FTF 9

The Dirka

Once upon a time there was a Dirka who lived in a squalid shanty next to a swamp. She didn't have a name, but if you use your imagination, you can probably come up with one.

The Dirka sat on an overturned bucket and pondered her life. Her shanty reeked, and she had something itchy stuck to the middle of her back, and all her efforts to dislodge it with a stick she found in the yard proved fruitless. Also, her sick, gluttonous brain was filled with angry alien worms which piloted her through life in a haze of confused outrage.

Evening fell. She wrote out a list of her problems, and fully intending to devote some quality time to complaining about them in the morning, the Dirka peeled back the crusty sheets on her soiled mattress and settled in for bed.

In the middle of the night, a pack of elves visited the Dirka's shack. Seeing the list, they observed sympathetically that the shack WAS an utterly gross mass of filthy, crusted dishes and stains, sticky surfaces, shed hairs and a collection of boogers inexplicably stuck to the wall under the kitchen window. With elfy industriousness, they cleaned the place up and vanished with the sunrise.

The Dirka awoke to find her hovel sparkling. "I KNEW this was somebody else's responsibility!" she snorted. "Whoever it is, they have been delinquent in addressing it."

That night, the Dirka nuked a couple of burritos, and ate them, and passed out face down on the sofa. At the stroke of midnight, the elves re-appeared, and climbed on top of her shapeless slumbering form. Four of them reached into the soft folds of her back and pulled back a flap of flesh. Four others crouched in a perilous position under the Dirka, peeling back the flap on the other side to widen the gulch of skin. Two stood on the back of her head, and using their weight for leverage, began prying at a foreign object wedged deep in a skin roll with a shovel.

There was a satisfying THWACK as the object was freed and the slabs of skin slapped back together. The good little elves placed it on the table next to #2 on the list, "Itchy thing wedged in my back folds".

The next morning, the Dirka awoke with a great sense of physical relief. She waddled over to the list and exclaimed, "A can of Goya brand Red Kidney Beans! I KNEW that my troubles were caused by Mexicans! I guess they broke in last night to get their beans back, which is typical, but good luck with THAT! Those things have been jammed in my back tits for months! Not even a MEXICAN would eat them now!"

Things were looking up. The Dirka was confident that the next day she would awake clear-headed, rational, and not driven by terror of the unknown for the first time in her life. She put on her favorite Quacker Factory sweatsuit and went to bed, feeling pretty good, but curious. Before turning in, she drank an extra large glass of Tang in the hopes that her bladder would awaken her and she would catch a glimpse of her benefactor, to whom she was completely entitled and owed nothing.

At midnight, there was a rumbling in her tank and dreams of splashing waterfalls and rushing rivers woke her. In the darkness, she saw a dozen sets of glowing eyes staring at her. "Duhhhh, what's going on?" she mumbled.

A tiny voice squeaked, "Your brain is filled with Horror."

Another voice chirped, "Evil aliens have invaded you."

A third voice, "Don't you want to be free from these malevolent alien presences in your mind?"

"We can give you a reading."

"Wouldn't you like to manifest your full potential?"

"Cross-post for Xenu!"

"Your immortal spiritual being is your true self."

"You need to be audited."

"We think you should read this book. And give us the title and deed to your home."

"Join us."

The voices were soothing, and the Dirka complied, so they decked her in robes and sawed her head open, eating the contents, and then rolled around naked on a pile of her most cherished possessions, in a ritual known to their people as "Beating the Symbolism to Death".