The winners of the Wil Wheaton/John Scalzi fan-fic contest (which I wrote about here) were announced last month. I wasn’t one of them – but congratulations to them what were.
What that means, though, is that I now feel comfortable posting my contest entry in its entirety. This, then, is the tale of ScalzOrc and WheatWil and the Curse of the Clown Sweater.
It started with the sweater.
He found it at a craft fair – one of those neighborhood thingies where people sell tchotchkes off of folding tables and all the proceeds go to the church, or the community center or something. I begged him not to buy it. “It’s the worst sweater I’ve ever seen,” I told him. The old lady selling it glared six kinds of death at me. I wanted to glare back, but the sharpened steel knitting needles in her hands scared me. I lowered my voice.
“Just look at it,” I said.
“I am,” he said. “It’s awesome.”
“No, it isn’t awesome. It’s fucking creepy.”
“It is kinda creepy,” he admitted. “But it’s creepily awesome! Have you noticed the way its eyes follow you when you move?”
I left him there with the sweater. When he asked me later for five bucks to buy a package of misshapen baked goods, I gave it to him. I was so entranced by a table full of strange ceramic animals that it didn’t occur to me that if he hadn’t bought the sweater, he wouldn’t have needed the fiver.
He wore that damned thing everywhere, even after it started to unravel.
“Dude,” I said. “I don’t wanna see your bellybutton.”
“Sure you do,” he told me. “It’s totally ripped.”
It was, too. He’d gone from a pale, flabby dude in t-shirts and Vans to a hulking, muscular dude in… Well, in a fucking clown sweater. And his skin was turning green.
“When was the last time you took a shower?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “The sweater smells funny if I get it wet.”
No wonder his wife had thrown him out.
“John,” I said. “The sweater has got to go.”
“Lighten up,” he said. “This sweater? Is awesome. And it’s not like I ever gave you shit about the rainbow sweater.”
I flinched. “That was a low blow. You know I didn’t have any choice about the rainbow sweater.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I shouldn’t have gone there. But I didn’t say anything about that – cat-thing you bought at the craft fair.”
He gestured at it, on the shelf behind his head. I took a protective step toward it. “That,” I said, “is not a cat-thing. That is a unicorn-pegasus-kitten. And it is awesome.”
“No it isn’t,” he said. “It’s unnatural. Not to mention ridiculous.”
We stared each other down, until I gave up and went to bed. I took my unicorn-pegasus-kitten with me, though. I didn’t like the way he was looking at it.
I woke up at 4 AM, and I knew what I had to do. I slipped my ceramic totem into one pocket of my old blue shorts, a pair of scissors into the other, and crept out to the garage barefoot. John was dead asleep on the old couch I’d dragged out there for him. He smelled so bad I couldn’t let him sleep in the guest room.
I was prepared for him to wake and fight me. I wasn’t prepared for the sweater to fight me, too. I thought I’d won both battles, until the ravelling threads of the clown sweater wrapped themselves around my wrists.
“Wil!” he cried. His eyes, for the first time in weeks, were clear, as he tore at the strands of acrylic binding themselves to my torso.
I tried to answer him, but another voice, one I had never heard before, rose up from my chest. “Away,” it said. “This one is a fitting vessel for my power.”
The unicorn-pegasus-kitten tumbled from my pocket, and stretched itself into a living creature larger than a horse. Its powerful horse-haunches launched it toward the roof of my garage, where its razor-sharp cat-claws tore through the wood and shingle. The Los Angeles freeways stretched out below me, rivers of tail-lights glowing like lava as far as I could see. I looked down to see John scrambling to clothe himself in one of my old LARPing costumes, as the scissors in my hand transformed to a glittering spear.
“I won’t let it take you, Wil!” he screamed.
But the clown only laughed. It already had. And all the world would suffer because of it.
