couldn't turn your back on anyone in case they stole your rice krispie squares or came at you with a shiv in the dark place out of sight of the security cameras and guards,  demanding at knife point the contents of the care package you just got in the mail. On the other hand, Mrs Hooligan looked tanned and well-rested. A long vacation in the Caribbean will do that to a person. Mr Hooligan couldn't make it to the trial; he was working overtime to pay for Mrs Hooligan's Caribbean holiday and her upcoming elective surgeries. 


The boys were found guilty of destroying the Dairy King with an improvised explosive device and sentenced to be hanged the next day. Just kidding! They would remain incarcerated until they reached their 18th birthday. Mr Hooligan would meet his sons at the front gate on the day they were released from jail, but Mrs Hooligan would not. No one who knew her when she was the mother of these two Hooligans knew where she was and no one would be able to recognize her. 


All her elective surgeries were completed during the first four years of her sons' incarceration. By the time she entered the hospital for her last surgery, the one that so radically altered her appearance so that her own husband couldn't even recognize her, she and her cosmetic surgeon had been having an affair that started when she went to him for a tummy tuck,  elective procedure number two. It was with his assistance that she was able to walk out the front door of his clinic, disappear and start a new life. No one who knew Mrs Hooligan ever saw her again, and even if they did, they wouldn't know it.  


I wish I could say that everyone lived happily ever after, but I'd be lying.