(Note: This is just part of the opening piece in the upcoming collection, "Funny, Sexy, Nanobots (and other improvements) - The Simple Displeasures Collection - Volume One" Coming in February, 2017.
I want to clear the air about one thing; I don’t sneeze all that much.
I admit I have a few allergies, pollen is not my friend, dust is annoying, but I live a normal life. I do now, anyway, now that I’ve moved on, now that Doc is put away.
Doc named us. You can tell, too. Look at the name he gave himself compared to the rest of us. Doc, as opposed to Bashful, or Dopey. I mean, come on! Dopey? You’d never know the ol’ D-man was a physicist. He’s a scientist, for crying out loud. Graduated from The University of Dwarford. Okay, he’s a little absent-minded. What scientist isn’t? So, one day he forgets his coat and Doc tags him with the name Dopey. Life just isn’t fair. For the record, my real name is Laurence. Dopey’s is Harold. Doc’s was Lucinda – now you know why he wanted to change our names.
As for Snow White, I know I’m going to hear from some haters for saying this, but she was totally f-- -ing crazy.
The first example came the very first moment we saw her. She was asleep in our bedroom. We had just come home from a hard day digging in the pit (please don’t get me started about that damn pit Doc was obsessed with), and it seemed a little strange that some rich chick was sleeping in our house. So we woke her up. She threw a fit. She acted like we had invaded her privacy. She stomped around yelling and then she went downstairs in a huff.
Then…she started cleaning.
She cleaned compulsively. She straightened everything up. I could no longer find my favorite books. Dopey couldn’t find a Physics paper he’d been writing. (He had been working to expound on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity; for years he had been trying to prove that not only are two objects relative to each other in space and time, but that they will also make a loud popping sound if you whack them together suddenly.) Doc put the pressure on, though, and Dopey and I settled for muttering under our breath.
If you only know the popularized fairy tale version of what happened, you would
probably expect Grumpy to be the most upset of all. Don’t believe it.
Sure, Doc named him Grumpy because he got a little upset now and then. Who doesn’t? Really, he was a softy. The Grump, as we called him, was a character, a round pudgy guy who tended to be goofy. When he did get upset he was so unsure of himself, he hardly had the will to yell at anyone.
Snow White stayed in our house that night. Doc told her she could. Personally, I questioned Doc’s motives, but kept it to myself.
That night she took over the bedroom and wouldn‘t let us in, not even to get our toothbrushes. Doc took the couch, and the rest of us had to curl up on the floor in sleeping bags. It was a miserable night. I tossed and turned, and when I finally did doze off I had a vivid dream that I was a dragon, and that I was delighted to breathe fire on Doc and Snow White. In the dream, I was still myself, while also being a dragon, though, and unsure how to handle my own fire-breath, I scorched the inside of my nose and mouth, and flew away screaming and in horrible pain.
Then Doc shook us all awake for another day digging in the pit. I still don’t know what he was trying to accomplish in that pit. There was nothing there. We were just digging, day after day, and the dust we stirred up was messing with my allergies.
Off we went every morning, mumbling that god-forsaken song, that annoying “Hi-ho" thing. If I ever hear that song again, I swear I’m going to hurt someone.
End note: You'll have to wait for the book to read the rest of this piece....
-Peter Wick
-January 14, 2017
