The automobiles honked, the little scruffy dogs barked, and the ladies in monochromatic outfits walked along with their umbrellas out despite the lack of rain and strong winds.
But Josh didn't notice. He was too busy staring at the girl next door. Watching the way she played in the yard, rolled in the mud and giggled while plucking daisies from the yard. He admired her manual lawn-mowing skills the most out of everything about her. He sighed to himself when she got down on all fours and plucked one such daisy from the ground by biting it off at the stem. As she scurried around the yard like some kind of nightmarish, skittering creature of the night, a bit of the admiration was lost by momentary scepticism of her sanity.
Of course, his sanity was also into question, since he had his face pressed firm up against the glass pane of the window and his frantic breathing was causing the thing to fog up persistently.
Cassius Bright thought all of this was unusual from his lawn chair outside. He didn't care much for watching the pedestrians going about their daily routines, that's what work was for. Instead he had set up his lawn chair facing the house, just in case space pirates thought to steal it when he was off-duty.
Meanwhile, Paul, a simple janitor and sometimes store clerk was doing inventory at the local supermarket. He had a pen and paper out and was jotting down everything in the store when he noticed two distinct unusual happenings. First of all, they were all out of the big boxes of Tide and secondly they were also curiously devoid of all multi-colored food. He didn't think anyone would buy the genetically modified rainbow-colored bananas, the neon-green glow-in-dark pineapple soda pop, or the whole wheat Nibs.
Paul waved.
So Paul did what any dutiful worker would. He walked away and pretended not to notice, hoping his supervisor would find out "first" instead and he wouldn't have to restock the shelves. As Paul fled the scene of the crime against nature, he found himself with no other choice but to work one of the cash registers and pray for mercy from Puss'n'Boots.
Well, that's just a fairy tale and a quote from a Shrek movie, so it didn't happen. Instead Paul worked until his arms felt like rubber and his legs burned from the heater he was standing on due to shoddy building engineering. Also there was no AC because that was too expensive to stock, genetically mutilated mutant frakenfoods were much cheaper... apparently. And possibly better for the environment... apparently.
That's when it hit him. He knew why all the Tide was missing! Cassius Bright was in here earlier with his kids! Question Mark.
So he did.
Mark, the local baker and sometimes soothsayer from Whynot, Mississippi tried his best to divine the answer from a loaf of hard tack but found no answer from beyond the grains.
With a snap of his Trepie fingers, Paul stuck his hands in his pockets and marched away, doing his best to figure out the truth behind these very strange, seemingly unrelated happenings.
But it was above his paygrade and possibly sideways from his education, so he posted an ad calling forth a pair of junior detectives. He aimed high and called Sherlock Holmes directly, but the time difference made him wake up Watson and somebody shot the receiver in the dark.
But nobody answered the ad. And the mystery of the missing detergent grew to soon be forgotten.
Meanwhile, Cassius Bright, single mother to his one-of-a-kind daughter and whatever Joshua was, was currently cursing out his kids while doing the laundry. Josh seemed to have some kind of a drooling problem, and Estelle's clothes were NEVER clean, even after he took them out of the wash. He'd have to have some choice words with the pair of them later. But it was 3 am, and he couldn't bring himself to wake them up at this hour.
Never mind that both of the youths were still up at that hour. Taking awkward sideways looks at each other from their separate beds in the same room.
"Hey... Estelle... do you ever think-"
"Nope!" Estelle cut off Josh mid-sentence.
"-...about love?"
Estelle gave Josh a raised eyebrow from where she had her covers pulled up to her neck. She laughed and laughed, and then bid Josh a good night.
She soon turned the light off from her nightstand and left Josh staring up at the ceiling in the dark. In the quiet stillness nothing moved, but from the basement, profanity could be heard. Josh thought he had a problem. A serious problem that needed rectifying.
The next morning, as punishment for the inanity of it all, Cassius Bright began seriously drilling his kids in the lessons of warfare. Estelle failed everything, swords, guns, RC-remote explosives, gatling gun handling skills, reloading, Close Quarters Battle and clerical duties of any kind.
She had SOME proficiency with whacking things with a stick and Cassius figured it was the best he could hope for.
Josh meanwhile had a lot of frustration he needed to vent and his skills at stabbing things violently seemed natural to the point of unhinged. Cassius gave him a barely passing grade. Curiously, also a bib.
Satisfied with the training, he gave the kids their first mission: Defend the house from any and all space pirates.
Cassius, departing for his storage shed down the street, sought to stow away all the boxes of Tide he had bought yesterday. With kids like his, he was up most nights washing and rewashing the laundry. He munched on a strangely human-like looking carrot and drank some green pineapple pop. Then the sky turned purplish and he felt a tingling sensation in both arms. But he fought on. He swerved into oncoming traffic and laid down the horn. He honked at everybody and shook his fists. Unsavory chemicals flowing through his system, he clotheslined one of the monochromatic women walking down the street while driving in the wrong lane. He shouted obscenities at her and wasn't paying attention to the road. Luckily other drivers were and swerved out of the way in time to avoid head on collisions.
It didn't take long before Cassius was pulled over by the police. The officer strolled up to Cassius' pickup truck casually. Chewing a stick of gum and with his visor down, the cop was doing his absolute best to look intimidating.
"Sir, do you have any idea how fast you were driving?" The cop asked with his thumbs hooked into the belt loops of his pants and leaned forward, studying the man behind the wheel.
"I AM THE LAW!" Cassius shouted so loudly, the green veins in his neck practically bulged with rage.
"No, sir. I am. I'm afraid I'm going to have to take you in to the station and impound your vehicle. Have you consumed anything in the last 24 hours to account for your behavior? Any drugs? Speed, coke, meth, orange juice, MSG, high fructose corn syrup, Titan?"
Cassius began to calm down somewhat. "I... I... uh... had this new pineapple soda pop. Could that have been the culprit officer?" Cassius handed the cop the beverage through the window.
The cop studied it carefully, looking the ingredients over in scrutiny. "Ah, here's your culprit, you consumed some-"
Cassius wasn't having it in his bad foods induced fog of rage, he floored the gas pedal and took off down the street, the frame of the car hitting the cop on the head while he sped off.
Dazed, the cop stood up and drew his gun. "Stop or I'll shoot!" The cop warned, tossing off his helmet and squinting where a fragment of the visor had cut across the brow of his eye. Unsteady, he pulled the trigger and the bullet tore through the back of the truck. Right into half a ton of Tide.
The resulting explosion of soap flipped the truck over frontwards, it landed on the cab and Cassius was pinned under the truck's wreckage.
EMTs quickly arrived on the scene. The cop collapsed, soaked in average toxic soda pop from where it had spilled upon him during the altercation, and half-blind in one eye, did his best to update the EMTs on the situation. Trained medical professionals pulled Cassius from the wreckage, but the soap had destroyed his credentials. Uncertain of who this man was, the EMTs quickly transported him to the nearest hospital without notifying his next of kin.
Meanwhile, Estelle whacked things with a stick and Joshua wondered when supper would be ready. He was also wearing his bib.
Forced to make ill-fated decisions on their own, the two decided to do things the only way they knew how: Weirdly.
But that's another story. Suffice to say, when Cassius was released from the hospital, he found his house stolen by space pirates, Joshua and Estelle missing, presumably dead, and a need for volatile chemicals in his system. Cast to the street without a home and without a razor to properly shave, the man soon developed a beard. Developing a pot belly from over-consumption of alcohol, the local children soon came to refer to him as "Santa." This warmed his heart. Unfortunately it also warmed his stomach and the result wasn't pretty.
The next significant thing he did was pull a stick from a drainage ditch that would become his home, right near a dumpster filled with fish sticks, and his favorite: Captain Morgan's spiced rum.
While he was sleeping, Roo bounced over and took back the stick, secretly a pooh stick, and left to return it to the Fellowship of the Pooh.
The End.