I started picking at it …

I started picking at the scar on my arm …

The one from when I broke it a year ago …

The surgical scar, where they taped my humerus back together with aviation tape and form-a-gasket and bondo …

I pick at it, and it bleeds, and I can see the metal wire, rusty, covered in fleas …

You would say “Dan, stop messing around”, but I heard a sound and moved fast. It couldn’t last, not the last of the JERG-WIZARDS, mixing elixirs and ancient pudding. And just like that the smoke cleared and I could see the bare bone and I groaned in pain as I shoved broken glass and wood chips in the wound.

I pulled on the broken plastic clamp holding the bone in place, and scratched at the remodeled bone with my rusty pocketknife …

It spoke, the bone, cursed flesh and marrow:

“The first of the KLUNGIT-ARMIES, being led by LORD JANGIS, is moving on S’compton … they just sacked Grinken Town.”

I’ll blame the SECTOR CHIEFS and the coyote herders.

I’ll take account of those DINGLE farmers, sharecropping the broken hearted no man’s land of BOBLIMPTOCK … Ungoobulating their women folk, greasing their boovulas.

And my bone is CHILLED MAX ICE …

And I pick at it for comfort.