Lance spends too much time thinking about all the ways life would be different if our eyes were on the top of our feet as opposed to perched over our noses. Shoes for instance...
Or karate.
He doesn't enjoy thinking thoughts like these, but grow them as he might, the beards never help. So off they come. Hairy reminders clogging up the sink, if hairs were thoughts and plumbing was being normal. Lance should know. Lance is a plumber. Well, a plumber in the sense that you and I are plumbers.
This is his seventh collection of humorous and odd short stories, none of which have ever made the New York Times Best Seller List. If that in any way influences you to avoid giving it a look then it's probably for the best.
Excerpt:
Tales of the Supernatural with Nap Lapkin.
When the Triple-A baseball team, the Duluth Dragons, folded last year due to low attendance, their mascot, amongst many other poor souls, was sent packing. The problem for fired mascots is there aren't a lot of other teams named “Dragons” and even those are rarely looking for a new mascot. Getting a new gig is next to impossible.
So difficult that it might drive said fired mascot to turn to the dark arts. If a small tingle just ran up your spine after reading that, it's perfectly understandable.
Like so many terrible things such as Meister Brau beer, it began in Milwaukee. At a Milwaukee Brewers game specifically. Right after the beloved seventh inning stretch ritual of the Famous Racing Sausages. Brat (#1), Polish Sausage (#2), Italian Sausage (#3), Hot Dog (#4), and Chorizo (#5) made their dash from left field to home plate. They had no sooner departed the field then a loud roar emanated from the bowels of the stadium.
An unlucky security guard that had gone to investigate was the first one on the scene. He flung open the double doors that led from the public walkways to the catacombs beneath the ballpark and fell back in horror. Chunks of sausage and bodily fluids littered the ground and an eight-foot-tall dragon in a blood-soaked sweater with two large Ds emblazoned upon it crouched between the tattered remains of Brat and Italian Sausage while Hot Dog squirmed in its slavering jaws. Chorizo, blind with terror, comically stumbled and bumbled down the hallway, its entrails protruding from a gaping wound as his terrible transformation was underway. (At this juncture you don't know exactly what transformation I'm referring to, so don't get too fixated on it.)
Polish Sausage was nowhere to be seen.
As the dragon gulped down Hot Dog and set off in pursuit of Chorizo, the guard later grudgingly admitted that the scent hanging in the air smelled delicious.
I realize that this is a lot for you to process. Usually you’re not asked to just jump in like this, so take a moment to digest what you’ve just read.
As far as the guard could tell, the dragon was a real dragon. If dragons existed. Teeth, claws, the whole show. And the terrible transformation I spoke about?
That’s the weirdest part, and the primary reason this story is called Tales of the Supernatural With Nap Lapkin as opposed to Another Tale of Adventure With Nap Lapkin. The corpses of the deceased mascots were made entirely of whatever meat they represented. There was never any trace of the people who had previous inhabited the outfit. They simply disappeared.
I know, right? Pretty supernatural.
