SPOT MUST DIE!
- or -
Spot's First Last Christmas

dedicated to Harlan Ellison, author of more
"Star Trek" comic books than _anybody_

© 1995 James "Kibo" Parry

Spot hurriedly pulled on his Spiderman costume and ran to the luge track--no, wait, that's not right. Spot put on his Tyvek clean-room suit and whalebone corset, and--that's not it either. Spot climbed into a giant whirling rubber teacup filled with Zima and--oh, dammit, I hate this. Sometimes I wish Spot would just die. "Waah!" whined Spot as his entire body exploded! Poor Spot had forgotten that in a work of fiction, the almighty Author has the power to blow up anything he looks at. (Spot would've known this if he watched "Superbook".)

Spot picked himself up, bit by bit, and ran down the street to his HMO to see a doctor. The doctor looked at him, and he exploded again! "Waah!" whined Spot again as he realized that every time someone looked at him he'd explode, FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE! Spot cried and ran into an alley where he hoped nobody would see him.

A kindly blind man was selling pencils in the alley. Spot was relieved. Here was somebody who would be his friend! The blind guy felt his face and he exploded again. "Waah!" cried Spot repetitively. Spot grabbed a nearby trash bag and put it over his head so that nobody would look at him, and ran and ran.

Suddenly, a gust of warm wind blew the bag off Spot's head. He was standing in front of a store whose window had dozens of TV sets in it, because Spot lived on the street where they were filming all those episodes of "The Lucy Show" for Nick At Nite. Spot looked in the window and saw--

--his reflection looking back at him. "Ay Chihuahua! Waah!" he wailed. The explosion blasted his eyes through the plate glass window and a picture tube, where lightning bolts seared the eyes beyond anything realistic. Spot picked them up, pulled out some of the shards of glass, and put them back in their sockets. Carefully, he looked through the hole in the window at one of the TVs and saw--

--a completely realistic space adventure filmed by Ron Howard in outer space. Spot yawned and looked at the second TV. It was showing the episode of NBC's "seaQuest DSV" where the super-submarine got sucked into outer space, directed by Anson "Potsie" Williams. This was better, but still too brainy for Spot's tastes. He looked at the third TV set and saw--

--Erin "Joanie" Moran wearing a hospital gown and one sock. Her head was shaved and there were numbered dots all over it. "It's like Dungeons & Dragons, see, I roll this cool hunnerd-sided die and I look at it to see what the number between one and one hunnerd is because it's got a hunnerd sides and then I drill the hole there and if I find my brain I win!" She closed her eyes and stuck the drill's auger bit into her left occipital frontal parietal temporal Wernicke's Islet Of Langerhans, which was directly between the two lobes of her brain. When she opened her eyes, she was looking right at Spot!

"Waah!" wassailed Spot as he blew up. This was worse than being in that "Star Trek" episode there they shaved his whole body with a phaser! Spot hated exploding. With tears spraying from his eyes like an animated Japanese girl, he ran away from the evil image of Erin Moran.

He ran into famous sci-fi author Arlen Hellion, who was nine feet tall, a Mormon, and hated it whenever anyone referred to his sci-fi masterpieces as "literature". Fortunately, Spot hadn't done that. Unfortunately, Spot was in a story that mentioned the Islets of Langerhans, which Hellion had mentioned in one of his most famous stories! The great author looked at Spot six times. "Waah!" whined Spot, "Waah!" bawled Spot, "Waah!" bemoaned Spot, "Waah!" thesaurused Spot, etc., etc. Hellion left to go be the Creative Consultant for NBC's "seaQuest DSV 2032 3-D" while Spot cried his way down the street. Rounding the next corner, he bumped into--

--Erin Moran, or what was left of her. "DOIDY!" she shouted. "DOIDY, DOIDY, DOIDY, DOIDY, DOIDY, DOIDY!" She kept yelling it. "DOI," she screamed, "DY!" She looked at Spot and--

Most curiously, Spot did not explode! Apparently, Spot reasoned, shouting the word "doidy" generated some kind of interphasic quantum subspace force field which prevented Spot from exploding all over the place. Fascinating! Spot thanked his lucky stars he'd learned all that science from watching "Star Trek" and "seaQuest". "Doidy," he said, "doidy, doidy, doidy..."

Spot strolled casually down the street, saying it louder and louder, until he was screaming it at the top of his lungs. He wasn't exploding, even though he just might have been attracting a little attention from passersby! "DOIDY, DOIDY, DOIDY, DOIDY..."

"Hey lookit!" said a six-year-old boy, "That puppy's stoopit! He'th saying a word like TOIDY and DURDY DIAPY but more DURDY!"

"DOIDY," said Spot.

"DURDY!" chastised the boy.

"DOIDY!"

"DURDY!"

"DOIDYDOIDYDOIDY!"

"OH YEAH WELL DURDY TIMESED BY INFINITY!!!" The boy won! Spot cried, as usual.

The next person he bumped into was the town's lovable local nerd, Eustace. "Look, Spot! I have invented a new form of wire which possesses the interesting property that electricity can only pass through it in one direction! It's so diody!"

"DOIDY!" said Spot.

"DIODY!"

"DOIDY!"

"DOIDY!"

"DIODY!" said Spot, and then he exploded.

The next person Spot met was a bad psychiatrist. "Say, Spot, did you ever notice that a breast is the same shape as the inside of a toilet bowl only inside out and in different proportions? That's so Freudy!"

"DOIDY!" bellowed Spot. The psychiatrist shook his head and walked away. Spot was HOPELESS! His brain was RUINED! "Wait!" yelled Spot, "come back! I can say stuff other than 'doidy'!" The psychiatrist turned around, and the usual happened. "Waah!"

The next person Spot bumped into was Arlen Hellion again. "Say, Spot, did I mention why I like 'Star Trek' so much? It doesn't have ANY cute robots on it, so it's much better than 'Star Wars'. 'Star Wars' is too droidy!"

"DOIDY!"

"DROIDY!" yelled Hellion, hitting Spot with a breakaway chair.

"DOIDY!"

"DROIDY!"

"DOIDY!"

"DROIDY!"

Just then, Spot saw a low-rider car driving past with, above the windshield, fuzzy pink fringe with little pom-pom balls. "Hey! Look! Deedlie!"

Arlan Hellion looked at the deedlie, then back at Spot, who detonated.

Spot pulled himself together, and then remembered he was supposed to be having some sort of special heartwarming family adventure, this being Christmas and all. He started singing "Doidy, doidy, doidy," to the tune of "Sleigh Ride". He saw a trivet made from the same pink fuzzy stuff, but ignored the dowdy deedlie doily as he doidy'd his way down the street. "DOIDY, DOIDY, DOIDY, DOIDY!"

Suddenly, Spot was surrounded by a bunch of poorly-drawn, poorly-animated children! "YOU BLOCK-HEAD!" they all shouted in unison, opening their solid black mouths so wide that their spherical noses moved to the back of their bald heads. "SPOT IS RU-I-NING CHRIST-MAS FOR EVERY-ONE! AAAAAUUUUUGGGGHHHH!"

One of the kids, who looked a lot like Joan Crawford, glared at Spot, and his body exploded with a loud "WUMP!" His shoes and socks flew off. Then Spot's dog, Snoopy, came over and telepathically insulted him. "|||| |||||| || |||| ||| ||||| ||||" replied Spot, as he flew away upside down. The kids made a snowball with their Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine and shouted "TANK YOU TOOPY!" as they threw it at Spot. Then they sang a song and shouted "TOOPABOOK!" while Spot swore at them in tick marks.

Poor Spot! He was getting bubbles in his brain from yelling too much. Static electricity was crackling between the bubbles, irradiating his left frontal anterior posterior cortical spinal thalamic thalamus. Hey! That's the FUNNIEST medical term anyone's every made up, except for Jerry Lewis!

"'Jerry Lewis' isn't a medical term, stupid," said Spot, forgetting that it's bad form to wise off to the Author. The author closed the book, crushing Spot flat, and went off to eat some beef stew, leaving Spot to explode even though nobody at all, not even the Author, was there. Poor Spot! Now he was exploding whenever someone DIDN'T look at him! He needed to get everyone in the world to look at him, and fast!

Spot's tiny, effervescing brain sorted through various ideas for getting the world's attention. He settled on yelling "HEY! LOOKIT ME! I'M STOOPIT!" and was about to do it when he realized he didn't know how to do anything stupid to get them to keep looking. "Doidy, doidy, doidy," he said to himself from habit, "gee, I wish I could think of something real stupid to doidy say." A tear slowly ran down Spot's cheek and fell in a bottle of Seven Seas Italian dressing that was running past on its seven legs. Spot's neural pathways were locking themselves into a dance of dementia! He didn't realize he was hallucinating because he was distracted by the fact that thousands of tiny Erin Morans were climbing all over him, wearing nothing but elastic straps that connected them all to each other in the shape of Vladimir Tatlin's "Monument To The Third International".

Just then, Arlan Hellion made his third appearance. Or was it just a hallucination, not an appearance? "That's '_an_ hallucination'," said the pedant. Spot, not being a pedantophile, ran away, but Arlan Hellion could easily outrun him, now being five thousand feet tall and having the physique of James Darren. (The hair too.)

Hellion cornered Spot in the middle of a vacant lot. (Spot was stupid.) And boy, was Hellion teased off. "You stupid henplucker! You keep saying 'doidy' even though I mentioned Howdy Doody in my story about the attack of the killer Islets of Langerhans! I'm going to sue you and make you put my name in your credits in a slightly different typeface from the rest of the names!"

Spot wondered if puppies even had credits, but then he saw that Hellion was carrying a tombstone inscribed with lovely lettering which read:

        HERE LIES DEAD SPOT
        WRITTEN BY ARLEN HELLION
        © THE KIBOMANJARO CORPORATION

Spot was confused. Now his Author--not Arlan Hellion, the other guy--was alluding to Harlan Ellison's corporate entity, which was a joke so obscure that Spot wished the Author would put some sort of explanation in, but that would spoil the joke, but perhaps that would work anyway because if you tell a non-joke and then explain it you can fool people into thinking you made a real joke than then ruined it and the Author was so infinitely clever that he could get away with anything, even the fact that Spot was now exploding whenever he wasn't exploding. Spot was baffled. And exploding. And not exploding.

"Waah!" cried Spot for the last time ever, because from now on he would be kind of busy. Exploding. Not exploding. Trying to ignore the millions of tiny Harlan Morans flying through the sky riding in gigantic rubber cups of Zima. Spot wondered if maybe the Author was a little mean, or weird, or something. Of course, that was just Spot's dementia talking. Spot really loved his Author. Spot gave him a million dollars! And then I took it and I bought all the candy in the world and I gave some to everyone except Spot. Then I saved this file to disk and then erased it.

the end