The King of Bowlers and the Queen of the Jet Pilots

by Edd

Now this, boys and girls, is a story from back when we still had kings and queens of Chicago.

Paulie Haversack was the King of Bowlers then, and Hildegarde Fullenwider was the Queen of the Jet Pilots. Well, you can just imagine the rivalry between those clans, what with the pilots buzzing the lanes, and the bowlers putting dents in the jets. It got so bad for a while there that the Hairdressers and the Anglers were taking over big parts of their territories while they fought each other.

This dirty little war went on for the better part of a decade, until the Bowlers were reduced to a few alleys off Humboldt Park and the Jet Pilots had to use air refueling planes from Baltimore. And that’s when Paulie Haversack had the bright idea of challenging Hildegarde Fullenwider to a bowling tournament, winner take all. He set up the meet and was just about to spring his bright idea on her when she up and challenged him to a jet airplane race.

“Nothing doing,” he said to her proposal, and she said the same to his. That was very nearly that. The world would see the last of the Bowlers, the end of the Jet Pilots. Was this the split he couldn’t pick up? The power dive she couldn’t pull out of?

No. He wouldn’t have it.

This was it, the tenth frame. Paulie Haversack gulped, and he stammered, his hands went sweaty inside his favorite bowling gloves. But then he did it; he asked Hildegarde Fullenwider to marry him. And she thought about it, and peered at a contrail far overhead, and glanced back at her wingmen. Then she said yes, and they tied the knot the very next week.

Until the day they died he couldn’t stand flying, and she wouldn’t bowl. And yet the Bowlers thrived, and so did the Jet Pilots, and they taught the Anglers and the Hairdressers the meaning of ‘massive head trauma’, if you know what I mean.

Regarding Moth Pixies and Browncaps

by JeremyT

The above photonic capture included the following from the notes of Dr. Julius T. Roundbottom, a naturalist at large in City Park:

I returned to the small forrest of brown caps after a week of working within my laboratory to discover that a family of moth pixies had made homes of the mushrooms–or at least, had tasked some other tiny beast to make homes out of it for them. Moth pixies, according to my field guides, are noxious pests that delight in uprooting gardens and spreading aphids (which they eat, but apparently in not very large quantities). The addition of chimneys to their homes was a proper shock–it is not in the published literature that moth pixies can wield fire! The discovery immediately set my mind racing.

I collected one of the browncap homes for dissection, much to their consernation, and I received a tiny bite for my trouble. The bite is healing very badly, despite being doused in poultices of my own creation. I’m not sure it was worth my trouble. The chimneys serve no function and are not connected to the inner dwelling. They are decorative in nature only. My theory is that they construct them in a mimicry of the rows of brownstones that line the streets just outside the Park. Despite folklore, this variety at least are far from intelligent creatures, I believe. Their intelligence seems more akin to that of a parrot, if parrots were so gleefully malicious.

There are such wonderful discoveries here. My heart runs wild imaging what more lies in wait for me out there in the brambles.