Dud Sea Scrawls The Writing, clearly, is not on the wall!

She is not sleeping, not eating.
- Steve Ross, Sr. Veep, pub fisher, Clown

McFarty was not the conscientious Don Corleone types, who did not peddle drugs. McFarty wrote puerile literature, which was the opium of the mindless adoloscents who’d copy even their peers’ exam papers simply because the others never noticed. No one knows how many actually read the
books McFarty wrote. But they were bought and random checks suggested that her books carried around by lots of kids, almost as if it was a proof of literacy.

Among those teeming millions of boys and girls with nothing between their ears, there was a clever one called Opal [not the gem, but opaque nonetheless]. What was between her ears was packed so tightly that sometimes they just froze up due to lack of adequate blood circulation and did not recognise their own from someone else’. Opal thought [since neither McFarty or her publisher know what she is writing about and what they are publishing, the kids are buying without knowing why or what they are buying and everyone is acting like a winner] : ‘let me find a lamb, whom I can feed at some swanky restaurant and promise a hefty commission for a book contract. There is always Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V.’

The deed was done and champagne flowed as 1,00,000 of the very same McFarty readers now started to read Opal’s literature. Unfortunately, Opal forgot that very common species : A local page 3 reporter. [remember that story about a murderer being the postman and no one noticed because he was such a common sight?] Being new to celebrity-hood, she ignored the first law - Never forget the yellow jounalists from your local papers, grease their palms, feed them well and oil their innards with expensive liquor. She’d pay for the oversight. Boy, would she pay.

McFarty chose to go on a diet. She decided that she had to get out of her overeating and oversleeping disorders that she had got into in the first place by writing teeny pop novels which were bought by 4,00,000 high school students who had excess pocket money and wanted to show that they were in the loop [not the one advised by the Indian family planning Commission]. She had so much money that she never had to work ever again in her life. Till someone stole her words and consequently her identity [which she never knew she had], sleep and hunger. The real reason she woke up from her big sleep, just like kumbhakaran during the war, was she could actually smell the lamb when her agent said: “There is a nice juicy lamb, let’s take it to the slaughter”. The words juicy lamb and slaughter kindled a burning fire inside the belly which roused her from her deep slumber. She realised if she was going to face a fight from the lamb,she needs to limber up and become atleast fit enough to not let the lamb run away.

The tightly packed grey cells turned liquid and loosened up. The lamb bleated “He was definitely invading my personal space, as I had learned in a Human Evolution class last summer, and I instinctively backed up till my legs hit the chair. That just made him move in closer, until the grommets [dont ask me what they are] in the leather embossed the backs of my knees, and he finally tilted the butcher’s knife toward me.” It continued in it’s best imitation of SRK’s patented bleat, unmindful that he could sue it and claim huge royalties and undisclosed damages : “It was a very hard process and there were endless attempts to clean me up, I am the first person in the family - aunts, uncles, cousins - who has ever shown the slightest inclination to be creative [the others were unimaginative, but hard working, fit and lean], but a fat lot of good did it do to me… well fed, unfit and lazy, I’m now cornered with that guy who has invaded my personal space breathing heavily down my neck, either to kill me or in desperate desire… you kids will have to wait to read what happens in the next part - IF I SURVIVE”

Disclaimer: This work is pure f[r]iction, any resemblence to people living or dead is [un]intentional. I apologise if I have internalised the language and words from books which spoke to me in a way few other books did.