Car 23 by David Fischer Copyright (C) 2005 David Fischer Grinding his teeth to keep his mind off the pain, the driver of car 23 suddenly shot ahead as the pack approached Dead Man's Curve! He flew through the air and across the finish line, looking back to see the driver of car 17 screaming in frustration as his car was engulfed in flame and plunged ten miles straight down into the Dead Man's Brother's Ravine, where it was immediately set upon by anti-wolves and robotic hyenas! Car 23 spun to a stop in a cloud of angel dust, and everyone gasped in surprise as the Vice President stepped out! The journalists and groupies ran forward, but not fast enough, for the Vice President had already hot-wired a biplane that was abondoned and rusting in a nearby field. "See you at the front!" he yelled as he swooped past, dodging ack-ack fire and slander. Everyone knew the race was fixed, but no one knew the course of the race, or the course of events leading up to it. The annual event had been organized last year to prevent the outbreak of war and malaria in the sub-arctic literary community, but things quickly turned sour. Claims of bribed judges filled the front pages, and after the first two days, the race's death penalty was temporarily suspended untill the claims were proven to be unfounded, or at least founded on principles lacking in established family connections. Soon it was back to poached hotdogs and gushing arteries as the pit crews worked feverishly to get through bronze age technology and develop iron ahead of the competing teams. My great-grandfather always used to say that in a car race between nobles, the team with the wheel has the advantage. A bus filled with tree-monkeys exploded and scattered primate settlements across the nine planets that maliciously orbit the bleak sickly orb that sends shards of romance into the soft undifferentiated tissues of lovers and stalkers the world round. "DAMN YOU, TEAM WINNERS!!!!" the captain of Team Losers yelled as blur after blur of superior engineering rushed past. His battle ox glanced back, shrugged, and returned to the drawing board, where it was working on the airflow problems of Team Loser's scramjet motorcar. "IF ONLY IT'S READY IN TIME!!!!" The laundry was done (vestment & investment alike) and it was time... time... time to WIN for once! Aiming ever lower, the generals agreed on a combined land & sea attack on a small five & dime on what remained of the amusement barge that rotted in the center of the Sargasso Sea, and had been known as Coney Island before the eviction & subsequent exile. The boats sank due to a massive methane hydrate release orchestrated by members of the Mollusca crime family, and the airplanes drifted higher and higher untill they crystalized and exploded with a sound reminiscent of wind chimes on an especially annoying spring day. Glitter comes from the moon, and confetti comes from shooting stars. The dance halls are always dark and everyone crawls home in agony when the camera does not leer. Twenty-six days and a lorry-load of gin later, the gangsters made their fatal mistake when they locked the dogs in the basement. Within an hour those devilish canines had stripped all the copper pipe from the water system, and in another hour they had an arsenal of zip guns. By the next morning, they had found saltpeter in a damp sub-basement, charcoal in the base of the chimney, and sulfer from an old children's pop-up edition of Dante. Luckily, the dogs were interested only in the global convergence of hunger and immobility. (Starvation is inevitable. Rocket ships run on Tort Reform, and there are no rocket ships left. The mission to Planet Breadcrumbs is based on an irresponsible fantasy and has more to do with back room politics than any plan for feeding the hungry.) There's no use crying over spilt eyeball fluid.