Hi, my name is Daniel Jeffries. It was late at night, and I was tired. I was sick of picking yeast out of my navel and I was fresh out of fruit-flavored beer. I needed a new outlet, but I had nothing to my name other than a collection of X-rated movies and popular TV shows sitting by my wall. Speaking of which, my wall has bullet holes in it--'cause I was in a gang, and the rival mobsters attempted to whack me after I stole their kids' Woody Woodpecker laughing plush doll toys. ... We called ourselves the Backdoor Boys. People used to laugh at us, for some reason.
Now, I have no friends, and my girlfriend left me because I was angry after she told me she never cared about me and just pretended to love me because she wanted free food, and she figured I was desperate for companionship (that's what I get for making videos in which I act like I'm depressed for the laughs.) After she packed her things and moved back home to the teepee at the Native American reservation she was from, I inspected the literal pieces of shattered glass on our bedroom floor. I noticed that she left behind a few other things. One of them was an Oprah Winfrey DVD. The others were bloody sponges, and piles of bobbypins, which were a deep metaphor for when she found out I was cheating on her. You see, she discovered another girl's bobbypins in various parts of our bedroom. Such as her side of the bed. And also, on her lamp desk, by a photo of her identical twin sister. Who I also wanted to have sex with. In short: it's not my fault that I wanted three chicks at the same time, man!
Now, I had nothing to lose and I couldn't get to sleep, so I popped the Oprah Winfrey DVD into my DVD player. It didn't work, and I had no idea why. Now, I have no experience with electronics, so I smacked it with a toilet plunger that I forgot to wash after filming myself pretending to be a morbidly depressed version of Super Mario. There were drenched plies of toilet paper hanging from the rubber and the wooden handle. You might think that all this and the toilet water would ruin the DVD player, but instead the thing started buzzing happily like a kitten that had just been offered delicious tuna by its master.
At this point, I picked up my remote. It was covered in crumbs from Doritos Loaded, which is basically just shitty mozzarella sticks. I selected an episode awkwardly entitled 'George Chokes', and prepared for what I assumed would be quality entertainment.
Assumed. And when you assume, you make an 'ass' out of 'u' and 'me'!
Now, I always assumed that Oprah was an African American woman who packed a little extra but was not quite a BBW, but what I saw was... not quite that. Instead of the schema of Oprah I had in my memory, it appeared that she was actually a stereotypically gray alien with big slanted bug eyes and two holes poked in her face that I guess were supposed to be nostrils or some kind of air holes. Otherwise, things appeared to make sense, since she was holding a card and a microphone and talking to people in what appeared to be a studio audience setting--so no worries, right?
Oprah had multiple guests--four, by my count. As you may have guessed, they were all gray aliens as well. They sat around the stage on various colored ottomans, perhaps to celebrate the multiculturalism that the show embraced. Of course, that didn't make sense, given that they were all gray aliens, so I considered writing the show a letter about it being the most hypocritical television program I had ever witnessed in my entire life. ... Or, at least since the episode of Home Improvement in which supposedly-wholesome family man Tim 'The Tool Man' Taylor murdered his family for being obese and unkempt.
Well, whatever. I kept watching. Perhaps I was the tuna-craving kitten, and curiosity was about to kill me. And maybe it was going to kill me... bad.
The microphone was passed around while each alien cried and traded girly gossip and sob stories.
"I can't get back to my home planet.", offered one.
"My pet dog told me that he's gay. And I told him that I love him no matter what.", cried another, to audience applause.
"I went to Taco Bell and the teletubbies were working there and tried to suffocate me with hugs", whispered the other.
"Everybody thinks I'm a racist and a murderer.", growled the other. He was wearing a nametag that read 'George' in ancient hieroglyphics.
Just then, things got awfully quiet. Then I heard somebody in the audience fart, and I kid you not: I could smell it. Given that some of these DVDs are equipped with smell-o-vision technology, I mostly ignored it, but thought I might mention it in my complaint postcard to the television network.
"Now why would anybody think that of you, George?", Oprah asked sassily. I was wondering where all this was going, but I didn't have an answer. I picked more belly button yeast and wiped it on my tilted, one-legged couch.
"Some colored kid was following me, because I followed him. I was on the neighborhood watch and didn't recognize him, so I had my reasons. But he didn't have any reason to attack me. Next thing you know, he was on top of me and reaching for my gun. I'm not gonna lie: I curbstomped him. It was all in self-defense. But on the grounds that I'm gray and he's, well, y'know..."
"You lying, racist pile of donkey fuck!" shouted an audience member, wearing glasses and spastically holding onto the pocket protector in his white button-downed collar shirt. He sure looked like a skeleton, but I assumed it was just a gimmick, like that side character who misspells his name from that late night Scottish talk show. This angry nerd threw a tomato at the alien, George. Apparently it was poisonous, because he fell over and foamed at the mouth as if he was dead or dying. I guess that's not the same as choked, but perhaps they meant choke in a deep and powerful metaphorical way.
Now, this was really scary to me... but it gets even worse. Just then, a tune that sounded like the 'you've won' music from Wheel of Fortune played. I'm not sure why, but it scared the crap out of me. Maybe Wheel of Fortune had a tie-in with the Oprah Winfrey television program, but something seemed awfully wrong with this disc.
"It's that special music! And you know what that means! Look what's under your seeeeaaa eeeaaaaats!", squealed the gray alien, Ms. Oprah Winfrey. The audience members did just that and... well, if you'd seen what happened next, you'd probably shit your own pants.
It wasn't just what they pulled out. It was who the audience members were. And I shit you not, they were all skeletons. Some were wearing Chicago Cubs hats, but there was, in particular, one that was wearing a top hat. The camera zoomed deeply into his skully, boney face and... and then it zoomed out as he danced with his cane and... and... and well, he sang!
"Mail mail mail map it's the map in the mail! Open up your mail and find the maaaap! Check the X, check the mark, you will find, the doggy's bark, and that's not to say your ex-lover is a biiiitch! And now here's the part of our show that'll make you SICK!!!"
Each... and every skeleton... all of the audience members... pulled out highly realistic pieces of the human anatomy. Appendixes, blackened lungs, puss-covered spleens, and still-beating human hearts were chewed on and eaten by the skeletons who devoured them before they... before the 'food' just went through them and hit the floor because they didn't have digestive systems!
Now, let me tell you something. I'm not a genius. I'm no Nikola Tesla, I'm no Dr. Frasier Crane, and I'm no Steve Irwin the devoted vaginal/clitoris hunter... but I can tell that when something's wrong, it's wrong. I ran up to the DVD player and smacked it with my shit-stained toilet plunger again and again... until it sparked and it blew up. "Why did you do this?", I thought I heard it hiss at me.
That was when a strange sensation came over me. Yes, that horrible episode of the Oprah Winfrey television program was gone forever, but something strange was on my conscience even though I didn't do anything at all wrong! I went back upstairs to my bedroom. I sorted through the bloody sponges and tampons left behind by my former lover. And under all of them...
Was a folded, blood-stained, Dunkin Donuts napkin. I unfolded it, and there it was... something that would change my life forever.
It was a treasure map.
... Wait. That was it! The whole thing on the television program! All of the skeletons eating organs were a deep and powerful metaphor for this period blood soaken treasure map! But... did I follow it? Was it all a trap, as the cool kids on the Internet Bulletin Board Systems say when trading ASCII pictures of The-Brady-Bunch-Meet-the-Free-Pain-Report-Gang characters? Was this my time? My moment? Was this very task designed and destined to be solved by the virtue of me and me only? Was I born for this moment?
Well, I'm not gonna lie. I was very tired and I passed out right there in the bloody tampons. I didn't mean to do this or anything, but I was tired and, shit, they made for appropriate insulation. When I woke up I took a shower and washed the red stuff off and made myself some toast. Like an absolute moron I wiped the jam off on the treasure map, because I briefly mistook it for a normal napkin. I shrieked in horror at what I had done, only to realize that it was no big deal and I had simply invalidated a tie-in coupon for a free small vanilla bean spleen-pussed coolatta. That's right: a small. Fuck that shit.
Anyway: I had it alllll figured out. After my work shift at the cheesecake factory, I stole the company van and went a-searchin' for the gold, or whatever the treasure of the map was. I hummed the song from the Oprah Winfrey television program to myself, hoping to discover some clues that didn't register in my active mind the first time that I heard the song. After doing a little bit of research, I broke it down into two pieces:
- "The map is in the mail", the skeleton sang. Given that soiled tampons in my bedroom aren't quite mail, I figure that it was a deep and powerful metaphor for how babies are 'mailed' into this world from vaginas. Also, I'm pretty sure I spotted an Elvis stamp in my ex-lover's vagina before.
- Checking the mark to find the doggy's bark... the non-bitchy ex-lover? Considering that the thought of somebody having sex with a dog is as disgusting as it gets, I simply had no idea what this all could mean. I know that dogs love doggie treats, but unless human hearts are analogous to doggie treats, this was probably just a line thrown in by the aliens to confuse me. And distract me by making me crave dog biscuits...
Now, I'm kind of ashamed to admit this, but because I wasn't paying attention to the road, I nearly crashed the van into a Taco Man delivery truck. The driver turned around and shouted some obscenities in Spanish at me, and I responded by throwing my pilfered Woody Woodpecker plush doll into his face as I sped by maniacally. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed his truck explode as he fell out of the driver's door and into the swamp water off the side of the road. ... He was eaten alive by a crocodile. As his dismembered arm drifted into the water, I could hear Woody Woodpecker let out his famous comedic laugh, and it turned into a bubbly echo as the stolen doll drifted into the muck.
... You know, I felt kind of bad, but as I put the doll to use, I guess swiping the doll from the boss's son was now justified. I could only hope that the Backdoor Boys, wherever in Heaven they were now, were smiling down at me for this economical use of the stolen goods that they sacrificed their lives for.
It wasn't too long--according to the stopwatch app on my iPhone, it was 576 seconds later--when I reached my destination. The X on the map. The answer to the alien episode of Oprah... and perhaps some of life's deeper questions. I parked the van, got out, and realized that the answer to the DVD episode's riddle was right under my nose.
I was at PetSmart. 'The doggy's bark'... as the cool kids say.
At this point, I felt a chill shoot down my spine, because I knew that whatever I'd find might be so horrifying that I could never leave the store, let alone return home. I mean, think about it: this was the product of a conspiracy by gray aliens, one of which was supposed to be Oprah Winfrey, and another, an obviously deep metaphor for George Zimmerman (which I think may have been Bob Dylan's birth name or something.)
Now, I'm not going to tell you that this story has a happy ending. In fact, it doesn't. I knew something was wrong as soon as I stepped out of the van. Perhaps it was the familiar voice shrieking "I'm going to fucking kill you, Daniel!", but at that point... I was scared.
I walked in. The windows were all boarded up and you couldn't see in from the outside, but I was feeling... lucky. And the opening and closing of the automatic doors felt strangely liberating, as if they were the gateway to Heaven. But... then I stared ahead of me. And what I saw was anything but your usual PetSmart sales floor and related activity.
I know I neglected to tell you this earlier, but I live right next to Roswell, New Mexico. Right where Area 51 took place. The reason I didn't mention this is because I was pretty sure that the alien conspiracy went back to President Martin Van Buren, so I don't trust the widely reported Area 51 'findings' (quote-unquote) that President Truman was the first to discover extra-terrestrials. And I didn't believe Area 51 was real.
... Until now. Because what was ahead of me was a UFO. And not just any UFO: it was shaped like a teepee. Not like the ovular thing that Dr. Wily escapes in in the Mega Man games, which he could easily just keep on riding in to avoid fighting Mega Man altogether with... but a teepee.
At this point, I was really scared and simply wanted to head back home. Furthermore, I had just realized that in my hurry to solve the map-related mystery, I forgot to put on underwear that morning. I considered leaving the scene behind for now and heading to K-Mart, which was hopefully not boarded up yet from catastrophic sales numbers... but no. Something came over me... hypnotized me, one might say. I felt like I couldn't leave. In fact, whatever mind control I was under guided me to thoughtlessly march right into the ship! The drawdoor was down, and revealed a stairway. This was my time... to stairway. To the heavens.
You may have guessed it by now, but my ex-girlfriend was the only person inside of the ship.
"Stella? What the hell are you doing here?", I asked.
"I said I was returning to my teepee, Daniel. And to my reservation...
... the one back on my home planet."
I gulped. Not even a 7-11 Big Gulp could cool me down in this anxiety-inducing situation!
"I thought you loved me, Daniel. You made me think twice about humans. At first, I wanted to blow you all up, because you waste natural resources and shit, but then I fell in love with you. Which was my life's biggest mistake."
"Stella..." was all I could muster.
She paused, and refreshed herself, I guess. "According to the Prime Directive, I'm supposed to kill you now, Daniel. Your species simply is not advanced enough to interact with any of us Kolobians, and learn any of the deepest, darkest secrets about what we've done to you and your government. Like the DVD...
But despite what you've done... I have gained the human emotion of empathy from you. I have chosen to spare you. After all, I left the DVD and the treasure map in our bedroom... on purpose."
What happened next is so surreal that I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't believe me, but she unzipped herself... revealing that, all along, her human body was just a suit to her, even if it was capable of leaking out a lot of vagina blood. She was, indeed...
... a gray alien.
At this moment, my anxiety disorder acted up and I reached for my iPhone so that I could call PetSmart security and have this flying object of hers taken away. But no: she swiped for my iPhone, and stuck it in her gray, likely silicone body, absorbing it into her belly as if it was a source of energy. On the frayed edges of sanity and now without my iPhone, I unwisely struck back with a racecar that I had gotten the morning of our break-up as a prize from my Alf Pops cereal box.
The deep and powerful metaphor of attacking her with the last object I gained during the time of our love was simply too much. She passed out alien-style, and I was left in the teepee UFO as the only sentient being consciously on board.
At that very moment, a chill spread down my spine as I realized that I did indeed manage to dial PetSmart security before she could swipe the phone away! They could arrive at any moment, and separate us forever!
Now, I'm only human. I thought of sacrificing my life, in hopes of becoming an electric ghost the way we all do when the 21 grams of energy leaves our bodies upon death. Maybe I could manipulate the lights in the PetSmart building and make it pitch black, or something. Plus, I could fuck around with people's power when they were playing video games and went a long time without saving. But instead, a better idea came over me. A much... much better idea.
I zipped Stella's body suit onto me. Nervous out of my mind and realizing that I was running out of options, I attempted to calm myself down by playing with the freshly-equipped vagina. And that was when it all made sense.
The reason Stella bled so much was because her vagina was actually quite flexible. In fact, I managed to stretch it out so widely that I could hide her in there, and I did just that. I waddled out of the tee pee because she was too heavy for me to walk straight. That, and the weight of all the Elvis stamps inside.
You know, maybe this lengthy story of mine has an OK ending after all. Upon leaving the store, PetSmart security had indeed been waiting for me, and they recognized me on site as Stella Realisti-Gor: Queen of the Brinstarian-Kolobians. It turns out that PetSmart was in on the government conspiracy about aliens. They put me in some sort of convoluted white jacket in which the arms are kinda tied together, and sent me to my throne room: a white, padded room without any decorations, because they assume that us aliens aren't much into art.
Every now and then, a doctor shows up and asks me how I'm doing, though he won't come inside. He only gives me enough food for one person, so I split what I've got and let Stella eat the rest. She tells me that life inside a vagina isn't the most comfortable, but I let her know that this was only temporary residency, and one day, the time would come.
For us--my home planet of Earth--to learn the shocking truth.
That Ms. Oprah Winfrey, George Zimmerman, and all Native Americans everywhere... are not from this rocky transport vesicle that we affectionately refer to... as Earth.
The End.