“You have been declared terminally uninteresting.” That was enough. Katie did not need more, yet she yearned in a deep, hungry place of her heart to hear an explanation. She very well knew that words would not comfort her now, as they had before in numerous pow wows, but loose ends are scary beasts, and must be contained. If left unchecked, they mutate into something bigger and scarier, becoming ever more inconceivably powerful until one begins to hate shoe laces as a transcendental way of coping. If one is to regain control of your happiness, one must handle the process delicately and with patience.
“Fwah…wha…nyuh…huh,” she says. Katie did not have a solid comprehension on the virtue of prudence.
“Yes, yes. It appears to be that on Tuesday of last week, you were denounced by Greg Gregory McGregor Gregorson Chadwick the fourth. [Editor’s note: The Chadwick clan is legally obligated to become proportionally obnoxious in the naming of their youths to the price of meat, as a result of an unfortunate confusion between Greg Chadwick’s Mightiest Meat, and Melinda Chatsworth’s Mitigated Teat]. As this was not the first complaint by an Honest citizen our corporation has received, we had the legal obligation to submit your case to a panel for arbitration. After much deliberation, the Honorable Men concluded that it was best to put forward a motion to activate your schnloz” - Katie nodded at this, as this was standard protocol - “and examine the readouts. They were successful. The deciding factor was your apparent fixation with the Venerable Henrietta‘s guinea pig. As it turns out, there was a discrepancy between the biorhythms of your blood pressure and the frequency and pitch of your voice, in correlation to the people you were addressing around you.
“As you became appreciably more excited and invested in your various monologs, those around you became fatigued, or interested by only a small margin. That is to say, you’re boring.” A job is enjoyable only if you can get the word palpable involved, and the OFBD [Editor’s note: Organization for a Better Death] clerk was quite satisfied with his. Pinch had quite the penchant for four point words.
The grief on Katie’s face was palpable. It had quite an unsettling effect. Unfortunately for Katie, Pinch had a meaty dominance over his chair and remained settled. Unmoved in heart and heft, Pinch continued on.
“After your case was processed, it went to federal hearings. Your mother, who has an internship as The Coffee Broad for Mr. Smurf [Editor’s note: Edmondson Smurf is the president of the OFBD], became aware of the proceedings. She attempted to anonymously appeal to the jury that you are, in fact, a good time on the basis that you do your own hair, but the jury was unmoved.” Pinch took a moment to pause. It was a weighty pause, the kind that a controversially fat man takes to revel in what has been said. “After little deliberation, the jury voted forty to zero. You were charged with Grand Banality.”
Katie was horror struck, in the sense that the bailiff Horror struck her unconscious with a cudgel. The OFBD operated with a grandiose sense of class and taste, even in economic downturns.
Katie awoke several hours later in her own bed. Perhaps it was all just a horrid dream, none of it was real. Such a vivid unreality could only come from the digestion of something horrible. She wondered if she had confused her Tic Tacs for her grandmother’s roofies again. This rumination was completely unrelated to events prior. There was no way that cheerleader extraordinaire Katie Confucius could ever be deemed uninteresting.
Katie stood up and stretched. With a yawn and a crack of the neck, she made her way to her mirror. She wanted to scream in horror and grotesque fear, but she couldn’t. Katie wouldn’t be doing any such thing anymore. Stretched across her lips was a big, black X, the Mark of Silence, sealing them tight forever more.
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