Flushed! part I
Down at the park De’Angelo’s
buddies were all ready dividing up teams, and they were all waiting
for him to even them up. Five of his friends needed Dee to get a
serious three-on-three game going. He had to hurry before the older
kids, the teens, took over every court. Only, Dee had to stop home
and go use the toilet. However, he flushed, but the water wouldn’t
drain, and the porcelain bowl was at the brink of overflow.
“Mom!” The ten-year-old
with the small Afro cried out through the closed door of the
bathroom.
“The toilet’s backed-up again. Kayla’s
probably playing in here again.” De’Angelo’s
three-year-old sister was a giggly whirlwind of destruction. She had
been known to experiment with the toilet by flushing household
objects down it. Objects that were not meant to travel through the
piping of the commode, Kayla was determined to get them to swirl out
of existence, or at least that’s what she believed happened to
anything going down the toilet. Ever since she started her toilet
training, her mom and dad have had to at times undo the entire toilet
to rescue crayons, forks, hair brushes, her daddy’s aftershave,
and even one of her brother’s pair of drawers.
“Dee,” his mother called in
return. “I’m really busy right now. Try the plunger
under the sink. You know how to use it.”
Dee puckered up his face in disgust.
Not only did he hate anything involving the toilet, but the guys were
expecting him. He would get the blame if they had to wait on him and
lose out on a court. Opening up the bathroom door, he bellowed a
complaint. The boy was ready to play with his tank top jersey,
sagging black jeans, and his prized high-tops for which he paid 150
bucks. His dad made him earn the money by mowing people’s lawns
and shoveling out their driveways. It took him nearly all of fourth
grade to get the right amount of money. All the guys were totally
jealous of him, which made the shoes worth the price.
More importantly, Amari Porter would
probably be in the park and he loved making her swoon over his shoes,
his Afro, and his basketball prowess. Unfortunately, Dee was better
at bragging about his sporting ability than the fact that it wasn’t
something he was exceptional at. He went out to play basketball
mainly to put on a show for the guys and for Amari’s sake.
“Mom! I gotta meet up with the
guys or the older kids will hog all the courts. I don’t have
time for this.”
“Well, I don’t have time
right now! Your dad’s gone with his buddies. It’s just
you. Look, if the plunger doesn’t work, then leave it for
later.”
“I’ll do it for ten bucks,”
he offered. Money would be an acceptable payment for his valuable
time, he thought.
His mom retorted, “How ‘bout
you don’t help you go on punishment for the next two weeks?”
“Dang, Mom! All right.”
He retrieved the plunger from under the sink and planned to do a
half-hearted job of it, just to say he tried. Too bad for Dee
because the toilet was so close to over-flowing that as he stuck the
plunger head down in the water, some splashed all over his special
shoes. “Aw…” He nearly swore, but knew his mom
would smack him upside the head if he uttered something so sinful.
Instead, he wailed in anguish, “My shoes. Mom…my shoes
have got toilet water on them and there’s pee in that water!”
“Dee, give me a break. It won’t
hurt your shoes any. Maybe it’ll give ‘em an extra
shine,” she laughed. He was appalled that his mother would
dare to joke about something so important to him.
“Mom. This
thing is too full.”
“Then, don’t put it in too
fast. Spread your feet to try and keep your shoes dry.”
At that moment he heard his sister
Kayla attempt to recite the alphabet song, quite unsuccessfully, and
he knew if she came in the bathroom, she would interfere with any of
his efforts. Before plunging any more, he quickly shut the bathroom
door and locked it. Returning to the clogged toilet, he re-inserted
the plunger slowly and deliberately this time, and less water
splashed out, but some still did. Luckily, this time he was more
careful with his shoes. Then, he pressed the head down into the
drain a few times, and whatever had blocked the water flow to the
drain had been dislodged. Finally, the bowl emptied.
Like his dad would do, De’Angelo
flushed the toilet to reset the water level to where it normally was,
but as he did so, he stepped on some of the liquid that spilled out
early, and he slipped head first into the porcelain throne. As the
water rushed down into the drain, suddenly Dee went along with it.
De’Angelo had accidentally flushed himself down the toilet!
Everything went black. Dee spun around and around, getting awfully
dizzy. His screams were all garbled from the water he was now
submerged in. The smell from the sewers was sickening and he wasn’t
sure if he could refrain from throwing up. Being under the water so
long, he wondered if he would drown, but he was very much alive. His
body shot out of the end of a drain pipe and he landed in a flowing
stream of water with a lazy current. The tall, skinny lad was
finally able to get up on his feet. De’Angelo now stood within
a cave of some kind. Stalagmites and stalactites protruded at the
sides of this shallow pool of water. To his left and right were
tunnels that projected light in this cave and it looked like if he
followed the stream, it would lead to the outside.
“Dang. Am I in the sewers?”
He glanced around and found no signs of raw sewage down here. In
fact, there was no such odor since coming out of the large corrugated
drainage pipe. “Hey. Mom! Can you hear me?” Dee
wasn’t sure to follow the tunnels or the stream.
A little tiny wheelbarrow full of rocky
chunks with crystals of some sort imbedded in them emerged from the
right tunnel and pushing it was a man that would only come up to his
chest. The man had neon orange skin that probably gave him enough
light to see in the cave system down here. A line of perhaps a
hundred were following behind single file. That explained the light
down in the tunnels in this cave system, thought De'Angelo. All put
together their bodies gave made it seem like daylight down here.
They each had a bright purple hard hats. Just as the one in the lead
reached the banks of the creek he turned to his right and proceeded
towards the entrance to the cave. So far none of them even noticed
Dee, until the tenth one in line came to an abrupt stop, dropped the
levers to his wheelbarrow, spilling some of his load of stones.
Rubbing his two eyes with his hands, he shouted and pointed right at
Dee.
“Hey! Look there! Could it be?”
He turned to the guy behind him. They had bright green work gloves
and boots, plus they wore brown rubberized overalls that hung down at
chest level, exposing their hairy chests. Each follicle glowed a sky
blue and they almost seemed like one of those toys with the colored
lights and little kids make pictures with.
The guy behind hollered with his hands
cupped around his lips. “Bweebles! Bweebles! Look! It's the
one prophets of old said would come in their stories and songs.”
Way up by the entrance to the cave, the
leader refuted what number eleven claimed. “Tongo, you're
always jumping to conclusions. Those prophecies have gone on for
centuries and never has the One of Restoration ever appeared.”
“Hyphyn...look. He towers over
us and his skin does not glow with the Orange like us. He has not
been contaminated with the Orange sickness that stunts our growth and
kills us when we are the Twenty-five.”
“Well, he does have hair so
tall,” Hyphyn admitted. After removing his hardhat, he rubbed
the top of his bald head, “Oh...how I wish the hair did grow.”
De'Angelo didn't know how to respond to
the conversation. The one called Tongo, eleventh in line, let go of
his wheelbarrow and ventured out into the stream to greet the strange
visitor who had to be the one from the prophecy. He had to tilt his
neck completely back to stare up at the much taller De'Angelo.
“Hey...are you the new king destined to restore order among our
warring factions?”
“Uh...I doubt it. I fell into my
toilet and somehow flushed down into a cave. It was impossible.”
Tongo's eyes bugged out with the
excitement after Dee's explanation. “That's part of the
prophecy. He who swirls around and around and appears in the cave of
Fashion...He will have hair so high...He will be free from the
Orange. Tall and mighty will he be and yet a child. He will pass
the test of the most dunked.” Clapping his palms together and
patting his helmet in rhythmic joy, “So far, you fulfill all
the signs, except for one.”
The leader of this group of little men,
Hyphyn, joined in right behind Tongo. However, there were hardly any
variation in any of their physical traits to distinguish one from the
other and Dee thought perhaps they were clones. Hyphyn believed it
was his job to negotiate with this boy who to them seemed so
gigantic. “What do they call you in your land? We are the
Bweebles.”
“They call me Dee. It's short
for De'Angelo. I'm a person...a human. I'm really just a kid. Man,
you Bweebles sure are tiny.” Dee was so amazed at these
creatures. He wondered if he ended up in a fairy tale.
“Well, Master Dee, if you could
come prove yourself to be our coming king, we would greatly
appreciate it. You see, you resemble the description of an ancient
prophecy. The one who would save us from the Orange. Then, our
future children would no longer live with this wretched curse on us.”
“Well...I guess. What do I have
to do? What happens if I'm not the guy you're hoping for?”
“A challenge has been set up that
has stumped the Bweebles for centuries. If you pass it, it will
prove you are the one. You will be our king, live in the Empty
Palace, and you shall have your pick of any female in the land to be
your wife and our queen. If not, we will return you to your land
from where you came.”
Until 2014! Be good to yourselves!
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