Otto and Space Shuttle Girl

    Otto pressed down on the pedal that makes the car go faster with the corrugated sole of his fancy shoes from that one store.  As the car careened and swerved both rightward and leftwise, Otto thought back to the store where he had bought the car.  It was a blue car and it came with a spare tire and windows.  The store was open in the middle of the desert when Charlie worked there by unlocking the display case.  Wantonly businessing morrow and gloaming.  He found it misplaced in the candy aisle behind a pack of Hubba Bubba.  He brought to Charlie the ticket and said, “I want this.  Blue is my favorite color please.”
   
    Charlie looked at Otto and thought him quickly an Otto, then briefly a Lamont, then thirdly and finally – correctly as well – an Otto, palindromicity streaming from his eyelids.  “It is many and many dollars,” Charlie said.

    “Poor I am not,” spake Otto.  “Many and many dollars I have, and then more enough still for cupcakes a week.”

    “Very good,” said Charlie.

    “I am very good,” said Otto.  “I went to school in Orange County in the great state of California, where they make movies and surfboards.  Also, the ocean is on the wrong side and sometimes people are weird.  My school was on a schooner and we water skied for gym class, counting assholes for math class, and reading books about plumbing.  I grew there and my father was a mechanic.  For the space shuttle.  My mother invented a type of cookie and sold it to a foodstuffs conglomerate, but they only bought it as a secret weapon for post-apocalyptic rich people orgies.  But my mother has made them and I have had them.  Until it is that the attorneys sent her a restraining order to not make them.  But still I have known what it is to be rich.  I met a girl in the eighth grade.  She lived on my father’s space shuttle and she gave me a kiss and three string cheeses.  So we had to get married.  And now I need a car.  My favorite color is blue.”

    “I ain’t got no receipts,” Charlie said.

    Otto had put the key in the turner onner and turned it and the car went on.  He drove it with the pedal that makes the car go under his fancy shoes.  He parked the car by pressing down on the pedal that makes the car stop and he opened the door that lets you get out of the car so you don’t have to live there until you starve to death and smell bad.

    Space Shuttle Girl was wearing clothes when he got home and Otto thought they didn’t look stupid.  Space Shuttle Girl was six feet three from living in space.  On a shuttle, as a girl.  She learned how to wear clothes that didn't look stupid in outer space from absorbing radiation.  She had brown hair and two eyes and one mouth, even though she grew up in outer space, even if up is meaningless without a reference point.  For this reason, her height was legally considered irrelevant and she was able to ride roller coasters even when she was only three feet tall.  This caused the baseball strike, and also the Miracle on Ice through a tachyon cascade.

    Otto was five foot ten and had two arms and two legs.  But just the one head.  This made Otto sad, except for times he saw a blue car or Space Shuttle Girl in clothes that didn’t look stupid.  He also wore clothes and they also didn’t look stupid, but his clothes were a different size and shape from Space Shuttle Girl’s.

    Otto also enjoyed his job.  He was a cosmologist and thought about how the universe existed and if there was enough soap for the Third World to stop having AIDS so much.  This involved a lot of math and also lye.  But when Space Shuttle Girl wore clothes that didn’t not look stupid, the math fell out of his head and he was only able to write literary critiques for obscure publications read by people with inferiority complexes. 

    Otto and Space Shuttle Girl had a daughter named Belinda.  They were going to name her Lillian after she was born, but until then after it the mail came for Belinda.  So Belinda was often found at school when she wasn’t not being born and she would write down answers – on occasion – to problems mathematical and socially scientific, ranging from fractions and long division to Abraham Lincoln and the atriums and ventricles.  (Although Lincoln had atriums and ventricles and sometimes used and understood fractions and long division, these were never mingled in the school classes because there could be an explosion.)  Belinda once wrote an answer so beautiful that her teacher tried to adopt her and Space Shuttle Girl had to talk to the principal about the teacher’s shitty attitude.

    Otto released the pressing on the pedal that makes the car go faster because he was dying from the explosion because Abraham Lincoln discovered irrational numbers and made mad Pythagorus.  Otto flew out of his car, and he was dead, and he fell on the grass that was there near where he was had been driving and he landed on it.  And it was green grass.  A lot of people died in the Civil War because of irrational numbers and then they made a movie about the Dukes in Hazzard because a Nazi Muslim Socialist with cooties robbed the White House and invented a new cabinet position – with his super Nazi Muslim powers (Socialists don’t have super powers) – for his Sommelier and then burned all the white lightning with a machete.

    Otto got up on his feet, which were wearing the fancy shoes that also had soles on them, and he walked over to his burning car and blew it out with his mouth.  He turned the car back over, with his hands that are for dexterous manipulation of objects (but not his penis, that’s bad) and he climbed back in through the back windshield because it wasn’t there anymore because of Abraham Lincoln.  And also because of the Jews probably, but the TV hadn’t told him that yet, so it might not be true until Tuesday. 

    Space Shuttle Girl cried when Otto told her he died and landed on the grass, which was green.  And also not on fire like the blue car.  “Otto,” she said.  “I am a simple space shuttle girl who only knows how to be from outer space and how to raise a little girl we get to name after the mail is forwarded from my uterus.  And also I have a Juris Doctorate.”

    “From outer space!” Otto added enthusiastically, with a blue car.

    “My only hope now is to sell ideas to people who only have beliefs.  And I will have to have a blue car also to get to places to transact this businessing.  And then or Belinda by then Lillian after before now will have to become rich with her answering prowess, earning at least fourteen or fifteen dollars.  No higher than that though, because of Abraham Lincoln.”

    “I can give you my blue car!” Otto said enthusiastically, with a blue car still for now until then.  “Also,” he said, “I want Belinda to have my fancy shoes.”

    “I’d rather them for Lillian,” Space Shuttle Girl said, “so that I will be crying less.  And also will have sold some ideas so we can have cupcakes.”

    “I feel.”

    “Yes.  People do that.  And also they call them things.  Sometimes it overlaps, mostly it doesn’t.  Probably because of Abraham Lincoln.  He loved tall hats.”

    “I read that in a movie once,” said Otto.  “He was also an avid beardist and inventor of basketball.  Because of his tall hat and also his tall body, that was shot near its top with a bullet I heard in that book I saw in the window.”

    “Yes.  Also.”

    “I am a very unhappy person after I am dead,” mused Otto.  “I don’t think I like it.  If I shake the Scrabble board, I might be able to be before after I am dead and resee if I am not unhappy as I am after it.  I enjoyed football and riding my bike growing up, though I could not feel mitosis, so it may have been painful in miniature or else like a massage, but without the structure . . . I will throw out the literary critiques and cram all the math back in and I will not mix long division and the Civil War because of my bitchin’ blue car.  Also the atriums.  But I think we may be safe with the ventricles.  Also, I didn’t like that one book written by the guy with the arcane vocabulary and also masking simplicity in a series of phonetic noises where no one knows about cosmology.  But I understand that I had played basketball with only three people when we did it in the schoolyard where the sun was in the middle of the ceiling, though not exactly of course.  We hurled the basketball at the basketball hoop in attempts both vain and successful at field goals, worth one point less than in the football we didn’t play in the schoolyard because of no uprights.  And also no kickers really and Mississippi and cutting the ribbon because of not eleven guys and the guy near the schoolyard had a rake he threw at the mice, but also sometimes at the gridironers and baseballers or even the kids throwing dog shit at each other because it is funny if it’s not happening to you when it happens to someone and they don’t make you smell them because you are dead because your car has no doors so you can’t get out and you hope it explodes because of Abraham Lincoln.  So I have an idea.”

    “How much does it cost?”
   
    “Dollars and dollars,” Otto said.  “But we can also have cupcakes for days.”

    “Belinda can stop making money after twelve dollars.  Huzzah!”  Space Shuttle Girl jumped twelve feet in the air and a dollar fell from her semi-fancy shoes each foot she climbed under her feet in the shoes that were not as fancy as Otto’s, but only because of her clothes that didn’t look stupid.  The dollars wafted down to the ground and wondered why the fuck you were still reading this.  Holy shit!

    Otto ran away, careful not to scuff his fancy shoes.

    Lillian skipped home from school, unadopted one day more through sheer wiliness and a deftness at quoting case law.  But not in verse, because that could cause an explosion.  She hurdled the cars that weren’t blue and lunged over the pavement, leaping as a turtle might.  With a paint marker, she added Esperanto translations to street signs, and so her commute was lengthy.  She was four feet and several inches as well and she wore clothes that were not stupid, but the way in which they lacked stupidity was divergent from her parents both as blue cars and silver cars.  And also red cars and gold cars and black cars and white cars.  But not green cars.  Or Cadillacs.  Unless they are convertibles.  But also she had four dollars, and this made her nervous.  But not so nervous as quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes in verse.  But she also didn’t know who Oliver Wendell Holmes was, so she never spoke in verse because she assumed he must have said “may I have a banana split” at some point.  And also other mundane things like “I hate The Scarlet Letter, that book sucks and is boring also”.

    Belillian von Scooter Ottoshuttle hated her name, though she loved her parents.  And not just because their clothes were largely not stupid, as were her own, just in a different way that has something to do with cars and why the fuck are you still reading this?

    A very loud noise hurt Lillian’s ears and when she got home she saw that a space shuttle was landed in front of her house, which was also where her parents both lived and also kept their clothes that weren’t stupid and their shoes that were fancy and partly fancy.  She looked in shock, and also she was stunned and unsure of how to react, as her father drop kicked out of the front door and did nine somersaults to the curb and announced, “I traded in my blue car for a space shuttle so your mother can be from outer space again instead of selling ideas that might cause Lincolnian explosions that kill her husband, and also people who don’t have fancy shoes and also who may or may not wear clothes that aren’t not stupid".

    The blue car drove up to the house.  Chapwood got out and screamed.

    And also, The End