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...a brisk breeze fanned the flames ever closer to the propane tank.
"Shut the door!" Datura yelled, but her cries were muffled by the potato sack. By now, there were close to fifty Under People milling about. They came from dark corners, from under furniture, and a few dropped from the ceiling with parachutes that barely had time to open. It was chaos. The flames inched closer to the propane tank as the Under People continued with their mischief, blanching vegetables and peeling the labels off things. Then,the tank exploded.

The next thing Datura knew, she was airborne, sailing through the night sky at incredible speeds. The forest, a blur beneath her, began to burn.

"Good heavens!" Datura explained, "I must be in Canada by now."

Slowly, she began to sink toward the flames, but at the last minute, she noticed one of the Under People's parachutes had become snagged on her ankle, so she used it to slow her descent, sailing further through the night sky until finally she landed gently in a field of Cheese Whizz plants. Dazed, she yanked the potato sack off of her head and saw before her a figure holding a small tray filled with German sausages. As her vision cleared, she saw it was Western.

"Spare change?" Western asked. "I'm trying to buy a ticket to Saskatchewan."

Datura reached in her pocket, but there were only tadpoles.

"I fear the explosion has caused my spare change to scatter over the forest," Datura explained, "But you may have a tadpole."

Western greedily held out her hand. Datura gave her a tadpole, which Western immediately fed to one of her sausages. "Might you have any ketchup?" Western asked.

"I'm afraid not." Datura said.

"I shall be on my way, then."

"Good day to you, then."

"Good day indeed! I seek the ketchup fields or Rwanda, but I shall settle for the blood of Yolanda."

With that, she tilted the plate of sausages so that they fell into her knickers and with a mischievous grin, she continued on her quest unaware that behind the next tree lurked the dreaded Tylersaurus..

"Doughnuts" Western exclaimed though she knew not why.

"My mouth is dry but my knickers are moist with the grease from the German sausage. So glad they are big enough to carry my food supplies in. Saskachewan is such a long way away and Oblivion wrote off the Morris Minor before I got a chance to hitch a lift".

She was in a completely different world of her own by this time. All she could think about was lumpy custard and watching Oblivion gag on rice pudding. Then in the undergrowth behind a pile of old potato skins came an utterance.

"who goes there"? She half shouted, half whispered.

"do not make another move' replied Mr Potato Head.

Then came the sound of a thousand high pitched giggles and...

..from beneath the potato skins crawled all of the little pieces of Mr. Potato head...the dead, droopy eyes, the malformed tomato nose, and the diaphragm-like ears, all giggling manically as they surrounded Western and began to attach themselves to her body.

"No..." She gasped. "No, not there. Ouch. Hey watch it! Wait a minute..."

But it was too late. She had become the spitting image of a Somalian demon, replete with the accoutrements of the Dark Soul himself, ready to be sliced, boiled, baked or fried: the dreaded potato demon. She reached into her knickers and pulled out a sausage, nibbling it nervously. Her horoscope had warned her about this, as had the old maid who milked her goat in the moonlight, casting her spells upon the stars, each one more sordid than the last, until they reached toward the very outer fringe of the universe and further still, through the void of that which hasn't, wasn't and won't, but will for a crisp twenty and a stack of Hot Pockets.

Then it appeared. The potato masher of doom, sent from the heavens to mash the unholy, the infidels, and those without internet access. A half dozen Bedouin appeared, reeking of garlic and gunpowder, and under the soil even more, amassing like a microwave full of peeps. The centrifuge would not hold, she knew this, and in a final desperate attempt to straw the red moose from over the blue moon, Tyler, having never heard a single Blur track, thrust his cache of sprinkles through the stargate and was thus beset by the worms, which ate into his brain to extract his penchant for Eurotrash, coming to rest at last in the Walmart gender free restroom from where the only escape was to pickle that which had never been pickled: the tired, the weary, the phantasmic cry of the long deceased, and the rattling cry of the celery, the lost moon of Evian, and finally, George Clooney. Talentless, arrogant, and no less noble than the trash of kings did Joyce wonder why her year long quest had ended in such a quagmire, reaching out, further and further toward a time yet to come, adorned in the way one might adorn a chalkless sidewalk: with crude renderings of dicks and tits, musical notes that went nowhere, crushed by the cement mixer of good intention and sodden with the guilt of the Father.

She had been drugged. But by whom? And why? And who the ###$ was Joyce?

Joyce turned out to be the ghost of Janis Joplins biggest fan. She didn't know how she got there but she'd lost control of her ghostly bladder and pissed all over the potato peelings rendering them useless as a makeshift umbrella.

Tyler was happy in the haze of a drunken hour whilst she drummed along to Blur. It was Song 2 but that mattered not one jot to Tyler as she didn't know it was Blur or even what the song was. No she was completely oblivious. In fact all she cared about was those doughnuts that she had been frantically trying to pedal for the past 300 years of her youth.

But the drugging incident had taken its toll on her and it was only the music that was keeping her in the here and now.

Way off into the distance there was a flash of light and crack of what seemed like the delicate sound of thunder. Datura was keeping her distance these days but there was no mistaking the sound of her size 200 feet as she clambered over rocks and dunes carrying the Olympic torch that had been handed down to her generations ago by Flat Footed Bill.

It was Joyce who spotted her first. She nudged Tyler out of her trance. "can i borrow your hat"? She asked without thinking what this question actually might be misconstrued as.

"You could if it was up to me. What you mean to ask is if the hat can borrow you for a while?"

"for the right price yes" I said
And then I shook my leg and took to the dance floor

-- Sun Jun 01, 2025 11:11 am --

"for the right price yes" I said
And then I shook my leg and took to the dance floor

But "the right price" turned out to be more than Western bargained for: an eternal loop of "Never Gonna Give You Up", playing continuously. Her mind screamed "NOOOOOOOO!!!" but her feet screamed "YESSSSSSS!!!!", and so it went; the eternal rickroll, again and again through the annals of time, it's malignant tones matched only by the compulsive need to ceaselessly dance.

TWELVE BILLION YEARS LATER . .

On what might have been a Tuesday, at approximately what used to be two PM, the first living thing in millions of years broke through the scorched soil and reached desperately for the sunlight. The sixth extinction had come and gone, save for the seedy Pittsburg club where Western was still dancing. Someone had left the refrigerator door open, which created a tiny oasis which climate destruction could not penetrate, nor could it erase her debt to the hat. Her feet now bloody stumps, her hair a ghastly (Astley) red, she danced on. And on. And on.

Meanwhile, life continued to prosper outside. The first humanoid life form of the new age was followed by the next, and so on, until societies arose, and with that, the quest for exploration and knowledge. Nomadic tribes combed the landscape for answers until they followed a wretched sound, a sound that could only be the personification of pure evil, to the run-down bar.

There they saw her. Her legs worn almost to her knees, she continued to dance despite being barely conscious. Her eyes ablaze with a quiet panic, she pleaded desperately, "Please. . . play . . 'Take On Me'. . . "

The nomads regarded her with astonishment at first, then fear, and finally adulation. They kneeled before her and began to pray . . .