Alphabetania: A Frabjous Guide
I swear tiles can smirk. The entire noodle house is plastered with these disgusting tiles. Floor, walls, ceiling. They’re all stained. Some with noodles, some with sauce, I think one’s even got blood on it. Normally I wouldn’t care, but the blood streaks, noodle smears and soy-sauce stains, all resemble something like a face. And it’s staring at me.
This was merely a single observation amongst the myriad minutiae passing through Artha’s head as he sat in Cheng’s Noodle Palace doing his homework. He’d seen every iota of human nature from his table: The man measuring each noodle with a pocket ruler before recording his results. The woman whose ridiculously long eyelashes were sucked into her nose when the breathed in. The child who’d secured a Mad-Hatter mask to the back of his head. The one event that evaded his observation was that the glittering plastic cat on the Noodle store’s counter had winked its painted eye at him. Twice.
Artha shook himself. He must get back to the task at hand. Task 4, issue date 3rd June, due date 19th June, today’s date June 18th. Anxiety whipped out some spoons and began tapping on the wall of his stomach. Outcomes H.1, H. 16, H.666. Task Description: The Board of Studies is forcing Extension 1 English students to extort a creative piece of writing, and your hellish school has agreed to participate. The spoons struck a triangle. Your piece must demonstrate an apprehensive understanding of the devices of language and - Artha shoved the paper away as the spoons were joined by A-Capella of pots and pans. The sounds seeped through his palms. His concise composition sniggered at him.
‘All of a sudden’.
The four words licked the droplets of sweat dripping onto the page. Artha’s nails dug into his palm. Table five’s occupant chewed another prawn chip. Sparkles of pink crumbs cascaded onto the table almost artfully, like sleek words seeping across a page. Inspiration drowned out the spoon’s sound.
“Maybe I could just do a wild, intensely imaginative, genius-splattered-across-a-prison-cell stream of conscious piece?”
Artha raised his pen. A furious flurry of flourishes followed.
‘All of a sudden the man fell to the ground and spilled tears of sufilious sorrow.’
“Sufilious?” Artha eyed the word. Was it a word? He hadn’t brought a dictionary.
“You’re not a word.” Artha condemned the nine letters. “I’m sitting here struggling to write anything so what do I do? I invent a bloody word!”
Artha gave the table a kick
“Sufilious.”
The word gazed up at him, sufiliously.
“You little bastard!” he shouted.
Artha raised his pen. Not to write, but to puncture, to penetrate and to punish. The frenetic cutlery orchestra thudding through Artha’s ears roared in approval. He swung his arm behind his shoulder and with a “yargh!” his pen stabbed through Sufilious’s outspoken ‘i’.
Artha punched the air in triumph. The cat waved mechanically back. But the murdered word wasn’t quite dead. Growing larger, bigger, huger the tear widened. Suddenly, the watery eyed, moustache smeared face of a man forced its way through the page. Fixated, Artha leant in closer and closer. When their noses almost touched, the man’s mouth swung open and flung itself completely out of the page, over Artha’s head and half-way down his body. Artha blindly grabbed at his noodle bowl as his legs flailed through the air, kicking confounded customers. The cat laughed manically behind its golden paws. Alarm throbbed through the noodle store, but before the sullen serving girl could even put on her gloves, Artha was dragged, howling with fear, through the page.
All of a sudden.
“Ohurghuhhough”
This was the throaty, choking and resoundingly unpleasant sound Artha’s eater made as he coughed up his meal. Shivering and stunned at the invasive, alien feeling of being swallowed and regurgitated, Artha fell to the ground. Not just any ground. The grand, gaudy, gymgardious ground of Alphabetania.
Above him lurched the mountainous form of his captor, still rubbing his thick neck and humming to sooth his overstretched throat. Seeing this as an opportunity to defend himself, Artha’s eyes searched eagerly for his weapon of choice; noodles.
Being a lad whose spirits were not dampened by a stranger’s saliva, Artha seized his Vegetable Satay Surprise, and twirled a single oily noodle into a make-shift whip. With this limp line of a weapon, Artha charged at his swallower and lashed a streak of oily, sesame-flecked noodle across his face. The man paused. His eyes narrowed. As he peeled the noodle off his forehead, a thin line of oil remained. The pair stared at each other. How does an Eater respond to their Eatee, especially when noodles are involved? The assultee believed etiquette dictated a retort something like this:
“The audacity of hurling noodles at a respected officer of the B.O.A! But you wouldn’t be familiar with that acronym, would you foreigner? We are the Binary Oppressors Agency, and you, undoubtedly, are another immigrant without an Intertextuality Passport!!!”
Artha, even armed with the experience of three prior food fights, did not anticipate this response. Despite his limited understanding of the nature of the B.O.A officer’s accusations, aided by the involvement of three exclamation marks, Artha ascertained their anger. However one does not slap another with a noodle then quietly quail at the first hurdle. No, one fights on.
Artha arched his leg forward into something of a praying mantis pose. His outraged opponent retaliated, raising his tremendous torso off the ground, supporting it on a single, daintily poised toe. Thus, the pair faced each other. The air sweated stress and sauce. A bird cawed overhead. Artha flung himself forward, flicking a fearsome fillet of sodden tofu at the man. With dazzling dexterity, the B.O.A officer snatched the tofu square out of the sky and held it, gently squeezing it together. A teardrop of sauce fell to the ground, where it sizzled in the heat of the moment.
With recognition of his opponent’s noodle duelling rigour, Artha’s adrenaline sidled shamefully away. Perhaps the best course of action when you’re a stranger in a strange land wasn’t to instantly engage an inquisitor of the law in a noodle brawl. Artha altered his tactics: he ran.
With a hopeless huff, he hurled his bowl of noodles into the air and fled. But before he could make a both literal and clichéd clean escape, the B.O.A officer sprang off the ground, snapped the base of the noodle bowl out of the air and slapped it down onto Artha. Artha fell, tangled in the terrors of being trolluped in noodles. The officer descended, seizing Artha with his arms and lifting him off his feet.
“It’s off to Parentheses Penitentiary with you, bucko. Let’s see you commit Textual Invasion when you’re surrounded by brackets!”
Thusly Artha was carried off by the B.O.A officer into the two bronze brackets that make up Parentheses Penitentiary.
Before we progress I must make note, with the arduous intention of avoiding being branded by an insipid reader as Implausible, Impossible and Utterly Unrealistic that, yes, to one sitting comfortably reading this alarming anecdote, Artha’s actions do seem absurd. But let it be considered that Artha had just been swallowed; an occurrence not often inflicted on a man, and therefore was not in an apt frame of mind to logically assess his situation. Indeed, his natural inclination into noodle propelled action (one cannot be sure that they are not also of this disposition until they too are in Artha’s position) took over. Furthermore, if you’re thus far flummoxed, I’d suggest you leave now. Get up out of your arm chair and go play a ball game, it’s only going to get more Implausible, Impossible and Utterly Unrealistic from here. So there you have it. Let the peanut gallery be silenced and the story proceed!
“Here you shall remain, bucko until you realise the errors of your footnote filching ways.’ The B.O.A officer disdainfully dropped Artha, penning him inside the punctuation. As he plodded off, the B.O.A officer shouted “It looks like a foreshadow is coming over, and I’ll tell you bucko, these brackets don’t keep out the rain.”
Artha was left alone with his circumstances: Trapped in Brackets, Covered in Satay Surprise, and Starting to Rain.
“I must be inside some stupid, HSC-stress induced dream.” Artha sat down. The enormous brackets rendered his damp, oily appearance particularly pathetic. “I’ll just have to wait for my alarm to wake me up.”
“You’ll do no such thing, young man.” boomed a voice from above.
Stretched across the two brackets was a man’s face blown up on a projector screen. He had a surreal purple tinge and technicolour eyes. His voice was mysteriously magnified and reverberated off the bronze brackets.
“You must find Perspective and rid this downtrodden, dejected land of the Binary Oppressors Agency.”
“What?”
“What is this ‘what’?” The projected man’s composure slipped, and the purple hue of his skin began to look more sickly than menacing. “Never mind. You, Artha, have a forced, narrow and stubborn view of language, completely alienated from what true language is”.
Artha sprang to his feet. Now that his name had been both mentioned and besmirched, he took a much keener interest in what the screen was saying.
“Your view of language is something like a frumpy, middle-aged woman.” The man’s multi-coloured eyes squinted with concentration. “She is permanently anxious, all expressions forced. When her husband laughs uninhibitedly during one of her meticulously arranged dinner parties, she glares and glowers at him, embarrassed by the sound.” The man’s overstretched features gave Artha a serious, intellectually probing gaze.
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“Perhaps, you’ll appreciate a visual representation?” boomed the man, his words self consciously over-pronounced.
“Oh god,” Artha mumbled, “Go on.”
With a flourish, the man raised the sodden noodles off Artha’s body. Weaving his arms in a mystical, impressive manner, the projected man telepathically manipulated the noodles before Artha. To Artha’s surprise and embarrassment, the noodles spelt out the words ‘All of a Sudden’. The letters were heaped on top of each other in a blind baby’s outline of a person, with Ls for arms and a torso of OF. The noodle man was then lowered face-down before of Artha.
“With the personification powers present in me, I have personified All of a Sudden, or AOAS – I love a good acronym” the projected face said, with a note of pride in his voice. “From AOAS it can be seen that one cannot fully appreciate the flippancy of language while focused on stubborn, shallow and stupid views? Respond.”
Artha dug his nails into his palms.
“I don’t get it at all.” He breathed, his words perceptibly permeated by petulance. “I’m doing a bloody assignment, having a great time, then I get eaten, eaten, by this fat man who chucks noodles at me and throws me in here. Well, I’ll tell you what: I am sick of being told what’s insightful, what’s thorough, what’s bloody perceptive; I get enough of it at school, and I’m sure as hell not going to put up with it in my dreams!”
The projected face bit its lip guiltily.
“I’m sick of responding to everything shoved under my nose. If I don’t want to respond, then I’m not going to respond. I don’t care how warped this place is, I’m not going to do what anyone says here, anymore than those idiots at school! Now let me wake up, or leave me alone!”
With this final shout, Artha stomped away from the screen only to find himself unable to move outside of his bracket-defined prison. Feeling the horrendous heat of humiliation, in a much smaller voice Artha said, “I’m just so tired of having everything picked at.”
The screen fizzled to darkness.
Artha crouched down once more. In the darkness, he didn’t notice the projected man, this time in the flesh, appear beside him.
“Your sentiments are kindred with my own, although you may not believe it.”
Artha looked up at the man. He was rather short, with a crusty tweed coat and lopsided glasses. Upon standing, Artha found himself a significant head above the man.
“What do you want?” asked Artha, unsuccessfully attempting to replicate the ferocity of his last statement.
“My name is Percy, the Psychologist with a PhD in Personification. I’d set up that startling screen to enhance my… physical impact on my patients.” Percy gave Artha a shy grin. “I understand you’ve met an officer from the Binary Oppressors Agency. They’re a bane and a drain even worse than the slanderous Slang Bang Gang. You see, the ambition of the B.O.A is to control language, which here in Alphabetania is something like trying to shove a pigeon in a sock.”
“Sorry?” asked Artha, his sullenness usurped by the absurd simile.
“My apologies, my similes are of a rough sort. Personification is my main mistress, as you’d imagine, although even she has become a target of the B.O.A’s technique terrorism. First it was slang, which was brillig, but now they’ve gone too far. They’ve closed the Entendre Escalators and even demolished the Palace of Euphemisms! Only with the Signifier’s arrival will we be saved. The Signifier will find Perspective, which is said to reside in the Attic of Abstract nouns, along with its brethren, Love and Happiness. Once it’s found, the Stream of Consciousness will flow again!”