Story time! Goat antics, day 1

Okay, so I’m not nearly as creative as @cinoclav, nor am I organized enough to arrange such a well thought out activity as the Field of 32. (Seriously, man, all heckling aside, kudos on your goat month project. It was outstanding.)

Instead, I’m going to bore you all to death with a sad tale of Irk, Glen, and probably some featured Meh products poorly worked into the story for really no reason whatsoever.

(and a lot of snark throughout the forums for the month – not that goatdom changed that; you’d be getting that either way.)

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It was a dark and stormy night; the sort of night that makes one want to stay in with a blanket, a roaring fire in the fireplace, a glass of wine, and a crappy mystery novel – the kind that starts off by talking about how dark and stormy the night is. The rain pelted against the windows in a steady, sleepy rhythm as dusk turned to night.

Suddenly, CRASH! A bolt of lightning and clap of thunder rattled the glass and the walls. Irk woke with a start, jumping up and falling off the couch in the process. In a pile on the floor, and having nearly avoided smashing the coffee table with his forehead, Irk dazedly looked around the room. How long had he been sleeping? Why was he so dizzy? When did it start raining? And where was Glen? He usually liked to curl up with Irk and nap every time he fell asleep on the couch.

Irk retrieved the clock from the ground where it fell when he knocked it off the table during his waking-up acrobatics. 12:30 am? That can’t be right. He’d left work at 4:00 and it was still bright and sunny. Further, it was very unusual that Glen had left him alone long enough to fall asleep, as typically he’d be hounding him for his dinner by 5:30.

“Glen,” Irk called, “Where are you?” He walked towards the kitchen but froze when he saw that Irk’s food bowl was still mostly full from breakfast. Something was clearly very, very wrong.

“GLEN!” He ran from room to room, checking in all of Glen’s favorite hiding places. He wasn’t in the washer and wasn’t in the dryer. He wasn’t in the hamper or in the laundry basket. He wasn’t curled up in a dresser drawer, and wasn’t in the closet. He was about to crawl into the little crevice behind the refrigerator where Glen sometimes hung out when he saw it. There, stuck to the fridge with a couple Speks magnetic balls at each corner, was a note.

Irk tugged at his funny little tuft of hair in nervousness as he plucked the note from the fridge.

Oh, right, this was just a blank copy of the silly bracket that he’d filled out for Meh last month. He’d lost miserably, of course; partly because apparently he liked candy corn more than the rest of the members, but mostly because of the crappy options that were presented to choose from by @cinoclav. He was so angered by the results that he’d burned his completed bracket, but the original blank copy remained, taunting him.

With a few muttered obscenities, he stuck the sheet back onto the fridge. He’d probably forget about the whole ordeal if he just threw it away, but he liked the visual reminder of his loss – the visual cue was enough to remind him to throw a few jabs at Clavvy each and every day.

Not being the sharpest whatever-he-was in the shed, Irk was now confused. Why was he on the floor in front of the fridge? Now, confusion wasn’t an unusual state of being for him, but for some reason he seemed even foggier than usual. The mental fog, plus this long and seemingly pointless sidebar of renewed blind rage at @cinoclav’s bracket, left him utterly perplexed.

Perplexed, that is, until he noticed a single red thread stretched across the floor. It seemed to stretch on forever, much the same way as Clavvy’s posts in the forums go on and on and on. Irk followed the thread across the room through a puddle of water to the back door, where it was caught on the door jamb.

A puddle? Why was there a puddle inside the kitchen? His gaze followed the thread up the shattered door jamb as he noticed that the door was kicked open, partly destroyed and swinging slowly back and forth in the storm. Rain continued to stream in the open door, forming a sad little river flowing to the newly formed lake in the middle of the floor. Oh no … what could have happened?

“GLENNNNNNNNN!!” Irk called out the door into the nothingness outside as he collapsed into the floor puddle and passed out.