Memory
Lame
©2010 The Angst Guy (theangstguy@yahoo.com)
Feedback (good, bad, indifferent, just
want to bother me, whatever) is appreciated. Please write to: theangstguy@yahoo.com
Synopsis: Amy Barksdale tells a little story, and Daria and Quinn
almost die.
Author’s Notes: This was written in response to another PPMB “Iron Chef”
challenge, this one offered by Tafka, who asked for stories that were supposed
to be serious but come out funny. I’m not sure this one fit the criteria, but
it went in anyway. I wrote it in an hour and a half, finishing about 4:30 a.m.,
when I had the worst head cold in months and could not sleep at all. As usual,
it is assumed that the reader is familiar with the major characters of the Daria TV show, so explanations of who is
who are not needed.
This tale,
like many of my sillier stories, makes use of a free font called Cuckoo for the
titles and subtitles. This cheery, useful font can be easily acquired from Urbanfonts.com or Abstractfonts.com.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Tafka for the contest!
*
“Thanks for
taking me out for lunch,” Amy Barksdale said as she picked up her third garlic
breadstick. “I’m glad I decided to pass through
Daria nodded,
sitting on Amy’s right with her mouth full of pizza. Quinn, sitting across from
Amy and working her way through a green salad with light Italian dressing,
looked appreciative. “We’re glad our favorite aunt is here to see us,” she said
gaily.
“You should
tell us a story,” said Daria around her pizza. “Something about the good old days, or whatever they called them back before newsprint.”
“Back in
Pleistocene times,” said Amy. “That darn Ice Age. You want a story about what
your mother was really like as a teenager.”
“Yeah,” said
Quinn. “Something we don’t already know.”
“We know about
the tightly wound pain in the ass part,” Daria put in.
“Hmmm.” Amy settled back in her seat and looked reflective.
“Well, there was that magical day in late June, the summer I turned ten, when
the sky was blue and the sun was bright and both your mother and Rita got laid
for the first time.”
Daria was
sipping her Ultra-Cola when twin streams of sparkling effervescent liquid shot
out of her nose. She dropped her glass, spilling its contents across her lap
and the tabletop. She began coughing nonstop, covering her face with her cotton
napkin.
Quinn froze in
her seat while taking a healthy bite of her salad. She stared at Amy in horror,
her eyes as big as an anime character’s. Pieces of red-leaf lettuce with
Italian dressing fell from her open mouth.
“I still can’t
believe they humped the hot dog on the same day,” Amy went on, ignoring Daria’s
coughing fit and Quinn’s failure to breathe. “I thought for a long time they’d
planned it like that, maybe as some sort of bet to see who would be first to
take the stinky bus to Sausageburg, but now I think
it was just a twist of fate. I was on the living room couch reading D. H.
Lawrence when Rita came back from a rock concert, walking strangely. I looked
at her closely and noticed her bell-bottoms were reversed so that her ass was
on backwards.
“‘Trouble
getting dressed this morning?’ I asked her, trying to be a helpful little
sibling.
“Then I
remembered she’d had her jeans on correctly that morning when she’d left. I
notice details like which side of her pants had the American flags sewn on the
pockets.
“‘Shut up, Chicklet,’ she said, hurrying
past toward her room. ‘Are mom and dad home?’
“‘No,’ I told
her. ‘And for ten bucks, they won’t get a detailed color commentary on your
unfashionably revealing faux-pas.’
“‘You little
four-eyed weasel!’ she said, her voice full of sisterly affection. She smacked
me on the back of the head the way she always did to show her love, then threw
a wadded Hamilton at me and stuck her finger in my face and said, ‘You breathe
a word of this, Anal Barksdale, and you’ll sleep with the fishes tonight.’
“I just
sniffed deeply and said, ‘Like that rotting fish you brought home in your
pocket? Oops, I guess that isn’t a fish in your pocket! Sorry!’
“‘I mean it!’
Rita said, and she gave me a heartfelt noogie. ‘One word, and I’ll tuck you into a shallow grave.’ She ran to
the refrigerator, grabbed a Coca-Cola douche, and ran off to her bathroom.
“Then your
mother came in.”
Daria’s
coughing increased dramatically until she shook like a palm tree in a hurricane.
All of Quinn’s chewed salad now lay in her lap. Her face was an unwholesome
shade of purple.
“Helen had
gone off for the day with her girlfriends to Thunder Demon Speedway, to watch
stunt drivers compete to see who would be first to send his car flying over a
line of tractor trailers and walk away on at least one non-artificial leg. She
left wearing a peasant blouse and jeans, but she came back wearing an I-just-saw-God
look on her face and a skintight, ultra-short red-satin dress that showed
enough of her ivory buns to shame a Wonder Bread bakery. Her panties looked
like a leopard had tried to chew them off her, and someone had autographed the
front of them with a black Magic Marker, right across Mount Venus. I think his
first name was Skeeter-Dog.
“‘Are mom and
dad home?’ she asked, wobbling like we were having an 8.9 earthquake. It must
have been the aftershocks.
“‘You’re in
luck—they aren’t,’ I said, ‘And lucky you again, I’m
having a summertime sale on the Sounds of Silence album, for the low, low price
of only ten smackers.’
“‘You wouldn’t
dare, Book Breath,’ she mumbled, then looked down the front of her hooker wrap
and said, ‘Damn, where’s my freaking bra?’ Only we didn’t have the word
‘freaking’ back then.
“‘Probably warming a pair of tiny trophy cups over a stunt driver’s
fireplace,’ I said, wanting to comfort her. ‘This Sounds of Silence sale
won’t last forever. Mom and Dad just pulled into the driveway.’
“Helen was a
good sport and only smacked me on the head once before throwing a ten-spot in
my lap. She made it to her room just seconds before Ma and Pa Barksdale walked
in the front door. She could have been a stunt driver, I bet. I went out that
afternoon and bought a chocolate milkshake, a Carly Simon album, and
seven—count ‘em, seven—paperbacks. That was a
wonderful day!”
Amy sighed
wistfully. “Where have those golden moments gone?” She came to and looked
brightly at Daria and Quinn, each in the last stages of asphyxiation. “So, how
are you two getting along?”
Original: 03/09/03, modified 09/04/06, 09/22/06, 10/02/06,
11/05/09, 05/10/10
FINIS