Her real name was Darlene, but the entire herd — including the brain-damaged shepherd — called her Baldie.
Sheep could be so very cruel, she thought, as she stood munching alone in the far corner of the meadow. Most people think sheep are timid, fearful, and well, sheepish. Hah! Not this bunch of barbaric Bovidae.
Can I help it I inherited my parent’s crappy hair genes? Darlene lamented. Life is so unfair!
One evening she stayed up late to watch the remake of “The Shushing of the Sheep” on FarmFlix, and during the commercial break she found the answer to her dilemma: Spanish Sur-Gro!
If this stuff worked on people, it would probably work on sheep too, she concluded. Same thing only different…
amazon.com
So, Darlene ordered a case of the stuff. When the box finally arrived, she gnawed it open and set about eradicating her baldness. All the while anticipating how hot she would look with long, flowing, wooly tresses … the guys would find her absolutely irresistible!
And that is exactly the way it panned out. The ewes were extremely envious of Darlene and her new ‘do, as the rams stood slobbering and rhapsodizing over her beauty.
From then on, Darlene was known as the “Lady Godiva of Sheepdom.”
When shearing time rolled around, sure enough, Darlene was the star of the shear show, too. No matter how short her wooly locks were snipped, with just a shot of Spanish Sur-Gro, it all grew back the very next day.
There was however, a downside to Darlene’s new luscious locks: the shepherd began paying way too much attention to her. Way too much.
Gloria awakened that morning with an erroneous smile on her face. Slowly, reality set-in as she came to accept the fact that Sunday was gone and Monday had taken its place.
Monday meant school.
School meant mean kids and bullies.
Mean kids and bullies meant angry tears that led to more stuttering, which of course, delighted the mean kids to no end. It was exactly what they wanted: ammunition to intensify the fear that had come to define Gloria’s life.
“B-b-b-bloody h-hell…” Gloria mumbled; flinging off the sheet and blankets.
She shuffled to the bus stop, dreading the inevitable. From a block away, she could see them standing in their usual circle, discussing their respective weekends and comparing notes. Normally she gave the bullies the wide berth they deserved, but today this was not an option.
Gloria wished a giant sinkhole would suddenly appear and swallow her up, right then & there. Albeit unpleasant, death by sinkhole was certainly preferable to waiting for the stupid school bus with a bunch of über-thugs.
Jimmy Swanson saw her first: “H-h-hey, G-g-g-gloria!” Jimmy taunted. “H-h-how’s it g-g-going?”
Predictably, the rest of the gang followed suit and a cacophony of pseudo-stammering peppered with cheerleader-giggling commenced.
Gloria didn’t even bother retaliating. What was the point? She was outnumbered, ill-equipped and browbeaten. Instead, she stared down at her scuffed penny loafers through a familiar blur of tears.
Their teasing roared like a train about to derail, but Gloria refused to acknowledge it. She clenched her jaw and jammed her trembling hands in the pockets of her red windbreaker. In the right pocket, wrapped in her grandmother’s handkerchief and secured with a rubber band from The Arlington Gazette, were two quarters, a nickel and a dime—lunch money that would likely be stolen within the next few minutes. Gloria clutched it; rubbing the coins together repeatedly between her thumb and index finger while the other hand was balled into a tight and tiny fist—so tight that her fingernails left crescent moon imprints on the heel of her palm.
Motionless, hyperventilating, and numb, Gloria prayed for the school bus to pull up, for the taunting to stop, for a meteorite to fall from the sky and squash them all like cockroaches beneath somebody’s boot.
She prayed, and waited for something, anything, to change.
And then, something did.
An unfamiliar silhouette appeared on the horizon and the teasing came to a screeching halt. It was a boy of approximately twelve — the same age as Gloria and her poopy-assed peers. He struggled toward the bus stop; both arms full of textbooks, spiral notebooks — and a tell-tale pencil case.
Clearly, this was a new kid.
A new kid.
Gloria could not believe her luck! According to The Mean Kids’ Guide to Bullying, the arrival of a new kid trumps a speech impediment any day of the week.
True to form and without missing a beat, the mean kids turned their attention from Gloria and set-upon the newcomer, knocking his books from his arms and then booting him in the rear as he tried to pick them up.
Having been the receptacle of mean-kid-terror for years, Gloria watched in anguish, accurately predicting each sequential move.
Finally, it became too much. She couldn’t take it anymore.
“S-sss-stop it! L-l-l-leave h-him a-l-lone!” Gloria roared, and rushed to the new kid’s aid.
Shocked, aghast, and put in its place, the band of bullies deferred. Gloria helped the boy collect his books. “A-a-are y-you okay?”
Without looking at her, the new kid nodded his appreciation.
This week’s prompt for Mindlovemosery’s Menagerie First Line Friday is:
They congregated up in the hills, far away from judging eyes.
They congregated up in the hills, far away from judging eyes.
Who could blame them? Had the narrow-minded townsfolk gotten wind of what those boys (who are now men) were up to, well, they probably would have ended up in a mental health facility. Or at least grounded.
It all started with Show & Tell Day in the third grade. One of their classmates, a cute girl named Farrah, (not Fawcett) brought her Suzy Homemaker ironing board and iron.
The girls in the class appeared perplexed over Farrah’s demonstration, while most of the boys yawned and kept glancing at the clock. The three boys who didn’t yawn are the heroes of this story.
Gary, Don and Jim were intrigued. Of course they’d seen their mothers iron, but certainly not like Farrah. Not even close. Farrah’s innovative technique was to prop the ironing board against the wall and iron vertically rather than the usual horizontal way. It was a little dangerous, for sure, but that was the attraction.
The boys made plans for the coming weekend: Gary would swipe his dad’s generator while Don offered to dig out his mother’s old ironing board from the basement. Jim promised to bring an iron and some old rags on which to practice.
Early that Saturday morning, the trio met at McTucker Hill which no one frequented since it was rumored to be haunted. They started out slow, taking turns ironing against tree trunks and boulders. As the weeks passed and they became more adept, the boys tried more dangerous ironing positions: hanging upside down from tree limbs, ironing in a pond on an inflatable raft, and one time (and one time only) on the roof of a decrepit outhouse.
Today, some 40 years later, Gary, Don and Jim are still into Extreme Ironing (EI), which has become one of the latest danger sports. According to the Extreme Ironing Bureau it “…combines the thrills of an extreme outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt.”
It’s Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie’s Lucky Dip! Today our writing prompt is the Oddquain — a short, usually unrhymed poem consisting of seventeen syllables distributed 1, 3, 5, 7, 1 in five lines, developed by Glenda L. Hand.
You
and I were
never meant to be
but we happened anyway.
Fate.
Hearts
like ours have
their own agenda:
they want you and me to be
Us.
The Three Fates’ by Paul Thumann: Clotho-Lachesis-and-Atropos
Ergo, the Ogre 