portalville


1. Let me Thread you a story… (1-14)
2. Peaches McCaffrey stopped into Bar-Bar’s Ice Cream Parlor. She told Bar-Bar she’d been having strange dreams.
3. Now, Peaches is a sensitive soul. She runs the Peace Now Meditation Center down on Greenbriar Road.
4. She likes to talk about chakras and higher consciousness & all kinds of stuff I don’t rightly understand, but it seems to make her happy.
5. And folks come out of her center with big smiles on their faces so I guess something must be going right down there.
6. But she said that every time she ate Bar-Bar’s orange ripple chocolate ice cream—her favorite—she dreamed the same dream.
7. In it there was a beautiful white horse with sapphire eyes that always tried to coax her to frolic with it in Laverty Pond.
8. Bar-Bar told her, “Not everyone can take the higher emanations of the chocolate-fruit infusion.”
9. (Or the mystical spells some say Bar-Bar mumbles as she’s mixing batches.)
10. She told Peaches to try a dollop of Calming Sprinkles next time she got the orange ripple chocolate.
11. Oh—and on no account was she to follow that horse into that pond, in dreams or in real life.
12. Some say Bar-Bar was a high priestess of some sort before she moved here from New Orleans, but nobody really knows if that’s so.
13. She’d be far from the only one in town fond of spells and potions. It’s that kind of place. It don’t make no difference to me.
14. Because who am I to judge? I’m just a Narrator and everyone knows narrators are unreliable sots, fruit infused chocolate or not.

This story can also be found on Twitter @downportalville.

  1. Let me Thread you a story… (1-11)
  2. A big orange blob parked itself in the town square. Just appeared overnight and plugged up the fountain something fierce.
  3. Trapper Bruce poked it with a stick & it blatted something that sounded like “Sad!” then barfed chicken fat out of one of its orifices.
  4. Sheriff Limonada suggested taking a flamethrower to it, but nobody had one of those, so a mob with torches formed up.
  5. I don’t really hold with mobs carrying torches myself as many an innocent creature has been declared a monster by them.
  6. But this blob gave off a foul odor of corruption & kept getting bigger, spreading all over the fountain and the park benches around it.
  7. It exploded soon as the first torch hit it. Guess it wasn’t much more than a giant gasbag filled with grease. Burned real good.
  8. The fountain ain’t never going to be the same, though. The nymphs who frequented it have been debauched & are quite traumatized.
  9. They had to go to Aunt Cozy’s Soothin’ Shack for some deep soothin’. Don’t know if they’ll ever return to the fountain.
  10. Only one happy about the situation was Natty Knowles who owns Spic n’ Span Like It Never Happened Cleaning Service.
  11. One of his biggest jobs in recent memory. I hope we’re all done with explosive orange blobs.

These tales can also be found on Twitter: @downportalville

 

  1. Let me Thread you a story… (1-12)
  2. Ned Riskom said as how he’d seen a leshy down Woodward Lane way. He’s usually sober as a church mouse. Not like him to spread tall tales.
  3. Then again he did once say as how he’d met the Queen of Sheba coming out of Bar-Bar’s Ice Cream Parlor & that sounded a bit off the mark.
  4. Bar-Bar herself didn’t mention the Queen. Then again, Bar-Bar once served a cone to Vice President Gilroy and didn’t know him from Adam.
  5. Vice President Gilroy allowed as how he’d never tasted finer rocky road in his life. Nice man. Him and his puppy, Adam.
  6. We’re always glad when Big People come through to visit us Little People. Makes us know we’re not totally alone out here on the fringe.
  7. So, back to Ned’s leshy. Trapper Bruce went down there to check things out but Woodward Lane can sometimes be downright weird.
  8. By the time Bruce got there, the elms had crossed the lane to have words with the oaks and there was an all-out tree war going on.
  9. ‘Spose one of them tree-shaper leshies could have had something to do with that, if more than one of them was walking Woodward Lane.
  10. I hear they fight to protect their territory. And they can take the shape of anything. Nobody remembers elms on Woodward Lane before.
  11. Bruce hightailed it out of there cuz the branches was flying like javelins & he didn’t fancy getting impaled for somebody’s else’s war.
  12. Ain’t none of us worked up the nerve to go down thattaway to see how the chips have fallen. Like I said, Woodward Lane is weird.

These tales can also be found on Twitter: @downportalville

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