The strange saga of Mr. George Blake - Chapter IV

“Granddad? What're you doing down there?”

George looked up from all fours into the festering pierced navel of the sixteen-year-old manifestation of every parenting error he and Dolores had ever perpetrated upon the girl's lost mother. His eyes wandered to the left of his granddaughter's crusty wound to a tattoo that read, “LOVE,” except the “O” was replaced with a deftly rendered hand grenade. He tried to imagine what would make Greta equate love with explosive destruction, but he was distracted by a dark object in his peripheral vision, galumphing down the driveway. He wondered if it was a dog, a very large dog running on its hind legs.

“Granddad? Like, what's up? Shouldn't you be on your way to work?” She twisted her long black hair and clipped it to the top of her head.

George grabbed the stuccoed porch pillar and tried to pull himself upright, but blood seeped from his eyes, his nose, the tip of his Johnson that hadn't see the inside of a woman in a full sales cycle — and with the cost of the vaporware he was peddling, that was maybe eighteen months, perhaps more, but George was still adding on the extra fingers he had sprouted when it came to him that the upright dog might be that idiot boyfriend of Greta's.

“Granddad, are you OK?”

“I just have a little bloody nose, Sweetie.” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and watched a torrent of Mountain Dew gush from his knuckles to the porch floor. It made him thirsty. “Do we have any soda, Gret?”

“Your nose isn't bleeding, Granddad. It's just runny. But you do look kind of weird, like, really weird.”

George managed to climb his way up the pillar to a standing position and then hugged it, enjoying the texture that he imagined might be like that of a large cat's tongue, a two-story tall cat. “Hmmm, feels good. I feel really good, Sweetie. Maybe a little leaky or-. I don't know. I think there was a slug in my waffle. Or it could have been a vitamin.”

Greta blanched. “Your waffle? You ate a waffle?!”

George bent over to wipe the Mountain Dew from his Florsheims. “I think I cracked a crown. Do you know how much I love you, Sweetie? So much, so much, so just say no to drugs, OK? Wow, just look at that Mountain Dew pouring out of my thumb! I didn't know it could hold so much.”

“Oh shit. Shit, shit, shit, fucking shit,” Greta mumbled as she texted Corky in shrieking caps: COME BACK GRANDDAD DROPPED A WAFFLE.

George toppled over and Greta was dismayed to learn just how threadbare his boxers were.

“Shh, shh, shh, shh,” George sang. “We don't want to wake up your grandmother, Sweetie.”

“No shit, Granddad.”

K-B