"This Stupid Pineapple Is..." Part TWO!

Hey! I'm running "The Stupid PineappleBlogfest" to celebrate the fact that author Patrick Dilloway, the Grumpy Bulldog of blogging, got a book contract and therefore must take part in blogfests. The details are here, and you have until this Friday to write your entry and/or accumulate numbers by tweeting about it and getting comments. In essence, though, you must simply write "The Stupid Pineapple Is..." and you're in, but be sure to leave a comment on this blog letting me know to check.

But you know who else would benefit from this? OTHER AUTHORS. Guys like Rusty Webb, who I'm SURE will want to enter as I essentially stole the idea from him, and because he'll want to publicize his awesome book A Dead God's Wrath. So you should definitely go to his blog and ask him breathlessly: "Are you really gonna enter that blogfest, Mr. Webb?"

Again: Details here.

To hype the contest, and because I wanted to keep a tiny stegosaurus from taking over this blog, I'm writing my own entry, cleverly titled:

"This Stupid Pineapple Is...",

a serialized Nick & Other Sexy Cop story! In part one, Templeton Freeney threw away a stupid pineapple that then sent him to a beach house with his wife. Also, there was a tiny wormhole. Read it here.

Today is Part Two: The important thing is, the cheeseburger ends up okay. So try to keep that in mind.

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"This stupid pineapple is driving me crazy!" complained Tiny, as he lugged a cheeseburger that was as large as he was across the refrigerator shelf to the edge, where he caught his breath and then pushed the cheeseburger, which was still in its original yellow wrapper, off the shelf and onto the floor below.

He watched it fall the equivalent of about six stories. Shaking his head, he then shimmied himself down the refrigerator that, to him, was the size of a giant building. Letting himself down from shelf to shelf, he reached the level of the produce bin and stared, in momentary horror, at a piece of broccoli as large as he was.

On the floor, he tugged at the cheeseburger wrapper and dragged it over to the table, where the stupid pineapple sat, several stories above him.

"How am I supposed to get it up there?" he asked, and grunted in disgust as he realized he'd have to push it onto a giant chair and then lift it onto the table.

"Don't know why I couldn't get some other job today," he muttered, laboriously going through the motions of getting the cheeseburger up to the table.

Once up there, the vast expanse of the kitchen table lay before him like several football fields if football fields were made of formica-made-to-look-like-wood and if on those several football fields, instead of large men trying to knock each other down to impress the large men watching them on TV who wished they could knock other men down, the football fields instead contained nothing but a regular-sized stupid pineapple sitting in the middle of it. Tiny pushed the cheeseburger over to where the stupid pineapple, no larger than his own head sat.

"Here," he sighed. "Here is your lunch."

The stupid pineapple didn't even look at him. "I can't eat that," it said. "I'm a vegetarian."

"A what?!" Tiny exploded. "You never said nothin' about... you can't be a vegetarian! That's cannibalism!"

"I'm not a vegetable. At least, I don't think I am. Am I a vegetable? No. I think I'm some sort of dog," the stupid pineapple said, and began muttering to itself a poem it made up on the spot about pineapples and dogs and how they were probably the same thing but who could tell because nobody had ever seen a dog.

Tiny sat down on the edge of the cheeseburger. "I'm not gonna go all that way just to get you some giant vegetable," he said. "It's the cheeseburger or nothin'. Take it or leave it."

"Why are you so crabby?" The stupid pineapple asked him, interrupting its poem. "What have YOU got to be upset about? I'm the one who was kidnapped. Wasn't I?" The stupid pineapple paused. "I'm pretty sure I was." It then paused again and said "I didn't kidnap you, did I?"

Tiny put his face in his hands and ignored it.

The stupid pineapple was talking to itself again. Tiny heard things like "Probably need to turn myself in. But I won't go easily..." and "I wonder what a dog looks like. Maybe I'm not a dog after all. Maybe I'm a skywriter."

Tiny decided that he would have some of the cheeseburger, and opened up the wrapper, reaching in and grabbing a fistful of meat and stuffing it into his mouth. From behind him, he heard:

"Hey, can I have some?"

He turned to berate the stupid pineapple for now wanting some of the cheeseburger but when he turned around he saw instead a man standing there, holding a green marker.

"Who are you?"

"I'm Nick," said the man with the marker, whose name was Nick. (That was why he said what he did.) "Who are you? And more importantly, can I have some of that? I'm starved."

Tiny pulled his laser gun on Nick and pointed it at him. "Don't move. Hands up," he said.

Nick, in response, pointed the green marker he was holding at Tiny as though it were a gun. "Don't you move," he said.

Tiny surveyed the situation. "That's a green felt-tip marker," he said.

Nick looked down. "It seems to be, yeah. I just found it on the way in here."

"I have a gun," Tiny said.

"Yes, you do," Nick agreed. "I mean, I'm no expert in guns. I'm more of an amateur punctuationist and professional UFO maker. I'd give you my card, but if I did that, I'd have to let go of this marker, and since the odds already seem against me, that strikes me as a bad idea. Still, that is a very impressive looking gun you've got there. Assuming it's a gun, and not, say, a green marker."

"You are holding a green marker," Tiny said.

"We were talking about you, not me," Nick said.

"Is everyone here crazy?" Tiny asked.

"Not me! I'm just stupid. But what do you expect from a pineapple? Dogs aren't very smart."

Nick looked down at the pineapple, then back at Tiny.

"So it can talk," he said. "I thought I was imagining that, the way I thought I was imagining getting sucked into a tiny wormhole and spun around and twisted over and over until like some kind of water slide only less fun and less watery and more interdimensionally, and at one point I got this green marker jabbed into my eye, which made it even less fun, let me tell you, and then suddenly I was here. So it looks like I didn't imagine either of those things. Any of those things," he corrected himself, after a moment. "There were more than two things I thought I was imagining," he said to Tiny.

The three of them sat there for a moment, regarding each other silently. Then Tiny thought he should reassert his authority.

"Hands in the air," he said again, a little more loudly.

"I haven't got any hands," the stupid pineapple said. "Would you like me to have hands?"

"No!" Tiny ordered it. "You've already made things bad enough, shrinking us."

"It shrunk you?" Nick asked, incredulously. Tiny was about his size. "How big were you before it did that?" After a moment, he said: "And how did it do that?"

"I can grant wishes," the stupid pineapple said. "As many as you want, although I'm supposed to limit it to three, which isn't as many as people always want but that's the rules."

"Quiet," Tiny said.

"Also, I didn't..." the stupid pineapple began, but it was cut off by Tiny picking it up and ordering it again to be quiet. In the moment that he did that, Nick took the green marker and used it to bat the laser gun out of Tiny's hands, sending it skittering across the giant tabletop.

"It seems that now I have the upper hand," Nick told Tiny.

"How? You still just have a green marker."

"But you have nothing," Nick pointed out.

"I have this stupid pineapple," Tiny told him.

"Touche," Nick agreed. "How about we make a truce. You send me back to where I came from, I give you back your green marker, and we're all free to go on with what we were doing. You can feed a cheeseburger to a pineapple, which seems kind of dumb as pineapples are vegetarian, and I can get to my meeting on time because if I don't, my business is definitely going to go under this time. I mean, this is it for me. The Bank is not going to let me 'accidentally' mail it a piece of toast again and claim that I got mixed up and mailed it my breakfast and ate the check. So I need this job and I'm pretty sure that having gotten sucked into a wormhole is going to mess that up."

"Send you back? How am I supposed to do that? Haven't you noticed that this stupid pineapple shrunk me, and all my men, and we're stuck here in this kitchen" he waved his hand to indicate the vast expanses of the kitchen they were stuck in, just in case Nick had missed the fact that they were standing in a cavernous, but rather nicely-done (if a bit dated) kitchen. "And I'm stuck guarding this thing while the men try to find a way to report back, which is going to take them a long time because even if they can get onto the roof, how are they supposed to operate a hovercraft that's now giant?"

"I didn't..." the stupid pineapple began, but Tiny shook it and glared at it.

"You shut up, you! You're why we're in this mess!"

The stupid pineapple silently wondered how it being kidnapped by the men was its fault, but that line of thinking confused it and it began to wonder again whether it had, in fact, kidnapped the men. It was terribly worried that it had, and that made it worry that someone somewhere was going to be mad at it, which reminded that this man, Tiny, was mad at it right now, and then he wondered why Tiny was so mad at him.

"Why are you so mad at me?" the stupid pineapple asked Tiny, who simply scowled at it.

"Do you see what I go through?" he said to Nick.

Nick, meanwhile, had idly started sauntering over to where he'd batted the laser gun. When Tiny spoke to him, he saw what Nick was doing and immediately flung the stupid pineapple up into the air and began to run after Nick, who began to run towards the laser gun.

Tiny almost instantly realized what he'd done and forgot all about the laser gun, instead, spinning to look in horror at the stupid pineapple, which was flying through the air backwards, towards the edge of the vast expanse of the giant kitchen table. The pineapple appeared unaware of the peril it was in, as it was humming the first several stanzas to Bizet's Symphony In C. You may think that is a rather odd thing for a stupid pineapple to be humming, given that many people are not aware of Bizet's early work, let alone conversant enough with it to be able to casually and calmly hum it while they are being flung, or have been flung, or are in the process of being flunging, towards the edge of a giant kitchen table which marks a precipitous fall that is the equivalent of many stories' of height.

But rest assured: the stupid pineapple did not know what it was humming. It was just dumb luck that the stupid pineapple hummed that particular set of bars which happened to perfectly match up with the opening of Bizet's little-known symphony. Dumb luck, of course, increases with the level of stupidity of the person experiencing it. Scientists have known for years about the attractant qualities of luck, with good luck being attracted to people who are good-looking or good at something, and therefore enhancing their skill and bad luck being attracted to the opposite sorts of people, and dumb luck being attracted to dumb people.

The stupid pineapple being particularly stupid, it had amassed a phenomenal amount of what scientist call "elucktrons," because scientists are not, when it comes right down to it, particularly creative, but forget about that: The pineapple was like a walking storehouse of dumb luck, except that it was neither a storehouse nor could it walk. In any event, it had a lot of dumb luck saved up, and most of that dumb luck accounted for its inexplicable ability to hum the first stanzas of Bizet's Symphony In C quite by accident as it flew end over end to certain doom.

"Noooooooo!!!!!!!" Tiny yelled.

The stupid pineapple hummed.

"Nooooooooooo!!!!!" Nick yelled, too, to cover for the fact that he was picking up the laser gun. Nick deliberately used fewer exclamation points and more o's than Tiny to set himself apart. He doubted Tiny noticed, but Nick was particular about things like that, and he noticed.

End over end over end over end over a side because the stupid pineapple had tried to twist itself to see what all the yelling was about, the stupid pineapple floated towards the edge of the table in what seemed to Tiny and Nick to be slow motion, so slowly in fact that they could see it rotating.

"Is it going in slow motion?" Nick asked Tiny.

Tiny put his hand, raised dramatically, down.

"Yeah," he said. "I think it is."

The stupid pineapple was almost to the edge of the table.

"Shouldn't you go try to catch it?" Nick asked. "I mean, I'm assuming all this nooooo-ing was because you realized that you shouldn't have thrown it."

"I shouldn't have," Tiny said. "It's a magic pineapple. It grants wishes."

"It does?" Nick asked.

"Yeah." Tiny said. He had started walking towards the edge of the giant kitchen table to retrieve the pineapple, which by now had forgotten entirely that it was supposed to be falling. It had so enjoyed the drama of being flunged -- it wasn't sure that was the word but would put it in its diary anyway, if it ever got a diary-- that it had slowed itself down to stretch out the moment, but now it was captivated by a thought it had just thunk up, one involving whether the number 3 was actually a kind of rocket ship, and so it had stopped falling altogether.

Nick walked casually behind Tiny, holding the laser gun casually behind his back, and tried to be even more casual as he said:

"So that's one of those talking, wish-granting stupid pineapples."

"Uh-huh," Tiny said, and then he stopped, and looked at Nick. "What do you mean, one of them? And why are you being so casual?"

Nick, for his part, had tried to find something to casually lean against, but the giant kitchen table was remarkably sparse on things to lean casually against. The giant cheeseburger was at least 40 feet away from him, and he wasn't sure how casual it would look if he were to try to lean on it and then slip on a giant pickle or something.

"No reason," he said.

Tiny stared at Nick for a second longer, and then turned and broke into a run towards the stupid pineapple.

Nick broke into a run, too, but lagged behind at first because he tried to run casually before realizing that nobody was being fooled by that and also that it's more or less impossible to run in a casual way.

Trailing by a few feet as they closed in on the stupid pineapple, Nick remembered the laser gun and yelled "Stop or I'll shoot!" which he'd heard Other Sexy Cop say all the time on her job and it always worked. He congratulated himself on being such a good husband that he'd paid attention to his wife and also that he'd learned something from her.

Tiny didn't stop.

Nick felt that was unfair, and wished Tiny would have listened to him and stopped.

Tiny abruptly locked into position, on one leg, other leg raised up, arms pumping, and promptly fell over onto the table, still in that position.

Nick caught up to him, and surveyed the man, who looked up at him and said "What...did...you...do?" through gritted teeth because he could not move his mouth.

"I have never seen that work so well," Nick said. "Man, Other Sexy Cop is going to be jealous of me."

He nudged the man. "It's okay to move a little. Just no sudden moves or I'll shoot."

"I... can't...move."

"Really?" Nick squatted down and poked the man in his face. "Not at all? How are you doing that?"

"I'm doing that," the stupid pineapple behind him said. "I told you, I can grant wishes."

Nick stood and looked from it to Tiny and back to the pineapple.

"So you granted my wish?" Nick asked it. "But I didn't even say it out loud."

He thought about that for a second, and said "So you can read minds?"

The stupid pineapple answered: "I guess I can. Hey, maybe I'm not so stupid after all!" And it was so overcome by that idea that it promptly forgot not to fall and dropped out of sight below the edge of the table.

Nick gasped.

Tiny gasped, as well as he was able to, since he still couldn't move.

There was a long silence, and then the stupid pineapple's voice, from far away, came floating up. "I'm okay," it said.

Nick breathed a sigh of relief. Things would be okay after all. He'd use the stupid pineapple to get himself unshrunk, wish them all back home, give the stupid pineapple to Other Sexy Cop who would finally be able to close that case, and then he'd finish up that meeting with the company and he would be sure to mention that it was very unsafe of them to have a tiny wormhole unguarded in their third floor bathroom.

"I'll be right down there," he said, and went to the edge of the table, where, looking over, he saw nothing but the tile floor -- it was a nice tile, if a little dated -- far below.

No stupid pineapple.

Nick stared all around, wondering where it could have gone, but his concentration was broken by the sound of a giant door opening. He stood up and held the laser gun warily ahead of him, looking in the direction of the sound, only to see Other Sexy Cop come walking in, which would ordinarily have been an extremely welcome sight, as Other Sexy Cop had never given up her habit of wearing extremely short, tight skirts, and extremely tight, unbutton-y shirts, and she also had never given up her habit of being drop-dead sexy, so just seeing her would alone be welcome but Nick felt he was in a bit over his head at this point and could use her very-competent, pretty-cleavage-y help, but in this particular instance, Nick was not, in fact, pleased to see Other Sexy Cop at all, probably because while she was wearing a tiny skirt, and had her shirt opened to the point where one could see her bra and a generous helping of boob, Other Sexy Cop was also at least fifty times taller than Nick, and she was not just fifty times taller than him but also she was blue.

And she was bleeding. She stared at the scene in front of her, and locked her giant (but very sexy) eyes on Nick's tiny (and bewildered) eyes, and said:

"Can you rescue me?"

And then she fell over with a thundering crash.

Click here to go on to Part Three: There's Bigger Problems To Have Than Simply "Too Many Pancakes."