THE UNKNOWN PLOT
By Jo
PART FOUR: A Room With A View
Himself got halfway up the tall fire escape and closed his eyes. "Oh...God!" he moaned.
"Now, now, now," Joimus admonished. "No taking of the Lord's name in vain in epis. You
know that, Himself."
"You put me on...on...on THIS and expect me not to...to...."
"I do, indeed. You are Himself. You need to set the standard for all your characters. You have
a responsibility, you know."
"Then Alex has to stop smoking. So does Terry. And...."
"You know smoking is never written in epis," she countered.
"There was smoking in just the last chapter!" he protested righteously.
"True. But that was a squirrel. I'm not sure it actually counts."
"There was a cigarette. There was smoke. There were lungs involved. It counts."
"I have never smoked." It was Maximus, getting his first line in two chapters.
"That's because John Rolfe never grew tobacco in Hispania!" Himself growled.
"Move along up there, will ya!" Ed was getting impatient hanging onto a rusty, half-
severed railing.
"Keep your britches on down there!" Himself yelled back.
"You don't actually have to do that, darling," Elise purred, smiling at Ed.
"I do believe, Himself," Jeffrey pointed out, "that that which appears to be a brownish tide
in the distance is not actually the overflow of the sewage system but quite possibly the approach
of a horde of squirrels."
"I was part of a horde once," Maximus said softly, frowning at an unpleasant memory, "but
we stayed together and survived, most of us."
"Come, beloved," Joimus whispered, her breath ruffling the fine tips of his faux fur drape.
"Let us away to within."
Shortly, well, a bit longly if truth be told, the entire cast awayed within. They stood, looking
about the large, top-floor room that the fire escape gave entrance to...or exit, should the
building be aflame, which, thank goodness, it wasn't...not currently anyway.
"Is...is that...blood dripping down the wall there?" Essie asked, sidling closer to Zack's side
for the sole purpose of adding to the cementing in the reader's brain of who is with whom,
a task not easily accomplished and frequently leading to much head-banging on computer
keyboards.
Bud strode over to the wall, wiped a finger through it, tasted it. "Sure is," he announced with
all the assurance of a man who's seen more than his share of blood dripping down walls.
"So, the walls are bleeding a little. No big deal," Joimus shrugged, her eyes searching out
Stacey, whom she knew for a fact would agree with her completely.
"Who...who's blood...is it?" Marie asked, taking the opportunity to clutch a Bud bicep, there
being a lot of biceptual clutching in epis, of course.
"It may not be who's," Bud replied. "It may be a what's."
"WHAT what's?" Shannon gasped.
"Shannon! I didn't know you were here!" Atonia smiled, pleased nepotismically-speaking.
"I didn't know, either," Shannon said. "Who am I with?"
"We shall know soon enough," the General replied Maximally.
"Maybe not," Joimus said, enigmatically.
"She's with me."
Every head swiveled, but only once, one is glad to report, looking to see who had spoken.
"Cort? I got...Cort?" Shannon said, eyes-widening epishly. "I...I thought he was with Layne."
"That was before," Layne replied smugly. "Now I'm with...him!"
Alas, the heads swiveled again. "We may need a priest soon," Atonia breathed, glad that Cort
was there.
"What in hell kinda wanted poster is THIS?" It was Ben, finally getting air time.
Ben's eyes narrowed dangerously as he read it. "None of my posters never said I was
irrepressible and lovable."
"Come here, lover, and I'll press you," Layne offered.
"Only in dark, shadowy places, Layne," Joimus admonished. "It is an epi. You'll have to
take him over there in the corner behind the slowly-opening mummy case."
"Are you actually giving me permission to...take him?" Layne's grin would no longer fit
entirely on her face.
"You know that's not what I meant!"
"Don't know that. Not at all."
"Aiiiiiiieeeeeeee!"
"Who aiieed?" Himself bellowed.
"And why?" Jim added.
"Who cares?" Sid commented.
"What...what are...those...for?" Arthur was pointing into a corner of the room, not the corner
with the opening mummy case nor even the corner with the large pile of rotting yams, but the
third of the four corners, no one yet aware of what might or might not be in the fateful fourth
corner.
"Bat wings?" Biebe suggested.
"Vampires probably," Sid said helpfully.
"But...but...why would they store them...here?" Arthur shuddered.
"Seems like a perfectly logical place to me," Sid added.
"But...but...where are they? The vampires. Where ARE they?"
A foot, wearing a red and white striped stocking, suddenly shriveled back under the pile of
rotting yams. "I don't think we're in Oz any more," Colin commented perspicaciously.
"Kansas. We're not in Kansas any more," Franki corrected.
"We've never been to Kansas, have we?" Nash asked, concerned that maybe he'd been there
but the seagulls had erased his memory of it. (See Toronto Tribulations)
"I don't think so. Not yet anyway," Franki replied thoughtfully.
"Are those black flies?" Alex asked, nodding toward the ceiling, which seemed to have a
moving, buzzing coating all over it.
"Hey!" Jack protested. "I thought this plot was about squirrels."
"There is no plot, Jack. Without a plot, black flies are definitely allowed to make an appearance."
Joimus was right. Everyone knew she was right. Of course she was right. After all, whose
fingers were on the keyboard anyway? She HAD to be right!
"You're right," Himself said and everyone's head nodded. Thank heavens they didn't all
swivel a third time.
There was a stirring in the huge yam pile, followed by the unmistakable sound of the sharp
blade of a cutlass bisecting something in the dank, close air, redolent with the odor of rotting
sweet potatoes.
"NO!" Jim screamed...but too late. Jack's blade had already done its deadly deed and the yam
lay, completely twained, gasping on the neon pink linoleum-covered floor.
"Jack," Jim sighed in anguish of heart and soul, "not ALL the yams are rotten."
Jack narrowed his eyes, wiping the yam gore off his blade. "And how would you know that,
Braddock?"
"I...I...." How hard it was for James J. to admit his new-found prowess of being able to
communicate mentally with yams. "I just...know." His voice dropped to a mere pained
whisper as he watched several unrotting yams come and tenderly haul away half of their
newly-behalved fellow.
Jack peered closely at the boxer, noting the slight sparkle of a tear in one seagreen. "You
actually think yams have FEELINGS?"
"There are more things about yams, Captain Aubrey, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
"I have no philosophy where yams are concerned. Never have."
"You should," Jim murmured, getting a clear image sent by a yam.
A particularly adorable little yam waddled out and Jim squatted near it, cocking his head as
it tipped itself up on a friend and proceeded to communicate the terrible story of the trials of the yam population.
As he listened, Jim's kind heart overflowed with compassion. After a while, he stood again and
turned to face the rest of the non-yam cast.
"What did it...he...say?" Biebe, who was used to using potato lifeforms to heat the insides of
hockey shoes, asked.
"It...it all started in Chad. Many years ago...in Chad, in the marketplace."
"An evil yam trader, his bags filled with miniature marshmallows, boding only ill for the
future of the rows of innocent yams, came one day, leering at them, and they knew, they
knew with all their little orangey innards, that they must flee, preferably to Pittsburgh."
Jim paused, hardly able to bear the thought of the meaning of the connection between yams
and miniature marshmallows. Brown sugar would also, almost without doubt, be involved.
"They piled all their younglings in baskets. Young yams waddle much too slowly to make it
conveniently, you understand, from Chad to western Pennsylvania."
"Wait a minute! Wait just a gol-durned MINUTE! Are you actually asking us to believe that
YAM is communicating with you? Why doesn't the critter just speak up so the rest of us can
hear him, too? Answer me that. Why doesn't the yam TALK?" Ed was suspicious of yams...
and with good reason.
"Have you not heard?" Jim sighed. "Do you not know? Surely you must have seen it? It was
a famous movie a few years back. Everyone has known ever since then that yams have no vocal
cords."
"They came in little carts," Jim continued as Ed turned away, watching Ben and Layne disappear behind the still slowly opening mummy case. "It had taken too many years to cross
the sea and they were in a hurry and knew that to waddle from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh
would be much too time-consuming. Many among them were already softening and a state
of rottenness would be shortly upon them." Sadly he looked at the majority of the pile.
"Along the way, especially at the rest stops on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, they faced great
trials."
"A few tried to find homes somewhere in the farm country east of Lancaster. But," he heaved
a great sigh, "their fate was...unspeakable."
Jim turned aside a moment, his hand over his eyes, and Marilyn, moved more by his distress
than that of the yams, wrapped her arms about him, offering comfort. It was part of why she
loved him so, that great compassion of his that extended even to root crops.
"Yams, you see," he continued with a break in his voice, "only, like the rest of us, wish to be...
happy."
"But such was not to be their fate. No Chad-grown yam had ever heard, simply had no way
of knowing, that the herds of yaks that migrate through Pittsburgh 27 times a year, feed only,"
he closed his eyes again, squeezing them tightly shut, "on yams."
"And so they, like we, sought shelter here in the top floor of this abandoned, broken-windowed
structure." He indicated the pile with a slow, weary gesture of his hand. "And...that...has become their fate."
So touched was the little, communicating yam with the good-heartedness of Jim's recitation of
their sad history, that it reached into a pocket and produced a tee, which it presented to the
boxer, who was truly moved by the kindness of the yam.
Before another yammish moment could find its way into the epi...suddenly...
"Oh...no!" Darlee oh-no'ed.
"What?" Alex's pocketed hand clenched reflexively, the shard extending his heart line by a
good inch and a quarter.
"THERE!" Darlee pointed, as pointing was running rampant in this epi, toward a missing
window pane.
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