The Spinach Can’s Son E-Book

Robert Jeschonek

• Herausgeber: Pie Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Imagine a world filled with comic strip characters you know and love...the world of the Underfunnies, where nothing is as it seems. Molly, a "Panelnaut" explorer, searches this strange 'toon world for her missing husband, only to find him at the heart of a bizarre mystery. Can she bring him back from the Underfunnies, resurrecting him from ink and paper to flesh and blood? Or will she end up lost herself, at the mercy of cartoon forces she cannot hope to understand? The answers lie somewhere beyond the funny pages and the bounds of imagination itself.

Leseprobe

The Spinach Can’s Son

A SCIFI STORY

ROBERT JESCHONEK

Contents

Also by Robert Jeschonek

The Spinach Can’s Son

About the Author

Special Preview: Six Scifi Stories Volume Four

THE SPINACH CAN’S SON

Copyright © 2023 by Robert Jeschonek

http://bobscribe.com/

Cover Art Copyright © 2023 by Ben Baldwin

www.benbaldwin.co.uk

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved by the author.

Published by Blastoff Books

An Imprint of Pie Press

411 Chancellor Street

Johnstown, Pennsylvania 15904

www.piepresspublishing.com

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Also by Robert Jeschonek

100th Power Book 1

100th Power Book 2

100th Power Book 3

Blastoff!

Cosmic Conflicts

Gray Lady Rising (with Annie Reed)

In a Green Dress, Surrounded by Exploding Clowns and Other Stories

In the Empire of Underpants and Other Stories

Battlenaut Crucible

Scifi Motherlode

Sticks and Stones: A Trek Novel

The Spinach Can’s Son

I am the can of spinach in a sailor man's hand.  He squeezes, expecting me to burst open and launch a blob of green power into his gaping maw.

But I do not burst.  He gets no mouthful of spinach, no surge of energy pumping up his arms to three times their size.  That's not how it works on this side of the tracks, my friend.

You're not in the funny pages anymore.

Potpie the Sailor tries again with both hands, straining for all he's worth.  "C'mon, ya ratfinsk!" He squints up at the threat looming before him, the whole reason he needs his spinach.  "We've gotsk to drive this she-hag off me boat!"

What threat could be awful enough to strike fear in the sailor man's heart?  Is it Bobo the comic strip bully, back for another knock-down-drag-out?

Not even close.

The figure standing before Potpie and me isn't a drawing at all.  There's nothing pen and ink about her. "Sir!" She's a three-dimensional woman in what looks like a spacesuit out of a 1950s movie--silver metallic tights and a bubble helmet.  Her black hair is arranged in tight waves beneath the glass. "Please, calm down! I just want to ask you some questions." She pulls a photo out of a pouch on the belt slung diagonally over her hips.  "Have you seen this man?"

"Never seen 'im before in me lifesk!"  Potpie squeezes me harder than ever. I try my best to help, pushing from within, for one simple reason.

I recognize the man in the picture, with his dark brown hair and square-jawed features.  I know him like I know my own self, in fact.

Because he is myself.  Myself in another life.

And I know her, too.  Her name is Molly. She's my wife.

And I know why she's after me.

"Take another look, please," she says.  "It's urgent that I find him."

Potpie shifts the corncob pipe from one side of his mouth to the other without ever touching it.  "I ain't seen him, she-hag!" He shakes a fist at her. "Now putsk 'em up!"

Molly takes a step toward him.  "You're sure you haven't seen him?"

Potpie scrambles backward, knocking over a stack of spinach crates.  Crying out, he puts me to the only use he can think of--hurling me right at her.

Molly ducks, and I go sailing over her head.  It's not a clean getaway, though; the bracelet on her wrist starts beeping as I pass.  

Here in the Underfunnies, I'm an anomaly, a deformity in the panel geography--the panelography--and her equipment has detected me.

Good thing a true Panelnaut like me can swim the currents here like a dolphin through water.  Focusing my energies, I dive deep into the sea of words and images, hunting a good place to resurface.

Found it.  I cross the borders in full flight and land with a shock that takes my breath away.

This time, I am the brick in the hand of a mouse.

I bounce lightly in his grip as he jounces along through a strange landscape, surrounded by abstract objects straight out of a surrealist painting.  He gives off a thick smell of stinky cheese and whistles a jaunty tune from his pointy gray snout.

I know him well--Ixnay the Mouse.  Once again, I've gravitated toward my favorite stomping grounds, the panelography of the early 20th century.  In this case, the Hazy Kat strip.

Or should I say, the Underfunnies version of that strip.  The reverse of it, the flip side where things don't work the way they should.  The negative space that accrues in the collective unconscious of the readership around these tiny, panel-bound stories.  The land of things unsaid and hopes unrealized.

For each time Potpie the sailor pops open a can, gobbles the spinach, and beats up the bully, we know in our hearts there must be times when the can doesn't open.  That's just the way life works. And our expectations create this flip side place that until recently no one knew about.

I am a Panelnaut, an explorer of this place.  Though "fugitive" might be a better word for what I've become.

"Boy," says Ixnay.  "Have I got one cooked up for that idiot cat this time."  He hops up on what looks like a warped sundial and calls out into the hot wind.  "Oh, Haaazyyy!"

Without delay, the creature known as Hazy Kat comes bounding over the horizon.  She's wearing a polka-dot scarf and matching tutu. "Comink, mine treasur-ed pession flour!"

"Make it snappy, willya?" hollers Ixnay.  "Yer burnin' daylight here!"

Hazy flops to a stop in front of us and gapes with a love-struck goofy grin.  "Dost Rumeo have a heart-wiltin' sonnet plucked out to make his Joliet swoon'st?"

"Ohh, yeah."  Ixnay turns me over in his grip.  "Ya ever hear of iambrick pentameter?"

Hazy claps her paws together and giggles.  "Butter 'course, o' bard o' the mousehole! Hit me with that iambrick pentagrammer to yer li'l ol' heart's continent!"

"You asked for it."  Ixnay hauls me back, ready to throw.  "Be sure to notice the rhythmic counterpoint of strike and release.  Or should I say the opposite?"

At that exact moment, Molly flashes to life between us and Hazy.  The second she materializes, her bracelet starts beeping.

She points her wrist in my direction and nods.  "I know you're here, Everett. You've figured out how to assume local forms, haven't you?"  Watching the bracelet, she walks toward us. "You're inside the mouse, aren't you?"