shoedoom

From afar it could be seen. Flames licked the sky over New Old Brumpton.

She decided it then, when the house burned down, then blew over, and her neighbor's dog came out of nowhere and bit her. She was standing in the street, random bits of newspaper piling up at her bare feet, her cold bare feet. Cars were whizzing by and she almost got hit, even as the flames reached out from her sunken living room and tickled her naked toes. Enough is enough, thought Marjorie. All of her stuff was on fire, including her mother's asbestos orthopedic pumps. Enough, she wept, again. And this, which she said aloud to no one in particular, but the dog may have heard it and used the defiant tones as an attack cue: “I am going to destroy this world!”

It was a new dawn for Marjorie. All her life she had been stepped on and used. Her family only called when they needed a car to haul dirt in. Her coworkers used her desk, which was really just a shelf, to store the coffee maker and supplies on. And her boyfriend, who moved all his junk into her living room but lived with his secretary because she was one block closer to the subway. He was really going to be upset when he learned his 70's album collection had melted. Marjorie was not going to take any more shit from anyone, especially not this fire thing. “Fuck you fire. I'm going to find out the source of all your power, and I will take you out!” Then with her new found power of rage, Marjorie smote down her neighbor's dog. They watched, horrified, from the kitchen window as Marjorie walked down the middle of the street, their pet pekinese turned inside out and spewing internal gunk onto the fire warmed sidewalk.

The morning news told the story from several eyewitnesses. Calls went out late, as the neighbors didn't bother to phone emergency services until they realized her burning house might effect their ability to collect Marjorie's morning paper. The firetruck didn't come down the street until the fire had thoroughly done its job, and Marjorie met it at the corner. The driver saw her at the last instant and swerved, took out a telephone pole then came to a shuddering halt. Marjorie stomped up to the door and ripped it off the hinges. She pulled the captain down from his seat and consumed him in one gulp. Then she slammed her hands down on the truck, sending it rolling up the hill where it bowled down a large estate and came to rest in the garden fountain. The butler and several ornamental carp were instantly killed.

Marjorie was not a particularly pretty woman, but she did have a normal human human body with all the usual lady parts. Damnation, she was sick and tired of sitting alone on weekends wondering if Hank would come by to put a needle in her record player. A reporter from the Daily Flop got the scoop from Gentleman Erv's Bar and Swill: 'We heard this ruckus from out the door, you know. It was a kaboom, like some big ole cannon, and then the door is stoved in and this lady glowing with righteous indignation comes a'barrelin' in and she screws every guy in the place.' Apparently Marjorie then drank a keg of the best stuff and proceeded to dismantle the building with her breasts. 'When she left we cried. She was the best **** I ever had.'

Helicopters and army reserve tanks followed Marjorie for two days as she walked around the town swearing at sign posts and looking under hills for the source of fire. She entered the local Family Grockery and Condom Hut to pick up a six pack of Dr. Pepper, and when they refused to give her a rain check, because they were out, Marjorie poked holes in all the shrink wrapped hamburger and wove 200 shopping carts into a sculpture of Wink Martindale. She ate the brains of the stock crew for a snack, and found them wanting. So she drank from the tear ducts of the teenage cashiers and found them remorseless. “What kind of world is this?” Marjorie lamented.

Finally, on the third day, the president came to the town in Air Force One to survey the damage, and to appeal to Marjorie's better senses. He flew in with a full retinue of congressmen as well as a family of lookalike stand-ins. By that time Marjorie had dug a deep hole into the side of Mount Receding Hairline and was piling boulders onto Main Street. “I am a glacier!” she shouted to the blackbirds. Everyone else had run away.

The president protected by a force field neared her, and then he spoke these words that he himself had written just moments early, “Marjorie. We wish you would stop being such a bitch.”

Marjorie heard these words and she thought about the words carefully. The president was elected by the people, and he was wise. Marjorie thought very hard, then she reached up into the sky and pulled down every blackbird. She tied all of the bird feet together making them into a conglomeration of winged fury that could transcend the universe, then she attached them to the president's force field with a piece of ire-fused hosiery and lifted the entire mass into the atmosphere, where to this day they circle the cosmos.

But the words struck a chord in her, and she wondered about the fire, and how it had destroyed her home, and how it burned to the ground, leaving nothing but a charred shoe. A shoe.

“Marjorie?” It was the tiny voice of a girl, the dwarf daughter of the President of the United States, the first reluctant astronaut president. She was by a newly enacted 28th amendment to the Constitution now the President of the United States, being the first born of a reigning President who somehow begins orbiting the Earth. “Marjorie, I know how you are hurting,” said Queen President Agnes, “and I would gladly give all of my newly bestowed powers to right this wrong, this horrible deed that has befallen you.”

Marjorie sat on the lawn with her splayed legs pointing east and northeast. She thought about being six, and her doll. And sandwiches.

“But Marjorie,” continued Agnes in a strong voice, “I won't do that, because I want you to be my vice president!” Agnes held up Marjorie's smoldering shoe and fell to one knee, presenting the charred pump to the fury of New Old Brumpton.

She belched as she received the shoe, then smeared the entire retinue over the blacktop with a solid backhand. And with her one shoe and a limp, Marjorie proclaimed for all to hear, “To hell with that, I'm going to eat the world.”