Plunging toward the lowest common denominator

Posted by Chris H.

I'm loathe to post this, but then I realized that we have nothing else. What follows is precisely what Laura forwarded to me, unedited, in all of its original glory. Ideally it will be the first and last partial manuscript we post here at what used to be Never Later (and may soon have a new name!), but then again, we never make promises because we are slaves to expediency.



Dear Sir,

Please find enclosed the first chapter for my novel HIS COWBOY HEART, HER NINJA BREAST. It takes place in rural American in the 1700s and follows the life of young Poliamareaux Potato, a French-Irish ninja-born farmgirl, and her struggle to choose between the sweet affections of cowboy Winner Longhorn and ninja Whiskey McBlarneystone and also avoid the eviller affections of Sheriff Dieter von Schweinfleisch. Pirates will also make an appearence.

Yours most sincerely,
Dawny Bougainvillea


Chapter One

Poliamareaux Potato - or Polly, as she was commonly called - swung her buxom frame into the farmstead with a sway of her womanly curves, the basket of freshly-gathered eggs balanced on her hip. With her cream-coloured hand she turned on the stove and placed a cast-iron frypan on the burner and threw some butter into it for melting. With her other hand she tossed an egg in the air and almost absent-mindedly gave it a karate chop that sliced the shell exactly in half and left the yolk and whites continuing their trajectory into the sizzling frypan.

Her Irish father, Fiddles Potato, watched from the barn with pride and sadness alternately tugging at his heart. "She makes eggs the same way her dear departed mother, and thus my wife, did," he whispered in the gloaming. "The ninja way."

It seemed like yesterday instead of seventeen years ago that he had forsaken his dying ninja clan, The Leprechauns, and fled Ireland to America via the ocean. It seemed even more improbable to him that he was the last surviving member of the Leprechauns, and downright impossible that he had decided to raise his precious daughter not in the ways of the vicious Irish ninja, but as a humble farmer.

Yet, as he watched her grow from delicate child to delicate almost-a-woman, it seemed even more impossibly impossible that she had nevertheless inherited his ninja abilities, along with her French mother's skill in cooking and needlework.

And that he now owned a farm in the middle of America, with fifty head and away from a life of constant inter-clan violence - impossible!

But here he was.

"Le sange, le sange est disparu, ou est mon sange, et ou est tu?" Polly sang. In her clear soprano, Fiddles knew he had made the right choice. His eyes misted over.

"La, Papa, what are you doing out in the barn?" Polly said from behind him. In the nanomicroseconds it had taken his eyes to mist over, Polly had managed to sneak up behind him with a buffet-style breakfast.

Memories of his beloved wife Monagamousse overwhelmed him and he hugged the dear girl to his chest. "That's my Polly!" he whispered.

Suddenly Polly pulled a face, pouting out her full lower lip. "Oh poot, there's that skanger Sheriff von Schweinfleisch. What's he doing here so early?"

Sheriff Dieter von Scweinfleisch sauntered up to the buffet table, a self-satisfied smirk under his large, waxed mustache. His pet marmoset Scrofula hopped off his shoulder to snatch up a pastry and hissed at her father with his venomous fangs. "Good morning, Sheriff," Fiddles said calmly. "What can we do for you?"

"You know what you can do for me," Dieter said in his thick German accent. He pointed at Polly. "Zer fair Miss Polly's hand in marriage!"

"That I cannot do," Fiddles shook his head. "She is already promised to one of her childhood playmates who is scheduled to arrive from over the ocean in a fortnight."

"Unt childhood playmate, you say?" Dieter smoothed his mustache. "We shall see whose childhood playmate will be arriving over the ocean in a fortnight!" With that cryptic statement, the sheriff snapped his fingers and strode off, Scrofula leaping to his back to cling to his shoulder.

"Papa, how could you lie like that?" Polly said when the sheriff and his monkey were out of earshot. "What shall we do when no childhood playmate arrives?"

Fiddles sighed heavily. "We think of another lie," he said.

She looked at him sadly. "That was never the ninja way!"

"You are too right, my girl. Back on the Emerald Isle we could have simply removed his vital organs without disturbing the lay of his skin, kept him propped up in a rocking chair, and had done with it. But we are among Indians and Cowboys now, and we must abide by the rules in this strange, foreign land."

Also out of earshot, Dieter tickled Scrofula under his chin. "Send word to the other sheriffs," he said. "I want all incoming ships' passengers arriving within the fortnight killed without mercy!"

"CAW CAW CAW!" howled the marmoset, who leapt off to do his master's bidding.

Dieter laughed. "Ach, mein proud beauty!" he said to himself. "We shall see how you marry a childhood playmate - when he has no body!"