I got whistles and catcalls as they led me into County Lock Up, but I at least got a nice orange jumpsuit to wear.

The police confiscated my wedding ring/the Signet Ring of the Bird Kingdom, making me feel more naked than ever before.

As I watched them pass the item into storage, I came to the sudden realization that, although Jessica had dumped me at the Sheraton, I never saw her remove her own ring. In other words, she could possibly still have feelings for me, that the ring actually still meant something to her, as it had during that fateful day on the Union Plaza rooftop. After all, our signet rings, as she had mentioned when she first tackled me in the glass elevator, also signified our betrothal.

Of course, it could have been just for the power, but I still held on to my hope.

They put me in a cell with a skinny white dude that looked stoned out of his mind.

"Hey, cutie!. Want some Xanax?"

I shook my head. "I don't do that shit."

He didn't skip a beat. "You streak often, or was it a special occasion?"

"Uh...I was drunk."

The man smiled. "You should get drunk more often. You got a nice butt."

I blanched. "That's it. No more talking."

When I got on the upper bunk and took off my prison issue shoes, he played with my feet.

I kicked him away, and as I did so, my leg became an animated rat foot, elongating enough to hit him in the face and knock him to the floor. He cowered in a corner, muttering about never doing drugs again.

Now, he'd been working on one of those adult coloring books.

I'm not sure what I was thinking, maybe being in Cool World doodle-fied my brain, maybe I momentarily entertained the erroneous thought that any prison would let me tap into Cool World's power, or maybe it was my foot turning furry. At any rate, I can think of no other rationale for playing with my creepy cell mate's coloring book.

Singing Outshined by Soundgarden, I poked my fingers against one of the uncolored pages.

My hand glowed, went through the surface.

Slight problem: The book was full of mandalas, and when my hand entered Mandala Land, the cell filled with the sounds of Iron Butterfly's In The Garden of Eden. A warden came by to see what was happening.

I got distracted, turned real, and my hand exploded out the back cover in a spray of shredded paper.

"Hey!" my cell mate cried. "My book!"

"Can it," I said. "Unless you want me to do the same thing to your head."

I smiled nervously at the warden.

"Man, I don't know how he did that...but I'd do what the man said." The officer paused. "Wonder if I have any sick days left?"

The officer walked off.

I picked up a blue felt tipped pen, thought about drawing a hole in the wall, but decided against it. I'd done that once before, and I only got into trouble. Here, in real life, I'd either end up in another cell, or inside the plumbing.

Instead, on the back cover of the book, I drew a crude skull with a passable imitation of a key attached to it.

By singing The Chili Peppers' Soul to Squeeze, I successfully managed to bring my drawing off the page and into the real world, an actual glowing key that constantly ground its teeth together.

The moment I brought it up to the cell door, I realized my mistake. The cell opened by a buzzer button, not a regular lock. It seemed I had been watching too many movies.

"You moron," the key said.

"Up your keyhole!" I muttered, stowing the tool for later.

The problem with buzzer locks is that they made noise, so even if I did like that one episode of Arrow and dislocate my arm, the warden would catch me. I'd actually be better off drawing a hole.

Again, doing so would only put me in a cell with Bubba, or the basement, or somewhere else where the cops would find me, but I didn't have any other plan at the moment.

That was, until I noticed the stamp on my cellmate's letter to home, a picture postcard-like landscape of cutesy New England cottages in winter.

Now, as a kid, I had seen a television program where a boy magically mails himself to Australia and Japan by merely...standing on...something and doing a little chant. Up until my imprisonment, I had taken this as a metaphor for using your imagination, but now, when I actually needed to remember the chant, all I could think of was, "Gooble gobble, gooble gobble, one of us, one of us."

I knew I was taking a big risk, attempting to mail myself to the man's brother in...Winnemucca (I'd probably destroy the stamp, letter and everything else) but I figured I'd be screwed no matter what I did, and this was as good an idea as any.

Placing my hand on the envelope, I emptied my mind of everything but the lyrics to Soul to Squeeze and opening the front door of that little stone cottage with the glowing orange windows and steam rising from the chimney on its snow covered roof.

To my surprise, I actually shrank to a size of less than 0.87 inches and landed in a snowbank. The thought occurred to me that I could have used a similar tactic to squeeze between the bars of my cell door, but such is life. I knocked on the door to the house.

The door swung open, and a man in Victorian garb and a face like Ebeneezer Scrooge poked his head out, scowling at me. "What the hell do you want."

I punched him in the face, knocking him out cold.

In my defense, I didn't see that many houses in that little hamlet, and I feared what would happen if the wardens saw a stamp that looked like me on the envelope.

I dragged the home owner inside, shut the door, watching the real world through the guy's frosted windows.

The interior of the house looked just as picture postcard-y as the exterior. Set design by Charles Dickens. A tea kettle bubbled in the fireplace.

I set my victim up in a rocking chair, securing him with ropes.

A woman resembling Mrs. Santa Claus came into the room. "Who is that, dear?"

I gave her a sheepish wave.

The woman screamed, so I knocked her out too.

When I peered out the window again, I saw a row of artfully painted doves staring back at me.

The birds moved and fluttered around in strange, annoyingly slow motions, like characters in that 1982 The Snowman film, like someone had made a cartoon out of a bunch of paintings.

They squinted at the glass for a moment, then bowed in reverence.

I opened the door, and the creatures all fluttered in.

"My king!" said one of them. "What brings you to this place?"

"I'm in jail. I...got..desperate. Do you have any better places to hide than this? It's going to be awkward when these guys wake up."

They bobbed their heads. "We know just the place!"

They led me through the snow to a big snow covered bird nest, built like an igloo, behind one of the cottages. The interior looked like Sherlock Holmes's living room, but with bird pictures everywhere.

The doves introduced themselves as Cyril, Reginald and Cedric.

Cyril poured me a cup of tea. "So. Was she good?"

"Uh..." I stammered. "Yeah."

"Who do you prefer more, Cupcake...or Splinter?"

I blushed. "Look, I know I...shouldn't expect that much privacy, being that you're birds, but could we please talk about something else?"

"Your garb is very peculiar."

"And bright," said Reggie.

"It's prison issue, so yeah, orange is the new black."

Cedric glanced at my finger and gasped. "Your highness! Your signet ring!"

"I know," I groaned. "The police took it."

The birds stared at me in astonishment. "They can do that?"

"Unfortunately."

"Is there anything we can do?"

I peeked out the door hole. "Could you...watch what happens in the real world, maybe see if they move me out of this jail?"

Cyril saluted me. "By your command, your highness!" and he flew out the door.

"So," I muttered. "Can I...get to Cool World from here?"

The two remaining birds shook their heads and said "Nuh uh."

"Something has happened to our world. It is collapsing. You were lucky to find us, highness. Even your trusted aid, Extra, has become imprisoned in a way we cannot access from here. We are cut off from the Multiverse. We have not heard any news for several hours."

"Did you and her majesty climax at the same time, or did you finish first?"

"Stop," I groaned. "Just...stop."

"Is that what you told her?"

I smacked my face.

Cyril flew back in. "We're still in the prison cell, highness."

I slumped into a rocking chair. "Let me know if there's any change."

All of a sudden, it felt like an earthquake had hit the village. Pictures fell off the walls, dishes broke.

"Would this count as a change, your highness?"

The birds kept me up to date with the recent developments, the wardens getting upset about my absence, my cell mate ranting and raving about me disappearing into a stamp, until they gave him medication, and his envelope got placed on the correspondence cart to go out.

The cart moved to the front office, then the mailbox. Everything seemed to be going according to plan.

Time passed. I slept.

When I came out in the snow to look around, I couldn't tell what was going on. The mailbag was dark, we got jostled around a lot, and the scrooge guy I punched came out with a shotgun, which made it hard for me to keep watch.

I returned to the nest, had tea and crumpets. I waited.

The birds told me we'd been placed in another envelope, sent to a sorting station, another dark bag, a darkened mail slot, then a facility where dozens of people sorted through envelopes.

The whole process sounded so weird that I came out to see what the hell was going on.

That's when I noticed I'd been placed in a dark concrete room.

As I stared, a stern looking brown face loomed over me. Humorless, female, short cropped hair. "Mister Deebes." It sounded like the voice of God from my vantage point. "Please come out of that stamp immediately. If you fail to comply within two minutes, I can make things very unpleasant for you."

To illustrate her point, she grabbed a corner of the envelope and slowly tore it off.

So I didn't believe the woman could actually rip an animated stamp in half. I stayed in my little world, standing still, pretending to be nothing but an illustration.

Stocky, bun hairdo, clad in a pantsuit...she looked like a grumpy frog in drag. "Oh, so you want to play hardball. Okay, let's play hardball."

Suddenly, Stamp World got really warm, filling up with smoke.

"Only you!" I heard a voice shouting.

I spun around and saw a brown bear in a ranger's hat brandishing a shovel.

"Only you could screw up something this bad!" the bear swung his weapon like a baseball bat, and I went flying out of the picture frame, onto the floor of an interrogation room.

The woman slapped the burning stamp, extinguishing the flame.

She stomped up to me, hands on her fat hips, glowering at me. "Glad to have you back, Mr. Deebes. Let's talk."