Some place in the Universe at some time that I don't know (so don't ask me):

I have just realized something: something so weird and strange and disturbing that it's sending my wonderful brain tripping and falling over itself (fine, so maybe my brain's not so wonderful after all).

I don't know where the heck I am.

No, really.

I've got completely and utterly no cruddy clue.

Now why I haven't I been having seizures over this? I don't know what's happening. I don't know what's happened. I can't remember anything. I can't feel anything. Everything is just gone. I can't see it. (Crikeycrikeycruddycrudcrud).

It's like I've been sealed beneath a sky of water, thick and black as night, slamming down into my skull and crushing me into angry blobs of jelly. (Preserves of Numbuh Four, maybe). Smothering me. Squeezing out my breath.

Can I even breathe anyways? I can't find my lungs; they seem to have wandered off somewhere on stubby legs of their own. So have my eyelashes. So have my arms. And where the cruddy heck is my head? On vacation, I guess. Off frolicking somewhere Else along with the fascinating organ that is my mind. (That stupid little organ)

My toes are gliding, sliding through the Wallabee-verse, stars beaming through my eyeballs and spurting out in sparkling constellations from my very surprised ears. (This would happen if I could actually find my toes, my eyeballs or my ears. Those stupid things.) Space is pulsing through me: a river gurgling and glimmering through its muddy banks. Nebulae clogging up my throat with clouds of murky glitter. I wonder if those nebulae would taste like cotton candy, and would puddle into sugary goo on my tongue. Maybe I should try it sometime.

Some other cruddy place in the Universe at some other cruddy time (or maybe it's the same place….I dunno…):

Hang on…I think that I saw something. I dunno. I just thought that I did.

I suck in a breath and suddenly I'm impaled. I'm clutched in an airless grip, like an iron fist crushing my windpipe into two dimensions. Oh crud: now there is cold, rippling cold, shivering up over my skin. It's as if I'm rising, ever so slowly, like a balloon from the ocean's foulest armpit. Around me everything is silent and frozen, crystallized into a pane of the darkest glass. Warmth touches my fingertips, spills down my back, flows across my cheeks (have I finally found my body?). Above me the heavy sky trembles with wriggling light, light that floods like a wave thundering over my head. My arms are stretching high over my head, higher and higher until my shoulders are throbbing with the reaching (If only I was taller—just a little tiny bit- crud).

That's when I see something. I don't really know what the heck it is. It's just something. A square of pale light in front of me. Bleeping lights, bleeping in a way that makes me want to sock them. They're like computer lights (fat chance!), with tiny heads of green bleepiness. The light-square lurches in the clouding gloom.

Suddenly something shudders. Shatters. Smashes. Whatever the word is.

My eyes are smeared with blackness. My lungs collapse. My legs are stone. I'm sinking, an avalanche crawling up my arms, the ocean of darkness burying me in its cruddy freezing blanket. I'm swallowing, choking again.

And so I'm back.

Back in the Wallabee-verse. Of course.

I'll probably be stuck here forever, with my stupid rotten luck. Like a dream that I'm never gonna wake up from.

A comet glitters past my shoulder, glittering like an annoying glittering thing that's just asking for a smack. But it just sparkles through my fingers, flitting away into the night like some annoying bird. I suck at my blistered fingers, my brain saying "crudcrudcrudcrudcrudcrikey" over and over and over again.

Shut up, brain, just

shut

up.

Seriously.

The same crud place, another crud time:

I've been trying. Trying and trying and trying and trying and trying some more. I've thrashed with my stupid legs and clawed with my stupid fingers and spun my stupid arms round and round and round like stupid windmills.

None of it does any good.

"Sure; it'll work!" my brain says, flashing its teeth at me in its very optimistic, organ-y smile (not really, but I bet that it would if it had teeth).

"Don't make me kick y'a," I wanted to say, but the words melted on my tongue before I could hurl them out of my mouth. Stupid, lousy organ of a brain. (yeah; take that!)

"This place is like water, right?" my brain splutters to me. "So if ya paddle around hard enough, ya just might be able to swim out! See; it's foolproof!"

I know that there's something important up there. Up there over my head where it's way too high for me to reach even in my wildest daydreams (this is how everything is, really). Up there is where the only light is in this cruddy sinkhole of a Wallabee-verse. Everywhere else there's nothing but blackness. Stupid, cruddy blackness. Getting in my way. It had might as well be shaking its bum in my face.

I batter at the blackness with my fists until I remember that I can't really do that because you can't punch the dark. Crud. I slice the space with my fingers, tugging at the galaxies and the nebulae and the winking stars and anything else that I can tug at. I've got to get outta here. I've just gotta. I've gotta to swim to the surface.

And then suddenly I remember something, something that comes stabbing into my brain like a glacier of brain-freeze:

I can't swim.

For a second my brain's silent.

Then:

"Crudcrudcrudcrudcrudcrudcrud".

In the Wallabee-verse-at The End (well, nearly):

Ohcrudohcrudohcruddycrudcrud. Just when I thought that it couldn't get any darker: it does. (Of course it does). It's darker than dark. Murkier than murk. Deader than dead. That's what I've got to be.

I've got to be dead.

My stomach's turned to stone. Pluto's sagging in my belly, weighing a zillion frozen, useless tons. My heart's hammering and hammering and hammering and then hammering some more. Any second now, it'll pop into a billion splatting bits, splurting my ribcage and then possibly dribbling out from my nose.

Around me, the blackness blooms. Swells like an ever-swelling universe of swelling-ness (real swell). A black garden of weedy weeds, worming and twisting their way up my elbows, towering over my tiny head and glowering like the stony eyebrows of Mount Rushmore. Gloom is yawning over me and I never thought that gloom could yawn over me before. I'm caught in its hulking shadow, my heart slithering down my leg and my eyes wrapped up in a flood of sticky velvet darkness. Clods of velvety air jammed deep in my throat.

The floor drops out from under my body and suddenly I'm drowned in a whole universe of nothing.

I'm gonna die.

I'm dead.

I've got to be.

Deader than the deadest dead thing.

Maybe I'm a pair of floating eyeballs, eyeballs forever stained with blots of sour black Sharpie. Rays of Sharpie blackness tangling over me. My lungs, they are flat. Flat like gasping balloons.

My cruddy brain, even splattering into bits as it is, manages to spew out some brilliant words of wisdom:

"Oh well. No one'll miss ya anyways. Fun talkin' to ya though, little buddy!"

Bloody brilliant.

I barely even notice the first snowflake of light, a little bit of firefly fluttering down past me (yeah, impending demise can do that to ya, after all). There's a teeny little spot of bright, winking at me through inky waves of Sharpie. Suddenly there's five of them. Then ten. Then twenty. Fifty. A hundred. A thousand. And then way-too-many to-count, a nebula of embers glittering and clouding around. A web of fire-stars glittering at my fingers and twinkling in my hair. Ripples of light quivering over my cement eyelids. I would say that it's weird but now I don't really know what to say. And so I say,

"Crikey."

WHAM. It's suddenly pitch dark, as if some loon has just ripped out the Universe's plug. My stomach pitches away and I plunge back into the trachea of the dark, my arms wheeling around and my heart thudding my throat and the lights sprouting up and popping away. I make a noise like "hungggh!" and THUD: I'm tumbling back into the stomach of the stupid Wallabee-verse. My bum is throbbing sore from the fall. My teeth are shredding my tongue into blood.

I should've just kept my cruddy trap shut.

But I'm still alive.

Only barely, probably.

But so wonderfully, beautifully alive.

I'd thank someone but I don't really know who to thank. And so I just sit here, my eyes falling open wide enough to let the whole galaxy come waltzing in. Real big.

In the Wallabee-verse-I have a genius, Nobel Prize revelation!:

Here it is: my stupid bum self must be stuck in some kind of crud sleep, an especially crud sleep that as hard as I try I can't pry my brains from ("Kiss that Nobel Prize goodbye", says that stupid brain that is most definitely not mine).

A swift mental brain-punch and I'm back to stumbling around, the murkiness slogging up round my ankles as I do. I'm yelping and I'm hollering and I'm howling my lungs dry:

"WAKE UP!"

"Try 'stupid lummox'," suggests the brain that is most definitely not mine. "Ya won't hear yerself unless ya yell something that will REALLY catch your attention! (mostly because it's true, mind you…)"

I don't want to listen but I yell,

"STUPID LUMMOX!" anyhow.

No dice.

Crud.

Then it hits me that this is the weirdest thing that I've ever done: I'm trying to wake myself up. From the inside. Yeah.

Morondumbbellthickheaddopeidiotlummoxdunceclodimbecile.

I'm Wallabee the Witless Wonder. Or at least I wish that I was, what with that stupid organ-that-calls-itself-my-brain always sprouting its crud at me.

I blunder around like a fool in the gloom (which I am), clawing my hands around and feeling with my fingers for something to strike. Maybe a good, hard punch-on-the-brain will wake me up, or at least shut a certain incompetent organ up for a bit. But there's only air, air dribbling down my forehead and streaming between my fingers. Air that is no good to me.

I thump myself down, folding my marble arms so tightly that they probably won't come loose until eons later. I hope so at least. Armies of jeering giggles (compliments of the brain-that-is-most-definitely-not-mine) whack viciously at my stupid ears, pounding me into a little stone ball with my knees smooshed against my chest and my arms locked around my knees and my cheeks slammed into my thighs, my eyes scrunched and heavy with dreaded tears. Oh no. Oh crud. Lousy lousy lousy lousy lousy TEARS. I sniffle. I breathe. I blink. With my Jedi mind-powers I will my eyeballs to slurp back up their thundering floodwaters. But of course I still can't hope to stop them.

The dam collapses. I lurch and suddenly there's tears slithering over my retinas, tears glistening in the dark, tears trickling down my cheeks and tears dripping and drenching my sleeves. Rivers of hot, sticky salt. A whole tropical rainstorm gushing outta my cruddy tear ducts.

I'm Wallabee the Wondrous Weeping Human Hosepipe.

And I'm dead, too.

Well, I ought to be.

What I saw

I saw her right there, right above my head. Floating. Floating like some beautiful alien or like a flower gliding on a murky pool. I saw her. I was choking on my own lousy tears when I saw her.

I saw an angel.

No, REALLY.

I'm sure of it.

She was the most beautiful thing. The most beautiful thing that I've ever ever seen, her dark curtain of hair framing her face in moonshine. Somehow her darkness wasn't freaky-like, not like the cruddy black pit of the Wallabee-verse that I'm sealed away in. It was black like a night rain burbling over my skin. It was all that I could do just to breathe. Breathing had never been harder than it was right then. My stupid lungs had nearly sputtered dry.

Her frosted eyelids had slid open to unveil her eyes, her eyes like bright windows peeking down at me from the mountaintops, flattening my spine with glacial light. Her ice had impaled me, but I was frozen too still to shiver. (I wonder if she could see me with my cheeks all flushed with the blushing? Oh crikey; I hope not…) Warmth jabbed at my skin but I didn't move. I might have scared her away, knocked her away with my stupid flailing legs. I didn't want to make her disappear.

Like the rising moon she suddenly bloomed over me. Sunlight touched my cheek and spread, running down my arms, slipping over my nose, dripping from my fingertips. Tears glistening in her eyes and the world balanced on her smile. Her smile, it slid heavy into my stomach and settled there.

Suddenly my breath was gone.

And so was she.

Her face swallowed by the darkness, her smiling glimmering with teardrops.

I think I know who she is. But I hope that I'm wrong.

'Cause I don't want Numbuh Three to see me like this.

Oh crikey. Oh crud crud crud cruddy crud crud.

I hope that she didn't see me cry.

Is she waiting for me?

Well, already, is she? Is she looking over at me, right now, her summer tears splashing on my lousy head? Well, is she?

I don't know. I hold her fallen smile like a bonfire sparkling on my palm.

She can't cry.

I don't want to be the one to make her cry.

She probably hates me. She'll hate me and hate me and hate me forever and ever. But I don't know how to plug up her waterworks. I don't think that I can snatch myself some cruddy duct tape and just stick her pieces back together. I'd probably screw it up, and the tears would spill out like Niagara Falls from her eyes. I'd deserve to drown.

I've gottta tell her.

I've just got to tell her.

I've gotta get outta here.

I've gotta wake up.

I've got to tell her.

WAKE UP!

Please, stupid brain.

Light puddles around my sneakers and all I can say is .

PLEASE.

Light spilling down my throat.

I've got to tell her.

Light crystalizing on my eyelashes.

I've got to wake up.

She needs to hear.