February 25, 2011
Someone in the know strolled down from Accounting and gave Finney the best tip of his life (at least they said it was the best tip of his life). Finney narrowed his eyes and nodded, taking it all in. Was it possible? By working a black magic spell, complete with animal sacrifice, could he attain an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, even though he’d never acted or appeared in a movie in his life? As always in matters of dubious repute, Finney fell back on his Golden Rule: assume something you want to believe is true until you’re proven to be a gullible doof.
And so Finney set out to gather the ingredients proscribed by that Someone from Accounting: a black cat bone; John the Conqueror root; sphincter of newt; gabardine swatches in three colors; rotten head lettuce; soap bubble mixture; and the last and most important ingredient, a living hamster. That night, he worked the spell in the drafty, hay-strewn stable stall in which he lived, alarming the horses. The window panes rattled, and the stall gates banged as the evening’s breeze became a throttling squall. Strange voices whispered in Finney’s ears, telling of alternate spell-castings that would surely bring him even more startling and extraordinary prizes. But Finney’s heart was set on that Oscar. It had always been his fondest dream, ever since his youngest days growing up as a child prodigy in lower west Southnorth: he’d been a genius then, before losing it all on a bad hand of Texas Hold-’em, but even then, the acting bug had been in his blood.
The time came to sacrifice the hamster, and Finney was willing. This was it, the moment that would define the rest of his sure-to-be glorious life. Who needed genius when one had a gold statuette glittering in one’s arms, proclaiming for all the world to see just how talented and popular one had become. All it would take was one simple cut with the exacto…one slice, and the blood would run down into the silver bowl, mixing with the other ingredients as he incanted the pig Latin spell handed down in illuminated human-skin grimoires printed in ancient Sitnalta (evil twin of Atlantis, in fact it’s “Atlantis” spelled backward), predicted by Nostradamus himself and echoed in graven images twitching subliminally between frames of a panoply of so-called reality shows on late-night satellite television.
But old Finney couldn’t do it. The hamster looked up at him with those adorably beady eyes and snuffled, and he was undone. The thing was, he realized, he’d never needed a lifeless statue to begin with; what he’d craved all along was the precious love of a furry mammalian creature, a fellow traveller on this tired old globe. So Finney scooped up that precious hamster with its mottled brown and white fur and raised him to his face, beaming with enlightened delight. And just then, that Someone from Accounting, who’d been double-crossing Finney from Minute One, leaped up from the stall next-door and completed the spell Finney had begun by cutting Finney’s throat, splashing Finney’s blood into the silver bowl, conjuring not a golden Oscar statuette for Best Supporting Actor, but instead opening a gateway into an infernal dimension from which a chittering horde of demons surged forth to ravage the Earth…every one of them covered in gold skin, eyeless, and perfectly postured as an Oscar award.
