You Must Wear Your Roo with a Difference: A Carl Mystery, Part One!

WK: Hey Carl.  How’s your summer going? 

Carl: Oh, great. My professors at UB tell me that I should write every day, and so I’ve been trying to do that, and I started cranking out my first mystery novel. 

WK: That’s great, Carl.  What’s it about? 

Carl: Do you want me to read you the first chapter? 

WK: That sounds great.  Let’s hear it! 

Carl:

It was a stormy night on the Bridgeport campus.  Thunderheads were blowing in off the Atlantic, making the elms and maples go into different kinds of epileptic seizures, variously dislocating their shoulders and swallowing their tongues in orgies of vegetable concupiscence. 

Carl sat grimly in his rocking chair in the lounge on the second floor of Carlson Hall, peering intently into the secrets of the universe.  He was just on the verge of discovering that the square of a prime number is always logarithmically entangled with the absolute value of an irrational integer when he noticed a shadow fall across the glass case where they display the faculty publications. 

He could identify his visitor from the musky odor.  Carla.  Why did it have to be her?  Of all the stormy Bridgeport nights?  Of all the dysfunctional kangaroo relationships?  Of all the messed up skibidi globbledeegook of life [editor’s note: Maybe find another way to express this?], it had to be Carla, back from the oblivion of intentional forgetfulness, to complicate my existence (I mean, Carl’s) with her drama and emotional neediness. 

Carl hopped out of his rocking chair and said, “Carla, what are you doing here, of all the elegantly architectured academic buildings you could be randomly showing up in?  Why here, of all skibidi places?" [Editor’s note: NB: It’s entirely possible to write an engaging short story without ever using the word "skibidi."  At least that’s what Chekov thought.] 

“Carl,” she gasped.  "I have to tell you something.  Nothing is what it seems!  Reality is not what you thought it was!  You are not you!  I am not me!  We are not even here!  In fact, the horrifying truth is that–"

Suddenly her eyes, already as wide-open as big wide-open windows, suddenly got even wider.  Then they went blank, a creepy pall passing over her irises, a ghostly shadow of tragic mortality!! 

Carl could tell right away that she had been stabbed in the back in mid-sentence by some random knife-wielding assailant, and he was right! 

When she slumped over, Carl could see the handle of a knife sticking out of her back.  “Holy kanga-moley,” thought Carl.  “This sure is some mystery!”

THUS ENDETH CHAPTER THE FIRST!!!

Carl: What do you think? 

WK: This is the best thing we ever read. We can’t wait to read Chapter 2!