Episode Seventeen

The Unabridged Continuation - Take your Valium now!

With one last superhuman effort, The Happy Paranoid threw the swede throught the plate glass window that shattered into a million deadly icicles, whilst the rotten globe of rotting vegetable started it's sixty storey descent.

Jed Isiah Orvill Yo'all White known as Jed to his simple family, was a simple man. Back in Hill Billy Country, out there in the Boonies, he could hunt like a wild cat and smell like one as well, for personal hygiene had very little priority in his life. Two years ago he married his dead father's wife, who was also his father's father's second wife. At the registry office he shot the fustrated clerk who explained to Jed that as far as the State was concerned, if he married this woman, he would officially be his own grandfather!

After two years on the run, he finally hit the big city and using his instincts was able to survive traffic and muggers. (He had been mugged last night, but when the thieves saw the poverty and stupidity of their victim, they had a collection and left fifty cents in Jed's jacket pocket. Jed awoke with a headache and more money than he ever knew existed. He said a thank-you prayer and carried on wandering)

The sun shone down on the dusty pavement, bounced off the glass structures built to the great god Commerce, refracted through the fountains onto Jed's unkept physique as he suddenly thought of the two loves in his life; beautiful, voluptuous, taunting, sweet-breathed Alice the mule, and his hardworking, stubborn wife.

This was his last thought as a swede at terminal velocity knocked his skull off into a flower bed and remained perched on his neck, a little deformed, but almost as useful to Jed.

Policeman O'Malley, 7171551, known as 551 to his buddies, tried to get through the crowd around the corpse and saw Jed's pathetic form. (He was later to be buried with full honours back home and his epitath was:

"Here lies the body of poor old Jed,
A doggone good'un in drink and bed,
Taken from us, to heaven he sped,
When a swede struck him on his skull, causing fracture of occipital and parietal bones."

For Jed was unlucky enough to have his last poem written by a passing Hill Billy medical student who hated poetry. (Her name? You guessed it, Phylis Stein)

O'Malley's mouth dropped lower than a mating daschund's as he thought of how the Organisation would react when they knew of his discovery. He'd have to grab that swede quick before the ambulance carne. But how? All forty years of his warrior training with the Organisation flashed before him. All those cold showers, banging his head on doors, eating worms and games of football had not been in vain. He leapt forward and kicked the swede over the crowd's heads and into an alleyway, picked it up and thought: I'll be King Poppa of the Organisation now.

A swift rugby tackle brought O'Malley down, and the swede, along with the policeman's dreams of promotion, were carried into the distance by Gilbert.