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A History of Absurdia in
10 Short Movements
10 blue frogs
stood under the shade of a rock. Around them, the smooth yellow bed
sheet shimmered in the fierce heat of the sun. Eight of the frogs
were preparing to leave. Their self-appointed captain, the most
puffed-up of them all, Seize-Her, pointed to the horizon and looked
at X. "Gah!" it said, authoritatively. X shook its head. "Gah!" it
said meekly. "Gah!" said Seize-Her in disgust. The eight frogs
shouldered their lunch boxes of fried flies in barbeque sauce and
moved on ponderously. X watched them sadly. As they were about to
disappear into the horizon, they were encircled by a huge shadow and
crushed by the jewelled feet of a dinosaur out to meet her
leather-loving boyfriend at Just Desserts. The horrified X turned to
find Y, a sleek frog that made it mildly (but pleasantly)
uncomfortable) watching him. "Gah," Y said, with amused disdain. It
turned away and walked with swaying hips into the deepest shade of
the rock. Mustering its courage, X ventured inside after a few
minutes. Y had her face hidden in Catcher In The Rye. It looked up
at X severely. "Gah," Y said, ominously and returned to the book.
The crushed X nevertheless moved closer and closer to Y. Something
about Y's little bits were different from X's little bits. Was that
why it excited X's curiosity so much? (** Purveyors of Absurdia
would like to apologize for the pronounced confusion, while
simultaneously regretting that the genderless beauty of Absurdia was
sacrificed to the demands of the viewing public. Read on to discover
how.**) X noted that Y was beginning to look uncomfortable at its
approach. It squatted next to Y and pressed Y against the rock.
"Gah," it said insinuatingly. "Gah," said Y rudely, but did not move
away. And as their tongues came together in gloriously disgusting
simultaneity, X discovered that he had to start going to the gym and
that he wished Y was not quite such an independent girl.
9
schoolboys walked down a deserted city square. Each bore a thick
cane in one hand and a Rubik's Cube in the other. As the clock in
City Hall struck noon, they came across a thick white line. Four of
them crossed the line before stiffening and looking towards the sky
with rapt attention. Ignoring the cries of their fellows, who were
beginning to threaten them with their sticks, they put their heads
together and carefully changed the permutations of the cubes in
their hands. Defiantly, they presented these to the four behind the
line. The schoolboy who had paused on the line, formerly their
leader, grew pale with indecision as he tried to decide which side
to join. Having to think (something, as teachers will attest,
students hate doing) drove him mad and his mouth began to foam. The
opposing camps, glad of a diversion, tied him to a lamp post and
took turns beating him till he died. They roasted him, ate him and
then, with great ceremony, fell to battle. Their descendants
continue to fight, in those deserted city squares of Internet most
prone to hate.
8 vultures, their white chests puffed up with
smugness, walked into a small village of storks. A wedding was in
progress and the storks were dancing in gay abandon, chasing and
capturing new partners frequently. The head vulture grew pale. He
opened his mouth and spoke the Words that had been imprinted upon
him and his army by a mixture of rude force and meek consent. The
village's more alert storks charged at the vultures with their
spears, but they were tripped up by the coldly logical lasso of the
words. A month later, the emaciated storks, their dance-hall having
made way for the mansion (complete with airlifted and airbrushed
Playboy models) in which the Words would repose kindly or
break-dance invisibly, queued up in a resigned queue for the daily
recommended dosage of Words to keep their supposedly Immortal Souls
alive.
7 large black cockroaches moved with slow menace off
an ancient and smouldering black-and-white chessboard into the
warren of houses surrounding it. Keeping pace with each other, they
moved towards one of the bigger houses. Their shining armoured backs
caused the girlishly pale winter sun to blush before it realised it
didn't really stand a chance, did it love? Destroying the door with
their feelers, they swarmed into the house and quickly surrounded a
family of guinea pigs, at dinner. "Don't hurt us," cried Papa Guinea
Pig, in heavily accented Imperium, the somewhat bland and thieving
language that would one day dominate Absurdia, "Take what you want!
I beg you!" "Shut up!" hissed the head cockroach stabbing the pig's
throat with its feelers. While his soldiers tucked gold picture
frames, paintings and cutlery under their armor, he began to circle
the sobbing daughter of the house, mesmerizing her with his
formidable eyes. She died in his army tent later that year.
6 Angels from the Paradise of Plenty sneaked into the
dressing room of the Satanic Pluguglies, the team they were playing
for the coveted Soul of the Common Man, to taste their supposedly
wild new champagne called Temptation. The bottle featured a horned
angel with a cigar in his mouth offering a meek looking demon in the
desert hair-growth supplements, Swiss chocolates and other such
riches. The Pluguglies rushed into the room and the lone female
angel was surprised to find that the Pluguglies were quite
attractive really, even if... Before she could finish the sentence,
their halos were knocked off, the floor collapsed beneath them, and
they plunged into a frozen underworld of collective imp-rearing,
food stamps and potbellied demons eating their tails to stave off
hunger. Four of the Angels were sent off to the northernmost
glaciers of Hell to dig for gold. One used his white teeth to flash
his way through Infernal Politics till he ascended to the position
of Satan and caused a massive recession by commissioning a statue of
himself made from the frozen teardrops of former boy-bands enslaved
in the Mines of Sadness. The female angel was rescued (or kidnapped)
from slavery in a rich demon's household by a family of renegade
imps who locked her in a cage, force-fed her till she was plump,
fried her in their secret sauce and then fed her to their friends
and relatives at a feast. They were descended from some schoolboys
who faced off in a city square millennia ago.
5 black
cockroaches, including the grandson of the Captain from a previous
movement stood silently outside a door-less house in a long and
mouldering alley of broken houses. (** The purveyors of Absurdia
would like to suggest to the viewers that if the houses look
familiar, it's because the same set has been used, with the required
modifications, in the interest of economy. This is a different
movement, in a vastly different part of Absurdia. The more voluble
dissenters might consider investing in our little enterprise.
Donations of any denomination will be gratefully received. **)
Inside, a guinea pig with a blue eye patch sat at a table with a
large pile of chemically-treated bird droppings. Behind him stood
four similarly eye-patched guinea pigs with their chins defiantly
up, trying to look as menacing as possible. Small guinea pigs, as
yet unable to disguise their fluffy sweetness, blinked up at him
with their large innocent eyes, deposited their spoils on the table
and took away a small envelope of droppings. Retiring to the back of
the house, they stuffed their droppings into their nostrils, took a
deep breath and fell to the ground with faces ranging from
deliriously happy to deliriously terrified. A group of guinea pigs
with black eye patches chose this moment to waddle through a hole in
the wall. While most of them fell upon the blue eye patch crowd, a
few of them stayed back to distribute free samples of droppings to
their near-unconscious potential clients. Watching the battle, our
friend of worthy lineage tensed his feelers impatiently. His captain
shook his feelers lazily and moved his heavy armorised body away
slowly. "I'd like to have been involved in some action," thought the
disappointed hero.
The captain's guess was correct, at any rate.
Within a week, the entire guinea pig population of the Wasteland was
dead and the cockroaches had done their duty as law enforcers
without actually getting a feeler dirty.
4 shades of the
colour Pink entered the University of Oxford. The fairest shade of
Pink got the best advisor, the best corner room and an endless
succession of dark, brooding colours as her boyfriends. While she
went on to graduate as a first-class-first, by writing her thesis on
My Dream Job: Becoming Mother Teresa, the other three shades of Pink
became staunch feminists and doomed her career as an actress by
critically panning her first film, Regally Pink. However, she
continues to be the most visible and sought-after Pink and the most
pernicious, deliberately sapping the brains of millions of young
girls and occasional heiresses by imprisoning them in a harmfully
fluffy way of thinking. For this, the Purveyors of Absurdia pays her
handsome royalties, as she is singlehandedly responsible for the
brisk sales of their Pretty in Pink and Pink Prat lines.
3
monkeys screeched their hearts out to a lustily appreciative
audience. They finished and their leader wiped his brow with relief.
The very next moment, a group of hyenas dragged them off the tree
they had reached through months of hard work, hurled them to the
ground and tore into their bellies. As the hyenas took off,
cackling, the audience descended upon the dying monkeys and took
home clumps of their hair and flesh as keepsakes.
2 penguins,
one with a pink hairband, were walking along the deserted shoreline
of a sobbing sea. The ocean, once crowded with surfers and various
species of cool dudes and biker chicks, was deserted, as its former
denizens had retreated indoors to play with something rudely called
the Wii, lounge in a tanning bed, jog on the treadmill or flail
about (if they were of the juvenile persuasion) in an indoor
sandpit. The penguins held an IPod between them, sharing the
earbuds. Their progress was extremely slow as they would stop after
every two seconds in order to nauseate their voyeuristic viewers
(that's you folk):
"Poopie-kins"
"My Dumpster of Solitude!"
"Oh Sugar Plum! If you're not the one! You're my angel, my
miracle, my lottery ticket, my sun!"
The penguins were fond of
deservedly outdated movies and singers. Just as they were about to
look into each other's eyes deeply for the 2,333,224th time that
evening, lightning balefully struck their IPod.
The IPod gleamed
and death roared his rather morbid manifesto into the ears of the
two twisted penguin bodies, joining them in an unholy eternity in a
Purgatorium for the deaf. "Serves them right," thought the lightning
with a trace of guilt, "They were already penguins. They had no
business getting cuter." The IPod, which had escaped without a
scratch, smirked to itself as it lay in the sand.
1 pink
unicorn, perched in a padded Starbucks coffee cup, in the Rare Books
section of Van Pelt, perused the artfully yellowed manuscript. It
began with a story of ten frogs, then moved on to nine schoolboys
and ended with the tasteless image of two penguins enduring a
violent death to their romance. And so contrived too, all of it, so
carefully constructed. Her lip curled. "Twaddle," she thought. She
took out her little pink pencil and wrote this word with great force
across the top of the manuscript before underlining it vigorously.
An impatient undergraduate in five-day-old sweatpants threw her book
bag upon the bag as she settled down to do her English paper,
sending the pale oblivion, along with her dissent. After all,
writers never like their creations to backchat, even if they are the
product of an afternoon fling with Soma.
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