“Don’t use excuses young man!!”
“But it’s … ”
“You know your sister’s too small!”
“But she … ”
“Don’t blame the dog!”
“But you … ”
“Don’t take that tone with me!!”
“But what … ”
“Right, that’s it! Clean it up right now and go straight to your room!!”
“Yes Mum … ”
For the next fifteen minutes I hunched over the rug with a bucket of hot water and vinegar, trying not to vomit from the smell. As I tried to scrape up the offending pile, it kept slooshing about in every direction. It was like trying to catch jelly with soapy hands. And as I kept cleaning and scrubbing and squeezing out the cloth into the bucket of warm, murky liquid … one thought filled my mind … I really, really wish I could have found the gloves.
Every now and again I glanced across to the door … Fluff Butt was sitting there, staring at me. She didn’t move, didn’t blink, she just sat there and I could swear she was grinning. I was almost certain she’d done it on purpose!
Ever since that explosion of white fluff disguised as a dog came home, I knew there was something weird, something not quite right, something evil about her. I tried to tell Mum but she just reckons I’ve got sour grapes because we didn’t get the pet that I wanted. Well, derrr!! Brilliant Mum.
I wanted a real pet; you know, a fat diamond python, a tarantula, scorpions, or at least something that was a bit more interesting, but nooo!! We have to have a pet that, “The whole family can enjoy.” Sure Mum. So that’s how we ended up with a prissy girly dog, small, yappy and really hairy. And gee it just happened to be the exact same pet that Miss ‘I’m so special’ Yelly Melly wanted … gee how lucky is that! Oh yeah sure, Smelly Melly gets to have the pet of her choice ‘accidentally’ but not me. It had been like that with everything, ever since Jelly Belly Melly was born. First we had to move to this ‘crap shack’ way out in the sticks to be closer to family and closer to nature. Yeah … we were closer to nature all right; the loo was in the backyard! It was supposed to be a “Quaint little cottage in the country,” as Mum put it. What a joke! I reckon Agnath probably means something like ‘goat’s bottom’ in Bulravian. The pub probably pays the locals to sit at the bar to hold it up; otherwise it’d just topple over for sure. The general store is actually a holiday resort for bats and termites. The whole place is only being held together by cobwebs and spit.
Oh yeah … and the school. There are thirty-something kids and just about all of them live even further out in the sticks on these dirt patches they call farms. Less than half a dozen kids actually live anywhere close around here and it’s pretty hard to tell them apart from the sheep and cows anyway. Booga Boris is the size of a cow’s butt that needs a really good milking. Toffee Thomas has the brains of a sheep; absolutely useless and his nose is stuck so far up in the air that the flies use his nostrils as an airport! And Crabby Abbey really needs shearing; she has this really thick tangled mop of hair down to her backside and over her face like a sheepdog.
Mum reckons the locals have been here so many generations that they’re all probably cousins anyway and that’s why they’re a bit ‘s l o w e r’ than me. But I know what she really means by ‘s l o w’ …
… she means dumb, pillock, unintelligent, stupid, anserine, not all there, dimwit, nerf, lunkhead, dense, thick, dolt, dopey, blockhead, muttonhead, fool, goose, bonehead, puddenhead, numbat, dumbass, simpleton, nitwit, half-wit, doofas, dunce, dunderhead, numskull, yokel, clod, bonehead, knucklehead …
The sixth grade boys all stick together. We call them ‘The Seven Dimwits’. There’s Toffee, Wheezy, Booga the twins Dufas and DORKY, and worst of all, Itchy. And I reckon the teachers were sent out here for punishment. Miss Croonarc doesn’t look much older than us and she’s straight out of Teachers’ College. She must have failed her course really badly to get stuck way out here.
We’re getting a new principal too. Crabby reckons Mr Penniless is ‘resting’ in a ‘special’ hospital because me and Jared caused him to have a nervous breakdown … awesome!!
I reckon I would have died of boredom if Jared hadn’t turned up when he did. Luckily he came from the city like me, so we became best mates pretty much straight away. While the other kids were out shovelling horse poop to clean the stables, we were out shovelling horse poop for AMMUNITION in our booby traps. If there was a competition for pooper-shooters, we’d be the champions of the universe. We made this totally awesome and wicked pooper-shooter that flung dung over twenty metres. It had to be our most magnificent and incredible invention yet. We lifted up Jared’s bike and hooked up the chain to a spring. The spring was attached to another chain and that chain was attached to a catapult. And of course the catapult was loaded with the freshest and smelliest AMMUNITION that we could make. We like to make our very own special ammunition so that the smell and colour really sticks to the target. It’s our very own secret recipe;
… a mixture of different manure types, heaps of really soft old raspberries … a few rotten duck eggs and three secret ingredients, so if I tell you, I’ll have to kill you. Then they’re all stewed together with the two-week-old jocks and socks from the local footy team. The footy coach reckons, “Some mongrel dog nicked their smellies when the guys were in the showers!” Then it’s all mooshed together with a half-chewed dog’s bone. Finally we drain it all off and then roll the dung balls gently in our hands to make the perfect cannon balls of awesome poop AMMUNITION.
Once we had enough, we set up the bike behind some bushes opposite the general store and waited for our first victim. We’d been watching and taking notes for weeks. So we knew exactly when and what each kid was doing at the shop on the weekends. It wasn’t long before Toffee came wandering by to pick up some milk, yep, right on time. Closer … closer … five more steps … Jared started to peddle, the wheel wound the spring, the spring tightened the chain, the chain pulled the catapult tighter and tighter. . . three … two … one …
“ Fire! ”
I pulled the trigger pin to release the chain, the catapult flew forward, the dung was flung … flying high through the air … splatttt!! Right on target! It was beautiful. The ball gave maximum splatter on impact. Bits of digested hay clung to Toffee’s hair and face as globs of manure started to slowly slime their way down his neck and under his clothing.
wow, I didn’t know a guy could scream so girly. But he did, over and over as he turned for home, running and screaming and spitting out dung all at the same time. We rolled about on the ground, laughing our heads off until our stomachs cramped. This was
