Chapter 17: God Bless America, Land of Bernadinberg
We, and by we I mean myself and the person with me, who incidentally was Sophia Loren, and I was Bella Black, entered the forest scene. After long travels down a hallway we emerged into said scene. The grass was green and the trees were green–and the sky was blue– and the moss too. The sparrows flapped their wing joints aimlessly in happy abandons.
Only the tallest tree in the scene was perhaps 5000 feet tall, and stretched many arms around basewise. The roots entered the ground like a many-headed snake. Its octopus branches branched out at least half way up the tree, in the direction of the sky.
Around the scene were other trees, which were green and brown, and then some verdant emerald bushes, and natural sawdust coated the floorspace. The bushes had prickles. It would hurt to run through them. You should not do such things.
"What are those lumpish articles laying the way they lie on the river slope?" Sophia Loren's loose lips dribbled. We were approached by the glen. The glen was by the river. The river lazed about in a surprising riverbed tangent to the forest scene.
It turned out that they were human shapes. The lumps spoke: "Hello, who is this?"
"It is me, and my friend whose name I call Ed!"
"My friends refer to me as Bella Black since my remarriage to the stud who is tragically a spirit away at this point in the story. Nice to meet you Janisa De'Loreal."
"Yes, I am."
The introductions smoothed over and soon the fattest lump wiggled forth, though now it had human form. The mound of human lard open its maw, its slitted shark eyes constrained within large glass frames. His hat cast a shadow, as hats tend to, but the shadow could not hide his criss-cross flannel casing and khakis.
"And who can you be, little friend?" I proferred.
"I go by Old Ben. Old Ben Bernadinberg."
"Bernadinberg..."
"Wait, are you the same Ed to whom I am a former ex-wife?"
"Yes, I am."
"What a coincidence! So you are my ex-husband, then? Nice to see you here, though in movies it can be awkward to meet former liaisons."
"Wait, do you know a man named Georgi who has your last name? He goes by Paul. By the way, right now I am Sophia Loren speaking," she said.
"Paul?" he took off his glass frames and held them on his flesh mound. "Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time."
To be continued...