"Ow," Murt cried. He had just hooked himself in the back with a fishing pole. "Hooked again." Murt was fishing on Fishy River. Strange name, he had to admit. Murt was with his four grandchildren Matt, Harry, Sam, and Hailey. He had promised his son he would take care of them for the day, even if it meant constant bathroom breaks and fish hooks in the back.
"What's wrong papa Murt?" asked his youngest grandchild Sam. She was the only one that never annoyed him by yelling that they had caught a fish, but had it end up being seaweed.
"Nothing," he replied. The old man turned around to check on the others. "How we going, guys?"
"Great," they all said, sounding sarcastic. They didn't like fishing. Matt would rather jump in a pile of bait, Hailey would rather complain about how gross the bait was, and Harry would eat the bait. Matt and Harry stood up.
"Murt," said Matt, "We purpose (he was only 9) that we go an' skip rocks over there." He pointed to the edge of the docks.
Murt couldn't argue with a 9 year old that "purposed" to do something, so he let him and Harry walk over to the edge and skip pebbles. Matt picked up a pebble and turned to Harry, his 8-year-old brother.
"Listen hear hairy face," stated Matt. "I'm gonna teach you how ta throw these here pebbles. First, ya lean your arm back, then shoot it forward and release!"
The first pebbles went skipping in the mist covering the rest of the river. Matt picked up a second, reared back, and threw it. It too, landed a spot in the hazy mist of Fishy River. "Wow!" Harry said, beaming with delight. I wanna try, I wanna try!"
"Whatever ya say hairy face!", retorted Matt. Harry took a pebble and tossed it with all his might. The pebble, like all the others, landed in the mist.
"Yes! I did it! I did it! Woohoo! Who's ya dada? Me! Oh, boy! Did you see that Matt? Matt?" Matt did not respond, for he was staring in awe as Harry's stone came flying back and hit a tree.
Frank and Lenny Hop-Eless were spending their precious Saturday on a stupid tour boat crossing a stupid lake in stupid Colorado. Lenny wished he could go back to the store and play a little Pac-Man before he had to leave for the second stop on the Hop-Eless's trip around the U.S.A.
Y' knows," started Frank, "we could go get something to eat instead of watching the dumb fog."
Y' knows what else?" Lenny retorted, "The food sucks!"
Frank was scrambling to think up another response, but Lenny had already beaten him to it.
"Fine, fine you beef-head; we'll go get something to eat."
They came back a couple minutes later with the chef's recommendation, chocolate covered potatoes. Frank bit into his, thinking it was supposed to be sweet, but the leaned over the deck and opened his mouth on the crowd below. There were a few shrieks and one "Oh, heavens! My new outfit!"
After a while, the brothers started to get bored with "Bull's-eye with Potatoes!" A faint clinking started up and the boys took their plates of hardened potatoes in chocolate over to the side of the ship to see where the clinking was coming from.
Out of the fog, they saw a circular figure appear. A rock! Someone was skipping rocks from the other side of the river! Suddenly, Lenny turned to Frank with an ominous smile of cruelty and trickery. He picked up his chocolate potato, leaned back, and heaved it across the river and into the fog. Frank caught on and started heaving his potato too. Soon, the brothers had emptied five bags of chocolate covered potatoes.
"Not such a waste of a Saturday after all," thought Lenny.
While driving back home, Murt yelled to the kids in the back of his BMW, "Who wants Pizza when we get home?" This was responded by screaming little children and some arguments about what topping they were going to have.
When the group reached ol' papa Murt's house, the kids scrambled out and into the house of wonders. Murt was a collector, and had a bunch off odd trinkets and weird rarities. He shut the car door behind him and headed inside. He grabbed the telephone and called the pizza man. The phone buzzed.
"Yellow! This is Dunlap the Great's Pizza Mayhem, how may I be of service, dude?" The kid on the phone was obviously a teenager, 17 or 18 years old.
"Yes, I would like a pizza. Half anchovy, half cheese."
"Ok old dude, I'll bring the concoction over n' 'bout 45 minutes"
Murt hung up the phone and turned around to see his own mayhem had started. All the kids were jumping on the pillows or ripping feathers from a couch. He put the phone down and huffed up some air then bellowed:
"EVERYBODY QUIET DOWN!!!!!"
This seemed to work fine, because all of the kids scrambled down to the basement at mach 3.
Hailey was the oldest of the children at age 15. She quite enjoyed I, for she could boss the others around in any way she pleased. She was also an actor. Born to perform the arts. Next month, she would be in a play. Not just any play, The Play! The famous play by Nerdsmendoff Hogglehoff! While her siblings were downstairs playing with a spider, Hailey was practicing for the play. It was the scene where the girl opened a possessed book and its illustrations leaped off the pages and killed her character off. She opened a random book and started reciting her lines.
"Why must he tell me not to open this book?!? I can open it, and read it, and skim through it! Why must he tell me not to open it?!? For I will! I will open the book!"
And with those lines, she reached over to her bed stand and picked up a book, showing it to the fake audience in her room, then dramatically and slowly opened the book.
"Oh no! Oh please no! Please, no! I-AIEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
She pretended to become possessed and fell to the floor. Hailey took out a bottle of fake blood, (a bottle of Ketchup for Ya Face!) and splashed it all over her clothes. She lied there, still as the floor, not moving, like she was dead. She would have to assume that position for 5 minutes, before intermission came to save her.
Just then, at a horribly wrong time, Harry came running past her room, catching a glimpse of the fake scene played out on Hailey's bedroom floor. Harry screamed.
"HELP! HELP! HAILEY'S DEAD! SHE'S DEAD! WITH BLOOD! WITH BLOOD! SHE WAS ATTACKED BY MUTANT SQUIRRELS BECAUSE SHE WAS KEEPING THE SECRET OF THE-
"HARRY!" screamed Hailey. "I'm not dead you dork! It's fake! I'm practicing for a play! Duh!
"SHE'S-oh what? You're not dead? Oh well…False alarm everyone!"
Hailey sighed heavily; she now had proof that her brothers had minds the size of corn, corn off the cob.
Hailey was at the G.T. Linden Public Library searching for a biography book that she would have to read over the summer. She didn't like old books. Hailey wished that she could skip from 1979 on to 2009. She wondered what kind of books they would have written by then. Oh, well. She would have to wait another 30 years to find out.
Meanwhile, she had to deal with her oldest younger brother, Matt. Matt was the most annoying of the two brothers she had.
She was shuffling through the 1900's section. Orville and Wilbur Wright, Teddy Roosevelt, there was no one really, really interesting! She needed a role model, but who?
Just then, with her peripheral vision, she spotted a dark figure, tall, maybe 17-18 years old. He stayed hidden in the shadows, a strange box in his hands. It was long and flat. Enough to hold a pizza, maybe. But what would a pizza man be doing in a library? As Hailey turned back to the bookshelf, the figure rose from the depths of the shadows covering him.
He approached the girl with caution. One step at a time, slowly, not making a sound. He tapped her on the shoulder. She turned and screamed, then ran.
Hailey grabbed Matt's hand and started to run.
"Matt!" she screamed. "There's a strange, mysterious figure following us!"
"Cool!" said Matt. He was glad that people cared enough or knew him enough to follow him mysteriously.
"We gotta get out of here!" Hailey yelled.
The two siblings sprang thought the History section, and almost knocked over the Fiction section. They jumped past the biography section they were in just minutes ago. The duo sprinted for the door, past the turnstiles, and out onto the open streets.
Arriving back home, in the safety of other people that didn't want to chase them, Hailey and Matt settled down for a cup of lemonade.
"Man, was that guy scary or what?" Matt said, all hyped up about the chase.
"Well I just think it's weird that a random stranger would want to come up to you and chase you," stated Murt.
"Blorg," Sam shouted. "More blorg!" "Blorg was Sam's three-year-old language for lemonade.
Suddenly, a knock on the door sent all five into a state of shock.
"Aliens!" hollered Harry.
"Yeah!" Matt replied.
"Ssh! There is no such thing as aliens you beef-heads! I swear, if they-"
Another knock on the door cut Hailey off.
""Whoa," Murt murmured. "I better go and check this one out."
Murt slid out of his chair. Two more knocks.
"It sounds like it's coming from the basement!" yelled Harry.
Out of nowhere, the floor exploded into a bubbly mass. Everyone went screaming and yelling and panicking. Murt suddenly had a flashback:
When Murt had bought the house, the previous owner had told him that he tried starting a blubber store. He had said it didn't work out well and that there may still have been remains of blubber grease on the floor under the carpeting. It could overheat and bubble u, too.
So Murt, being the never-prepared man he is, grabbed a chair and started whacking the overheating blubber grease. It had no effect because the bubble of blubber just grew until it burst through the carpeting. By impact, Murt released the chair from his grip and landed on the couch. The blubber stopped.
"Oh, well." He thought. "I uses that's another thing I'll need to get fixed when I move my new house."
The knocking proceeded again and Murt was on his way back to the basement. The basement was the only place in Murt's home where he felt the least safe. He had all his old junk that got rejected when he moved in. He didn't want hat stuff just hanging around upstairs, so bam! It then became basement stuff!
The knock on the door brought him back to reality. Murt walked over to the door. He was about to turn the knob when it suddenly moved by itself.
The door creaked open, creating suspense. Was it the wind, or a mad lunatic? A tall, dark figure arose from the door.
"Good Evening Mr.! Dunlap the Great's Pizza Mayhem Pizza Delivery is here! DTGPMPD, for short!"
The man took Murt by surprise, so he attacked him ferociously. He hit him, punched him, scratched him, even bit him. All of thins fighting and screaming went on until Dunlap yelled, "HEY!"
"Dude, I'm like, the pizza man, dude!"
With those words, Murt stopped slapping him and stepped back.
"Wait, so you're not a stalker?"
"No, sir. I'm just a common teenager, if you will."
Murt started to babble like a baby. It was like all his words were crumpled up then stuck back in his mouth.
"I…but…you…pepperoni….half anchovy…stalker…why?"
Dunlap understood what Murt was trying to say and they both apologized persistently. Dunlap handed the pizza to Murt and bagged the pizza money.
"Well," started Murt, "I appreciate the pizza, and once again, I'm so sorry for the black eye!"
"It's ok," Dunlap hollered over his shoulder.
So Murt headed upstairs to greet his grandchildren again. Up there, they ate their half anchovy, half cheese pizza. Murt came to the conclusion, that yes, after all, all the events he had witnessed today were all just one big coincidence. Case closed.