October 2, 2009
9:18AM: Five months after the death of Filament Fisk, every thread-based supervillain in the town of Tapir Point, Pennsyltucky went on a crime spree rampage at once. They felt free to act, now that their arch-enemy was definitively gone. Without Filament Fisk to commandeer the strings, strands, and fibers of their weapons and costumes, the thready evildoers could conquer and hold Tapir Point as their very own refuge of cruelty. Woe to the citizens of Tapir Point!
11:45PM: Three days after the coordinated rampage of the thread-based villainy, Filament Fisk did not rise from the dead to save the day. No matter how vile the desecrations heaped on his grave by the thread-wielding villains, Filament Fisk would not claw his way free of the grave and mount a fearsome campaign of retribution to reclaim the town of Tapir Point.
7:06AM: After six months of horrific tyranny by the evildoers, no mysterious stranger blew into town to take up the mantle of Filament Fisk. No one dared attempt to recreate his incredible feats of fiber manipulation, such as undoing elaborate and powerful hair weaves or deconstructing villainous shoelaces in the midst of wickedry. No one among the townspeople rose up either; no hard-bitten old-timers or energetic young people stepped up to fill the peppermint-stick boots of the once-and-not-future Filament Fisk.
3:58PM: Three months and two days later, when all hope was officially gone and the thread-loving bad guys had begun to stage gladiator combat among the townsfolk, no everyday hero climbed out of the dung heap to wrest back control of the everyday world. No plucky sheriff or gunslinging girl reporter battled back the forces of what had come to be known as The Knot. No demon-hunting, vampire-slaying, werewolf-skinning paranormal womaness barelled out of the church basement or roadhouse back room to extinguish the flames of decadence while finding true love with a paranormal creature of some stripe.
23:45 Zulu Time: The Knot removed all fibers of every kind from every warm-blooded and dead-and-buried individual. Seventeen months after their conquest, the villains transformed the entire town of Tapir Point into a filament magnet, sucking in every bit of stringy matter from all around the globe, attaching it to a rapidly growing monstrosity dubbed Frankenstring. The day of world conquest swiftly approached, when Frankenstring would be unleashed and demands would be made of the U.N. Incredibly, no one popped out of the woodwork to offer opposition, and none of the unholy thread-obsessed villains experienced an epiphany inspiring them to turn on the others. No suspense of any kind built, and no one in the outside world worked feverishly to thwart the fiendish plot.
25:37 GMT: One day, The Knot simply lost interested and abandoned their project. Unwilling to be tied down, they left Tapir Point to its own devices. No one took much notice when the original town government stepped back into the power vacuum, and no one expounded about lessons learned or opportunities missed over apple pie and coffee or cans of beer and fishing poles. No one unearthed the hidden legacy of Filament Fisk, which tragically was found too late to stop the takeover and villainous plot. And no one laughed at the end of the day at some snappy snip of quippage meant to lighten the mood and leave the reader with good-feelin’ feel-goodies after all the sensational conflict and exhausting vicarious action.
©2009 Robert T. Jeschonek
